Thirty-Six
This year’s graduating class stood up for the first time in healer blue, and received their generalist belts from Chancellor Jean Marcelle.
The title of Dux Scolaris was bestowed upon the Chancellor’s own daughter, Marie-Claude Marcelle, who had showed exemplary performance and high magical skill through all five years of her scholarship.
The Chancellor also announced, to great excitement, the planned construction of a dedicated hall for chorale rehearsal and performance.
—From an article in the Sieuxerr Gazette, held in the archives of the Academie Sieuxerr
Estiene slept in.
It didn’t come naturally to him, unlike Jehan, but he also wasn’t usually awake well past midnight and energetically occupied during some of that time.
He awoke to the aggressive slant of sunshine around his curtains, a dry post-brandy mouth despite all the water he’d insisted he and Jehan drink while they were recovering between rounds, and the general bodily sense that he’d be pushing it to try to make it to breakfast.
Though it was Mathé’s Feast, and he was in fifth year. The kitchen staff would probably keep the dining hall open longer than usual out of sheer sympathetic practicality.
He was alone in his bed. Jehan must have left after Estiene fell asleep.
Estiene batted away a brief sting of perplexity and disappointment.
What did a few hours matter, set against what was to come?
Estiene stretched and found some interesting aches, and smothered a grin in his pillow.
That sword of a future still hung over him, but he was armoured with happiness.
Mathé’s arse—he’d discovered that he was a pathetic romantic, but letting himself indulge in it was something else.
He was wrapped in a bathrobe, ready to give up on breakfast and go for a long shower instead, when there was a knock on his door.
Jehan? Surely they were past the habits of infatuated first-years who glued themselves together at the hip and needed to walk one another to breakfast.
Still, Estiene found himself grinning again. He even re-mussed his hair a little before opening the door.
It was his father.
Estiene’s mood shrivelled like hair caught in a flame.
He wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t still asleep and dreaming.
What would Jourdain Marcelle be doing here, in the residence hall, dressed in his full feast-week Hospital regalia and holding—Estiene inhaled—a grease-spotted paper bag that smelled divinely of butter and almonds?
Then he remembered: This was something parents did. They’d all be at the concert that night, but plenty of them would also be keen to see their soon-to-be healer children, and wish them Mathé’s luck for the final day of the Grand Exam.
The Head Healer of the Hospital Sieuxerr looked his half-dressed son up and down and up again, and did not wish him Mathé’s luck.
His eyes fixed on Estiene’s neck and he said, “I see you’ve decided to maximise your chances of a good graduation grade by pissing about instead of getting a good night’s sleep. ”
Estiene touched his neck, had a brief and vivid memory of Jehan’s teeth, and went hot with embarrassment. Blood must have driven rational thought clear out of his head, because otherwise he wouldn’t have let the next sentence out.
“It hardly matters what I do, when I’ve got you around to make sure the Chancellor passes me anyway.”
Jourdain’s face darkened. “Keep your voice down,” he hissed, and pushed past Estiene into the small room.
Estiene closed the door. His heart hammered painfully.
Now they were going to argue about that again, and Estiene would hear exactly how much of a disappointment he was and how little faith his father had in him, and all the pleasure of having an illustrious, talented father who also sometimes did normal, supportive father things would be ruined.
But his father was smoothing a hand over his braid, looking around Estiene’s room. When he looked back at Estiene, he was his normal composed, confident self.
He was simply going to pretend that Estiene hadn’t said it.
For a wild contrary moment Estiene thought about dragging the fight back into the open, but his stomach took that moment to grumble loudly at the scents coming from the bag.
“Here,” his father said shortly, and held it out.
“Bad enough that I’m accosted by reporters outside my own house, now Augustin Thoury is having me tailed.
I had to stop at a bakery and then make a big song-and-dance for your hallmaster about coming in to surprise you, and no doubt a smirking gendarme is waiting for me to emerge again. ”
Estiene was already halfway through a sweetmouse. It was superb, but the taste soured with disappointment. Not a normal paternal impulse, then. Just an excuse.
“Why are you here, then?” he asked, once he’d swallowed.
