“Yes.”
Behind her, one of the bodyguards was playing with a knife, staring at Aurore with the familiar contempt of Fallen for a mortal menial. She was exhausted and her hand was a symphony of pain.
I have a revenge to take. A city to burn.
She wanted to go home. To warn Cassiopée. To run, but where would they run to?
“Where are they going, Aurore?”
She didn’t know. Silverspires, surely, the children still used as shields by Morningstar. But Frédérique had said something about Niraphanes and the wars of the House, and how she’d wanted to drag Virginie into it.
“I don’t know.”
The bodyguard moved—no, she wasn’t a bodyguard, because she moved with the easy gait of someone used to power.
“We’re wasting our time. Give her to us to play with.” A smile that was feral and predatory. “Who knows, we might even get something useful out of her.”
Niraphanes looked annoyed for a moment, and then her face was smooth again. She turned to Aurore again, watched her closely.
“Don’t mind Lorcid. She gets overeager. They abandoned you. I thought you’d be a little less eager to protect them.”
Aurore wasn’t even sure why she was doing it—stubbornness, compassion?
“There’s a child,” she said finally, finding nothing but the truth in the scorched ruins of her mind.
“My child.”
“They ran.” She kept her voice level, but she was well aware nothing about her manner was humble or servile anymore. She didn’t care. The time for masks was past. “They knew it was you and they still ran. If Frédérique is scared enough to leave the House rather than face you, then maybe you don’t deserve your own child.”
Lorcid moved—one moment she was behind Aurore, and the next pain shot through her cheek and her head whipped back with the force of the blow. She tasted blood.
When the world unblurred, Aurore saw Niraphanes had, effortlessly, thrown Lorcid to the ground.
“No violence,” she said, still in that firm pleasant tone.
Lorcid sat up. She didn’t look fazed or angry.
“You’re too sentimental.”
Niraphanes said, “Do you want us to be no better than Guy?”
“Morality will never win you the House.”
“Perhaps it’s not about winning,” Niraphanes said. “But about doing things the right way.” She turned back to Aurore. “I’m sorry. You were sharing unpleasant truths. Do go on.”
What? Aurore had dealt with many Fallen, but none like Niraphanes. She didn’t know on which foot to dance, which was annoying.
“I was saying I didn’t feel like betraying a confidence. Even if I knew it.”
“Commendable,” Niraphanes said. “You do know who Frédérique is running away with, don’t you?” Her voice was still amused, but Aurore could feel the steel beneath.
Morningstar. She tasted ashes and dust. He’d keep them alive, because he had to.
“He’s powerful,” she said. “And it’s in his best interest to keep them alive.”
“Is it?” Niraphanes’ face was expressionless. She reached up, brushed a hand through her own hair, stopped at the first tangle and gently worked out the knot, her gaze on Aurore all the while. “I won’t ask how you know. But surely you must have asked yourself what will happen once their usefulness runs out?”
He’d used children as shields. He’d bargained with their lives and pain to keep himself safe, because he couldn’t envision his House without his own presence.
“I…” Aurore opened her mouth, closed it again.
Niraphanes’ voice was low and intense. “Frédérique and I may not agree. I understand she wants to keep Virginie safe at all costs, even when the time for safety or neutrality has passed. But I’m not willing to leave her with someone like Morningstar.”
She said, slowly, “He said he would offer them the shelter of the House.”
Would he? When he was back within his own domain, when he no longer needed the children to shield him from Dân Chay?
“He might. I don’t know. Is this a risk I’m willing to take? Of course not.”
Niraphanes sounded… frustrated. Angry. Human. A mother, worrying about her child. No. Aurore couldn’t afford to think of her that way.
“They’re going to House Silverspires.”
Aurore was offering nothing to Niraphanes but confirmation of what she already knew, or could work out for herself. Nothing that would keep her unharmed.
Niraphanes was silent for a while.
“I can work with that.” She snapped her fingers, and Lorcid was at her side. She appeared unperturbed, though the glance she flashed Aurore wasn’t entirely friendly. “Take two people and stop them. Preferably before they reach Silverspires.”
