“For now.” He took a real sip from his glass. “Silverspires is weak and small. Barely a House anymore, by all standards. You overestimate your importance in this city.”
“You want to harm me?”
“I merely want to make sure we both understand where we stand.” He laid the glass on the table by the side of the chair, and shifted. He had to have knives or daggers on him, and she’d expected him to draw one—he’d always been one for the cheap, dramatic gestures, which were a lot less cheap when it was her at the end of the blade.
“At the thinnest, sharpest end of mercy and caprice. I’ve spared you so far, but I’ve got very little incentive to continue if you give me nothing of value.”
She was so, so tired. All she wanted to do was lay back against the bed and sleep. He knew this, no doubt. He didn’t need a knife.
“I don’t want Darrias in the room,” she said.
“Angry at her?” Asmodeus smiled. “She knows where she belongs, Emmanuelle. And who gives the orders here.”
“I don’t want her in the room,” Emmanuelle said stubbornly.
He shrugged, languid and graceful, and gestured Darrias out with one wave of his hand. Came to stand by her side, laying his wineglass right by hers. There was another chair there, and he lowered himself into it, as if they were having a meal together. The smell of bergamot and citrus choked the taste of food in her mouth.
“Tell me.”
She did. In slow, halting words—leaving out the amnesia and her own suspicions of what might have happened that night, of how far she’d compromised herself by interfering in House Harrier affairs. It was none of his business, and he didn’t need more weakness from her.
When she was done, he considered her words.
“You have no idea what caused the explosion.” His voice was flat, without a trace of sarcasm.
“I woke up in the middle of it,” Emmanuelle said.
“Hmmm.” He said nothing for a while. “Where is Morningstar?”
Emmanuelle, startled, looked up at him. “I don’t know. We got separated.”
An amused snort. “Probably busy advancing his own agenda. I understand why Selene felt the need to make a statement by sending him, but there are better people.”
He didn’t like Morningstar. He never had. Asmodeus hoarded his dependents like treasured possessions; he felt Morningstar had been too cavalier with their lives, back when he’d been head of the House.
“I don’t make Selene’s decisions for her.”
Another snort. “Untrue. If you asked, she’d listen. But you’ve never had any interest in politics, have you?”
“Is this a review of my personal failures, as perceived by you?”
“Not at all.” A sharp smile. “Merely about the location of a powerful Fallen in the middle of this carnage. Especially one who doesn’t understand the difference between removing a splinter and setting fire to the hand.”
“That’s not true. He’s changed,” Emmanuelle said. “Death does that.”
He’d died and been born again with no memory of who he’d been, and Selene had always suspected Asmodeus had a hand in his reviving. No proof, obviously: Asmodeus was too canny for that.
Asmodeus’s gaze was sharp. “Does it? Power goes deeper than flesh and memories, you’ll find. What we are is written in the dust of our bones. No one ever changes. They merely apply themselves a different way.” And, in a different tone, “You’ll notice he didn’t try to rescue you.”
It was like a gut punch; because she’d so hoped he would be there, in the cells beneath Harrier. Because she’d prayed so hard for him to come, and he hadn’t.
“I told you,” Emmanuelle said. “We were separated.”
“Did you?” He shrugged. “You’re too kind, Emmanuelle. We both know it.”
“I’d rather be kind than heartless.”
“I have a heart.” Another smile. “But never mind my… personal failures. Morningstar wasn’t part of any faction that I know of, and I don’t think even he would openly engage in another House’s politics. Selene would have his head if he did.”
“Darrias—”
“Darrias has always been too preoccupied with the life she left behind.” A snort. “You take what you have and run with it as far as you can. Though I can understand—her family was hers, in the same way the dependents of a House are its head’s.”
“Showing me weakness?” It ought to have come out as ironic, but her voice would barely obey her.
“By now you must know how I work.”
“I know how you work. Not how you feel.”
A gentle nudge. She realized he was pushing her wineglass towards her.
“Don’t fake kindness. Please.”
