“Is anything the matter?”
He could feel her weighing him—deciding whether to trust him. He didn’t move, and tried to project the same face he had for his patients—calm, competent, concerned.
At length, Cassiopée said, “Aurore is in Harrier.”
That stopped him. He hadn’t been there when the sisters arrived, but he’d heard Aunt Ha—what she had said, and what she wouldn’t admit.
“Regrets?”
Cassiopée snorted. “In a manner of speaking.” She said, finally, “I’m worried about her.”
And no wonder. Philippe considered and discarded the first few answers in his mind.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Can you fight a House?” Cassiopée’s voice was bitter.
No one could. “Is she… Is she in trouble?”
Cassiopée didn’t answer.
She said, finally, “It’s funny, isn’t it. I can trace the lineage of my ancestors all the way to the first scholars”—she used the Viet word, the one that implied knowledge and power and magic—“and we end up here, in the gutter.”
“Bloodlines don’t mean much.”
“Said like an Immortal.” She snorted. “For some of us, they’re the only wealth we have. The comfort of our kin. The flesh of our fathers, the blood of our mothers.”
She was speaking archaic—the language of the court in Huê, of the Chinese colonizers who had preceded the French ones. A scholar, indeed. It was jarring to hear that here.
He said, finally, “No one can fight the Houses. You have to know this.” Her face closed. He should have left it there, but something in him had twisted past prudence. “I was in a House. Twice. Held against my will, both times.”
“But you escaped.”
Once, because the House had died. And once… He closed his eyes, remembering broken fingers and ribs and wounds, and the glint of the knife in Asmodeus’s hands, and Selene’s voice telling him that he had gone too far.
“I was lucky. You can’t count on that happening every time. They…”
He paused, trying to put things into words, flexing his fingers again and again, reassuring himself that they worked. That he could breathe without pain or the bubbling feel of blood in his mouth.
“The Houses hold all the power in Paris. It’s always been that way. And every time someone with the barest hint of magical talent rises, they take them. Or kill them. Or both.” He was keeping out of their sight, hoping they’d forget him—especially Asmodeus, who had never willingly let go of what was his. “I’m sorry.”
Cassiopée’s face was closed. He fought the urge to shake her. To make her see.
“Yes, I know, the world has always worked this way. You don’t need to tie yourself in knots justifying it to me.” She put her cup of tea down. “We’re going to change the rules of the game.”
An odd remark, but he forgot it because a scream came from just outside the room. Philippe was on his feet and running before he could think, grabbing his apron from the table just in case. He took the staircase leading from the hospital floor to the ground floor at full speed. It was completely dark outside, and the refugees seemed to have been herded elsewhere to sleep. A man of perhaps forty years old had collapsed, writhing, at the foot of Aunt Ha’s kitchen station. His shirt was soaked with liquid. He was the one screaming, but the scream didn’t seem to be human anymore.
The air was saturated with khi currents—a tangled mass like an angry swarm, flowing into Philippe’s hands and driving spikes deep into his flesh, again and again. Each of them stung like an insect bite. By the time Philippe had reached the trestle table, elbowing an aunt who wouldn’t move fast enough out of the way—a sin of impropriety he would pay for later—his hands were dripping blood from a hundred pinprick wounds. The air was taut and heavy, like the moment just before a storm.
Aunt Ha was kneeling with her hands on the man’s chest. Trying to stop the flailing? No, her eyes were wide and dark, her teeth gritted, and her entire body was arching, as if on the verge of convulsing as well.
Tade, the burly Yoruba dock worker who always worked night shifts, said, “He was already shaking when he came up to Aunt Ha.”
He had his sleeves rolled up, one arm heavily tattooed, and the other one with a small, simple pattern of sketched lines, and his lithe body was tense, ready to jump into battle.
“No one touch him,” Philippe said, sharply. “Or her.”
A bowl of soup had spilled on the floor, spreading noodles redolent of star anise everywhere in the midst of rubble.
