I made a trip down to the city today.
This was Olrick’s doing. He had made inquiries with our neighbors, and it seems that many of the palace residents make an outing of it every Tensday to attend church or take care of personal business. Nadine didn’t seem terribly thrilled at the prospect, but she conceded that some fresh air would be good for all of us.
Church was fine, I suppose. I had too much on my mind to pay close attention. Afterwards, Olrick and Nadine wanted to make some social calls, so they suggested Jacque and I use the time to resume our tutoring sessions. Jacque readily agreed to this.
(I was rather preoccupied with the question of Governor Valia, and was in no mood for Jacque’s antagonistic banter. Alas, I could not think of a suitably polite excuse.)
He had mentioned in passing before that his abode wasn’t so grand as the old Seaborne Estate, though I had perhaps dismissed this as mere humility. In retrospect, it was a rather foolish notion; Jacque hasn’t a humble bone in his body, and if anything, he had understated how meager his dwelling actually was.
Jacque lived on the penultimate floor of a four-story building at the base of the hill. His quarters consisted of a single room, perhaps smaller than my old guest room at the Seaborne Estate, made further cramped by the shelves of books that lined the walls. Ornately patterned rugs were layered over each other on the floor, and tapestries covered the spaces between the shelves. A lamp hanging over a single table, composed of a ball of enchanted light and a shutter, bathed the space in a dim glow. An exotic, sweet incense filled the air.
It was clear that Jacque had gone to great lengths to give the space a luxurious atmosphere. It was nearly enough to distract from the clutter, the low ceiling, and the folded cot in the corner.
“May I offer you something to drink, Miss Why?” he asked as he ushered me to a chair at the lone table. Without waiting for an answer, he poured for us both a glass from a nondescript bottle. Neither the cups nor the furniture matched.
“It is a nice home,” I told him, lifting the cup in both hands. “I thank you for making me your guest.” I took a cautious sip—just water.
He played with his own glass nervously. Out in the world, he could put on a facade of being successful and connected, but the illusion was quickly dispelled once one saw where he had made his home. I suspected that he had realized this very thing, as I’d never seen him quite so obviously miserable before.
“Perhaps I could arrange it for you to come to the palace,” I said. It was an empty promise spoken with the intention of raising his spirits, and I hoped he would recognize it as such.
His eyes lit up. “I have always wanted to visit. Oh, but you must tell me everything, yes? Is it true that Lord Governor Valia keeps a private [menagerie] with animals from every corner of the continent?”
“I have not seen a [menagerie], but the palace is very wide inside. There may be.”
“Your grammar is slipping,” he chided. This was unlikely, of course. My language spell would prevent any such degradation in my grammar. If I was making errors, then they were old errors and could be attributed to the poor quality of my teacher.
Still, it was good to see Jacque act more like himself.
“I have always dreamed that I would one day see the palace,” he said, setting aside any pretense that this would be a productive lesson. “Perhaps I would author some groundbreaking treatise, and Lord Governor Valia would invite me to give him a private lecture on the matter. Unlikely, yes, given what you have told me of the man. Ah, but I do miss academia.”
“Please forgive me, but maybe I do not understand. You are a teacher to me and to the children at the church. Is that not academia?”
“Thank you for your patently unsophisticated perspective, Miss Why.” He rolled his eyes. “That is education. Academia is something else entirely.”
Swirling the water in his glass, he continued. “I graduated at the top of my class from the University at Brent, you know. My thesis on the evolution of social [hierarchies] in the [postwar] years was [hailed] as a [revelation] by my peers. I was invited to speak at the most prestigious conferences in Lecosia, and my adviser had already told me I was being considered for a [???] position.”
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His voice grew distant and dreamy as he reminisced about the past.
“If I may ask this question, why did you leave?”
My question pulled him from his reverie, and his voice took on a tone of flat disgust. “It is for the same reason that anything awful ever happens. Politics.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but he waved a dismissive hand at me.
