“Not ‘we’. ‘You’.”
Hoa Phong used the singular, and an honorific he’d seldom heard—only in workers’ prayers, the ones he walked away from knowing he couldn’t satisfy them.
Foreigners hold our treasures and our subjects’ submission.
It couldn’t be the subjects—well, at least he hoped it wasn’t, because he could imagine Grandmother Olympe’s face if Hoa Phong walked in and attempted to convince her of the Jade Emperor’s supremacy.
“Treasure,” he said, flatly, since Hoa Phong didn’t seem about to explain herself. He would guess, the court hadn’t picked her for her diplomatic skills.
“They took something.”
“They took many things,” Philippe said.
Behind him, Isabelle pulled out a chair, and sat in it—frowning and trying to follow the conversation, but smart enough not to intervene. Good, because the currents in this were past her. He didn’t know Hoa Phong or what power she wielded, but the fact she could just fly into their flat and coalesce from flowers suggested the main reason the court had selected her was sheer strength and endurance—and that he might not be able to match either.
“Why is this one important enough to send someone?”
Hoa Phong pursed her lips. “I’m not allowed to say.”
Philippe shrugged. “Perhaps I don’t care, then?”
“Don’t you?” Hoa Phong asked. “I saw your face, when you touched the seal.”
“I was expelled from the court.” Philippe’s offense had been minor—a celadon cup, broken at a banquet—but enough of a loss of face for the Jade Emperor to cast him out. To make it clear to his guests that no imperfection would be tolerated. “More than a hundred years ago.”
He’d wandered the land, then, treading, lightly, on the bones of everyone he’d ever known, finding mausoleums of his own descendants—not even Hoa or Kim Cuc, because his own children had become vague myths in a golden age of inexhaustible rice and rivers bursting with fish. He’d watched the French go from merchants and missionaries and explorers to soldiers and conquerors, and the officials of the mortal court in Huê fight each other for scraps rather than unite against the threat. He’d watched spirits chained; dragons mortally wounded; mountain spirits retreating to their fastnesses. And, finally, the court that had once cast him out had closed itself off, desperate for respite from ceaseless Fallen attacks.
He’d ought to be glad, but all he’d felt—all he still felt—was a bleak despair.
Hoa Phong watched him, for a while. Then she moved, fluid and inhuman, to stand by his side—the sweet smell of flowers, the trembling reminder of his past—and made a gesture with her hands. The dress shifted, uncovering the lower part of her torso, just above the hips.
“You’re still a doctor,” she said. “Tell me. Help me.”
The wounds looked like claw marks, their edges jagged and blackened. Within were specks of mold, with that peculiar blue-gray he’d already seen on the petals. Philippe sucked in a deep breath.
“How…?”
“Fallen.” Hoa Phong shrugged. “They’re fast, and they’re everywhere. And if not them—their agents are.”
Isabelle had risen, come to stand near Hoa Phong. She looked at the wounds, and then back at Hoa Phong.
“You smell of death,” she said, finally. “Of… wrongness. You shouldn’t have been touched by it.”
Hoa Phong stared at her for a while, and then at Philippe.
“Who is she?”
“A friend,” Philippe said, stubbornly.
He could tell Hoa Phong wasn’t happy—that she was going to come back to this. But not right now, which was something. He knelt and looked at the wounds. They’d sunk deep into flesh—the only thing preventing the infection from being carried further into the body was Hoa Phong’s immortality—and even then, he could see the meridians, and how they were choked off by the rot.
“You’re sick.”
“Wounded,” Hoa Phong said. “It’ll heal.”
Philippe didn’t agree.
“It’s a hard land,” Hoa Phong said, finally. She wasn’t looking at him. Her face was petals again, cheeks breaking off in chunks of whitish-yellow, hair streaming away into smoke and wind. “People ignore me, or try to kill me. Or both. I can’t retrieve the object the Court sent me for alone.”
Philippe took a deep, shaking breath. He’d walked away from the intrigues of the court. He owed them nothing; and they were offering him nothing.