“He collapsed when he took the meal?” Philippe asked. “They’re noodles. It’s not like…”
He didn’t see the connection—it was hard to focus, with that endless screaming in the background, and Aunt Ha’s dark, frozen gaze. He wiped his hands on the apron he’d grabbed when he’d left the room and grabbed the khi currents—struggling with them as if he was wrestling panicked beasts that kept clawing and biting—and wove a quick spell of protection, something to soothe panic.
He felt like he was throwing it—not at a wall, but at something sharp that shredded it into nothingness. He tried again. Again, his simple spell was cut into shreds. But it wasn’t like Diamaras—the khi currents weren’t cut.
No.
They were fleeing, as if something or someone at the center of the conflagration was driving them away. All but one: around Aunt Ha and the writhing man on the floor, a single set of lines, tangled and chaotic, remained, colored the red of heart’s blood.
Khi fire.
That made no sense. They were khi elements—the breath of the land under them, the warp and weft of the universe. They couldn’t get scared.
Behind him, he could distantly hear Tade screaming at people to stay away and not touch anything. Good. That gave him time. He wove the spell of protection, not around Aunt Ha or the man, but around himself—khi water, because it was the element opposed to fire, and wood, which gave birth to fire and could thus control it. The stillness and weight of old age. All his years and all his memories, from the very early, bright ones of his parents holding him before incense sticks burning on the ancestral altar, to the more recent past—the Houses, Isabelle, Hoa Phong and Diamaras in her decrepit refuge, refusing to believe that time had reduced all she held dear to worthless curios. The rough and cold feel of a dragon’s scales, of a fish held in both hands, in that single suspended moment before it slipped away into the river.
Then, carefully, cautiously, he reached out and touched the man’s skin.
It burned, as if he’d grabbed a live coal. His spell of protection was overwhelmed and reduced to cinders in a moment, and then the fire looked for something else to burn, too—digging into his chest in search of his heart.
Isabelle, standing in the darkened corridor of a House, telling him anything was justified if it ensured the House’s survival—and the flash of anger and disappointment he’d felt then, knowing they couldn’t possibly remain friends.
Asmodeus, rising from behind a mahogany desk and smiling, and a noose of Fallen magic tightening around Philippe’s neck, with nothing—no khi currents, no stolen magic—that could possibly save him…
Fleeing in the darkness after the fall of House Draken, walking the streets looking for food and drink and knowing the Houses held it all.
They deserved to burn. They’d always deserved to burn, the Houses and all they held dear. As the thought filled his mind, the fire found something else within him—the dark shadow of the curse he’d once found in House Silverspires, the never-ending, never-sated hunger of a dead woman.
No.
He’d left all anger, all grief behind him once. He’d carried that curse within him for over a year, a penance and a reminder, but he had never given in to it. That wasn’t him. That had never been him.
He opened his eyes, and found himself facing the man—who had risen, tossing the limp Aunt Ha aside like so much chaff. His hand was clenched around something, which he sl
owly unfurled: a translucent paper like the one Hoa Phong had shown him, except the Southern characters on them were elongated and sharp, traced so roughly they’d torn the paper. At the bottom was a seal so stylized he almost didn’t recognize it, but then he remembered the language of the court.
“Dân,” he whispered. Tiger.
“Annamite,” the man whispered, and his teeth were no longer blackened and broken, but long and curved and sharp. “A message for you, from the ruins of a House.”
“Who are you?” Philippe asked, but the man wasn’t looking at him.
“You knew,” the man whispered. “All of you who cooked the food and fought in the war and tended the cages. You knew, and yet when your Houses cut you loose, you did nothing.”
Tiger.
“Dân Chay,” Philippe said, but the man was speaking over him, not even acknowledging his existence. A message. Recorded words, nothing more. Nothing he said or did would change them.
