When the nurses came—two frazzled women in the colors of Hawthorn, with burn marks on their hands and dozens of scabs on their faces—the tremor had subsided. Emmanuelle was sitting on the bed, endlessly reciting Our Fathers and Hail Marys in the vain hope of keeping her from worrying.
“What happened?” she asked.
Neither of them answered. The examination was perfunctory. They spoke in monosyllables, and then left, leaving dried food, a flask of water and a package of pills on the table.
“Wait,” Emmanuelle said.
One of them turned, on the threshold.
“We’ve got other emergencies to deal with. Consider yourself lucky we came at all.” A snort, to her colleague. “Freaking Silverspires, think they own the world.”
And then she was gone.
Emmanuelle ate, because it would be a shame to let the food go to waste. She wasn’t sure about the pills, but if Asmodeus had meant to kill her he would hardly go about it in such a roundabout way. Even drugging her to keep her docile was unnecessary—he could easily cast a spell for that, or force sedatives on her. So she took them, and didn’t feel they made much of a difference at all.
Selene, damn it. I want to be home.
She was going to cry again, and sentiment had never got anyone anywhere.
When the door opened again, she wasn’t sure how much time had passed. She’d dozed or slept, she couldn’t be sure, but she snapped out of the fuzzed darkness with panic clenching her guts. They were coming for her.
The person at the door stared at her, expressionless. An Annamite, his long hair tied in an impeccable topknot, his gray and silver suit incongruously pressed. He must have used magic to do it—highly unlikely anyone had managed to get a steam iron going in this much devastation.
“Thuan.”
Emmanuelle rose and tried to bow, but her legs wobbled too much, and she fell flat on the floor. Great. How pathetic. She scrabbled to get up, and heard him come into the room, calm and measured steps towards her.
Thuan knelt. One hand brushed the short curls of her hair—the other rested on her forehead. Coolness spread from his fingers, gently penetrating her mind. Her thoughts seemed to fuzz and freeze again.
He inhaled, a slow sharp breath that resonated in the room.
“Nasty injury.”
“So I’ve been told.”
Emmanuelle’s tongue felt stuck to her palate, every word a struggle.
“Hang on…”
Thuan’s fingers tightened and ice spread, cold enough to burn—she bit her lip not to cry out—and then it passed and there was nothing but a fuzzed, pleasant coolness, all the way down to the sharp, clean taste of melted water on her tongue.
“There. Better?”
Not… not what she’d expected. She couldn’t seem to focus on anything. It felt like a roiling storm in her brain, stirring up old memories, old wounds. Rejecting the name Morningstar had given her; meeting Selene, flirting and kissing in the shadow of Notre-Dame; racing along a corridor on Ash Wednesday to find a mildly annoyed Javier and his congregation waiting for her in the chapel of House Silverspires.
“Somewhat,” she said.
He offered her his hand to pull her up, and sit on the bed.
“Your husband would have enjoyed watching me struggle to my feet,” she said, and then clamped her lips shut. “Sorry.”
Thuan laughed. He sat in a chair by her side, watching her with curious eyes.
“I’m not him. As you should know. Give it time. It’s a bit of a hodge-podge healing; all I can do right now, I’m afraid.”
She oughtn’t to have spoken up, but she was tired of fencing with people who wished her harm.
“My memories feel shot to hell.”
“Yes.” Thuan grimaced. “Closed-head injury, right? Iaris told me that might happen. Your memories should sort themselves out at some point.”
“Including…” She hesitated. “Including the parts I don’t remember?”
Thuan was silent for a while.
“Memory is tricky. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe there’ll be a gaping hole where those should be, forever.”
“Or a lie,” Emmanuelle said.
“Only if you want to tell yourself that lie. I can only return what’s here, not make things up for you.”
Great; though whether or not she’d meddled in House Harrier affairs seemed such a small worry, compared to what had happened. What she’d felt through the distant link to Silverspires—there had been an explosion there, too. Which wasn’t good news.
