By breeding child after child that she’d watch Guy infuse with magic, and losing them one by one to the House battles? Emmanuelle stopped herself before she could fling the words into Andrea’s face.
“He doesn’t love you,” she said.
“Oh, Emmanuelle. Don’t be so naive. We both get what we need from the relationship.”
Emmanuelle closed her eyes, because it hurt too much. Because it was all bitterness and political calculations, and watching children die… Her head hurt again—she’d thought that once before, hadn’t she? Such a huge, angry thought that had seemed to swallow up the universe.
“Who is Niraphanes?” she asked, finally.
“An upstart.” Andrea drew on her cigarette, blew out the smoke in colored rings. Magic pulsed, weakly, in the air. “Someone who thinks she can run the House better than Guy does.”
“That’s not what I meant. Guy said she’d try to stop him if he killed Darrias.”
Andrea laughed. “I doubt she would have. Niraphanes is the one who replaced Darrias.”
“Replaced?” Emmanuelle asked with a sinking feeling, suspecting the answer already.
“Every magician needs a Fall-parent. After Darrias was disgraced—before she left the House, when Guy sent her back onto the streets—Niraphanes took her place.”
“Took. Her. Place.”
It was so clinical, so detached. As if you could take one parent away and replace them with another, and have neither child nor parents notice or care. But then it was what Harrier did, wasn’t it? All the blood they spilled and the misery they thrived on, never giving a second thought to the devastation that sustained them.
Again, that pitying head-shake. “Darrias wanted everything back. As if that would ever have been granted to her.”
“Guy warned me,” Emmanuelle said, slowly, carefully.
Missing memory was bad enough; having to hide it from everyone else was like dancing on the edge of the abyss.
“Next you’ll be saying you just happened to meet her in the House.”
“I did,” Emmanuelle said.
She stopped, then. Had it been truly random, or was this an elaborate plot on Darrias’s part? But why would she? No. Not trusting the people who wanted to torture and kill her was the most sensible course of action.
“I saw your face,” Andrea said conversationally. “When Guy warned you, back before all this happened. You’re good at hiding it, but you were upset. And worried. You went straight to see Darrias, didn’t you?”
When in doubt, stay on the offensive.
“What if I did?” Emmanuelle asked. “I think we’re allowed friends.”
“Outside our Houses?” Andrea’s voice was sarcastic. “Very risky.”
“Is it?”
It was like fighting with one hand tied behind her back, and she couldn’t afford that. It was very uncomfortable defending herself against allegations of interfering with another House’s affairs when she had no earthly idea how rash she’d been in the past day or so.
“Things have changed too much. And we can’t afford a war with Silverspires.”
She should have sounded as though she was going to free Emmanuelle, but it came out very differently. The cigarette holder shone like a beacon in the dim light, and magic bloomed in the room, dragging Emmanuelle down on the floor.
“You’re not here to do me any favors,” she whispered. “There’s no need…”
Silverspires couldn’t afford to get into a war with anyone, not even for retribution.
Andrea laid the holder down. It smoldered on the threshold, and when she stood up again she had a dagger out.
“In a manner of speaking,” she said with a bitter smile. “It’s such a dangerous House, currently. So many things can happen. It’d be so… regrettable if you died in a skirmish and we had to return your body to Selene, but much less so than having you executed in full sight of all the dependents and the rebels.”
It felt unreal. Emmanuelle, flopped on the floor like a dead fish, watched Andrea walk into the room—everything slowed down and jerky, time stretched out into molasses, but her own attempts to escape were as through treacle. This was how it ended, and she didn’t want it to, so many things to say and do…
Selene.
In her mind, the link to the House burned, and she heard her lover’s voice, edged with anger and fear. Run.
Where…?
It didn’t matter where.
