“What did you do?” he asked.
One of the two nurses detached himself from the wall. Ahmed. His face was grave.
“The usual. Bathe in warm water, basic analgesia. Some magic to relieve the burns.” He grimaced. “The blisters were too extensive for treatment. And they kept coming back when we tried to remove them.”
Because of the khi ice.
“I see,” Thuan said. “I’m going to need everyone to take a step back.”
He closed his eyes—remembered the spells of healing in the books he’d used to read in the palace’s library, trying to find some calm and order in the cut-throat environment there. Right. First remove the ice, then use a lattice of khi fire and khi earth to soothe the burns. Easy.
He bit back a hollow laugh. Who knew that skimping on his magical lessons would lead him there.
He made the weave slowly, carefully: khi earth and khi wood, just enough of it to dampen the effects of the earth. Then, in that same suspended moment when everyone and everything receded into an impossibly faraway distance, he started applying it to Mélanie’s skin.
It was slow and painstaking work: crystal by crystal, fragment by fragment of khi ice, to make sure that his impact was as small as possible. Halfway through—or maybe less, maybe more—he’d lost track, Mélanie shuddered. He stopped, heart in his throat. What if he’d damaged her body past healing? But she subsided, her breathing ragged and slow. One of the nurses, who’d started to approach with a syringe, slowly backed away. Thuan resumed chipping away at the khi ice.
He didn’t know how much time had passed when he looked up. In the gardens beyond the barred windows, the sky had turned the red and pink of evening. Ai Nhi was curled on the chair, watching him. The sandwich had been replaced with another, which she barely nibbled on. She looked miserable. Mia was still watching him, and the two nurses had been replaced by a single one, who watched Thuan unblinkingly.
He exhaled, slowly, softly. It didn’t seem like there was ice anywhere. He rose, wincing at the way his body cramped, went around the bed to check. Once, twice.
“May I touch her?” he asked.
The nurse nodded.
Thuan lifted her arms slowly, carefully. Bandages crumbled into dust and dry, iridescent scales like a snake’s. Mélanie didn’t even stir. No ice left.
Good. He settled on his haunches again, and wove the lattice for healing, slowly looping it around her arms like a woven bracelet, strand after strand—and then around her chest and back, covering every burn he could see or guess at.
There.
Her breathing was still slow and ragged, but the burns were fading into puffed, raised scars, the kind that would subside with proper care. He exhaled again, got up.
“It’s gone,” he said. “You can bandage her again.”
And met the eyes of Phyranthe, who was leaning against the door jamb.
His entire body tensed, drawing on reserves of energy he no longer had. He almost tripped over his own feet.
“You,” he said.
Mia was gone. Ai Nhi was asleep in the chair.
Phyranthe’s smile was incandescent. “Very nice healing,” she said.
“Have you come to gloat?”
Thuan was exhausted, his body racked by the cramps he could no longer keep at bay—and in the worst state possible to fence with her. But she must have known this.
“I’m impressed, actually. You didn’t have to care quite so much about a mortal child.”
Thuan’s eyebrows shot up. “Was I supposed to let her die?”
“Some people would have,” Phyranthe said, and he knew with absolute certainty that she was talking about herself.
Some of what he felt must have shown on his face. Phyranthe laughed.
“You must know by now what I’m capable of.”
Capable of, yes. But something about her behavior was off. She was taunting him. Waiting for him to say the irreparable. Like Asmodeus, Iaris had said, but Thuan didn’t think that was true. Asmodeus freely described himself as a sadist. Thuan would have bet that Phyranthe didn’t feel quite that inhibited.
He said, finally, “I’m capable of killing people. It doesn’t mean I’d do it.”
Laughter, almost good-natured, from her. “You’re sharp.” She sounded almost pleased. “I came to see justice done.”
Phyranthe showed him pointed, shining teeth. Her red dress shone against the grayness of the tiles. She turned to look at Mélanie, the dress slowly following her movements until she seemed surrounded by a whirlwind of red cloth.