“You’ll want something, I expect,” Emmanuelle said. “In return for the healing.”
Assuming it was a real healing, and not some barbed thing. She didn’t have much experience with Thuan—he seemed honest, but honesty wouldn’t get you anywhere in the Houses.
Thuan looked at her for a while.
“Some truths.” His face didn’t move.
“I already told Asmodeus everything I know about House Harrier.” Emmanuelle leaned against the bedpost, frustrated. “I don’t see what I could add to it.”
“Answer me this, then. Did you cause it? The explosion?”
The question was absurd.
“Of course not,” Emmanuelle said.
“Hmm.” Thuan pondered that.
Emmanuelle said, “Your House blew up. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than worry about a lone hostage. Such as whether or not it’s going to happen again.” She exhaled sharply. Time to get unpleasant. It was much easier with Thuan—because she had no history with him, because his presence was comforting and steadying, very different from his husband. “We both know the moment you harm me, you lose your leverage. Selene won’t negotiate if you touch me.”
Thuan said, “There are different kinds of harm.”
“I think you’ll find Selene doesn’t quibble over points of semantics.”
“Mmm,” Thuan said. “Asmodeus seems to think she’d offer concessions to get you back.”
Asmodeus, which meant not Thuan.
“Oh, she would.” Emmanuelle kept her voice light. “And then she’d come after you with everything she’s got until you were dead.”
“Huh. She’d have to join the queue,” Thuan said.
A hint of laughter in his voice. She didn’t know what to make of him.
Emmanuelle decided to take a stab in the dark.
“I think it’s a time for all Houses to stand together, isn’t it?”
“An alliance? I’m not sure what you have that we don’t.”
“Food. Medical supplies. Water,” Emmanuelle said.
That got his interest, but barely.
“You’d help us? You’re as devastated as we are.”
“But it’s unlikely we’re all missing the same things you are, isn’t it? We could… share. Help you find whoever caused the explosion before they strike again.”
She was making wild promises in Selene’s name, not even sure she could hold them. But wasn’t that the game, in the end?
Thuan steepled his fingers in front of him. He wore gloves—elegant cotton ones in a vivid red, like two splashes of blood.
“Mmm,” he said. “The blind leading the blind.” A pause; a sigh. “Asmodeus won’t stand for it, you know. He hates losing his playthings.”
Emmanuelle shrugged. He wanted to scare her, but he’d already half decided. She was a bother rather than an asset. If he could get rid of her and get something of actual value in exchange…
“Selene will stand by my promises.” Which was for little enough, after all; they were unlikely to have much to share. “Or we can play the game of who’s going to harm whom most. Your choice.”
She lay back down on the bed, winded. It was out of her hands now, and all she could do was pray. If she had any prayers left in her. A moment of silence. Thuan’s slow, even breath. The sound of running feet outside the room, and dependents gently coaxing someone into walking.
At length, “I’ll take that alliance. You’d better h
onor it, though.” Another pause.
“I’ll sign for it.”
Another amused laugh. “I love words and their bindings, but right now paper is worth less than ashes. I had something else in mind.”
* * *
What Thuan had in mind became obvious when Emmanuelle—escorted by two bodyguards—reached the wrecked wrought-iron gates of Hawthorn, and saw Darrias waiting for her.
No.
She had a brief movement of recoil.
“I don’t think—”
Thuan’s face was unreadable. “Darrias knows the streets by heart. She’ll see you home safe. And make sure Selene knows what you’ve promised us.”
“Was this your idea?”
A blank, but not puzzled face. Not his, then. Asmodeus’s. Or Darrias’s. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
It wasn’t going to be a long walk. A couple of hours? She could bear it. She could get home. She breathed out slowly, evenly. Only a few hours to home.
“Let’s go.”
* * *
Aurore wandered back to la Goutte d’Or in a daze.
Everything hurt her, and everything delighted her. The air was a hundred, a thousand, prickles on exposed skin, as if the thorns had left a thousand bleeding wounds on her body, and all of them hurt at the same time, except that it was a hurt that reminded her how alive she was—a giddy rush of power that flowed within her, a sense that she could do anything, go anywhere.
