Thirty-Three
My love has eyes as blue as stones
Upon this ground I make my home
The seasons change but my heart does not
The seasons change and the river changes
Grey to green and blue to grey
My love is sure as stone
I trace my lover’s veins so blue
The river of them guides me home
—Folk song, traditional, translated from the Old Resée
We’re all alive.
Jehan had said it. Estiene couldn’t stop thinking it.
And they’d talked about futures that they couldn’t have until they sounded almost like futures that they could create, if they were bold enough. The Academie Sieuxerr was not a place for boldness to flourish. It was a place to survive.
Estiene was full of ideas and brandy and want. The world was enormous and it was as small as this rooftop; the world was the size of one person, and for Estiene it had always been Jehan.
Jehan, at his shoulder, sharpening his ideas for the array and pointing out how Ysabel would have wanted to use his half-under technique.
Jehan laughing with a mouth full of pastry and arguing for justice.
Jehan’s lurching, asymmetric lantern somehow rising faster than any of the others, even if it looked on the verge of bursting into flame at any moment.
Estiene knew the feeling.
“Jehan,” said Estiene, quietly, beneath the clarity of Clement’s voice.
He touched the back of Jehan’s hand and traced a shape. It was one of their old signals, from back when—back when, as if it weren’t three months ago—they were fucking regularly and keeping each other like secrets.
Ysabel probably knew, Estiene thought. The idea wasn’t as irritating as it could have been. She still wouldn’t have known all there was to know about Estiene’s feelings; he’d barely known them himself, had built a seawall against them, until it all crashed down a few months ago.
Jehan gave a sharp intake of breath. Estiene held his own.
“Okay,” said Jehan, “yes,” and Estiene stood up and went before Jehan could change his mind. Jehan came behind him, close enough to touch. Not touching.
The corridors of the North Tower were darker than the rooftop had been, the lanterns only gold specks seen through grubby windows.
On the ground floor they came out beneath the blue arch that led onto the quad, and there was light again: the Academie grounds were lit with artificer-lamps which must have been on a timed spell, sending out pools of golden glow between deep shadow.
“Estiene,” said Jehan. It was one of his filthy murmurs, familiar like the hand signal, and Estiene turned back to him expecting a grasp, a kiss. But Jehan only ran a thumb over his own jaw and said, “Why? You keep changing your mind on this.”
Estiene swallowed down his first snap of a response—As if you care why. Either you want me or you don’t.
It was the First Healer’s own feast day. It was the last day of the Grand Exam. It was a time to be truthful if ever there was one.
“The reasons I had for stopping aren’t good reasons anymore.”
“Enlighten me,” said Jehan. Not hostile, but on the edge of it.
As an experiment, Estiene started walking again, in the direction of the fifth-year residence hall. No doubt half their fellows would be crammed onto the roof there, and the other half scattered around campus, or at the enormous gathering at the square in front of the Hospital.
Jehan followed.
Estiene said, “It would have been a distraction from the Grand Exam. Which we’re almost through with, and we have tomorrow’s answer.
And—what does it matter now that you’re leaving Sieuxerr, you might not be able to leave, and I might end up life-bonded and sent to a pit of mage-churned mud on the other side of the continent, or freezing my fingers off doing whatever passes for healing in the courts of the Etirran ice-queens—”
“Dramatic, dramatic,” said Jehan, and touched the back of his neck.
Desire wound around Estiene like a spindle.
“Fear not, Soon-to-be-Healer Marcelle—if you do end up in one of the Three Frozen Courts, I’ll run away and keep you company.
I’ve always wanted to see one of those palaces made of ice.
Or do you think they’re only made up for the Chambely books? ”
It was one of Jehan’s silly teases, designed to stop him from spiralling.
Estiene kept quiet for the rest of the walk, stewing in his feelings, wishing they’d go away.
It would be so much simpler. He wondered if his own parents had ever felt a love like this, a hook in his flesh, a fevered pull that he could imagine continuing forever.
They were at the residence hall; there was nothing in Estiene’s pigeonhole; they were heading up the stairs. Estiene was leading so they were going to his room. Jehan’s room, part of Estiene thought nonsensically, was always so untidy.
Most of the celebration was probably still happening on the roof, and Estiene’s room was only on the second floor, but they still encountered a couple of fellow scholars whose whoops of greeting turned into nudges and tipsy staring as they remembered that Estiene had been arrested.
