Thirty-Nine #3
Now for the active muscle spasms. This, they all knew how to do, at least. Working in such close harmony was like moving shoulder-to-shoulder in a dark space, doing the steps of a memorised dance.
It was efficient. The muscles fought back feebly, but were swamped under the certainty of the healers.
Clement had only participated in a handful of healings which felt so sure and so strong, and all of them for much simpler techniques.
Somehow the confidence of that success was a new note in the working, a sparkling energy between the five of them. Now. They had to move now.
“Just like for vermeil,” Clement murmured. “Hold the idea of what we want. That’s all.”
And sang another note, waiting for them all to join it. The great creature of their combined magics washed restlessly in Perrin, hesitated at Perrin’s skin, and Clement felt a frisson of fear that they couldn’t afford.
“Now,” they said. “Alys. Everyone. Now.”
The hesitation—and then the flood. All of them held their magic steady, envisaging the new normal that the body had to be convinced to adopt, and around them the glorious gold of Alys’s power began to work.
It went on, and on. Clement’s own heart was in their throat at the beauty and the fragility of it.
Somehow they held the balance.
With even one or two more healers, or with a group of healers who weren’t already learning one another’s styles so intimately—and without Clement’s ear, which in this sense went beyond hearing and became a fine-tuned sensitivity to how the magic thrummed in their hands and in Perrin’s body, the give and take of it like blood in the heart’s chambers, the rhythm of it as well as the pitch—this would be impossible after all.
The more singers, the more imperfect the unison.
Clement waited, held it, waited. There was a final piece that made Ysabel’s technique possible, made the unison essential—
—and there it was.
Jehan’s technique had kept Perrin’s own magic quiescent until now. But as they worked, as Clement felt the slow shift of the entire body toward something new, it stirred.
That hadn’t happened with the original array.
A sixth singer, a new instrument, entered the mix. It didn’t know the tune. It didn’t want to submit to it. Sleepily, it whistled and whined a discordant counterpoint.
The threads of the healing wobbled.
Clement sang loud and strong. It took all their strength and musicality, all the confidence that had blossomed this week from the cracks of their grief. The five of them came together again at once—and Perrin’s magic drifted into the thread as well, and expanded there. And stayed.
Singing with them, not against them.
Believing it would work.
“I think that’s it,” said Estiene, after an age. His voice felt like it had come from Clement’s own mouth, and they heard Alys’s voice in outright echo: “. . . that’s it.”
If they stayed in this state longer, what might they do? What might they find? It was like standing in temple, lighting candles against the dark; like the knowledge that every candle, burning alone, contained the sparks of every loved one already gone.
If Clement sang long enough and strong enough, would they find Ysabel in this working?
She’s here, a part of them said. She brought you here.
“Count us out, Clement,” said Clement’s lips. Who’d said it? Jehan?
It didn’t matter.
Clement kept a beat. They all withdrew from Perrin’s fingers, feet, arms, legs, up past the steady-beating heart. And lastly, like releasing the top of a house of cards, they coaxed Perrin back awake.
“Four, three,” said Clement. “Two, one.”
And lifted their fingers clear of Perrin’s temples, and opened their eyes.
Light rushed in. Clement sat and felt bruised by it, by the pairs and pairs of eyes staring down at them, as they hadn’t for days.
They wanted to cry in astonishment. Perrin sat up; Estiene was already doing diagnostics, somehow scraping up some spare magic to do so.
Clement didn’t need his shout of triumph, or the choke of Perrin’s breath as they started crying and laughing both at once. They already knew.
It had worked. They’d done it. Ysabel had done it.
To the audience it would have looked like—nothing. Anything. The senior healers of the Academie were already crowding down into the theatre floor. Dean Saige took over from Estiene, clearly unwilling to believe until he’d felt it for himself.
Estiene whacked Jehan’s arm, face ablaze. “Did you feel it when—”
“When their magic took over? That was incredible.”
“Clement,” said Alys, and extended a hand. Her eyes were overbright and her hand shook until Clement grasped her fingers and was hauled to their feet. “Do you want to do the next part?”
The old Clement didn’t, particularly—they wanted to sleep off their wonder and their gratitude and their exhaustion in a dark corner somewhere.
But Ysabel was owed this as well, and the new Clement would see that she had it.
“Yes,” they said.