“It’s important,” Hoa Phong said. Another hesitation. “In Annam…” All of a sudden she wasn’t a powerful flower spirit any longer, but a young, frightened girl with no future ahead of her. “They’re at the gates now. The Fallen. Walking in the gardens, where the grass shrivels where they step, and the longevity tiles split in halves in their wake. They…” She took a deep, deep breath. “They’ve killed the star maidens and driven the Weaver and the Cowherd from their domains, and uprooted the sacred banyan in the moon.”
It was bad then. No, not bad. Worse than that: it was almost over.
“This thing you seek—”
“Yes.”
“Will it help?”
She wasn’t looking at him. Because she thought herself his inferior? The possibility hadn’t even occurred to him: it was deeply disturbing.
“It’s power,” she said, finally. “Raw, naked magic. If it doesn’t help…”
She didn’t need to say it.
“Who has it? A House?”
“I don’t know.”
Which probably meant it was. Anything that powerful would have been claimed by a House; because that was all they did—suck others dry to maintain themselves. Parasites. But he’d made his peace with that. He wouldn’t play their games. He wouldn’t get involved with them. He would remain within his small community, helping it survive.
But it was his country, his countrymen, the spirits of his homeland. And if he stood by while they made their last stand, then how could he live with himself?
“I can’t promise anything,” he said, finally. “But I can try.”
* * *
Thuan cleaned up his office, slowly and carefully. Most of the debris had been swept up by dependents. He’d insisted on it, knowing all too well the value of appearing strong at times like this, and to asset his authority as, with Asmodeus in hospital, he was nominally in charge of a House that had never really accepted him.
He’d returned Ai Nhi to her aunt Vinh Ly. The child had protested, and Vinh Ly had given her a stern talk about the importance of propriety and what an honor she’d been given—all of which had no doubt washed straight over Ai Nhi, who considered Thuan a combination of doting uncle and surrogate father.
About forty people had been injured when the shock wave hit Hawthorn. No serious wounds. Thuan had ordered every wounded person moved to hospital, though arguably the most injured was Asmodeus, who was still in the doctors’ care, but not in immediate danger. The House in Thuan’s mind was quiescent again, the sense of danger to its dependents having passed.
Which meant it was time to regroup, and think things through, and plan.
Thuan penned a small, curt missive to his relatives in the dragon kingdom of the Seine. The kingdom was drained of blood and resources following an unsuccessful rebellion, and had made it abundantly clear they wouldn’t intervene in the affairs of the city. Still, Thuan’s Second Aunt would expect regular updates on his life, and mercilessly remind him how unfilial he was when he forgot them.
He looked outside, towards the river. The plume of smoke was still rising from Harrier, but the children of thorns were no longer watching it. He thought for a while, then he threw open the broken French windows and walked out, to stand in the middle of the ruined lawn.
He waited. The air was saturated with khi water again, but beneath it was the faintest tinge of fire and burned wood. There was no summoning the children. They only showed themselves to the heads of the House—and then only when they chose.
“You were on the riverbank,” Thuan said, slowly. “Watching House Harrier burn.”
A sigh like the wind in the branches. A sharp noise like dozens of flowers budding at once.
They came silent and invisible. One moment they weren’t there, and the next they stood in front of him: children that would have seemed human, if they hadn’t been woven of thorns. Three-fingered, skeletal hands, arms of branches and twigs, and bodies that were merely frames on which hung flowers the color of rot. In the hollows of their eye sockets was only darkness—the hungry, watchful kind, the devouring night only held at bay with fire and the ancestors’ blessings.
“Thuan,” they said. Their mouths opened in unison, but not a muscle of their faces moved. “What do you want?”
“Answers.”
Laughter creaking like old wood. Like the buildings of the House. They weren’t human. They’d never been: just a mask the House chose to wear when it judged suitable.
“You don’t come out for trivialities,” Thuan said, stubbornly. “And I don’t have time to waste.”
A silence.
Then, “Things are changing,” one of the children said.
