The little dragon positively bounced. Thuan winced.
“Isn’t she a little young…?”
And watched Ai Nhi weave khi water around the teapot on its warmer, until a stream of tea went from the spout to the teacup. The weave was strained: he held his breath. Anything—including Ai Nhi’s loss of focus—would make it explode.
“Education,” Vinh Ly said, firmly, “starts young.”
As long as one didn’t mind droplets of hot tea burning everything in the room. Thuan clamped down on the thought before he could utter it.
“You need to distance yourself from me,” he said. “Or to leave the Court of Persuasion. You’re going to be a target.”
He didn’t add that he didn’t know how much she could bear.
Vinh Ly’s face was hard. “She can’t kill me. It would create too many complications.”
As if that was reassuring.
“I’d rather it didn’t come to testing that,” Thuan said, more sharply than he’d meant.
“I’ll handle Phyranthe.”
Thuan watched khi water flicker in her hands, and said, “Let’s be clear that ‘handle’ doesn’t involve causing… accidents for her.”
They were going to need every available dependent, just in case the Harrier business went pear-shaped.
“Not at all.” Vinh Ly was serene. She gestured to Sang. “Play to your own followers.”
The Court of Strength, the Court of Gardens. Those who were tired of living in fear. Those who listened to him, or at least indulged him because it amused them.
“Asmodeus,” he said, aloud.
Vinh Ly inclined her head. “As soon as you can.”
“Before Iaris?”
“You can’t,” Sang said. “But…”
But he was Asmodeus’s husband, and surely it had to count for something. Thuan didn’t know anymore.
“I’ll see.” He pursed his lips. “The business with Harrier might help, too. Force us into unity.”
“Hmm.” Sang nodded.
“You can’t control that, though,” Vinh Ly said.
“I can remind Iaris tearing ourselves apart will weaken us all,” Thuan said.
She’d been the one to bring up the argument in the first place; perhaps she’d be receptive. He doubted Phyranthe would, but who knew.
Something tightened in the room, seconds before it exploded. A tinkle of glass—Thuan raised wards to protect everyone. Shards and liquid bounced off them, harmlessly. The teapot. Ai Nhi’s weave around it had exploded, splattering porcelain and tea all over him. The little dragon stood, desolate, in the middle of a growing puddle.
“Unka Thuan…”
Thuan laughed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does,” Vinh Ly said. “She needs to learn control, Your Majesty.”
She sounded like Phyranthe, which Thuan found more disquieting than he’d like to admit.
“She’s five years old.”
“And she’ll be judged on far harsher criteria than Fallen or mortals are,” Vinh Ly said. “As you well know. Scrutinized for anything and everything that goes wrong, and her shortcomings becoming those of our race.”
Thuan stared at her, hard. Vinh Ly’s face was creased in worry—and it was amply clear that what she’d said applied, not only to Ai Nhi, but to all of them.
“I’ve got this,” he said, smiling with a lightness he didn’t feel. Asmodeus, you’d better wake up soon.
FIVE
Dreams of Power, Dreams of Fire
Aurore traveled home through a rising haze of pain.
For every step she took towards la Goutte d’Or—and away from the plume of smoke that marked House Harrier’s location—the disk grew hotter against her skin, and the hook in her chest sank deeper, pulling her in the other direction.
It was bearable while she was on the omnibus, letting the vibration of the horses’ hooves soothe her into something almost resembling sleep, but when she got down at Château Rouge, where the small, desolate manor loomed over the few pedestrians still out at night, she fell to her knees, breathing hard.
“Younger aunt?” One of the Annamites who’d gotten down at the same stop—Sébastien, one of the dockers who worked at La Villette Basin. “Are you all right?”
Aurore struggled to breathe through gritted teeth.
“I’m… fine,” she said.
She rose, shaking—felt the tug again, tearing at her gut.
“You’re not,” Sébastien said. “Come on. I’ll help you home.”
