A silence. “So you leave your dragon to me? As a… sacrifice for my goodwill?”
“Don’t think it doesn’t cost me.” Thuan couldn’t help the slight acidity in his voice. “But I trust you to treat her fairly.”
“Are you relying on my decency? Because she helped me carry her to safety? That’s novel.”
Thuan thought—of all people—of Emmanuelle. Everything has to start somewhere.
“Tell me something. Did you like the House under Uphir?”
“You know I didn’t.” Her voice was level again, but her hands had tightened in her lap. “Be thankful you didn’t live through that. Uphir cared about no one and nothing. He harmed as he wished.”
“As he wished.” Thuan kept his voice as emotionless as hers. “And have we changed, really, since Uphir? Or have we just found new ways to harm each other?”
A silence.
“That’s not the same.”
“Really? You said you didn’t take advantage. You said you wanted justice.” Thuan kept his voice quiet. “You said Vinh Ly was yours to deal with. Then tell me this—given everything that happened, what would be fair?”
Phyranthe watched him, her eyes burning. “You really believe it, don’t you?” Her laughter was bitter. “That people are decent and kind. That we won’t give in to our wildest urges and do everything that is allowed of us. That we will be fair.”
Thuan shook his head. “That people are fair? No. I don’t. But I believe you are.”
“I know exactly what I am.”
Thuan walked to her, then; knelt, so that he was looking her in the eye.
“I know what you are,” he said. And, after all, it was no more and no less than Asmodeus. “And I also know that we’re not defined by the things we’re capable of, but the ones that we choose to do. And I know who I am, and all the things I’m not happy or proud of.”
A snort. “You?”
“Quick to anger, trying to solve all the problems on my own, and riding roughshod over people? You tell me,” Thuan said.
Short, bitter laughter again. “Idealist.” But it wasn’t angry like the last time, but quietly resigned. And taut with something else, too, that hadn’t been there before.
“I’ll take it.”
Thuan moved away from her, leaning against the wall and trying to disguise the tremor of exhaustion running through him.
Phyranthe watched him, unmoving. He said nothing; merely waited—because whatever happened next was out of his control.
At length she said, and her voice was flat, her hands utterly steady, “Fairness.”
Thuan forced himself to shrug. “Yes.”
Phyranthe shifted against the bedhead, winced.
“I can’t abandon discipline altogether, you understand. There will still be consequences.” She reached for the flask Asmodeus had given her on the bedside table, unstoppered it, and stared at its contents, thoughtfully. “But, all in all, perhaps I can see that Vinh Ly has already paid most of the price for her… lapse.” She smiled, her teeth as sharp as a cat’s. “Preventively, for some of it.”
“Perhaps.” Thuan kept his voice flat, hardly daring to hope.
A shrug. “As you said—things can and will change.” She held out the flask to Thuan. “We might as well drink to that.”
* * *
“So?” Asmodeus asked when Thuan came out of the room. “I didn’t hear any screaming or knives being drawn, and you seem to have survived with all your limbs intact.”
“It’ll do,” Thuan said curtly.
Asmodeus detached himself from the wall he was leaning against. He took the flask of whiskey Thuan was proffering to him, and tucked it back in his jacket.
“Good for you. I must say, appealing to her principles wasn’t on my list of means to persuade her.”
Thuan suppressed a weary smile. He was barely keeping himself upright and from shaking: he’d gambled too much on too little energy, and the confrontation had left him wiped out.
“You prefer more explicit pressure?”
“You malign me. I’ve found whiskey and a heart to heart talk are usually enough, with her,” Asmodeus said. “It wouldn’t have worked for you, though.”
“Because I hate whiskey,” Thuan said, deadpan. He tried to lean against the wall; and found Asmodeus’s arms holding him. “Is this really the time?”
“To prevent you from totally collapsing? Yes.”
Asmodeus bore him against the wall and held him there, lips on his, for a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity. Fallen magic washed over Thuan, a warmth spreading over his aching muscles until everything felt afire—and Asmodeus’s head resting against his, one hand running in his hair. He made a wordless sound at the back of his throat.
Asmodeus released him. “There,” he said. “Better?”
“In a… manner of speaking,” Thuan said in a strangled voice.
And stopped, because the link to the House flared, abruptly, in his mind—Lan, the dragon who was in the Court of Gardens. She was in mortal danger.
“Asmodeus.”
Asmodeus’s face had hardened. “I feel it.”
Thuan moved away from the wall, heading towards the distant source of the danger, but before he could even move two paces, her light… went out. Not snuffed out, just removed from him. As if she’d been torn from the House.
And she wasn’t the only one. There was another light—not gone, but hovering on the edge between life and death, except in a different place. Lan had been in the Court of Gardens; this one was a Fallen called Aerneth, who worked in the Court of Hearth, and she was somewhere near the bedroom where he and Asmodeus had made their headquarters.