Jourdain sat in the chair at Estiene’s desk, and pulled a braid over his shoulder.
“Listen. There is absolutely no chance that I will allow Thoury and his band of overpaid ruffians to ruin my life or yours, do you understand? I expect you to keep your head up and behave as if you know this and you’ve done nothing wrong. ”
“I haven’t—”
“I will be at your exam room, as agreed, to show that I am a reasonable and cooperative citizen. But instead of overseeing Grand Rounds this lunchtime, I will be spending it calling in the last and largest favours I’m owed, to get this nonsense to go away.
Or at the very least, to ensure that you stay in Sieuxerr doing respectable work, even if you are found guilty of—these things.
It will not be pleasant for me, and it will not be cheap. Figuratively speaking.”
Estiene wanted to sit down too. Pride or perhaps stubbornness kept him on his feet, clutching the bag of pastries.
So the Head Healer hadn’t been completely defanged after all.
A complicated worm of hope moved through him.
Surely it was best to have a strategy for if his exam group’s plan failed?
Influence. Favours. Shifting the immovable block that was the Committee for Healer Workforce.
“Could Mamie help?” he ventured.
“No,” said Jourdain. “She most certainly does not need to hear about this.”
For the first time Estiene saw something of himself in his father that he hadn’t expected to see: that pained need for approval. His grandmother Marguerite was a retired healer herself—and, Estiene had always assumed, mothered in the same exacting style that she grandmothered.
“You could perhaps gather your manners enough to say thank you,” said Jourdain. “As I said, this is going to take all of the favours I have owing, from people who like me only a little more than Thoury does.”
All of Estiene’s nascent sympathy for his father vanished. His pride bent, twanged, and struck back.
“You’re not popular,” he snapped. “Who’d have thought?”
“Politics is above your head,” said Jourdain. “I don’t expect you to understand it, just to behave well and not shame me any further.”
“So am I a naive boy or am I a brilliant healer in my own right, as you were so keen to tell Thoury?” Estiene demanded. The mark on his neck throbbed and made him rash. “Am I part of you or am I my own person?”
Jourdain stood. He was only an inch taller than Estiene, but had always known how to make himself seem enormous. Estiene dearly wished he were wearing anything other than his bathrobe.
“You’re enough a part of me to have dragged me into this mess,” said Estiene’s father. “And you’re lucky you do reflect on me, or else I’d be tempted to leave you in it. I’m not the one who was found with a bloody knife standing over a corpse!”
Estiene laughed. Part of him was squirming, horrified, wanting to take everything back and just agree to whatever his father wanted, and perhaps salvage some semblance of the relationship they’d had. Or the one he’d thought they’d had.
Another part of him, the part that loved Jehan’s recklessness, whispered: Push.
“I won’t hang around in Sieuxerr to shame you,” he said. “I’m thinking I might go and work in Mostau, once I’ve graduated.”
“Mostau—what? Mostau in Fenehaf? Where they train the nautical air-mages? What are you talking about?”
“Or perhaps some tiny Resée border town that’s never even had their own healer,” said Estiene.
“You want to flee?” said Jourdain. “And make it look like you’re guilty of everything they say, even if I can get the gendarmes to back off?”
“It wouldn’t be fleeing,” said Estiene. “It’d be choosing something for myself.”
“And you wonder why I treat you like a child,” said Jourdain. “All you’re doing is acting like one, and a petulant one at that. Be serious. You want to work at the Hospital. You want to do diagnostics, and learn from the best in the world, and become the best.”
A last tiny shred of paternal pride, there. Estiene wanted pathetically to cling to it.
“I do,” Estiene agreed. “But there might be things I want . . . more?”
Jourdain, again, decided to deal with this by ignoring it. He went to the door.
“Pass your exam. Excel in your exam,” he said. “I will see you afterward.”
“Wait,” said Estiene. “If you’re coming to our exam—it’ll be at the Teaching Theatre, not the Rondelle.”
“They changed the location?”
“It’ll be changed,” said Estiene.
His father sighed, delivered another look of skewering disapproval to the mark on Estiene’s neck, and left.