Lorcid nodded, and was gone, to confer with the guards at the back.
“You knew,” Aurore said. “Where else—?”
“Where else would he go? I couldn’t be sure,” Niraphanes said. “And I have to be very, very sure, before I interfere with the business of another House.” She laughed. It was tense, but still amused. “But I have an eyewitness now.”
Aurore’s heart sank. “I’m not Harrier.”
Niraphanes’ look at her, this time, was long and steady and entirely too uncomfortable. Did she know Aurore had been from Harrier once? She couldn’t possibly know. It wasn’t like Frédérique or Morningstar or any of the others would have screamed the evidence at her as they fled.
“You’re not.” She smiled. “I’m not going to ask you what you’re doing here, am I?” It wasn’t a question.
Aurore said nothing.
Niraphanes shifted and Aurore flinched—but Niraphanes was simply kneeling by her side, pointing to the hand she kept curled.
“You were wounded in a fight, weren’t you?”
She reached out, and unfolded it. Aurore tried to stop her, but Niraphanes’ fingers were unbreakable steel. Pain spread through her burned palm and wrist, and she couldn’t help the whimper forced out of her mouth.
And then, surprisingly, it stopped—not because Niraphanes was done, but because she was staring at the wound with mild concern on her face.
“That looks ugly. And unexpected.”
“I’m not sure what you expected,” Aurore managed through gritted teeth.
“Something more sordid. That looks like you tried to catch a spell of shriveling.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“If it had worked, you wouldn’t be here,” Niraphanes said. “Well, your charred body would.”
Her chest had burned. The disk, trying to save her? Not out of goodness of heart, obviously, but because Asmodeus would have been disappointed to lose his favorite toy. They were all the same. And Niraphanes, for all her play-acting at concern, was Fallen too. Aurore owed Harrier and the other Houses nothing but blood and pain, and she would never, ever help them save themselves.
“It was the armory,” she lied. “I don’t know what they kept there.”
Again, a long, weighing look from Niraphanes. Lorcid still hadn’t left—was she going to call her back? Aurore braced herself. She could bear pain, but at some point she knew her body would betray her.
At length, Niraphanes smiled. “Too many secrets, Aurore. They always choke you in the end.” She touched, gently, the charred mark in Aurore’s hand. “I’ll have my people bandage this, before you leave.”
Aurore said, “You’re letting me go. Why? You said you needed an eyewitness.”
“Mostly as an excuse. It’s not like I’ll have to produce you for House Silverspires.” Niraphanes shrugged. She rose, looking at Lorcid and the devastation around them. “Why? Because every scrap of goodwill has to start somewhere.”
An idealist, Frédérique had said. A decent person, but Aurore had seen the light in her eyes when she’d said it. She might not agree with Niraphanes, but she admired her all the same. A naive child, from Aurore’s point of view. Th
ere was no room for goodwill in the world, not between those at the top and the bottom of the heap.
“If it makes you feel better,” Niraphanes said, “believe I’m saving you in case I need you, further down the line.” Her voice was bleak.
Aurore thought, again, over what she’d seen.
Do you want us to fight? It wouldn’t be contained. There might be… casualties.
She’d barely met Frédérique and the others, and she didn’t have the energy to care about people beyond her own—those she was already failing. And whatever lay between Niraphanes and her family wasn’t for her to solve. But there were children involved—and children or no, no one deserved to be used that way.
“I hope you find them,” she said.
As she left, nursing the hand Niraphanes’ people had bandaged, she turned. The smoke was still dissipating, revealing the ruined barracks, the field of debris and bones and skulls all around them—ashes and charred stones, and melted glass. The wind whistled over the emptiness—and in it, she heard, again, Dân Chay’s voice.
A city to burn. Houses. A stray Immortal.
She needed to find Cassiopée. She needed to warn her. She needed to stop Dân Chay. But how in Heaven did one stop a being of living fire?