“You don’t care about justice,” Thuan said.
“You malign me.” Her voice was sharp. “Of course I care. Punishment to fit the crime.”
“So that’s why you took a five-year-old into the cells.” Thuan knew he should have been nicer, less abrasive. More willing to find ground they could meet on. But he had one scared child, and another he’d taken from the verge of death. “Very fitting. Very… apt.”
Phyranthe threw a glance at Ai Nhi on the chair. Something passed across her face he couldn’t quite interpret: anger, and that same expression she’d had when telling him what she was capable of. She turned back to Thuan.
“Iaris tells me you were inquiring about Vinh Ly.”
Ah. Gloating, then. Thuan bit back the fantasy he could plead on Vinh Ly’s behalf.
“Punishment to fit the crime,” he said, slowly. “What do you think would fit the offense of standing up on behalf of her niece?”
“I was under the impression parents were punished for their children’s offenses, where you came from. A life for a life, or sometimes more, if the victim’s life had value.” Phyranthe’s voice was level. “The nine kinships exterminations.”
Thuan couldn’t help it. The laughter welled out of him, sharp and desperate and uncontrollable.
“You malign me. Not every old-fashioned tradition has to be blindly followed.”
A raised eyebrow. Phyranthe moved back to stand in the door frame, backlit by the lanterns in the ward. Thuan didn’t know how long he could sustain that conversation before he fell flat on the floor.
“Old traditions. You know,” she said, almost conversationally, “back in Uphir’s day, he didn’t really care about who was harmed, or how. People like me were given license to indulge their wildest urges.” Again, that odd expression on her face.
And had the House changed that much, really? Asmodeus allowed no one else to harm his dependents; but he’d torture the guilty and make examples of them without a qualm. Thuan said nothing, exhausted and angry.
“You’re lucky that times have changed.” Phyranthe sounded amused again. “And that I was never the kind to take advantage of that. I keep my… less savory urges under strict control. I won’t kill your dragon.” She moved away from him again, looking at the still shape of Mélanie on the bed. “A fitting punishment.” She pursed her lips. “I’ll let you know how I get on with her, shall I.”
And then she was gone, and Thuan finally fell to his knees, trying very hard to pray to his ancestors for mercy.
* * *
When Thuan finally walked out of the ward, he found Mia waiting for him at the doors.
“Here.”
He handed the sleeping Ai Nhi to her, because he didn’t think he was capable of carrying her further. His weakness stung. He turned to close the doors to the ward. As he laid a hand on the ivory handles, he felt that cold touch at the nape of his neck.
This time, he definitely hadn’t imagined it. And he didn’t think he’d imagined it before, either.
“Mia?” he asked.
The Fallen looked ill at ease. “Yes?”
“Stand a little further away.”
“I have orders—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Thuan said darkly. “And you have Ai Nhi, in any case.”
Mia stared at him. She must have thought he was joking, and then she saw the intent fear in his eyes.
“I don’t understand…”
/> Thuan stood in the corridor, watching the swollen parquet floor. Every step they’d taken had released a little cloud of mold, increasing the humidity in the air. It almost felt as though he were back under the Seine. The wallpaper was peeling—opening up the ceiling through a dozen wounds like flowers.
“I know you’re here,” he said.
Silence. The creak of parquet floor. The sigh of the wind through the branches of trees, in a grove with blood-soaked earth.
“Thuan,” a familiar voice said.
There were three of them: children with bodies of woven thorns. One of them, the one speaking to him, was smaller than the others, with the antlers of a young dragon. Thuan had a flash of anger.
“Don’t ape her,” he said.
The child’s head cocked towards him. “Aping? We merely choose the shapes which hold meaning for you.”
Thuan’s fists clenched. He unfolded them only with an effort of will.
“Find another one,” he said.
Another of the children—one that didn’t look so much like a parody of Ai Nhi—moved towards him.