She was so, so close to breaking down, and she couldn’t be sure how successful she was in hiding it from him. He was a sadist who questioned prisoners in the cells of Hawthorn for his own entertainment: he had seen dozens like her, on the verge of giving him everything he wanted.
When she looked up again, he’d stepped away again. He was on the threshold, watching her, leaning against the door jamb, his smile mocking.
“Sometimes kindness is more cutting than the sharpest knife, isn’t it?”
He knew.
She said nothing, braced herself, waiting for the final blow.
“Enjoy the wine,” Asmodeus said. “And get some sleep.” He turned away, the doors drawing close behind him. But not before she heard him say, “I may, after all, need Selene’s kindness in the very near future.”
Why—what for?
“Asmodeus!”
But he was gone.
TWELVE
Weakness
Emmanuelle, startled, woke up from a nightmare of beating wings and concealed birds to a room bathed in light. She stared at the French windows: the green baize curtains in faded cloth; the omnipresent smell of mold; the sunset over the debris-speckled lawn. Someone had come in, and left a meal: a decanter of wine, a covered tureen, a dish of what smelled like fish and herbs, and what looked like a cherry clafoutis. Expensive, difficult to find things: a clear statement of what Hawthorn could afford to feed its prisoners. The smell enticed her stomach, but wasn’t enough to steady her.
She’d dreamed of Morningstar. He’d stood at the door to her room in House Harrier, holding a sword that changed into a spear, then a whip, the radiance of his skin illuminating the four-poster bed.
“What’s wrong, Emmanuelle?” he’d asked, and when she’d looked up the world had been blurry with her tears—and the wings had started then, the birds peeling off from the bed and flower paper to find her in the darkness, in the heart of Hawthorn, and run her down.
It was a dream. One of those meaningless visions her brain kept coming up with to fill the hole, none of which could be trusted. But she’d thought the doors to Guy’s reception room were fake—and they had turned out to be devastatingly real.
Guy had warned her. He’d told her he’d kill Darrias.
Surely she’d at least tried to turn Darrias aside from the path she’d chosen?
Not that it mattered—because in the end, Darrias had chosen her own path. No friendship between Houses. Just jailer and jailed.
It shouldn’t have hurt so much.
The key turned in the lock.
Another meal tray, another day of forcing herself to eat and desperately wanting to go home.
She looked up, and Darrias was standing in the door frame.
“Emmanuelle.”
She’d reapplied the henna markings: an elaborate tracery of letters on her face and hands. Her uniform of House Hawthorn was freshly pressed, her face expressionless. Emmanuelle looked for words—for polite things she could say, as she always did—and found nothing.
“I hadn’t thought anyone would be allowed in.”
“He’ll find out eventually, and then he’ll look the other way. He… indulges me, in that matter, because it makes no difference,” Darrias said.
Anoth
er way of saying she wouldn’t help Emmanuelle escape.
Darrias came in and sat, coiled like a wolf before the final leap of the hunt.
“You’re angry at me.”
“Yes,” Emmanuelle said, because she wasn’t in the mood to prevaricate.
“I had no choice. It was cross the bridge or face the birds.” She sounded scared, which was… wrong. As if the world had tilted sideways. “You’ve seen them.”
A boneless body crumpling in the street. Dozens of still, silent birds standing on furniture and mantelpieces. She dug her nails in the palm of her hand.
“Yes.”
“And once we’d crossed, I couldn’t hide whom I’d brought back. Even if you hadn’t been wearing Silverspires’ colors, you’re… distinctive.”
Distinctive. Emmanuelle clamped her lips on a wounding reply. Her patience had run out.
“I thought you’d want to know Louiza and Jamila are both safe. Lord Asmodeus was delighted at the prospect of poaching people from Guy, even menials.” She sounded almost surprised. Because her head of House had been decent for once? “Jamila has been given to the Court of Birth, and is getting a proper education.”
