“Bitter?” I offered up. “Most people call me stubborn, but only when they want to be polite. If they don’t want to be, they use insufferable.”
“You treated your training as if it were a joke, as if you were the only one these societal rules affect,” Charles said softly. “You sat in class as if it were a waste of your time.”
I swallowed. “To be completely honest, every class excepting yours was a waste of time. There was no unified curriculum. It’s a miracle anyone knows the femur from the fibula. Most of what we learned was self-taught after class. At least you answered questions and talked about useful things.”
I could see the thought rolling through his mind, crinkling up in his brows and thinning his lips into one pouting line. He wore his feelings as well as he wore his clothes.
“Are you going to try and convince me that your terrible attention span has noble reasons?” he asked.
Why would I do that; I knew I was terrible. It was plain as day.
I shook my head. “I was only being a little smart with you. I don’t handle surprises well.”
“Good place we’re going for that.” He let out a deep breath. “I was only being a little smart with you when I called on you. I like to be taken seriously, and you irk me.”
“That’s the least insulting thing anyone has said about me.”
“See how free you are with words?” He glanced up at me. “If your family name is Boucher, I will eat this coat.”
“I cannot believe you’re going to make me change my family name.”
He snorted. “Come again?”
“I’m changing my name to Boucher. Not to make it all about me, but I would like to see you eat that coat. It would be hilarious and wonderful for morale.”
“Your funeral, since it would make me sick and you would have to deal with me,” he said, standing. “I’ll vomit on your favorite shoes.”
“I don’t have a favorite pair of shoes.”
“I’m understanding the insufferable comment now,” he said, but he smiled when he said it. “Would you like me to walk you back to your tent?”
“No,” I said, glancing around the mostly empty infirmary. “I might sleep here. No one can call me dishonorable for that.”
I was supposed to share a tent with Madeline, and I couldn’t suffer through her seeing me alive. Maybe they would think me a corpse and let me rest. Maybe they would burn me with the rest, and when I died, Rainier would wake up.
“That’s not going to work for your spine or for tomorrow.” Charles came back. “Come on.”
“Is that an order, Apprentice Physician du Ravine?” I asked.
“I’m trying to help you.”
“Everyone’s always trying to help me,” I said. “For my own good, they always say, but rarely is that true.”
“Emilie,” Charles said, holding out his hand. “You’re in charge of my patients in the morning. It’s in my best interest that you’re well rested.” He swallowed. “And you saw Rainier die but haven’t talked about it. I want to make sure you’re all right.”
“I’m not,” I said, taking his hand, “but thank you.”
He walked me back. Sleeping there didn’t help—I stared at the top of the tent, sweating in the late summer heat. Eventually, once night had settled over the camp, I crawled out of my sleep roll and made my way to where they were keeping the Thornes captured. The guards wouldn’t let me near, turning me away since everyone was living, and I wandered on the outskirts with my face to the breeze and my nose full of ash. I couldn’t see the pyres that were certainly burning in Kalthorne. A week, and so many dead.
A fly, iridescent and annoying, landed on my arm, and I brushed it away. Then another and another, and my whole head itched before long, even though I knew there was nothing there. The guards didn’t notice. They brushed them away and paced.
But I had seen enough maggots to know what flies meant.
One winter, in the deep of night when fog rolled thick as snow and rain froze long before it hit the ground, one of the scullions had spilled oil on her legs. She was twenty-five and I was eight, and I had borrowed the mouser’s kittens to keep her company. She couldn’t move, and the physician had set up a little screen to separate her legs from the rest of us, meant to keep away contamination from the air. I had peeked, once.
I hadn’t looked again.
“Death has set in,” he had said. “We need to get rid of the flesh too far gone.”
They had laid maggots against her burned skin and let them feast till the rot was gone and they could replace the lack of flesh with magic and bandages. I had helped with the maggots after that.
The flies, gently touched with power, had glowed gold when I looked at them.
I followed them. We were supposed to turn over the dead to priests for funeral rites, not leave them to rot on the ground. The flies led me farther from camp, deeper into Segance, and smoke stung in the corners of my eyes. Here, a house had stood, but Demeine had burned it down. I stepped through the remnants of a kitchen, candles flickering in the dark before me.
It was the king’s tent. We were still far back enough from the lines and camps of soldiers guarding the new border, but of course he would want to sleep on Segance—now Demeine—soil. Cloth of white and gold fluttered in the warm night breeze, holding on the tent poles glittering in the light, and the expanse of earth between the tent and me was clear of guards. The golden glow of flies flitted through the air, streaking from ground to guards to grass. Shadows danced across the tent walls.
There was a great tug at the edge of my awareness, the one I usually ignored because it was simply my mind telling me magic was here, but there was no ignoring this—the noonday arts and midnight arts, every source of power nearby, gathered in the hands of artists in the tent. A line of thin windows, shaded and covered in a golden mesh, lined the bottom of the tent. There were no guards near me.
My skin prickled, uneasy, and the hair on my arms rose. I pressed forward. It was easy to slow the beat of my heart and soften my breathing. No artists would sense me, not with this much power gathered here. My boots squished through the damp muck beneath me, air filling my nose with the sickly sweet scent of rot and long-damp earth. No wonder the guards avoided this place.