* * *
Emmanuelle woke up in shadow, gasping. For a moment everything was limned in edged light, and then it passed. The feeling of dizziness took a while more to do so. What…? Where…?
She was in an utterly unfamiliar room. Dull green wallpaper—that awful olive color that she’d wanted Selene to remove from the west wing of Silverspires. She lay on a four-poster bed with a moldering scarlet canopy—fresh sheets, smelling of laundry. It was, quite definitely, not a room she’d ever seen. Harrier? But the part of Harrier she’d seen had been brash and over-decorated. This… had been that way, once upon a time, but now it was just genteel decay.
Where was she?
She was wearing new clothes: a set of silk pajamas, the chinoiserie that had been all the rage, with a matching satin bonnet which she took off. She got up, clinging to the bedpost. Her torn and burned Silverspires uniform had been folded and left on the bed, but not patched. A clear statement if ever there was one. There was a door: a huge, two-paneled thing with elaborate wood carvings that were now mostly stubs of creatures with missing heads and limbs. It was locked.
How surprising.
There was a large window with baize curtains in that same shade of green drawn over it—the woven cords of the curtains hung on the walls, flecked with mold. Everything had the same faint smell of humidity.
Emmanuelle drew back one curtain, carefully. It was large and heavy, and she had to pause twice when doing so, once because her hands flexed open of their own accord, and again when her leg spasmed and left her, panting, leaning against the cloth and breathing in the smell of humidity. Wards tingled as she did so: nothing so painful or so barbed as Harrier’s, but a gentle touch to warn her away—a softness wrapped in a core of cutting steel.
A vast sweep of lawn, going down to the murky, oily surface of the Seine. Children playing on the ruined gravel, their feet scattering pieces of stone and blackened grit. Dependents in silver and gray swallowtails and top hats, and here and there the sharp features of an Annamite, their faces blurring away to reveal the antlers of dragons.
Hawthorn.
She was in Hawthorn. Darrias’s House. Asmodeus’s House.
The door opened behind her. She would have turned, but she could barely move, the burst of strength that had propelled her through the room all but extinguished now.
“She’s fainted,” someone said.
“Not quite. She’s conscious, but in no state to stand up,” an older woman’s voice said. “Come on.”
They carried her to the bed: two orderlies dressed in white with the crowned hawthorn arms of the House, and behind them Iaris, Asmodeus’s right hand—if she still was that, in the new order of the House—who bent over Emmanuelle with a faintly irritated expression, unwrapping her stethoscope from around her neck. Clearly there as a doctor first, and a representative of the House second.
“Sit still,” she said.
It was all Emmanuelle could do to sit. She supposed it was a good sign that they were treating her at all—but it was Hawthorn. The House was not known for random acts of kindness, and everything they did was barbed and poisonous.
Iaris’s examination was cursory. She snapped the stethoscope back into place around her neck, asked Emmanuelle a few questions about when she’d woken up, and stared into her eyes.
“Mmm,” she said. “Flex your arm for me?” She thought for a while.
“You’re wondering if you should tell me,” Emmanuelle said. “I can take it. I know it’s a brain injury.”
Iaris didn’t even blink. “I’m wondering what I’m allowed to tell you.” She shrugged. It was slow and graceful. Finally she said, “He’ll tell you. But I won’t leave this untreated.”
And with that she and the orderlies were gone, leaving Emmanuelle to wait. There was little doubt who “he” was—but what would he want from her? She must have dozed, or slept, because when she opened her eyes again, the key was turning in the lock.
Three servants, carrying a tray with food they laid on the table. One of them, a woman with long flowing hair, helped Emmanuelle stand up and fold her body into the chair while the others laid a plate and cutlery, and a fine crystal glass into which they poured wine. A thick, golden soup redolent of cheese, a chunk of bread by its side—Emmanuelle stared at the spoon for a while, her hands shaking. She hadn’t realized how long it was since she’d touched proper food.
“It’s not poisoned,” a voice said from the doorway. “Poisoning lacks immediacy. A coward’s weapon, I’ve always thought. There’s no pleasure in watching someone die at a remove.”