“They were Harrier dependents,” Emmanuelle said. “It’s impossible to break a link to a House—”
“If you’re not its head? The rules have changed.” Her face was very still. “Harrier is dying. Links can be snapped, with enough power.”
“Dying.”
Houses didn’t just die. Especially not Harrier. It was brash and unpleasant, and it had always been there. Every few decades it would convulse and present a new face to the world, but it had always survived. It always would.
And, if Harrier was dying—if Houses could die—where did that leave House Silverspires?
Darrias’s face was bleak. “There might have been a point, shortly after the explosion, where Guy could have turned it around. But he let it descend into civil war while he tried to consolidate his own power. The House barely answers to him now, I’d think.”
“How do you know…?” Emmanuelle stopped, because it was an injudicious question. Darrias would never reveal her informants.
“Know with certainty? I don’t. I can guess, though. Remember the birds?”
Emmanuelle shivered. “Yes.” And, belatedly realizing, “They turned on the magician, didn’t they?”
“They’re the House itself. The wards became something that takes apart dissenters. The head’s eyes in the streets and buildings. And when the magician said to stop in the name of the head of the House, they didn’t.”
Obvious, in retrospect. Except she’d been too busy trying to survive.
“If you ask me…” Darrias’s face was still that odd mix of gentle and expressionless. It wasn’t Emmanuelle to whom she was being gentle—it was herself. “If you ask me, he’ll have to leave anyway. Sooner or later, regardless of whether he wins, he’ll realize he’s standing in a field of ruins with nothing worth crowing about.”
“And go where? There’s nowhere inside Paris.”
“It won’t matter. The other Houses will drive him back into the streets.”
Grim satisfaction.
Leave him at the mercy of the Houseless? It would never happen—he’d still have the power of a Fallen. How much damage would he do, before finally succumbing? Darrias was still thinking like a Harrier dependent: putting too much value on Fallen, and none on the Houseless. Hawthorn, for all that Emmanuelle didn’t get on with Asmodeus, regularly recruited its dependents from the streets.
“Dying,” she said flatly. She thought of the ruined buildings; of shards of glass glistening on the cobblestones. “You’ve told Asmodeus.”
“Of course.”
And of course he wouldn’t tell any of the other Houses that this could happen, because it wouldn’t give him an advantage.
“I need to tell Selene. We…” She fought a wave of panic. “We need to cooperate, to neutralize whoever is doing this.”
Darrias’s face didn’t move. “I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“Because you won’t gainsay him?” It hurt. She said, “I trusted you.”
“To be disloyal to Hawthorn?” Darrias sighed. “You know exactly what I fled from, Emmanuelle. I don’t want to be cast out from Hawthorn and go back to Harrier. I need his goodwill.”
“He’d never do that.”
Asmodeus would never let her return: in his twisted little world, Darrias was now his to punish, should she err. He would never let someone else exercise that right. Returning to Harrier as an envoy, perhaps—and even then, that had been Darrias’s idea, hadn’t it? Not his.
“And he let you return to Harrier for your family, didn’t he.” She kept her voice light, because if she broke down she was going to say something unforgivable.
Darrias stared at her for a while. This was the source of Emmanuelle’s anger—not the betrayal of delivering her to Hawthorn and standing by when she was imprisoned, because she’d never expected Darrias to choose friendship over House loyalty. No, not a failure of trust; but a failure to tell her the truth. To not ask her help.
“You never told me about your family because you thought I wouldn’t help you.”
A silence. Darrias got up, and paced the room.
“No. I didn’t tell you because I knew you would.”
“Darrias—”
“You’re a bleeding heart on legs, Emmanuelle.” It was said softly, affectionately. “Of course you’d have helped. And you couldn’t afford to. Silverspires is weak. I don’t need Selene’s partner dragged into a sordid affair between Harrier and Hawthorn, because I can guarantee you that Asmodeus wouldn’t have stood up for you if things had gone badly.”
Which they had.
I was going to take her apart at the dinner after the Great Presentation, and the most beautiful thing is that Hawthorn couldn’t have interfered—not when she’d started it, poking her nose into the affairs of another House.