Alys grinned, put her fingers in her mouth, and gave an enormous piercing whistle that would have been at home on a horse track. Then did it again, for emphasis.
The Teaching Theatre fell quiet.
“Dean Brodier,” Clement said. “Can you explain to everyone what we just did?”
“You healed the serrage,” said Brodier. She, too, had a smile trying to turn into a grin on her face. Clement wanted to punch it. “Using my technique. I knew you could, Savoye, I knew it would work—”
“Not using your technique. You told us that we were wrong, at the start.”
Brodier paused.
“Moyna,” said Clement. They had to keep the momentum. So many people were watching.
Moyna picked up the chalk, found a new patch of floor, and explained.
The Theatre was as attentive as if the First Healer had strolled in from the annals of history and was giving a lecture.
It was packed with robes of both grey and blue now.
Word had continued to spread. And it would spread across the city—across the world, Clement thought.
Moyna was explaining aloud for the first time something that would be repeated over and over and over.
Ysabel’s missing piece was what she’d practiced with Genevieve Balenne’s study group, and it was this: A mage’s healing magic could be called upon to complete their own healing when the process was perfectly even. No hierarchy. No roles.
The working couldn’t be an imposition, or an overpowering. It had to be an invitation. It showed the patient how to be their own healer, then lent them both the enormous amount of power they needed to do it, and the belief that it would work.
There was an elegance to the idea that made it seem inevitable once you’d done it—healing as half song and half belief, healing as the kind of unselfish and interconnected art that Mathé themself had wanted it to be—but it was still a leap.
Clement would never have thought to try this; and knew, sure as stone, that Brodier never would either.
Healers worked in arrays. Healers thought in terms of radials and hierarchy.
It was ingrained from the first day of the Academie: divided by seniority, marked out by colours, and never allowed to forget that they were one another’s competition.
The longer a healer worked, and the less protection they’d built for themselves against the isolation that the profession demanded, the more this attitude would bore itself into their bones.
No. Brodier would not have conceived of this. It was all Ysabel, young and loved and fearless.
Brodier stood motionless when Moyna was done speaking. Finally, she said, “So you’ve come up with an alternate technique—”
“Something as outrageous and new as this, on no notice? Without any discussion? In the middle of the Grand Exam?” demanded Dean Saige. “What in Mathé’s sacred name is going on here?”
“This isn’t Dean Brodier’s work,” said Clement. “It’s Ysabel Caudotte’s. It was always Ysabel’s.”
“What?” A shaky laugh, but Brodier had been surprised off balance. It sounded feeble. “No. Caudotte was brilliant, but—”
Clement went on, “Brodier wants to take all the credit for it, but she doesn’t even know the most vital component.”
“Mathilde,” said the Chancellor. “Is this true?”
A long, long pause. Brodier’s sigh seemed to take more than air out of her.
“So she told you after all,” Brodier said to Clement, a slash of disgust in her tone. “All that talk of keeping it to herself, keeping the five of you in the dark so that the exam would prove the process—”
“No, she kept it secret. Right up until the end. Why did you have to kill her?”
They’d hoped it would sound triumphant. Accusing. Fierce.
Instead they sounded like the raw, half-broken child who’d first sat down at a desk next to Ysabel Caudotte, not knowing that they were about to be enfolded in the warmth of her friendship.
“I didn’t kill Caudotte,” said Brodier. “What a preposterous suggestion. Yes, all right—she developed this technique, under my supervision. When she died, tragic as it was, I saw no reason not to carry on with the proof.”
“And to take all the credit,” said Jehan.
Brodier’s cheeks were sallow and tight. “Perhaps not my finest moment, but if you understood the pressures I’m under—”
“You have her research notebook locked in your desk,” said Clement. “She never went anywhere without it. She would have had it with her when she died.”
“I—very well, perhaps I—found her body,” said Brodier wildly. “Yes, I took the notebook so I could use her research. I was ashamed. I didn’t tell anyone—I knew she’d be discovered the next day. No doubt she did burn out, or—”
“No, she didn’t,” said Moyna. “You stopped her heart. And I think you stopped Artificer Decroy’s, as well, when he tried to threaten you with the fact that he’d overheard you and Ysabel the night before the Grand Exam.
Arguing? Fighting, because she suspected you planned to publish and take the credit before she could? ”
Brodier gaped at her. Moyna gave a thin smile.
“How could—” Brodier broke off. “No. That’s—that never happened.”