Estiene put on his coldest face and kept going.
“That was fun, earlier,” Jehan said abruptly, when they were alone again. He had a way of announcing the end of a long train of thought and assuming you’d come along for the ride.
“Failing to solve Ysabel’s stupid puzzle?” said Estiene, waspish. Then relented. “Yes.”
“We got most of it.”
“You didn’t need me. You’re twice as clever as I am,” Estiene said. “I just memorise things well, and I’m stubborn.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“It’s on your long list of my failings, I’m sure.”
“Estiene.”
Estiene shivered. Jehan only said his name like that in certain contexts. His footsteps hastened; they were almost at his own door.
“What Moyna said,” Jehan continued. “Would you still want to do this if you could choose otherwise?”
Estiene stopped, key in hand, and turned. He was just drunk enough that it seemed impossible to think about that question and do the motions necessary to open the door at the same time.
“Yes. I’d want to do it even if I didn’t have the magic to do so. And now you’re going to say it’s because of my father, because I’m a healer from a long line of healers and it’s always been expected of me, but that’s not it. I love it.”
Jehan, very close, was smiling at him. “I wasn’t going to say that. I know you. I know what you love.”
Teases were one thing, that was another.
“Fuck, Jehan, don’t.”
Estiene turned away and opened the door to let them in.
It was just like it had been hundreds of times over the last five years.
Like the very first time: hot with drink and reeling on the brink of the future, excited, scared, and wanting Jehan to touch him so he could crackle with that lightning-bolt need that had never been matched, never before and never since.
He was ready to be snatched up and dragged close to be undressed. His mouth was parched and waiting.
The lack of the action he expected left his nerves twanging. When the door closed, Jehan was looking at him not like a man he intended to fuck, but like their diagram of Ysabel’s array: seeing a problem, searching for the last piece of solution.
Estiene took an aggressive handful of Jehan’s robe, ready to push him shamelessly into acting. Jehan’s gaze went from Estiene’s mouth to his throat to his hair and back again, but he still closed his hand over Estiene’s to make him pause.
“Why did it matter that I plan to leave?” Jehan said. “You knew that I would. I got the Mostau scholarship at the end of second year. Nothing changed then.”
“Normally I don’t mind your habit of having three conversations at once and out of order, Jehan, but right now I really just want—”
“Why did it matter?”
Humiliation it was, then. Estiene lifted his chin. He’d get through this and then take the nostalgic pity-fuck that Jehan was here to grant him, and no doubt it would be good enough that he’d forget what it was and what it wasn’t.
“I told you at that stupid warehouse. I didn’t know you planned to come back to Sieuxerr.”
“So you’d have kept fucking me through the last month if—”
“No, I—” Estiene shook Jehan by the grip on his clothes.
“I knew you’d leave. I decided we had to stop—this—because I’d realised that you leaving would poison me and I thought, if I lanced it quickly—I thought it would hurt less and I’d have time to recover.
I was wrong. Are you happy? I was wrong.
It hurt so much and it kept hurting. I’ll get over it, I just need more time, but give me tonight.
I can forget that I’m not good enough for you, not good enough for anyone. I know you don’t—care. The same way.”
Care. A feeble word at the end of that long, excruciating stumble. A small and sweet word. Not the hook; not the gaping, festering howl of need.
Jehan’s mouth was half-open. Estiene, with shredded dignity, retrieved his hand from beneath Jehan’s. Maybe he’d ruined it after all. Maybe he wasn’t even good enough for this.
Jehan said, “Whatever made you think I don’t care for you?”
“The many, many times you told me so? You’re such an arsehole, Estiene. Let’s list your flaws. You’re a self-centred, pretentious little shit, Estiene.”
“Estiene.” Jehan kind of laughed. It went up and down with a lurch in the middle, like a street in the old city. “I have spent more time with you than with anyone. You know more about me than anyone—more than my friends, my sibling, my mother.”
“I didn’t know about that fighting ring,” said Estiene, and wanted to shrivel up at how petulant he sounded.
“Neither did they!”
“And you never told anyone about us.”
“Come on, you know you were insufferable in first year,” said Jehan.
“Back then it was because I’d have been mocked for it, and I would have minded, because I was insufferable too.
And then it was fun to have a secret. And then we were in the habit of it, and you seemed to need it.
I knew you were still a bit ashamed that you wanted someone like me. ”
“I was ashamed—”
“You dumped me.”