He supported her on his shoulder along Boulevard Barbès, and then up the small, narrow street where she and Cassiopée lived. Every step was agony, every breath a constellation of pain in her chest and above her hips. She was torn apart—unmade and remade every time she lifted a leg, burning coals poured into her intestines every time she moved so much as a chest muscle. Her breath came in short, ragged gasps.
“Here,” Sébastien said. They were at the door of her flat. She had no memory of getting there, or even of crossing the small, crowded courtyard with charred, half-demolished walls. “I can call a doctor.”
Which mostly meant Philippe.
No.
Aurore shook her head. “Cassiopée,” she said. The word shivered in her mouth: she tasted blood on her tongue from Asmodeus’s spell. “Get me upstairs. She can take care of me.”
Sébastien looked at her for what felt like an eternity—a sharp, perceptive look as Aurore stood trembling, struggling not to collapse again, not to run, screaming, towards the distant House that was still filling the sky with smoke.
“All right,” he said, finally. “As you wish, aunt.”
Aurore pushed open the door, her hand tightening on the knob. Her fingers refused, for a moment, to obey her—as if she’d grasped live flames and they’d opened again in a burst of pain.
For every moment when you’re not where I expect you to be, the pain will increase.
Bastard. She wasn’t his servant; or anyone’s servant anymore.
Cassiopée looked up as Aurore staggered into the flat.
“Big sis!”
And then she saw Aurore’s face, and rose—a slow process requiring clinging to the shelves by her side. Her legs, broken multiple times that night in Harrier, hadn’t healed properly and wouldn’t bear her weight for long periods of time.
“Don’t!” Aurore said.
“Don’t be silly,” Cassiopée said.
She reached for her cane, leaned on it to cross the room and walk to the table. Her long, graying hair fell down her back: it wasn’t tied in her usual topknot, and strands of it were curving away in all directions.
“Here.” She laid a small box of unguent by Aurore’s side. “Camphor, and a touch of khi fire.”
From the last time Philippe had visited, for her daughter Marianne’s fever.
Aurore laughed, bitterly. It was going to take more than a touch of khi currents and traditional medicine to overturn Asmodeus’s spell. She found a chair, with shaking hands, and sank into it.
“I’m going to need a knife,” she said. “And some boiling water and whatever clean cloth we have.”
Cassiopée stared at her. “What happened?”
Aurore glanced at the back of the flat. The partition with the other room—the thin, patched curtain with colored splotches of ink—was closed.
“Marianne is sleeping,” Cassiopée said. “It’ll be fine.”
Not if Aurore managed to do what she needed to do.
“The knife, lil sis. Please.”
Cassiopée handed it to her. In silence, she set water to boil on the stove, and brought back a slightly grubby cloth from the scraps basket. When Aurore bared her skin and raised the knife to the disk, she looked alarmed for the first time.
“You can’t possibly remove something that large…”
Aurore cut into her skin, below the disk. Or tried to. Because, as soon as the knife touched the wood, the pain rose a hundred-fold, a thousand-fold. Her hand opened,
sending the knife clattering to the ground, and she fell, convulsing and clutching her chest, breathing through burning tears and struggling to pull herself to her feet.
The clatter of the cane on the floor.
“I can… get… up,” she said, as the pain lessened—going from utterly unbearable to merely agonizing.
“You don’t look like you can.”
Cassiopée held out a hand. Aurore got up without touching it. She picked up the knife again, stared at it.
“The disk,” Cassiopée said.
“It didn’t work.” Aurore sat down again. She raised the knife again—felt a hint of the same pain she’d feel if she tried to cut away the disk again. “I got caught. I barely had time to get oriented in Hawthorn, and certainly not to find the building on your map. Deer antlers on the doors. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?”
She closed her eyes. Below her eyelids, in the darkness, blood-red flowers blossomed, limned in terrible, distant light.
I could die there.
It’d be such a shame, wouldn’t it? But mostly for you.
“Never mind the map. He branded you.”