I knelt and peeked through the meshed slits. His Majesty lounged on a cot, his back propped up by pillows. Physician du Guay was bent over His Majesty’s right arm, the king shirtless and sweating still, and scars, twisted and deep, webbed His Majesty’s skin. Welts crisscrossed his right arm, the flesh bubbling as if he had been held far too close to a fire. His channeling this morning had worn him out.
Greatly. The flesh was the frightening white of a burn so deep the nerves had died. The apprentices around du Guay—only two, each of them struggling not to tremble and neither thankfully Madeline—must have been the ones gathering magic. One of them had a hand on a young chevalier’s hack stretched out atop a cot. Power, so strong it burned when I looked at him, threaded through his veins.
There were no other hacks in the tent. There were no guards. There were only nobles.
“They were warned. That attack this morning was a distraction so the Felholm homestead would have time to raze the fields. That’s lost land and a traitor,” His Majesty said. “I’m here to rip out the Thornes and retake the fields, not be king of a salt flat.”
Pièrre du Guay pulled one hand up—the work must have been delicate if he was bothering with physical gestures to control the magic—and His Majesty slammed his free hand onto the table.
Pièrre gestured for one of his hacks to block the pain. “Apologies. There is more damage to the surrounding tissue than I thought. The bone has worn away. It will need to be replaced.”
His Majesty exhaled with a low whistle and spat out a glob of blood. “How’s the replacement?”
“Good, good,” Pièrre said
. “He’s quite the artist, and this shouldn’t affect your arts as much as the last one did.”
A chill settled so deep in me, I was sure that winter had come. I lowered myself to my knees, mud seeping through my clothes. The flies, gilded from feeding on noonday artists’ flesh, crawled across my cheek. I did not want to watch this.
This is your cost, Emilie des Marais, and it is your duty to pay it. Power demands sacrifice.
I gathered a few small strands of the noonday arts not quite pulled into Pièrre’s gathering yet.
The hack was breathing and aware, but he couldn’t move. I could feel his panic rapping against his chest. He could feel—Pièrre’s hands along his ribs, the knife beneath his skin, the pull of power hooking in his bones—and couldn’t do a thing about it. Pièrre and his apprentices set the work above him.
They removed his bones, his muscles, the threads of his nerves, and the little strips of yellow fat. They broke him down piece by bloody piece and built up the healthy tissue inside of His Majesty the king.
And the hack felt it. I felt it, my right arm burning.
I snapped the nerves in his spine, let my power eat through them as he breathed out. The panic softened.
I yanked myself out of his consciousness with a heavy cough and slapped my hands over my mouth. Eventually, Pièrre’s apprentices carried out the hack’s body and threw it into the dark, steps from me. There was nothing left of his arm, and the skin of his chest and shoulder had been worn away by the noonday arts. The bones they hadn’t removed were nothing but dust, his common body broken to support a noble one. A slow, unsteady thump echoed in my head.
His heart—it slowed and stuttered and stopped.
I tried to channel the noonday arts through me, tried to restart his heart and dive back into his mind to keep him awake. Blood could be regenerated so long as bones were intact. But his were hollow.
Channeling power allowed an artist to control it, to use it as they wanted. By running it through their veins, it became a part of them, and it wore them down. His Majesty shouldn’t have been able to channel the power he had today. But he had.
We are not our own.
They had undone the damage done to His Majesty’s body, the damage that was irreversible after so much had been worn down, by replacing parts of His Majesty’s body with a hack’s. This was what Pièrre du Guay had been researching, had been testing, and they must have thought Laurel knew some part of it, so they needed a distraction. They had gone to war rather than let people find this out.
Laurel hadn’t gathered enough help yet, but if people knew this, no one would serve the king again. Everyone would have backed Laurel.
And now I knew.
Sixteen
Annette
I got more sobbing than scrying done the next few days in Estrel’s office. I slept there that first night, the dam of my heart open and me drowning. Estrel wrapped me in an old, worn quilt and brought Vivienne to see me. They spoke in hushed tones, Estrel telling her that I’d revealed the traumatic event I’d seen the first time I’d ever scryed and that was why I hated the midnight arts, and Vivienne had wrapped me in a gentle hug. She smelled like ice and mint, and she muttered that it was all right. I shook my head when she asked if I had ever told my mother.
Maman knew, but I had never told her exactly what I had seen.
I couldn’t live with it. How could she?
“Can I stay here?” I asked. I couldn’t let the others see me like this. Isabelle was already too worried about her brother, and Coline was busy with the other girls, organizing letters and plotting how to sooner warn the soldiers we weren’t given orders to divine for. They’d bigger things than a decade-old death to deal with. “I don’t think I can sleep.”
After Vivienne had left, commanding Estrel to let me take it easy, I’d lifted my head and said, “Teach me to divine. Please.”
Estrel had sat next to me. “You need to deal with your grief as well. You can’t just work through it. Trust me—it catches up with you eventually.”