“I can make my own choices,” Emmanuelle said stiffly. That feeling of fear—of a huge, yawning chasm she was teetering on the edge of—was back, and worse than ever. “Don’t treat me like a child.”
“Sometimes,” Darrias said, “it’s not about truth, or choice, but about how to best safeguard those you care for. How far would you have gone for friendship, Emmanuelle? You’d have thrown away Selene’s instructions and entangled yourself in a heartbeat. Look me in the eye and tell me you wouldn’t.”
Emmanuelle opened her mouth, closed it again. Because Darrias was right. Except that she hadn’t learned about Darrias’s family ahead of going into Harrier, but later—with hours to spare until Guy had her killed slowly and in agony. What would she have done, knowing sooner? She weighed, swiftly, the price of admitting to something Darrias likely already knew.
“There’s an entire chunk of time missing from my mind. The injury…” She paused. “I woke up, and I was in the middle of a burning House. What happened that afternoon, Darrias?”
Darrias looked surprised. “Nothing. I went to a garden before the banquet to find someone. Next thing I know, the House is on fire and full of corpses.” A sharp, weighing glance. “What do you think happened?”
Something large and unknowable and horrible.
What’s wrong, Emmanuelle? Morningstar had asked, in her dream.
“I don’t know,” she said, struggling to breathe. “I don’t know.”
It wasn’t her. It couldn’t have been her. Whatever had happened to Harrier—however much she’d wanted Guy’s smug face wiped off the surface of the earth—she’d never envisioned… Her mind froze, fleeing again and again.
Darrias’s look at her was sharp—but at length she laughed.
“Bleeding heart, Emmanuelle. I don’t know what you’ve forgotten, but it’ll be a book you failed to read or an overpolite, unpleasant conversation you had with someone. You shouldn’t worry about it.”
“I’m not sure what I should worry about,” Emmanuelle said. The feel
ing of panic had ebbed, but it was still there. Still waiting to be summoned. “Guy—”
“Guy is a snobbish racist coward,” Darrias said. “You cannot believe a word that comes out of his mouth. Trust me—I’ve served under him for years. He’ll try to insert all the wedges and raise all the fears he can, and if he has to distort the truth, he will have no compunction about doing so. Insinuation and abuse are second nature to him.” She poured Emmanuelle a glass of wine. “Here. Drink this. He got to you, didn’t he? I’m sorry.”
Empty words. Except that Darrias seemed to mean them. She took the glass, inhaling the wine’s scent—a sharp, acid taste of pineapple and grapefruit, followed by a taste like vanilla and honey in the mouth, and a lingering, full-bodied sweetness. Selene would have hated it, but Emmanuelle liked her wines much sweeter than her partner.
“He said…”
A beating of wings. A flock of birds on tables and chairs and the mantelpiece. Words shriveling in her mind when she tried to speak.
“I don’t want to know what he said.” Darrias closed her hands, gently, over Emmanuelle’s own—held them for a brief moment before withdrawing. “It’ll be too much work untangling truth from lies. If there’s any truth, at all.”
“You’re sure—”
“Emmanuelle. You’re the only person I know who insists on helping the Houseless without expecting anything in return.”
“I…”
It was a drop of water in the ocean. A sop to her pride, dispensing charity as though it could make any difference, beyond helping her sleep at night. If she was braver…
Again, her mind stopped, on the edge of a chasm she couldn’t contemplate.
Darrias said, “Stop worrying about lost hours. You didn’t cause any trouble, and that time won’t be coming back anyway. You can’t change the past.” And, more softly, “I’ll ask Lord Thuan if we can open negotiations with Silverspires. At the very least he can tell Selene we have you, so she’ll stop worrying about where you are.”
Emmanuelle stared at Darrias. Words seemed to have gone altogether.
“And if you want anything, ask. I can get it for you.”
Something to make her imprisonment bearable? But it was well meant, no matter how inadequate.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 22