One of the children had come with her: the one who’d pierced her brow and tied her to the House, a dark shadow in her wake no one else seemed to see. It didn’t speak, or wasn’t in the mood to speak anymore, but she could feel it, nevertheless, a trailing heaviness behind her. A link to a distant House where her heart was now the heart of a building.
It didn’t matter. She’d made her choices; claimed her power.
In the ruined streets, people crept away from her—staring at her and finally seeing her, that she could be as frightening as any House-bound. More so, because there were no Houses left—just Silverspires, just the dying remnants of Morningstar’s House, awaiting its final fading away.
Just us, the child whispered in her mind.
She couldn’t feel Dân Chay’s threads under her feet anymore; just the weight of her own footsteps, making the earth tremble with pent-up magic. But, when she reached the boundary of the community, the threads of khi fire became more and more numerous, running under the cracks of the cobblestones, forming a low, ankle-level pool of shimmering light at an invisible boundary. More threads, on the other side of that wall, except that these were khi water and khi wood—and they were holding it back.
Philippe? But he didn’t have that kind of magic.
Did he?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. It kept Dân Chay at bay, but it wouldn’t kill him.
Not enough.
She didn’t want to announce her arrival by striking against him, though. She needed, desperately needed, like a person dying of thirst, to know that Cassiopée and Marianne were fine. That they were alive. What was the point, otherwise?
She stepped over the small pool, bracing herself for…something, anything, but there was just the distant sense of exhilaration from the magic in her blood. The pool was nothing but colored light.
Their small flat was empty: neither Marianne nor Cassiopée there, but the acrid, diluted tea was still warm on the table. Where…?
The child shifted, next to her. Her mind flew, abruptly—blood to blood and flesh to flesh, because her family was hers, because they were the ones she’d sworn to hold close and protect. And, like a hook sunk into her ribs—like the disk, all over again, except that it barely hurt this time—she knew exactly where she had to go.
* * *
Philippe had wanted to hold the meeting in Grandmother Olympe’s flat, but Olympe had demurred. Too many people. Her tone suggested she didn’t want Philippe to upstage her, either, so they took over one of the tea houses just next door to her flat, with her and the other aunts taking pride of place in the center of the floor.
If he closed his eyes he could feel the relentless press of the flames, Dân Chay’s never-ending attack on them—the fragility of the wards he and Isabelle had drawn. He’d had Hoa Phong take a look at them. She’d said nothing: mostly because she didn’t know, anymore, what they were facing, what mixture of predatory spirit and twisted weapon the Houses had unleashed on them.
Hoa Phong and Isabelle arrived, carrying Aunt Ha’s limp shape. She’d said—quite rightly—that she wanted to know what was happening; and of course they couldn’t leave her alone.
“She’s getting worse,” Isabelle said, flatly. “Isn’t she?”
Aunt Ha’s entire skin was tawny now, and in the intervals between two convulsions, black, charred stripes would briefly appear. Even her voice, when she whimpered, was lower pitched and more raucous.
“You should get her out of here,” Isabelle said. “Can’t have enemy agents here—”
“She’s ours,” Grandmother Olympe said, giving Isabelle a long, hard look. “If we sacrifice even one person for the good of many, we’re no better than the Houses.”
Some Houses are like that, Philippe thought. Not all of them, and the thought was alien and frightening, a dance on the edge of the precipice. He watched elderly Annamites file in: the men and women of the docks, of the factories, the ones with filmed eyes, with fingers worn down to the bones, with broken bones and the careful gait of those with misaligned hips and spine. Mothers holding babies in their arms and sliding on to benches with the grim look of fighters who’d defended their home and seen off invaders as if it was all in a day’s work.
Olympe said, sharply and loudly enough to be heard, “Refugees from other Houses aren’t enemy agents, either. Anyone who wants to shelter here and will help us help others is welcome. In all fairness—everyone should know we’re also the next target of Dân Chay, which makes us a dangerous shelter.”