“What do you want?”
“Answers,” Thuan said. “You were standing watch outside the door.”
Once, before he’d become head of Hawthorn, they had touched him. Once, they had drawn him deep into the House, trying to subsume him into the wards so that his magic could be Hawthorn’s, now and forever. They hadn’t foreseen that one day he would bind himself to the House more thoroughly and more tightly than through them, willingly, and for… not love, perhaps, but out of desire, and in hope of a better future.
“What’s so special about here?”
A silence. The children stared at each other.
“Nothing more and nothing less than any other place.”
Obviously. That would have been too easy. They weren’t children, weren’t even human: just a mask the House chose to wear.
“Then tell me this—will Harrier’s devastation touch us?”
A moment of hesitation. The children stared at each other.
One of them said, “No,” at the same moment the other said, “Yes.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“We’re not here to be helpful.”
The children had regained their composure. Their fingers danced gently in the air, as if they were pulling the strings of some vast puppet, and trails of light hung from their tips, fading into nothingness before they touched the floor. But nevertheless the parquet under Thuan shivered and danced, too.
“This is where the children of the House go, when they are wounded and sick—one of the many places where the future of Hawthorn hangs in the balance.”
Thuan struggled to keep the weariness from his voice.
“That’s not exactly reassuring.”
Laughter, which sounded like thunder shaking the branches of trees. Bluish, sheeny petals fell from the children’s bodies onto the floor.
“Beware, Thuan. Things are changing, and we are weak.”
“Things are changing?” Thuan asked.
He hadn’t looked away—but the children were gone, snuffed out as if they’d never been, with only the distant sound of wood creaks to mark their departure.
Beware, Thuan, the House whispered.
Beware of what?
* * *
Grandmother Olympe and the aunts, with their usual ruthless efficiency, had set up a triage station for refugees. For a brief moment as he saw the tables under the vast rafters of what had been Gare du Nord, and the queue of haggard, shocked people, Philippe was back in House Lazarus, trying to keep his head down, to be nothing more than a starved mortal in a sea of starving mortals. And then it passed—he was sixty years older, and Isabelle was a reassuring presence by his side. And it was a single queue—forty to fifty people, not the hundreds and hundreds Lazarus had attracted each morning.
The large trestle tables had been set on the ruins of the platforms, and people queued from what had once been the station’s marshaling yard to the departure concourse—the hall of wasted steps, as they’d called it back then. Beneath the ruined three-lobed glass windows of the entrance, three aunts were questioning people, most of them covered in soot and blood and other unpleasant fluids, and holding young, screaming, exhausted children. They were then directing them to various areas. One was for food: Aunt Ha was ladling warm soup into bowl after bowl. One appeared to be for lodgings, and one—the one on the mezzanine floor—was the hospital.
It had once been the buffet—a small salon with luxurious sofas and a large dining room, serving meals unaffordable to the working class. But now the dining room had been hastily cleared of debris, leaving small gray canvas tents spread across the floor to provide a modicum of privacy—where had they found these?
At the entrance, harried Annamites triaged people. The smell of chlorine hung in the air, overwhelming the scent of fish sauce from the platforms.
“Philippe!”
A middle-aged Annamite woman with gray hair: Cassiopée, the bookish one of two sisters. She was sitting at a low table, her cane propped against the edge. She had her hands full of bandages and gauze.
Philippe asked the question on the tip of his tongue. “Lariboisière…?”
The hospital was about a ten-minute walk.
“Understaffed, underequipped and already full of patients.” Cassiopée’s voice was grim. “Not to mention the risk of sharing infections. They sent us the people they could spare. We’re going to do the basic bandages, and we could use an operating room.” Her smile was mirthless. “A lot of them have eye injuries from the debris.”
“Water—” Philippe started.
“This was the dining room. The pump and pipes are still working. Come on.”