Emmanuelle kicked at Andrea, again and again until the magic holding her in place broke. Her first kick was so weak it didn’t even lift dust from the floor, the second one landed wide, and the third one hit Andrea in the solar plexus. She gasped, reeling. Emmanuelle kicked again and again, feeling the magic shudder and give way. It should never have worked, but the House was weak, and so was Guy and Andrea’s magic.
Andrea was folded over in pain, curled around an arm that hung at an angle. In shock, though that wasn’t going to last long.
The grate.
Emmanuelle ran to it. No time. She couldn’t finesse unwinding of the threads anymore, but she had something on the outside, this time.
The disk.
She pulled it in, pulling again and again, the wards shriveling in its wake. Too slow, it was too slow—at any moment now Andrea was going to pull herself together. What would she do, if it was an inner courtyard and not the outside street?
The wards burst. The bars melted. Emmanuelle clambered out, breathing heavily—she expected, at any moment, Andrea to come behind her, but nothing happened. When she finally hauled herself up, she was on a vaguely familiar street: rue des Entrepreneurs, a long, thin line of empty buildings leading up to the greenery of Place Charles Michel. The disk was warm in her hands: it pulsed, not like a tracker disk, but like a stuttering heart. A beacon, Darrias had said, but the tug Emmanuelle felt was stronger than that.
She walked, staggering, into the street. Not much time until someone found Andrea. Until Guy realized what she’d done. Until the birds wheeled in the sky once again. The tug was pulling her west—there something was wrong about that but she didn’t remember, any more, what it was. The only thing keeping her upright was sheer adrenaline, and the slow, steady tug in her hand. The street opened up, became a plaza with absurdly verdant trees, and then a long avenue bordered by disused factories—large wrought-iron gates opening on empty courtyards, long hangars with only empty spaces for doors, a chimney still blowing smoke at the sky. And, on the other side, buildings that still stood, covered in soot and fungus, the usual genteel decay of post-war Paris. No corpses, just the glittering of broken shards in the empty window frames, and the air itself was almost clean, almost empty of smoke and so sharp it hurt her throat to breathe in…
Her world was black, shivering and folding back on itself, when something stopped her. All her legs wanted was to keep walking, one foot after the other until she finally reached safety, so she pushed on ahead, stubbornly—she could hear the sibilant cries of the hawks behind her, detaching themselves from buildings, coming for her—but the obstacle, the person, didn’t move. Someone moved her hands from their shoulders, pushed her back from their chest.
“Emmanuelle.”
“Darrias,” she said. “You shouldn’t—”
“Have waited?” Darrias’s voice was soft, and terrible. “You were hard to miss, Emmanuelle.”
The disk vanished from Emmanuelle’s hand, the tug finally fading—and Darrias held her as her legs gave out, and the rest of her body followed.
“Like a hook in a fish’s mouth,” she said, almost tenderly—and held Emmanuelle against her as the world shivered and went completely dark.
* * *
“You don’t understand,” Philippe said.
The small kitchen space in Olympe’s flat looked like nothing so much as a court: the dim light of fires in the gray light of morning; the circle of aunts spread behind Grandmother Olympe, their face unreadable in the dim light. Every available surface seemed to be covered in gr
it-filled flour, and the air was redolent with the smell of garlic and fish sauce—not the adulterated stuff, but as pure as it would ever be, this side of the Mediterranean—a thick, strong odor that hung on his tongue and reminded him of better days.
Grandmother Olympe was chopping ginger roots with Colette, Aunt Ha’s daughter, on a stool and watching with rapt fascination as the rectangular blade made paper-thin slices of yellowish flesh. She put the ginger in a small, chipped bowl.
“I don’t understand?” she said, turning to Philippe.
She was using the pronoun for grandmother for herself—demanding respect and not acknowledging Philippe’s status as older than her.
Not that he’d ever tried to make much of said status. It had been embarrassing—until now.