“I do not wish to speak of it!” he said. He took a moment, then, stewing, and just as I was about to answer, he spoke of it. “I was effectively banned from every reputable institution in Panzea. Even out here, where House Valia likes to pretend the rest of the world does not exist, all I can do is take on the odd teaching job here and there. I do not even believe in Inspirationalism.” (This is the name of the philosophy to which Olrick subscribes.) “I only took the work because I was desperate and Nadine’s husband knew people in the church.”
He let out a single, dry laugh. “Pathetic, no?”
It should go without saying that I was utterly discomfited by this outpouring of despair from Jacque. Perhaps we had developed some degree of familiarity after so much time spent in study together, and his attitude had shifted slightly after our most recent misadventure, but I was accustomed to the Jacque who regarded me with something between disdain and rivalry.
I racked my mind for a culturally appropriate response. While my personal feeling is that turning away and giving him the conceit of privacy would be appropriate, my experiences with Nadine and Olrick told me that some combination of physical contact and comforting words was the norm here.
“There, there,” I said, reaching across the table and patting Jacque’s hand.
Was it an effective form of comfort? He jerked his hand from mine, eyes bulging in bewilderment, and then burst out laughing. I submit that one cannot deny the efficacy of my approach.
“Ehem,” he said once he’d regained mastery of himself. “We should begin. Your grammar is in desperate need of attention, after all.”
As I predicted, it wasn’t our most productive tutoring session. The issue wasn’t even that he was distracted; he was just fine, actually. Rather, having fallen out of our old daily cadence, he had lost track of what he had already taught me, and much of our time was spent struggling to align his lesson plan to my needs as a student.
It was not a pleasant process.
At the end of it, Jacque was pinching the bridge of his nose as though to ward off a headache. “Gods, you have regressed. I do not know if I can help you with only one day a week, but we will have to try.” With a groan, he pushed himself to his feet. “You had better procure that invitation to the palace for me so that I can provide for you a better education, no?”
“Is your leg hurting?” I asked, disregarding his question (which was, in any case, rhetorical). He held his recovering leg out at an odd angle, knee stiff, most of his weight on his cane.
“Ah, you see, my doctor has gone away to treat the nobility,” he said with a mirthless smile. “She has no time left for us small people, and the other doctors in town do not have idiot apprentices that I can tutor for a discount.”
“That is a misfortune,” I replied dryly. “I understand that an idiot apprentice is most beneficial for the career.”
He gave his knee an experimental bend. “It is not so bad if I keep moving, but if I sit for too long it becomes painful, stiff.”
I set my free hand to casting my Theramantic Recall spell, eyes closed as I mentally flipped through my medical reference. “The leg’s pain is getting worse?”
“Yes.”
It wasn’t a good sign, certainly. In Guntao, I might have expected recovery to take a year or more. But with the quality of healing magic he had received under our care, he should have been nearly ready to abandon his cane. He had exacerbated his injury while sword-fighting with ruffians on my behalf, yes, but enough time should have passed to recover even from that.
“You should see a physician,” I told him. “Maybe it is difficult in the current situation. But if it is healing in a bad way, you want to correctly fix it now.”
“Exactly my thoughts.” Jacque fell back heavily into his seat, and I winced on his behalf. “You have a little more time before you must return to the palace, yes? My next student will understand if I am late.”
“You will be late?” I asked. “I do not understand.”
“I think it is obvious, no?” he said, stretching his leg out towards me. “You can help me.”
“Ah!
“How absurd. You are apprentice in name only. I have seen you work, and you are more than a match for any Theramancer in this city.”
He couldn’t understand, of course, that I’m not a Theramancer at all. Nor could I explain that I was powerless to heal him without an actual Theramancer, like Nadine, to light a magical spark that I could shape into a miracle.
Instead, I lowered my head until it touched the table in front of me. “Please forgive me. This is something I cannot do.”
His only answer was an incredulous scoff.
“I will tell Nadine,” I continued. “She will find a good doctor for you.”
“That is fine, then. Go.” I lifted my head as he shooed me away with one hand, head turned so as to not look me in the face. “We are done for the day. You may leave.”
I stood then, backing out of the room uncertainly. “I am sorry.” With one more low bow, I turned to leave.
He sighed, causing me to pause in the door.
“I will see you next week, of course,” he muttered. “In the meantime, you should try to remember who your friends are.”