Hoa Phong’s gaze went from the people huddled in corners against the gray canvas of the tents, and then upwards, to a distant Heaven that did not contain the Jade Emperor.
“This is—”
Isabelle’s face was hard; when she spoke, he felt pride flutter in his chest.
“How can we help?”
* * *
“There,” Philippe said, carefully laying down his scalpel in the bowl. It clinked, the noise like a rifle shot in his mind.
Everything seemed drenched in blood or gore or both. He realized he was still holding on to the amputated eye—he put that down too, and then called khi fire to burn the contagion on his hands. Flames danced over his fingers, illuminating the darkening corner of the hospital. His patient—a thin, starved teenage girl called Morgane—stared at him, eyes wide.
“You’ll get used to it,” Cassiopée said. “He’s our… good luck charm.”
Which was embarrassing but not as much as being called a tutelary deity or whatever other nonsense half the community believed.
Cassiopée had moved from her original desk to assist Philippe. Isabelle could have done it, but her nascent skills with the khi elements meant that she could boil water for another operating table, set up by Aunt Rochita—whose Viet name was Xuan Yen, but who breathed fire on anyone who even suggested she needed to use it. Isabelle couldn’t do complex work, but gathering khi fire didn’t require much subtlety. Hoa Phong… He didn’t know what Hoa Phong had done, or what skills she’d admitted to. Perhaps she could heal just as he could, though his healings were small, slow and pathetic compared to a dragon’s touch.
“You’re not House,” the girl said.
“No.” He smiled, but it took an effort. “I’m something else.”
“Come on.” Cassiopée finished bandaging the eye, and watched as the girl walked unsteadily from the room. “There should be someone waiting for them.” She gestured at her cane. “I can’t help them out.”
Philippe grimaced. “Everyone is busy. And they need the bandages more than a friendly arm.”
“Mm.” Cassiopée didn’t sound convinced. She said, “It’s the middle of the night. Isabelle and your… friend left a while ago.”
By which she meant no one wou
ld blame him if he did, too.
He didn’t need to look into the corridor, though, to know that there would be more wounded people, and that dealing with them would be slow and involved.
Philippe held his hand in front of him. It was still steady. He felt worn, but not so tired he’d make mistakes. Or perhaps that was just sheer optimism.
“Do you remember how many people we still have outside? Don’t get up,” he said, realizing what he’d done. “I’ll have a look if you can’t remember. It’s been a long day.”
“Four, five?”
Aunt Ha had left some cold rice cakes. Philippe took off his work clothes, stretched, and grabbed two, one of which he proffered to Cassiopée. He dipped his in some of the fish sauce—the over-salty, under-spicy concoction that was the best Paris had to offer. Literally the best: that looked like Olympe’s bottles, not the ones cut with soy sauce and salt that were traded between the poorest residents.
“The good stuff,” Cassiopée said ironically, lifting her own rice cake. “Rewards of virtue.”
“Community,” Philippe said finally, a word that tasted unfamiliar and strange.
“You’ve been listening to Olympe too much.”
“It’s not optional.”
“Maybe not,” Cassiopée said, clearly suppressing a smile. “She gets like that.”
Philippe finished his rice cake, and brushed his hands on his clothes.
At length he said, “Half of them will get infections. If we’re lucky.”
Cassiopée’s voice was sharp. “We do what we can with what we’re given.”
He didn’t really know her or her sister Aurore. They’d run from a House, hadn’t they? And then he remembered the House was Harrier.
“It must be odd for you, helping your former House.”
A flash of something he couldn’t interpret. Cassiopée said, levelly, “The wheel of life turns, and everyone gets what they deserve.”
“Do they?”
Cassiopée didn’t answer for a while.
“They will. One day.”
It sounded sharper and more personal than it ought to have been. It was none of his business, and he’d sworn not to get involved in Houses’ affairs. But that was hypocrisy and cowardice, because helping Hoa Phong and the court of the Jade Emperor made running into Houses a certainty.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 16