It stared at Thuan, but didn’t blink.
“Because of a House on fire?”
The child turned, briefly, to look at the plume of smoke. Its face was almost thoughtful.
“There hasn’t been war in such a long time.”
“We’re not at war!”
The child shrugged. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” It inclined its head, considering Thuan. “Perhaps the House is weak, and has need.”
Behind the mist, on the riverbank, was a place only the heads of House could reach: a grove of hawthorn trees garlanded with bodies. A place where the heads of the House went, hanging on hawthorn branches, their blood and magic forever feeding the wards that kept the House safe. Some dependents, too, once; but Asmodeus had changed that. The House took in outsiders, and asked sacrifices of its leaders, but not of its own.
Thuan didn’t flinch. He didn’t fear death. He never had. Much like Asmodeus, the only thing he feared was loss.
“Take me, then, if you think it necessary.”
They’d formed in a loose circle around him. They left no tracks upon the damp grass, and anyone who saw him would assume he was talking to himself. He stared at them, levelly—at hands with long, pointed fingers, at the hawthorn flowers threaded around the hollowness of ribs.
They were the ones who looked away, eventually.
“Not yet,” the child said, shaking its head. “One day.”
Thuan shrugged. He kept his shoulders loose, relaxed.
“We all die.”
That was a worry for another time; Ancestors knew he already had enough of them.
He must have blinked, because they were gone, as if sunk back into the earth, and he was genuinely alone on the lawn. He walked back, chilled, to his office. War. Changes. He’d a lifetime’s worth of changes already, all compressed into a few months—rising from being an obscure and unimportant prince of the dragon kingdom of the Seine to co-head of one of the most powerful Houses in Paris. He’d wanted time to enjoy it; or at least to make the most of it, to reform the House into a place where dragons and mortals, Fallen and natives could live together as equals.
War.
They wouldn’t survive another one.
He was looking for clean paper and reports in the drawers of his battered desk when Iaris walked in.
“My lord?”
“Other people knock,” Thuan said, mildly.
“Do they.” Iaris smiled.
She had two underlings with her, like an honor guard—one of her nurses, Ahmed, and Mia, the Fallen with a taste for flamboyant clothes whom Thuan had seen at the entrance to the cells. The last person, who entered the room at the back of everyone else, was Phyranthe, the leader of the Court of Persuasion and, as such, Vinh Ly’s hierarchical superior. She wore her fair hair cut short, and was clothed in a long flowing red dress, her usual garb when outside the cells—though the hems of its sleeves smelled faintly of encrusted blood.
That… was not good news, whatever it was. Phyranthe was like Iaris: old guard. A Fallen who’d met Asmodeus back when he’d been head of the Court of Birth, befriended him in the Court of Persuasion, and had risen to become its leader after Asmodeus became head of the House. A stickler for rules who worshipped the ground Asmodeus trod on, and resented Thuan and the other dragons for disturbing her routine. And particularly Thuan, for convincing Asmodeus that everyone was due a fair trial before being sent to the cells.
He’d prepared poorly. Thuan should have had dragons with him: his own, loyal followers brought in from the kingdom and dispatched to every court that made up the House. He could have asked Iaris what she and Phyranthe wanted, but that would give them the upper hand, which was little better than waiting for them to speak. Instead, he pulled up the chair behind his desk, and sat down.
“Tell me what we know,” he said.
Iaris grimaced. Good, bad. Good because she didn’t know, and wasn’t going to get the upper hand on him. Bad, because it left them in the dark. Ancestors, how much he hated playing those games, but it was the price of power. The price of having a home where he belonged, where he mattered.
“Lord Asmodeus is sleeping,” she said.
Something in her voice suggested barely hidden panic, to see her idol weak.
“He needed the rest.” Thuan was deadpan. “He expanded a lot of magic breaking out of the cells.”
“No one else had the power to do this,” Iaris said, with absolute certainty.
Sometimes he wished he shared her faith in her master—instead of seeing Asmodeus as merely… no, human was the wrong word, obviously. As a person with their own failings and strengths.
