Asmodeus couldn’t cut him out of being head of the House—the spell that Thuan had cast, the one that had wrested supremacy of it from Asmodeus, was one that Asmodeus had no way to undo. But being head of the House was in many ways just a title. Asmodeus could most certainly make sure Thuan didn’t have any voice in the running of the House. Or, worse—set him aside as consort.
He thought of Asmodeus’s lips on his—of bergamot and citrus, swallowed at the same time as a kiss—of clothes hastily torn off and the bed in Asmodeus’s room creaking under him, the way the mattress enfolded them both. To lose this—to lose any of this… He had his doubts, Iaris had said. Why had he never told or shown Thuan any of this?
“You’re bluffing,” Thuan said.
“She’s not, and neither am I,” Phyranthe said, again in that same quiet voice, a statement of fact rather than a boast. She pulled on the sleeves of her dress, smiling with sharp, white teeth. “Lord Asmodeus spends enough time with us that I know exactly how he thinks. Did you think he was happy with the way things were going?”
Happy? He hadn’t been, not at first. But it was over now, wasn’t it? He’d become used to it.
Thuan stamped down the wave of sheer panic that shot through him, and said, “You presume a lot about the way he works.”
“I don’t presume,” Iaris said. “I’ve known him for long enough. And I’ll go to him—if we cannot find… an arrangement.”
Of course. He was meant to be scared. To beg. To abase himself in front of both of them, so they could smooth things over—in full view of Mia and Ahmed, who’d no doubt carry the word to the House of what he’d done, on how he’d finally bent his neck and behaved. Submissive, the way natives were supposed to be in Iaris’s and Phyranthe’s world. Or worse, they would all keep silent, and Iaris would use what he’d done as a weapon, a handy blackmail tool to make him go her way when she needed it.
How dare they? Not in this lifetime.
“An interesting offer,” Thuan said, dryly. “But I think I’ll pass.”
Iaris stared at him. “You’d rather risk your husband’s displeasure?”
Thuan snorted. “Try it.”
He made it come out as supreme confidence, rather than show them how rattled he was.
“An unwise choice.” Phyranthe looked like she’d swallowed something sour, and was searching for someone to vent her temper on. “Very unwise, my lord.”
Thuan smiled, letting a fraction of his dragon’s maw flicker into existence.
“I’ll make sure Lord Asmodeus knows about what happened, though in the light of what happened to the House I imagine he’ll have bigger fish to fry.”
His version against theirs. How would Asmodeus react? Probably smiling, and not doing anything one way or the other.
Not yet.
“Was there anything else?” Thuan asked Phyranthe.
She shook her head. For a moment he thought she was going to say something about how bad his choices were again, and then the moment passed.
“No, my lord.”
One point to him, though he felt about as annoyed as Phyranthe—and he knew it’d come back to bite him, one way or another.
“Then you may leave.”
He waited until she and Iaris were almost at the door before saying, “Iaris. Stay a moment, will you? I need to discuss House business with you.”
Iaris turned. For a moment he thought he’d gone too far—that she’d snap.
“Iaris.” Ahmed’s voice was low and urgent.
“My lord.”
Her smile was edged and forced as she came back into the room, and sat again in her chair. Mia and Ahmed visibly hesitated, but Thuan gestured for them to leave as well. He’d had enough of Iaris’s supporters and underlings as it was.
He made her wait: he’d earned a little pettiness, a little reminder that he was technically her superior. He rearranged the papers on his desk, carefully and completely unnecessarily.
“I want to talk about the fire,” he said. “The one in House Harrier, which set off all of this.”
Iaris stared back. “You worry too much, my lord. We can most certainly survive fire. Ice, on the other hand…”
Good to know that she didn’t let setback keep her down. The allusion was deliberately nasty: it was ice from a rebel dragon that had almost ended the House, weakening Asmodeus so much he’d had no choice but accept Thuan’s coming, and of course Iaris would throw this into his face.
“Ice isn’t going to be a problem,” Thuan said, firmly. “Or internal rebellions.”