Cassiopée’s voice was flat, angry. She reached out with her free hand to touch the disk. As her hand brushed it Aurore felt the pain squeezing her insides, cutting off her breath. She pulled away before it could send her sprawling to the floor again.
Cassiopée said, “I told you to be careful—”
“We agreed.” Aurore breathed in, and it burned in her lungs. “It was the only way.”
Get in. Find the building. Follow the map.
Cassiopée grimaced. “I can’t even be sure that the artifact is still there.”
“No one looked for it, did they?” Aurore thought it was the kind of thing Fallen would try to destroy. “I don’t even understand how it still exists.”
Cassiopée shrugged. “A whim of a Fallen, it suggests. One who loved a mortal very, very much, and didn’t want them to feel powerless.”
Aurore snorted. “As if that ever happened.”
As if Fallen ever wanted mortals to gather power enough to challenge them. As if it wasn’t in their interest to keep mortals dependent on their magic.
“Don’t judge.” Cassiopée’s voice was gentle. “Fallen are just like the rest of us. Anyway, saying that artifact is obscure is probably an understatement.” She was a scholar’s descendant through and through, hunting down rare references in books and wrestling with ancient, fragmentary texts with dogged tenacity. “Insofar as I can tell, the key text was destroyed, and the only extant copy was made by an Annamite servant of Hawthorn with a grudge against his masters. It’s unlikely the Fallen speak Viet, or are going to bother with it. So I think it’s still there.”
But they had no way of finding it.
“We could…” Cassiopée stopped, then, “Philippe…”
“No.”
They could ask Philippe to teach them magic, but, even if he said yes to students beyond the one he already had—which was unlikely—the khi currents he wielded were insufficient. His magic lay in small healings, spells to make life easier: nothing that would stand up to a House.
“We’ve been over this before.”
“I know,” Cassiopée said. She looked tired. “But it’s not the only way.”
“You want us to remain here?” Aurore asked. Everything hurt, and she didn’t have the energy to be gentle or kind anymore. “Wait for Harrier to get interested in us again?”
“They threw us out.”
“They killed us,” Aurore said.
The only reason Harrier wasn’t interested in them anymore was that they had been left for dead—and they would have died that night, if Aurore hadn’t found the broken pieces of a mirror infused with Fallen magic in the midden heap. She tried to remember what it had felt like, to inhale that power. To have fire coursing through her, a manic energy that had helped her rise despite her pregnancy. To stagger to Cassiopée’s unconscious body and lift it, and run into the streets of Paris, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps, everything limned in trembling, decaying light. To run, through street after street after street, every step taking her further and further from the House that had cast them out. She tried to remember what it had felt like when Marianne had been born: a pregnancy carried to term despite all of her injuries, her very own miracle, the kind that squeezed the breath from her lungs. But all she could find was pain: that endless hook pulling her away from their home, and back towards Harrier.
Cassiopée laughed. “House Harrier has other problems.”
House Harrier blew up, Asmodeus’s amused voice said in Aurore’s mind.
Bastard.
“But we’ll always have to bow and scrape to them,” Aurore said.
“I’m not reneging on the plan.” Cassiopée watched Aurore for a while. “But I still don’t understand what happened.”
It came out in halting, fragmented sentences—interspersed with that growing, sharpening hook within her: the cells, the torture, the hospital room. The disk. The long, endless way home, with only the red haze of pain stretching across her entire world. After a while she got up and paced the flat. It helped, but the pain remained within her, like a tiger biding its time before it struck.
Cassiopée was silent for a while. Then she walked back to the chair she’d been sitting in, putting the books she’d been reading on the shelves and painstakingly lowering her body into it.
“You can’t stay here.”
“I have to.” Aurore wasn’t going to give Asmodeus the satisfaction of doing his bidding. “But how are we going to find what we want, if I go into Harrier?”