“But everything is afire now. I’ve burned down the House that imprisoned me, and I’ll burn everything else in the city, Houses and mortals alike. I’m coming for you all.” The man shifted, and bones cracked, as if they were as fragile as kindling. “Because you didn’t harm me directly—because you’re the least guilty of them all—I’ll give you a warning. All that makes you proud—your little community of fragile hopes and dreams rooted in the blood of others—I will destroy.” He smiled again, and it was a horrible expression, the lower lip pierced with the bloodied holes of fangs. “Abandon it all, and you may live.”
He collapsed like a puppet with cut strings.
Philippe knelt—not by his side, for there was nothing to be done, but by Aunt Ha, trying to find her pulse with shaking hands. Once, twice, his fingers slipping on what should the small area of skin.
“Philippe, Philippe!”
It was Isabelle, out of breath, followed by a dark-faced Hoa Phong.
“We found something.” She ignored Hoa Phong’s attempts to stop her. “Diamaras got the wrong House. The second one, the one that actually held Dân Chay. It wasn’t Draken.”
“I know,” Philippe said.
You knew. All of you who cooked the food and fought in the war and tended the cages.
By his side, the blue and black of the man’s uniform peeled away in a rising wind that carried the smell of charred meat and smoke to Philippe’s nostrils. Beneath, the naked body was marbled with what looked like bruises—dark, purple skin in sharp, mercilessly clear patterns, spreading on either side of the spine and turning into rings encircling the arms and legs: the thickened, fuzzed lines of a tiger’s stripes.
A message, from the ruins of a House.
“It’s not Draken. It’s Harrier. Dân Chay is in Harrier. He’s the one who destroyed the House.”
Abandon it all, and you may live.
And, now that House Harrier had split open like a skull cloven by an axe—burning, burning, always burning, a cage Dân Chay had charred into cinders to get free—he was coming for those he thought had failed him.
NINE
A Box of Smoke
Morningstar’s errand took them straight to the edge of the smoke that was still billowing from the source of the explosion. As they neared it, Aurore’s chest began to ache, and she slowed down. Morningstar was walking ahead of them in great strides, unconcerned by whether they were following. Charles, the toddler in Nicolas’s arms, began to cry. He rubbed his hair and whispered to him and after a while the screams became whimpers. Virginie, the eight-year-old with the uniform, strode ahead, with that determined air of all children pretending everything was fine.
Aurore had had enough, by then.
“Morningstar!”
“Yes?” He barely slowed down.
“The children.” She ought to have toned it down, but she wasn’t breathing very well either. The smoke had gotten in her lungs, and it felt like something stuck in her throat that wouldn’t go away no matter how often she swallowed or took deep breaths. “They’re going to choke.”
He paused. She couldn’t see his face.
“Very well.”
Lambent light streamed from him: he turned and walked, in turn, by each of the refugees, laying a hand on their shoulders. When he lifted it, the light still clung to them—patches of translucence that swam under their skin, throwing veins and muscles into sharp relief as they moved upwards, to settle around their noses and mouths, descending all the way to the chest, a luminous thread splitting in a butterfly-shape blob at the level of the lungs.
When he reached Aurore, he paused. He towered over her, and the shadow of large, radiant wings hung behind him. Her knees wobbled—she ached to kneel. No. He was Fallen, but no more extraordinary or valuable than her or Marianne. Anyone with magic could be as powerful as him.
The hand he laid on her shoulder was warm, and the magic roiled as it passed into her—an odd, unsettling sensation of bubbles climbing through her arms, filling her mouth with something warm and sweet, but beneath it she could feel the sourness, a sharp taste like mold, a reminder that everything he touched would rot and become corrupted. When it reached her lungs, she thought she’d gag. It felt like inhaling sweet-smelling smoke, and only realizing afterwards it evaporated into bitterness.
“There,” Morningstar said. “Let’s go.”
When they started walking again, Charles was wailing ceaselessly. Nicolas was attempting to calm him, looking increasingly frazzled and desperate, until he got the idea of bouncing him up and down, slowly. Charles laughed, and nuzzled against Nicolas’s shoulder, bright eyes watching everything within the smoke.