He watched Iaris: she flinched, for the barest of moments. Her only daughter had been cast out for disloyalty, and the only reason she wasn’t dead was because Asmodeus valued Iaris too much, and had chosen to exercise mercy.
“This is another threat.”
“Do tell me,” Iaris’s smile was edged.
She’d gotten over her initial panic at seeing Asmodeus weak, but she was still on edge. Not that it stopped her being unpleasant to Thuan.
“I have it on good authority that House Harrier was blown apart,” Thuan said. There was nothing written on the papers, but there didn’t need to be. The smell of sandalwood wafted up from the incense sticks in his desk drawers; he inhaled, trying to steady himself. “There’s nothing more than a field of ruins where it used to stand. I don’t know who’s survived, or not, and if the House is still in play.”
“It takes more than that to kill a House,” Iaris said. Her voice was sharp.
Thuan raised an eyebrow, his best imitation of Asmodeus.
“We don’t exactly know what happened, do we?”
Houses had died during the Great Houses War; but they had been overrun by their enemies, their dependents fled or killed, their heart of power annihilated. Even the explosion of House Hell’s Toll’s armory had merely been the prelude to all-out assault.
But there was no longer a war, and things were supposed to be more civilized. As if anyone believed that: that the new, polite masks were anything more than an illusory facade; that the war hadn’t moved into the salons and reception rooms, its battles fought with loss of face, diplomacy and the careful dance of threats from the more powerful Houses to get their way in all things.
Unfortunately, insofar as Hawthorn went, they weren’t strong enough to risk threatening anyone.
“Tell me where we stand,” Thuan said, again.
“You know all there is to know about Harrier.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I was under the impression you didn’t think I knew enough about other Houses.”
Iaris flinched. Only a little, and not for long, but Thuan had good eyes.
He said, “They’re our southern neighbors. Our unfriendly southern neighbors, because they think we’re too nice to mortals. They invited us to the First Presentation, didn’t they?”
“Yes.” Iaris closed her eyes. “I can find more information, but…”
“Give me what you have.”
“For all their bluster, House Harrier’s power relies on its human magicians,” she said. “And the strength of their head rests on how many they can call loyal. The Presentation was going to be… a show of strength. A private Harrier ceremony made public for the first time—when its child-magicians leave the Warded Chambers in the Great Interior and become adults in the eyes of the House.”
Thuan could read between the lines.
“So Guy and Andrea were in trouble, and eager to show they weren’t afraid by having outsiders come deep into the House. Inner power struggles?”
Iaris hesitated, obviously reluctant to commit herself by speculating.
“All our informants suggest so, my lord.”
Thuan thought, for a while. House Hawthorn was still putting itself back together after the cataclysmic events that had brought him to be head of the House, its territory shared between dragon and Fallen magic. And the shock wave of House Harrier’s explosion had made enough wounded.
“It sounds like someone tried to depo
se Guy and got a little overenthusiastic,” he said.
“I couldn’t say, my lord.”
No, obviously she wouldn’t: it wasn’t her business, but Asmodeus’s and the Court of House.
“Keep an eye on it, will you? This has no reason to affect us.”
It was too early to say, but he dearly hoped they’d sit this one out. They needed time: the House wasn’t strong enough, or whole enough, to involve itself in the chaos that would follow as every House in Paris scrabbled to fill the power void.
They could use the breathing space of not being at the top of everyone’s target list.
“I presume we sent a delegation to that First Presentation ceremony.” Thuan had no memory of handling this, which probably meant Asmodeus had. “If they’re not back today, then find them.”
They weren’t dead, because he’d know it, but the sense of the dependents he had in his mind didn’t extend to their precise location, unless they had tracking disks with them.
Iaris’s face was a careful blank.
“Find out who went,” Thuan ordered.
“My lord.”
Iaris bowed, not deep or long enough.
Thuan watched her leave. She was… he wouldn’t say cowed, exactly. Merely inconvenienced—and he heard that last word the way Asmodeus would say it, smiling sharply when describing someone’s mortal wound. Thuan had called her and Physanthe’s plot for what it was: a play on weak foundations. But they would try again.