I wasn’t running away. This was my normal run, and Alaine was right beside me.
“I need to learn,” I said. “I need to do something. I’m not made to be still like this. Does that make sense?”
Eventually, she agreed.
She sat across from me, ready to stop me or shake me if I started coughing up water, and walked me through the steps of divining one by one. We divined gentle things at first. When chicks would hatch, who would walk the hall later, and what they’d serve for breakfast tomorrow. I cried sometimes. A lot of times.
Half of it was off, though. That hollow sobbing of knowing I should be sad but couldn’t feel it. Like a burn so bad, it didn’t hurt anymore.
Alaine’s death had seared my soul so deeply, I couldn’t even feel the pang of her loss.
“What’s happening with you?” Coline asked after three days. “You’ve barely been able to do anything, you spend all your time with Estrel, and you come back with red eyes. You’re acting like something has happened, and we’re supposed to be your friends. What’s wrong?”
“Remember how I couldn’t divine?” I swallowed. My eyes were still that tight puff of crying, and I knew I was being unfair. “I got tired of not being able to help and told her what happened last time. She’s teaching me to work around it.”
“You’ve been helping more than most of us can,” Coline said. She stared at me as if I were out of focus. “What happened the last time you divined?”
“I watched my sister die.”
Coline narrowed her eyes at me, her mouth open in a little circle, and shook her head. “I thought Marian des Marais only had one child?”
Oh.
Oh fuck.
“I have to go,” I shouted over my shoulder.
I reached Estrel’s office as she was leaving. She took one look at me, sighed, and opened it back up. “Realized it, have you?”
I swallowed all the words I’d prepared on my sprint up here and nodded. She ushered me inside and shut the door. I didn’t sit.
“I don’t know why you’re so nervous,” Estrel said, sitting on one of the stools. The laboratory was clean and gleaming, the mess of our midnight arts gone now that it was four in the morning and time for bed. “But I would like to eat before I go to bed, so—” She held up her hands. “Who are you exactly?”
“You don’t know?” It left me in a stutter, and I inched along the wall to one of the stools. “Why haven’t you turned me in?”
“The fact that you believe I would is remarkably insulting,” she said. “No, I don’t know your real name, but I know you are not Emilie des Marais.”
I couldn’t look at her, but I heard the soft shuffling of her clothes as she rose, the rub of her shoes against the floor, and the soft hiss of her laughing at me.
“Since the moment we first spoke, I knew you weren’t Emilie,” she said. “You’re as common as I am.”
“Oh.” I wrung my hands together, rubbing off the leftover stains of Yvonne’s kitchen. Maybe she’d give me a chance to run. “How?”
“Your teeth. They’re crooked and a bit stained.” She stopped a few steps short of me and did a half bow till she could glare into my eyes.
I lifted my head. She pulled her top lip up in a sneer, showing off her own crooked front teeth.
“Rich people have enough money and time to get their teeth cleaned, bleached, straightened, and replaced by physicians, and there’s no world in which a comtesse has your teeth. I’ve met Madame Marian des Marais. She’s a perfectionist.” Estrel inhaled a deep breath and blew it out through her teeth with an unintentional whistle. “They get their wounds healed, so they don’t scar. They take their smallpox through the nose instead of in the arm, so no one knows they have to get protected like the rest of us. They have money to keep themselves healthy and happy, and they pretend
they don’t. You don’t even know what to do with an extra lune much less all the money you’re wearing right now.
“But mostly, you’re me,” she said. “Your accent comes out when you’re tired. You walk as if your silk dresses are made of nettles. You stare at the silver as if you’ve never seen it before because until you were here, you hadn’t. You stare at the food as if it’s a mystery because you’ve never eaten before. You stare at the books and lessons and supplies in this school as if you want to devour them and keep them in you forever because you know this is your one chance. Ten years ago, I walked and talked and stared like you. When I told you I see myself in you, I didn’t mean the midnight arts. I meant you. Whoever you are. I know the important parts of you, and I didn’t need to know your name to know you.”
I looked at her. “No one else has noticed.”
“No one else knows our hunger,” she said. “No one else has ever seen us, not truly, so they can’t see you now.” She touched my arm, voice soft and rough and sad. “I had no one when I was your age. No teacher, no family, no friends. So no, I’m not turning you in. You are my student, and that is a responsibility to protect and teach you that I will gladly take.”
I could feel myself crying. Slowly. Quietly. No one ever wanted me.
“My name is Annette Boucher,” I said. “I’m from Vaser.”
Estrel smiled. “It’s nice to meet you, Annette.”
And I knew she wasn’t lying.
* * *
Two days later, wrapped in the same warm quilt and sitting on the floor of Estrel’s laboratory, moonlight streaming across the floor in silver streaks, I filled a bowl with ice-cold water and divined my brother. I held my memories of Macé in my heart—the sound of him snoring, the way his hand felt in mine when I walked three-year-old him around Vaser, the way he slurped his water from the cup and how horrible it sounded but how it was him, horrible or not. The water shuddered—a soot-streaked hand gathered magic over a steel chest plate.
The image rippled and ended.
Belle Révolte Page 19