Tade’s face was thoughtful. Surprised. Pleased. Philippe remembered what he’d said about refugees.
Not everyone in the audience looked happy.
Aunt Thuy said, “Regardless, we don’t have enough food. Or water.”
Olympe’s gaze was withering. “We have a duty. The sense of compassion is the beginning of benevolence, is it not?”
A silence, and slow, grudging assent.
Cassiopée was at a table, calming a weeping toddler—Cassiopée’s sister, he suddenly remembered, had gone to Harrier, been caught in the games of Houses, and not come back. Another loss in the sea of their losses, but that was too facile. For that child, it was the end of her world.
He wished he could really offer blessings, and miracles; but he wasn’t that sort of Immortal. Instead, he walked to her, smiling with a confidence he really didn’t feel.
“Can I?” he asked.
She nodded, exhausted.
The toddler—Marianne, he abruptly remembered, the Republic’s first name—stared at Philippe, hard, when he shuffled on to the bench.
He called khi wood—not khi fire, too dangerous—let it burn on the palm of his hand, a fire the green of fresh leaves, of grass after the rain.
“Look,” he said. “Magic.”
“My mummy knows magic,” Marianne said scornfully.
“Don’t mind her,” Cassiopée started, but Philippe was already weaving colored figures: a singing fisherman, a boat, a palace with a trembling light in its window.
Marianne watched, entranced, while the little figure in the boat floated closer, and the shape of a woman with an elaborate crown appeared at the window—the fisherman stretching into the shape of a dragon, flying to meet his love.
“More! More!”
“The man is exhausted, little fish,” Cassiopée said.
Philippe laid his hand on the table, and the khi wood clung to it, still illuminated—still showing a dragon embracing a princess.
“Here,” he said. And, to Cassiopée, “It’ll be gone in hal
f an hour or so.”
“An eternity for a toddler.” Cassiopée smiled. “Thank you.”
“Your sister…”
Her face set, a careful, fragile mask over despair.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be.”
She stared at the figures of light as Philippe left, feeling obscurely like he’d failed them. Party tricks. Children’s stories against the fire.
Javier was sitting alone on a bench, staring at nothing. He’d not spoken a word since facing down Dân Chay, and Grandmother Olympe had found excuses to keep Isabelle busy. Philippe wasn’t sure what to think, anymore. Javier had walked into fire for him, twice, when he could have let them die—the priest’s fondness for Isabelle didn’t extend to Philippe.
There were decent, brave people in the Houses. He’d always known that. It didn’t change a thing. He couldn’t let it matter. It was House Silverspires that had hurt Dân Chay in the first place, had made him a monster.
But wasn’t that a facile excuse, too? If all the hurt and tortured had turned into monsters, the community would be replete with these, the easy-smile, smooth-tongued killers. In the end, wasn’t it about what you chose, with the hand that you were given—rather than what you were made into?
He didn’t know, not anymore.
“Philippe.” Hoa Phong had left Isabelle minding Aunt Ha. Her face was grim. “You asked how we face a tiger. There’s something they do, in Annam.”
Her voice was low and intense. Of course, she was a fighter and wouldn’t have liked sitting by like this, powerless and watching her patient’s body fail.
“Something?”
“Raj merchants brought it to Annam. Mustard oil and latex,” Hoa Phong said. “They spread it near the tiger’s watering hole, and when he comes out to drink or to take his prey, his paws become sticky. When he tries to rub it off, he becomes blind from dirt, oil and dead leaves he’s picked up.”
Philippe raised an eyebrow.
Hoa Phong snorted. “I’m not suggesting we try mustard oil. But if we could spread something sticky on the ground…” She raised one hand, stared until the faint outline of petals became visible on her skin. “Then I could blind him. And maybe contaminate him with Fallen magic from my wounds.” A low, bitter laugh. “They might as well be useful.”
The House of Sundering Flames Page 32