They’d stymied him before, but coming at him so brazenly meant they were surer of themselves than they’d been. Something had changed, and he was deathly afraid that what had changed was Asmodeus himself.
He wanted to go out and sit by Asmodeus’s bed until Asmodeus finally woke up—kissing him fiercely and asking him for an honest answer, the kind Asmodeus never gave anyway. But he hadn’t lost all common sense yet. Revealing a weakness of that magnitude to Iaris would have consequences for him long before Asmodeus was in any state to deal with anything.
Thuan went back to what he’d been doing, and finally managed to retrieve the reports on the House’s budget he’d been forwarded before his office exploded. He didn’t usually involve himself in the affairs of the Court of Hearth. Like Asmodeus, he was a member of the Court of House only, dealing with the diplomatic business of managing the other Houses. But, with the shaken dependents and the influx of wounded in the hospital, there was work to do. Like increasing the food supply—the rotten food grown in what was left of the countryside after the war. How he wished that the dragon kingdom hadn’t closed itself off to all traffic and commerce. Under the Seine there would be jujubes and mangoes and rambutans—not pure or uncontaminated, but tasting sweet and pleasant, and not like the bland cardboard with a faint aftertaste of mold that seemed to overlay everything in Paris. But the dragon kingdom, convulsing and dying from its internal power struggles, had made it very clear they would have nothing more to do with the city, not even in an emergency.
He was halfway through a particularly difficult calculation involving three different pages of three different reports when someone knocked on the door.
“Yes?”
Not Iaris, which was a relief. Unless she’d learned politeness in the past hours, which he doubted.
It was Sang, one of the dragons who worked in the Court of Strength—the court providing bodyguards, soldiers and security to the House. She was wearing the House’s uniform, her hair impeccably tied into a topknot. She had to be one of the only dragons either oblivious or confident enough to wear a halfway shape, which showed the antlers on either side of her head, a scattering of scales on her face, and a faint sheen of rainwater around her as she walked.
“Your Majesty,” she said.
Thuan winced. He’d tried to explain he wasn’t their king, but the traditionalists among them had just ignored him.
“What’s going on?”
Sang was one of the dragons he almost never saw in his office. The Court of Strength was not in Iaris’s orbit, but rather attached personally to Asmodeus—and they had effortlessly transferred over that loyalty to Thuan. He got written reports from Sang on other Courts’ politics, some funny tidbits about who was sleeping with whom in the Court itself, and that was about all.
“It’s… hard to explain.” Sang sounded embarrassed, as if bringing something too small to his attention. Except it was Sang, which meant the “something too small” really was an emergency. “I think you should come. I mean, strictly, it’s not my business, it’s the Court of Persuasion’s…”
The Court of Persuasion. Phyranthe. Iaris. Thuan was on his feet and at the door in a heartbeat, grabbing Sang as he passed.
“Let’s go.”
THREE
Ruins of the House
Emmanuelle wandered the ruins of House Harrier in a daze.
She’d left the distant shadow of the Great Interior behind her, trying to move away from people, from the sound of fighting, from all of it. She’d walked north, or what she thought or hoped was north, along small streets until she stumbled along a larger one—Boulevard de Grenelle? It was hard to tell anymore. The verdant trees were blackened and burned, and all the windows were smashed. No people, either; just bodies poking out from the debris, and an unbroken silence spreading around her like that of the grave.
She turned east, because why not.
The sky was the color of the storm, and as she walked on it darkened, until she seemed to be the only source of light. She wasn’t burning as brightly, was she? She didn’t feel warm anymore, and the patch of light she’d thrown across the ground seemed smaller now. Was she back to the small, barely visible light all Fallen naturally emitted?
She’d wrapped her torn petticoats tightly around her. Dried blood still caked her arms and legs. She couldn’t stop shivering, and from time to time the cobblestones seemed to buckle underfoot, and send her sprawling to the ground—or had she missed a step? It didn’t seem possible to forget something as simple as walking, but nothing seemed to fit anymore.
