Thirty-Nine #4
“And then you framed me for it,” said Estiene.
“Me and my father. Because you wanted our exam group to stop asking questions, and you knew the gendarmes would leap at us as suspects, and because”—he hesitated only a tiny moment, then lifted his chin—“because Chancellor Morant told you that you had to pass me with a high rank, no matter what, because my father had bribed him for it. And you hated that.”
Well, there was an even larger stone thrown among the pigeons. Clement wanted to applaud. They also wanted to look up and see Jourdain Marcelle’s expression, but they couldn’t take their eyes off Brodier.
All of that hatred was naked on Brodier’s face as she stared back at Estiene. She took a shaky breath, her sharp mind clearly rallying for another explanation. She would talk as long as it took. She was fighting for her freedom, for her life.
Another voice rang out from above them.
“Mathilde. Mathilde. You killed my daughter?”
Mathilde Brodier looked up. Adala Caudotte was standing at the rail, gripping it for support with her thin and pain-ravaged hands.
The two women stared at one another for a long, awful moment.
Clement felt on their skin, like storm-charged air before the lightning, the moment when Brodier broke.
“There was nothing left for me, Adala.” It was a bird’s cry, anguished and piercing.
“Fifteen years I’ve given to the Academie, you know that.
And I worked myself to rags when the serrage hit—all that horrible, grinding work, for nothing but anger—people spat in my face.
You know. You were there. But the townies are wrong about us.
We are still Mathé’s gifts. We can believe it of one another, at least. So I kept up my private work, and my hours in the clinic.
I bothered to care about assessment, instead of endlessly reusing exam questions.
I was told,” a near choke, “two years ago, that I was on track to be Chancellor, one day. And then told last term that actually, my job would disappear, and I’d be lucky to be kept on at all.
Because Rogier Saige, who cares more about lining his purse and fucking his scholars, has pressed the right hands and pretended to supervise a third of every cohort.
This year he’s had the sheer luck to supervise, if it even deserves the word, someone with a truly original idea”—pointing at Jehan—“which I only hear about because Ysabel thinks of a way to fold it into her work as well.”
Saige weathered his inclusion in this tirade without blinking. He looked, to his meagre credit, a bit sickened at where this was heading. Success and misery were wound so tight together in Clement that they couldn’t separate them.
They’d been right. They wished there was nothing to be right about.
“For a job,” said Adala, very controlled. “Her entire future for a scrap of yours, was that it?”
“For the serrage,” snarled Brodier. “I wanted Ysabel to wait to reveal it until we had a cure for everyone, but she was graduating and—and you know what this will mean, even as it is. The workforce can expand again. The pressures on all of us will ease, at least back to where things were before it hit. We’ll be able to breathe.
The Academie could consider keeping on its healer faculty, so nobody would have to lose their job after—”
She halted. Her hands closed and opened by her sides. Clement found they were biting their lip hard. Brodier looked around, the centre of attention, the centre of this piece of theatre, just as she’d wanted. She’d committed herself now.
She lifted her chin and said, “I suggested we publish the array together, as co-authors. Her name would still be on it. She could talk as much as she wanted about how clever she was for coming up with the idea, just let my name be there too. Let me have something to show for all these years. And Ysabel—laughed. She laughed in my face.”
Ysabel, who believed in fairness and also in her own glory. Yes. Clement believed it.
“I even—well, I pointed out that I was the Dean of Assessment, after all. Just to give her a nudge. Remind her of how the world works. And she said that nobody would believe she needed to cheat, but that everyone would believe her if she accused me of academic theft.”
This breath was so long and awful that Clement felt it in their own throat. The air was thick and sour and spiced with magic.
Brodier said, “She laughed. As if everything I’ve done and how hard I’ve worked, how thin I’ve been stretched, meant nothing. As if she didn’t care at all that I’d have the disgrace of being dismissed from the Academie. I’ve given everything, like we’re told to, I have nothing—”
“So you killed her,” said Adala Caudotte. “She was a gift as well, Mathilde. She was . . .”
Adala’s voice went raw and gave out.
Brodier took another gulping breath. She was shaking all over now, her hands writhing around one another.
Everyone had drawn back from her, leaving space.
She was standing at the chalked leader-point of the array—or what would have been the leader-point, if the solution hadn’t been about turning your back on everything that Brodier had clung to all through those fifteen years.
She looked horribly, heartbreakingly alone.
She gave a convulsive nod.
“And the artificer as well, I presume.” It was Gendarme Captain Thoury, who’d used the time to come down to the railing himself.
He nodded to the two gendarmes with him, who took the steps onto the theatre floor.
“All right, Jourdain, no need to look so smug about it,” added Thoury, over his shoulder.
This intrusion, this cymbal-clash of practicality in a symphony of pain, rang dreadfully in Clement’s ears.
“No,” said Brodier. She backed away, eyes wide with horror. In the approaching gendarmes she clearly saw her future: not only removed from the Academie in more disgrace than a simple dismissal, but sold into whatever role the city deemed most profitable, kept prisoner and barely respected, forever.
She said again, “No,” and pressed one of her shaking hands to her chest.
“Oh no,” said Alys, a whisper.
Clement still didn’t understand until it happened.
Brodier took another wild look around her own domain, the Teaching Theatre of the Academie Sieuxerr, stuffed full of the scholars she’d guided. Then closed her eyes.
And fell, soft as a faint, to lie limp on the ground.