Aurore caught up with Frédérique, who was watching her daughter Virginie with the attentive gaze Aurore knew all too well: that desperate attempt to watch over her child while knowing it was futile and any protection she could offer was hollow.
“Do you need help?”
Frédérique shook her head. “Just keeping an eye on her, that’s all.”
Her gaze rested, for a moment, on Nicolas and Charles.
“Poor thing. I wish his parents had survived.”
Aurore almost stopped. “I thought—”
Frédérique laughed. It was almost carefree. “That she was ours? Only one magician per family until they’re presented to the House. Or thrown into battle.” Her voice was carefully casual, balanced on a knife’s edge. “Charles’s parents both died in the explosion. We thought…” Her voice trailed away. “It didn’t feel right to leave him all by himself.”
“No,” Aurore said. No wonder he had been wailing. Unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar setting, and a tension to the air he had to feel. “Are you all right?”
Frédérique rubbed her chest. “I guess.” She didn’t sound convinced. “It doesn’t feel quite right.”
“Like being underwater?” Aurore said.
Like they were choking all the time, except with a sweet aftertaste. At least they were still breathing. At least they were upright. She felt a ghost of Hawthorn’s tug in her chest: a reminder that she was bound to a House as surely as Frédérique was.
“You said you used to be House,” Frédérique said.
Aurore tried to keep her shrug casual. She didn’t know much about Frédérique.
“My sister and I were menials. We worked in a number of places—the hospice of Dames du Calvaire, the household of the Master of Baths. We made a mistake.”
Too many mistakes. Lazy, untrustworthy servants, Pellas had said, before washing his hands of them. But then, what can I expect from mortals?
“The House doesn’t forgive.”
Frédérique’s gaze was bruised and haunted, as it had been in the slaughterhouse. Aurore fought the urge to reach out to her.
Keep her head down. Wait. Go back to Hawthorn and pray for Asmodeus’s mercy—and start her quest for power again. That was the wise thing to do. But she was so tired of being the plaything of the powerful; of failing, time and time again, to be listened to instead of manipulated.
> Instead, she said, “I always thought being Great Interior would be…” She stopped, then. “Would change your life. Would keep you safe.”
“Nothing is safe.” Frédérique’s face didn’t move.
“Factions,” Aurore said flatly.
“The losing side.” Frédérique laughed bitterly. “Niraphanes…” She shrugged. “We used to be with a Fallen called Darrias. She was one of Guy’s enforcers. The one who noticed me, originally. Who took me from being a menial into the Great Interior.”
“I don’t know her,” Aurore said.
Had Darrias been one of them—one of the enforcers who’d come for her and Cassiopée, bearing the swift justice of the House? She’d remember their faces, surely—and she was surprised to realize she didn’t care anymore. She didn’t want revenge. She just wanted her family and her community to be safe.
“She wasn’t a saint.” Frédérique sounded… regretful? “But Guy is worse.”
“He doesn’t like you.”
“He doesn’t like Darrias. Darrias walked away from Harrier.”
“She…? I didn’t know that was possible.”
“She walked away, but we stayed.” Frédérique’s face was carefully closed.
“That must have been hard.” Aurore said. “Sorry. Platitudes.”
She’d faced the House’s harsh justice herself—what could it bring to bear, against the family of someone Guy would have considered a defector and a rebel?
Frédérique shrugged. “We’ve survived. Niraphanes was Darrias’ friend, and she’s been looking out for us. She’s… decent.”
Looking out for them. Replacing Darrias. A complex tangle of relationships Aurore wasn’t privy to.
“But she asked for more than you could give.”
“She needs magicians.” Frédérique’s voice was quiet. “Most of the House’s magicians are in the Great Interior with Guy, regardless of how loyal they actually are. Niraphanes doesn’t have much choice, if she wants to win.” Her voice was bitter. “She’s an idealist. She believes in that House more than her own children.”
Family business. Questions Aurore had never had to ask herself, because Marianne was a toddler with absolutely no affinity for magic.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 17