Philippe closed his eyes, and tried to think of words. He was exhausted: he and Isabelle had spent the night trying to heal Aunt Ha, fighting the khi fire that kept rising in her, again and again, tiger stripes appearing on her skin the moment they faltered. He’d left Isabelle there with Hoa Phong—Hoa Phong had insisted her expertise was helping, but she’d turned out to remember some of the more elaborate weaves used by the Court to heal their servants.
“I don’t mean any disrespect, but you have to leave before Dân Chay burns this entire place down to the ground. As he’s burned House Harrier.”
Grandmother Olympe set down the knife.
“No touching,” she said, firmly, to Colette. “We can’t leave, Philippe.”
Was this about their faith in him? He was the last person they could count on for help.
“He’s one of Heaven’s enforcers.”
“Stronger than you?”
Once, perhaps not. But now? He didn’t know what the Houses had done to Dân Chay—he could guess, but he didn’t have the stomach to ask Isabelle—and he could barely keep Dân Chay’s magic at bay in one person.
“What happened in Gare du Nord… that wasn’t him. That was just someone he’d touched, once. We’ll lose, if we fight.”
“And you’re saying this with absolute certainty?”
“Nothing is certain,” Philippe said. “But the chances—”
“Are minuscule?” Grandmother Olympe smiled. “Still, they exist.”
“They might as well not!”
But Grandmother Olympe didn’t budge.
“Do you think he’ll come back?” Aunt Thuy asked.
The midwife wore a loose tunic over baggy pants, and looked as exhausted as Philippe felt, her topknot almost eclipsed by stray locks of hair. She leaned her back against the counter for support.
“Not this way,” Philippe said. He’d burned the scroll the man had been carrying—the vector that had infected Aunt Ha. “He wasn’t there. It was just… a memory of him.” Khi fire honed to a killing edge—elemental stripes that kept reappearing on Aunt Ha’s body. “I don’t even think he meant to harm Aunt Ha. He burned the man for the fuel so he could speak, and she was just standing in the way. But that’s not the point!”
Grandmother Olympe snatched the knife from Colette’s grasp.
“No touching, I said! I hear what you’re saying, child. But we can’t leave.”
“Because your life is here? That’s just…” Material things. Houses and furniture and walls. “It can be rebuilt.”
And he stopped, because he realized he was speaking as an Immortal to whom possessions had never meant much.
Grandmother Olympe smiled. “There’s that, too. But that’s not the issue, Philippe. Where would we go?”
“Anywhere!” He tried again. “Grandmother, he’s an Immortal who was tortured by two Houses in their attempt to make a weapon of war. He’s managed to slip their control, and now thinks most of the city is to blame for what happened to him. He’ll burn this area to cinders. He’s—like a House, but instead of ignoring you he wants to kill you all.”
Abandon it all, and you may live.
“This is our home.” Grandmother Olympe sighed, and for a moment she was an old, large and formidable woman who had seen all the decades go by. “You can’t understand, child. I wasn’t born when the war ended, but I remember what it meant for our parents to be torn from our homes. Those wounds never really closed. This… we built this. We built our altars and we buried the bones of our ancestors, and every flat that stands is something we made with our own hands, against the indifference of the Houses. This is what home means. And this is where we’ll be buried.”
“I…” He stopped, again. The fatigue he’d been keeping at bay came crashing down, and it was just him, standing in the middle of cracked tiles, struggling to stand, let alone put two thoughts together. “Not everyone will want this.”
“You assume other places will welcome us, the dregs of the city.” Her voice was amused again. “You assume it is easy to build. People remember how much each stone cost us.” A short, bitter laugh. “You also assume he would keep his word.”
“Who?” And then he realized. “Dân Chay.”
“You may live.” The words, spoken in the archaic language of the court, sounded almost alien to Philippe. “He burned a man to deliver a message. Why would he not hunt us down, merely for fun or because of his outdated grudges?”
“Outdated.” Philippe couldn’t help it: the word came welling up before he could stop it.
Olympe’s gaze was steel. “Yes. I know in the old country the sins of the father became those of the children, and of their own parents. The nine kinship exterminations. This isn’t the old country anymore.”