Near where they’d put Ai Nhi and Camille.
His blood went cold. He couldn’t possibly cover them both.
“That’s two dependents in two very different places.”
“Yes,” Asmodeus said. “Which one do you want to check out?”
He wanted Ai Nhi to be safe, desperately, but the danger to her was only uncertain, whereas the one to Lan was real.
“I’ll take Lan,” he said curtly. “Can you check in on the children at the same time as Aerneth?”
“Of course.”
“And send me Mia and Vinh Ly? You know where I’ll be.”
“All too well,” Asmodeus said. “Let’s find out what’s going on.”
A last, regretful look between the two of them—a last brush of hands—and then they parted ways, and Thuan started running.
Vinh Ly and Mia caught up with him as he ran out of the ruins of the House, and into the gardens—to that last presence he’d felt from Lan, before the link had been taken from him.
She was on her back in the mud, eyes vacantly staring at him.
“My lord,” she whispered, though her voice was a liquid gurgle.
She was half in dragon shape, but her scales had been torn off, scattered like withered petals on the ground—their faint iridescence quenched. They’d left a trail on her body, an imprint like a dragon’s scale drawn in blood.
No.
No.
Dragons didn’t die. Not like this. Not this easily.
“Lan,” he said. “Come on.”
He knelt by her, putting together a spell of healing.
“My lord,” Vinh Ly said, gently taking his hands from Lan’s body. “Let me.”
Her spell of healing was swift, and sure. And it was like pouring water into a gaping, never-ending hole. Not a wound on Lan’s skin closed; not a drop of blood coagulated, not a single scale regrew, or found its luster.
She was staring at him with that vacant, utterly frightening smile on her face.
“It’s all right,” she whispered, except he couldn’t believe that’s what she wanted to say. “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity…”
A Bible quote. How apt. He bit back on an angry answer.
“Child. Stay with me. Please.”
But her breathing only grew mor
e and more erratic, and as he watched she sank into a torpor that was a prelude to death. At length, Vinh Ly withdrew her hands from the body, and sank down on her haunches next to it.
“I’m sorry, my lord.”
He didn’t deserve that title, if all he did was fail his people.
“Stop calling me ‘my lord’, please!”
A hard look from Vinh Ly. “That’s who you are.”
“Fine,” Thuan said. “Then you can start taking my orders, and mend your behavior with Phyranthe.”
Vinh Ly stared at him. Thuan sighed.
“I sorted out the situation with her. Just don’t make it bad again.”
Another hard look. “Is that an order?”
“Or a commonsense thing. Take your pick.”
Vinh Ly opened her mouth to say something, but Thuan didn’t hear the words. Because, in his mind, Aerneth blinked out, and then another light, the same as Lan, then another and another. No. No. Was the House dying? The damage wasn’t that bad. They were weak, yes, but they would rebuild. He’d have a home again. A place where he’d have a purpose. Where he’d have Asmodeus with him, and the fragile understanding they had, which might not be love, but was still enough.
Stop.
Stop.
Mercifully, it did. Seven dependents: six in the gardens, and Aerneth. Was something prowling the edges of the House? But there had been one in the buildings, too.
“Mia,” he said.
Mia was already half-gone, in a wave of glitter, as he and Vinh Ly looked at Lan’s body. When they tried to move it, something broke: a bone in her arm, followed by the skin wrinkling and tearing itself off.
“There’s nothing left of her,” Vinh Ly said. “It’s… It’s as if she used up all her magic to defend herself.”
Except that she shouldn’t have been able to do that, because her body should have stopped her long before that. Dragons didn’t routinely commit suicide through over-exertion.
“I lost her,” he said. “Did you feel it?”
Vinh Ly grimaced. “She was in danger, and then she was gone. As if she was very far away.”
“No,” Thuan said. Even far away, he would have felt her, because he was the head of the House and he always had a sense of his dependents. “She was torn from the House.”
And it shouldn’t have been possible, unless they were talking about something seriously nasty.
An old, unpleasant memory at the back of his mind: a thought he didn’t dare to utter. No tracks, no traces, just magic taken.
Mia came back, out of breath, but completely unharmed.
“There’s no one,” she said. “Just dead dependents. You can come and see.”
They’d been trying to dig someone out from a ruined pavilion deep in the gardens: whatever had struck them hadn’t left tracks, whether physical or magical. They had no wounds he could see. One of them, a middle-aged man, had been carrying a charged artifact: it was now empty, and brittle, as if he’d used it all in a single rush of magic. But there was no trace of any spells he might have cast.
“I don’t understand,” Mia said.
Five of them. And the sixth was Aerneth. Thuan knelt, to stare at the dead dependents. Their skin didn’t show the wounds that had killed Lan, but a hundred, thousand, ten thousand pinpricks like the bites of an insect. Most of them were so fine they hadn’t drawn blood.