At length she reached a place where there were no trees anymore, just smithereens of blasted wood, and ashes and dust. Above her and in front of her was smoke, a cloud dense enough to engulf the entire world.
No exit that way. She wouldn’t even be able to breathe in there.
Whatever had propelled Emmanuelle this far gave out. She sat down like a puppet with cut strings, staring at the smoke. Something was burning. Something had shaken the House to its foundation. Morningstar. She needed to find Morningstar—how had they been separated?
She must have fallen asleep again, because suddenly there were footsteps, getting nearer. She tried to rise and run, but she didn’t have anything left in her.
A silhouette, getting nearer and nearer. A fuzzy shape against the darkness around her, with the faint light of Fallen magic wrapped around them. A small, whipcord body, with short hair—no, not short hair. No hair at all: merely elaborate henna markings on a shaved head, not in one of the bridal styles used by mortals, but traceries of brushed letters, like the obsolete alphabets in books of magic.
Darrias.
House Hawthorn’s envoy. Her… friend, she guessed? She was never sure where she stood with Darrias. They had so much in common, but belonged to different Houses. Especially Hawthorn, with whom Silverspires had a barbed, quiescent sort of peace: friendship almost seemed possible, in those circumstances.
“Emmanuelle? What are you doing here?”
She still wore the swallowtail coat and trousers of Hawthorn, in silver and gray that outlined the perfect shape of her body. But the swallowtail was cut in multiple places, and one leg of the trousers ended above her knee.
“I don’t know,” Emmanuelle said, honestly. Running away, as far as she could; trying to avoid unknown territory and making things worse with every step. “I don’t understand—”
“How I found you? You’ve been shining like a beacon from three streets away. It’s a wonder I’m the first. What’s w
rong with you?”
“I don’t know.”
It felt absurd to admit her ignorance, especially to an envoy of another House. Emmanuelle tried to get up, but the world spun and spun, and the cobblestones rushed up to meet her.
Darrias knelt by her side.
“Never mind. You’re not well.”
“You don’t have to help,” Emmanuelle said.
Darrias rolled her eyes. “Yes, I’m sure I could leave you here to die.”
“I don’t belong to—”
“Hawthorn?” Darrias laughed. “In the current circumstances, we envoys need to stick together. Arguably”—she smiled, and it was grim and unamused—“I owe you a debt, anyway.”
“You don’t,” Emmanuelle said. “Anyone would have done the same.”
Darrias had formerly been House Harrier’s hound—sent by Guy to enforce his will in the world outside. She’d defected from Harrier to Hawthorn when her sympathies for mortals and the Houseless had earned her Lord Guy’s enmity, and Emmanuelle had happened to be in the right time at the right place. Yes, she could have stopped Darrias, but that would have meant handing her back to Guy and his twisted ideas of punishment. It hadn’t been a choice.
“I don’t think so,” Darrias said, in a way that shut the conversation down. “Come on. We have to get you to hospital—there’s a school on rue Fondary. Their infirmary might have first aid supplies…”
Of course, this area had once been Darrias’s home. She would be intimately familiar with the streets, although some things were bound to have changed. Emmanuelle bit back bitter laughter. Obviously everything had changed.
“Not in Harrier,” Emmanuelle said. “I need to get out—back to Silverspires. I—”
“There’s no exit here.” Darrias pulled Emmanuelle up—businesslike and with no particular gentleness. “The Seine bridges, maybe, but you won’t want to get into Hawthorn territory. Hospital, Emmanuelle.”
They walked in awkward silence, Darrias supporting Emmanuelle with one shoulder—stopping, without a word, when Emmanuelle’s legs spasmed.
They left the smoke behind. Emmanuelle didn’t realize how much it had affected her until she took a deep breath and it didn’t hurt. As they walked, their surroundings became buildings rather than smoke and vaporized stone. Debris cluttered the streets. There was a faint smell of smoke in the air, coming from minor fires. It wafted through the broken windows of the building’s ground floors, clinging to the limestone, and to the small garden courtyards they saw through bent and torn-off wrought-iron gates. Darrias sniffed.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 5