Cassiopée sighed. She’d been the one to find the old, old legend in the ruined books she collected, painstakingly piecing back together rotten fragments of texts, trying to make sense of words that time and war had blurred. An inexhaustible source of magic: an artifact that didn’t need to be recharged by Fallen breath or blood. An object hidden in Hawthorn and lost a long time ago. A promise of something that would make them more than magicians, that would give them power to be reckoned with.
“A day and a night,” she said.
“You forget.” Aurore rubbed the disk. It bent under her touch, as if hungering for the warmth of her hand. “I have to go back to Hawthorn once this is done.”
“Where you’ll be free to search.”
Of course she wouldn’t. She didn’t even know if she’d be alive, then; or back in the cells of Hawthorn, where it had all started.
“Lil sis.”
Cassiopée sighed. “I know. But…” She paused, took in a deep breath. “Do you really think you have a choice?”
They’d never really had one. They’d been servants in Harrier since birth, raised to cringe and bow to Fallen—given to the House’s summary justice for failing to make way quickly enough for a Grand Secretary of the Great Interior. A path ringed by threats and punishments and pain, and Aurore had had enough of it.
“I don’t know,” Aurore said, but they both knew the answer to Cassiopée’s question.
Cassiopée glanced at the window. Its oiled paper was halfway gone, leaving a large, gaping hole through which whistled the evening wind: they’d have to fix it before winter. Outside, in the street, traffic was thinning. It was late summer: people were bringing out tables and chairs, and congregating around them to eat, play chess, or trade gossip with the street sellers headed home. Aunt Thuy, the midwife, was down there with a few other aunties, laughing. She waved at Cassiopée. Thuy had sewn them back together when they’d reached the safety of the community. Aurore would always remember the long, long nights Aunt Thuy and Aunt Ha had spent over Cassiopée and her, forcing them to swallow water and medications, and grimly waiting for the dawn of another day.
For a moment—a hopeless moment of weakness—Aurore wanted to go down there into the street and beg for their help. They’d understand what she and Cassiopée were doing. They’d know, all too well, that their community existed only on
the whim of people like Asmodeus.
No. Even if they did understand—even if they did approve—they wouldn’t be able to help her. No one could, anymore.
Cassiopée said, “There’s food on the table—I kept dinner ready. Try to stay here a while. Until daylight, at least. The streets outside our community will be full of gangs at night.”
The lost youths, roaming the streets and hoping to find Fallen they could rip apart before the Houses could step in; but in the absence of Fallen they would quite happily turn on their own.
Aurore rubbed her chest, trying to find a position that would be free from pain—obviously there was none.
“Let me see that dinner.”
* * *
The meal was rice dark with grit, a drop of fish sauce to hide the blandness of grains that had grown in poisoned fields, and a scattering of dried fish, from the large jar that they’d been sparingly taking from for months.
Afterwards, Aurore went into the bedroom.
Beyond the curtain, Marianne was sleeping with the abandon of a three-year-old. The tattered blanket she’d been sucking on lay by her outstretched hands. Aurore bent, slowly, gently—the pain made it hard to do so, sending little jerks of fire under her ribs, into her heart—and kissed her on the cheek, breathing in the smell of youth, if not of innocence, in a city that had since long corrupted everything from the air they breathed to the stones they walked on.
Then she sat on the floor, on the broken tiles by the bed, and tried to sleep.
In her dreams, she ran away from the blurred shape of a Fallen with horn-rimmed glasses, and with the shadow of great, black wings at their back. She woke up, gasping for breath—fell back into sleep—and they were there again, chasing her. And again and again, each time deeper into the dream. And as the Fallen got closer and closer her heart burned fiercer and fiercer, and when she looked down she saw it, tearing itself free from her chest, trailing bleeding stumps of veins and arteries, and shards of bone and skin…
She opened her eyes, and everything hurt. The hook had spread from her chest to her belly and it was tearing her apart, driving her to her feet, scrabbling and biting her lip not to scream—anything, she’d do anything to make it stop, even to make it abate, only for a moment.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 10