Phyranthe stirred from her chair.
“Speaking about the cells,” she said.
Her voice was mild, her blue gaze expressionless, but that didn’t mean anything. She’d grown up in the House under Lord Uphir, Asmodeus’s predecessor, where to show the depths of her friendship with Asmodeus would have had her killed. She was used to remaining impassive.
“Yes?”
Thuan turned to her and waited. Iaris was smiling. Not good.
“I understand you made a decision to move prisoners in the cells to hospital.”
Thuan stared at her. Of all the things he’d thought she might complain about… But of course, he’d forgotten that the House still ran on fear and punishments—no matter how much he might wish otherwise.
“Hospitals is where you move gravely wounded people,” he said, mildly. “No matter where they are in the House.”
Phyranthe said, levelly, “They’re traitors and in my care. They get to see a doctor only if I deem it appropriate.”
Thuan massaged his temples. “You realize,” he said, finally, “that the cells are still half-blocked off by a pile of rubble, and that several of them have collapsed walls. One of your prisoners had shattered ribs.” One of the other ones—the woman with Asmodeus—had lost so much blood it was a miracle she was still upright. “Lord Asmodeus said to get them to hospital.”
Mia stirred, behind Iaris. “I heard him. He said to get the woman he was holding to hospital. Not any of the other prisoners.”
“I assumed…” Thuan started, and then stopped.
He’d wanted to say he’d assumed Asmodeus’s order applied to everyone in the cells, but it was the wrong tack, because he might as well be driving the knife into his own chest.
Too late: Iaris had heard him. Her smile was malicious.
“You assumed you knew the way the House worked. An easy mistake to make, when you haven’t been in it long enough.”
He hadn’t been there twenty years ago, when Asmodeus’s coup had deposed Uphir—when the old, old guard had formed, the ones who now undercut him at every turn. Because he was dragon; because he was other, but mostly because he was too newly come.
“I’m head of the Hou
se,” Thuan said, mildly.
“Yes.” Phyranthe’s gaze held him—weighing him, seeking the exact place to insert the knife and slowly draw it, watching blood bead and muscles clench in pain. “There is that.” The way she said it, it was nowhere near enough. “I’m sure you’ll figure out how we work, eventually. There’s a place for everything and everyone. The Court of Persuasion is where we make examples of the disloyal.” She snorted. “Shattered ribs is nothing more than they deserve.”
Thuan watched Iaris. She’d said nothing when he’d triaged the wounded into hospital. She’d known exactly what would happen; probably had sent one of her own subordinates straight to Phyranthe to make sure she found out, and then ‘helpfully’ accompanied her into Thuan’s office.
Ancestors, he was so tired of this. He was used to court intrigue—but at court he had allies, and here all he had were the other dragons, whose position was as beleaguered as his own.
He weighed his options. They’d come to him with the complaint rather than to Asmodeus, or to another official of the House. Which meant that, as much as Iaris was enjoying him squirm, she wasn’t sure enough of her hand. He was meant to look for a way to placate her.
“I’m sure you could get the prisoners out of the hospital, and back where they belong.”
Iaris was looking at him with that same smug smile. Something obvious he’d missed.
“I don’t release those under my care, as Lord Asmodeus knows very well,” she said. A slap in the face that wasn’t even subtle. “I heal people. I don’t patch them together so they can be tortured again. The Court of Persuasion has its own doctors.”
Which he should have known, or remembered. Thuan stifled a curse, and gave up on subtlety. Cards on table.
“So an impasse,” he said, flatly. “And don’t tell me you’ll tell Lord Asmodeus, because we both know you’re waiting for a failing larger than this.”
“Oh, but I will tell him.” Iaris smiled. “I don’t need a large failing. A host of little ones will do just as well, don’t you think? A… realization of how utterly unsuited to the House you and yours are. It’s not like he didn’t have his doubts already.”
“He won’t discard me,” Thuan said, with more confidence than he felt.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 4