“I won’t judge you,” Philippe said. The words tasted like ashes on his tongue. “I can’t. I fought in the war.”
Olympe’s voice was almost gentle. She left the kitchen, and folded his hands in hers—and around the hilt of the knife.
“But do you see now? We don’t run away. We hold. We fight, no matter how minuscule the chances, because it’s the better alternative. Because it’s the hope we have.” She looked back at the aunts, for a moment. “You can decide, now, if you want to leave. It may make more sense to you. But if you do—you’re on your own.”
A silence. Not one of them moved.
“You’ll die,” Philippe said.
“Some of us will.” It was one of the newer aunts—a gaunt, tall Maghrebi refugee from Harrier with a singed blue scarf around her head. “But everything dies, in time. At least we know it’s coming.”
ELEVEN
Rude Awakenings
Aurore was sitting on something hard—the ground between the two gates of the barracks. The smoke was slowly dispersing, which meant she could see. She wished she couldn’t, because skulls and fragments of bones and Harrier uniforms littered the ground.
She was alive.
Everything hurt. Her hand, the one she’d raised to catch Morningstar’s spell, felt as though someone had torn it to shreds.
“You’re awake,” an unfamiliar voice said.
She turned, startled. A Fallen in the uniform of House Harrier was sitting on a pile of rubble, watching her. She had long flowing hair she hadn’t bothered to gather in a proper hairstyle—it was tangled and knotted and filled with pieces of dust and smoke. She wore a dress covered with black lace in an elaborate circles and flowers pattern—it were lightly singed, but the damage was almost imperceptible. Her clothes were the colors of Harrier, though the crest of the House, the hawk in flight over the burning tower, had been joined by a second bird. Behind her were three guards, standing in a falsely nonchalant pose Aurore knew all too well: if she moved so much as an unapproved muscle they’d slam her to the floor.
She should bow down and grovel—it took an effort to keep her body still, to stare the Fallen in the eye.
The Fallen was unperturbed by her insolence.
“They’ve gone,” she said, conversationally.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Aurore said.
A gently amused snort. “You were unconscious and too hard to carry as they ran away.”
They’d tho
ught she was dead, then. Which was good, or Morningstar would have made sure of it before he left.
“I didn’t mean much to them, anyway.” She shrugged, keeping her voice casual. “I snuck into the House to scavenge and they dragged me along with them.”
The Fallen’s brown eyes were all too sharply perceptive.
“Into all sorts of trouble.”
Aurore weighed up what information she could give. It had all been very friendly so far, but she doubted it would remain that. And though she’d sell Morningstar out in a heartbeat, she didn’t think the Fallen was looking for him so much as for the children. And she wasn’t going to hand them back to their tormentors.
“They wanted to look at the source of the explosion.”
Again, an amused snort. “So they could replicate it elsewhere?”
The Houses. A stray Immortal. The mortals.
Dân Chay was going to set fire to everything. She needed to get home, before Dân Chay did.
“Yes,” Aurore said.
Morningstar had used Dân Chay to devastate Harrier and then let him loose in the city. Aurore couldn’t understand his reasons, but she’d got the rest. Morningstar didn’t care if the city became an ocean of ruins, as long as Silverspires was still intact.
“It’ll happen again. The explosion. Because the Fallen never really care about anything but destruction.”
“Don’t we?” The Fallen’s face was very still. “We’re not all the same, you know. Morningstar is… peculiar. I haven’t introduced myself, by the way. My name is Niraphanes. What’s yours?”
Frédérique’s wife. Aurore blinked, staring at her.
“I’m Aurore.”
“Aurore. Pleased to meet you. You’ve heard of me.” Niraphanes smiled. “I’m not surprised.”
That seemed, if nothing else, an easy thing to admit.
“Yes.”
“From Frédérique?”
The House of Sundering Flames Page 20