“Asmodeus,” Emmanuelle said.
He leaned against the doorway, with Darrias a couple of steps behind him. Darrias was in full House uniform, a masculine swallowtail over a ruffled shirt, and wouldn’t meet Emmanuelle’s eyes. Asmodeus wore his usual jacket, with a red cravat at his throat and a hawthorn flower in his buttonhole. His gaze, behind the square horn-rimmed glasses, was sharp and amused, and why wouldn’t he be? He’d had the lover of a rival House’s head delivered straight to him in a neatly wrapped package. With her in his hands, he could make Selene dance to his tune for as long as he’d liked. Though she didn’t know what their weak and devastated House could offer…
“Hello, Emmanuelle.”
The servants finished laying the table. The woman left a wrapped package on it, which shone with a faint lambent light. A spell?
Asmodeus came in, Darrias trailing him like a silent shadow, and pulled up a chair, watching her.
“Eat,” he said.
One of the servants brought him a glass of wine. They offered one to Darrias as well, but she shook her head.
“And take the medicine,” Asmodeus added.
The medicine? Emmanuelle stared at the table. He had to mean the package.
“What is it for?” she asked.
“I’ve already told you. Not poison.”
“There are many things that aren’t poison and that I wouldn’t necessarily take.”
Emmanuelle unwrapped the package. Her hands were shaking—any time now, she was going to knock over the wineglass and break it. Inside was a small vial with round, white pills.
Asmodeus shrugged. “You have a head injury, Iaris tells me. You need rest.”
A good thing she was his prisoner then; and locked in a room she doubted she’d leave in the near future. She didn’t say the words, because she wasn’t capable of mustering the necessary sarcasm. A wave of shakes hit her like a blow to the heart. She wanted so badly to be home, in her little office behind the stacks of books in Silverspires with the smell of paper and glue around her. She wanted to hear Selene’s voice, teasing her for worrying too much.
She closed her eyes, so that he wouldn’t see
her weep. But of course he would.
He was still speaking as if nothing were wrong.
“These are injuries that mostly heal themselves, but you’re still weakened, and you might burst a blood vessel, which would have… drastic consequences. Fallen magic can’t heal, but these will help smooth your injuries out. Take one now, and then one every morning and evening. You have Iaris’s prescription in the package.” A pause, then, in the same tone, “This is a prison cell. The walls are reinforced with metal, and the wards around it have been tripled. Thuan has added some spells of his own, a weave of khi metal to dry out Fallen magic. I wouldn’t attempt anything… extraordinary, if I were you.” She couldn’t see him, but she could imagine his smile. “Rest is good for you, is it not?”
Emmanuelle opened her eyes, still gummed with tears.
“What do you want?” she asked.
He smiled. “Information. Leverage.” He sounded like he was explaining it to a child.
All she wanted to do was sleep, but she lifted the spoon to her lips, and swallowed the soup. It left a burning trail of cheese and onion taste all the way to her stomach, its warmth spreading through her entire belly. She hadn’t thought she was hungry before, but now she couldn’t have enough of it. She dipped the spoon back in the soup, and before she knew it the plate was empty. The second one they’d left her held cold cuts and some kind of orange purée—squash, which left grit and mold on her tongue. It should have tasted sweet, but the days of sweetness were long gone.
When she looked up again, he was still sitting in the chair. He held his glass of wine, and sipped from it, but it was for only show: the liquid’s level didn’t change.
“Tell me about Harrier.”
“I’m sure Darrias told you everything when she dropped me in your lap.” Emmanuelle couldn’t quite hide her anger.
“I like to have several sources.” Asmodeus’s face didn’t move.
“I might not feel like sharing.”
If he wanted her as leverage, he wouldn’t take the risk of harming her.
A smile that was all bright, sharp teeth. “You’re assuming you have value as a hostage. Delightful, but I might not need you.”
“I’m still alive.”
The House of Sundering Flames Page 21