Not an insect. Not a creature.
Thorns. The marks of thorns. And the children, when they walked, left no imprint upon the earth.
What was it Asmodeus had said, when they’d talked about the thorns in their pantry? The House needs blood and magic to sustain itself—and if it doesn’t have them, it’ll take them from outsiders. That’s what makes us different.
That was what Asmodeus had taught the House. But lessons could be forgotten. Could be set aside, if the stakes were high enough.
“It’s not a thing,” he said, slowly, carefully. “It’s the House. It’s taking dependents apart for their magic.”
It… It was dying. The thought was a stone in his mind. All the dependents, unprotected and naked against everything else, the dangers of the streets of Paris, the other Houses’ depredations.
How could he justify letting that happen on his watch?
Mia stared at him, with dawning horror in her gaze.
“I… I don’t understand. It’ll stop, surely, when it’s replenished itself?”
Thuan stared at the ruins all around them, breathing in the distant smell of smoke from the places where fires were still burning.
“I’m not sure where it’s going to stop,” he said. Or even if it was ever going to.
TWENTY
Those Dying of Thirst
Emmanuelle ran. In her mind, the memory of Harrier’s destruction played, over and over, a never-ending stream of words and sounds—the trembling, overpowering light of Morningstar’s body, the dim shadow of wings at his back. The way he’d said “friendship” in that fond and exasperated tone, before breaking the city apart for her sake.
How far would you have gone?
You’d have thrown away Selene’s instructions and entangled yourself in a heartbeat.
Street after street after street—once, her path was blocked by a low wall and a few barricades, and a concerned Annamite with a rifle staring at her. Behind him were others with swords.
“Elder aunt?”
They were young, barely out of their teens—their eyes limned with gray, their body sagging with fatigue. They stood in the ruin of their streets, on split cobblestones crunching underfoot with debris, and they had nothing but worried solicitude in their eyes.
“Elder aunt? Are you all right? Come inside…”
No. She was so not all right that she was choking on it.
“Stay away from me,” she said. And, when they still didn’t move, “Now!”
She called magic and pushed them away from her, and ran, stepping over the low wall and weaving her way through the barricades. They’d be after her. They’d know. They would never let her into their homes. Of course they wouldn’t. Her arms tingled. Magic was painful, burning her from the inside—her muscles, her skin, her veins.
In the distance, birds screamed. A beating of wings—not in the darkened corridors of Harrier, but here, in the streets.
“Emmanuelle!”
Hands grabbed her—and when she tried to wriggle free, to push them away, magic rose, binding her to the ground and locking her arms into place.
“Emmanuelle!”
It was Darrias, out of breath and looking angry. Behind her came two of her escort, with more guarded faces—the older man, Victor, was taking his rifle down, scanning the street for threats.
“Go away,” Emmanuelle said.
The bindings on her loosened, but Darrias had her in an iron grip.
“No,” Darrias said.
“I destroyed the House. I—”
Darrias’s face was angry. “You’re deluding yourself. We’ve had this conversation before.”
“You don’t understand. I remember.”
“You told me—”
“Thuan healed me.” Emmanuelle’s breath came fast and difficult. Every time she inhaled it felt as though a vise was constricting her chest. “I remember. I truly do.” She paused. That corridor, with the smiling Fallen. Guy, waiting for her. “He knew, Darrias. Guy knew why you’d come into House Harrier. He knew you weren’t just there for the presentation, but to snatch your family away from him.”
Darrias opened her mouth, closed it.
You’ll watch. Everyone will watch. You and Silverspires and all your masters.
“He was going to arrest you and execute you at the banquet. He…”
She breathed in. The buildings on either side of the ruined street seemed alive with shadows—and every time one of them shifted she heard the silky sound of wings opening. Every time she moved, and light glinted on oiled windows and polished door panels, she saw the yellow, unblinking stare of hawks. She w
as trapped in the House that she’d never managed to leave in time, listening to the way the future was going to pan out and utterly powerless to change it.
“He told me. He said there was nothing I could do, that the die was already cast. That I’d have to watch. To pretend not to care.”
Darrias’s face was unreadable. Shock. It was shock, but Emmanuelle had never seen it on Darrias’s face.
“That’s impossible.”
“I tried to warn you, but the dependents of Harrier prevented me,” Emmanuelle said, and it was more plaintive than she’d have liked. “They kept me apart from you until it was too late.”
A silence.
Darrias said, finally, “There were many dependents tailing me in the House. I assumed they didn’t trust me because I was Hawthorn. Not…” She wasn’t the kind to flinch at near-death, but even so she looked taken aback. “He told you. And—”
“I asked Morningstar for help.” To do something. Anything.
A silence. Darrias’s face didn’t move.
“And he destroyed the House. Fine. Let’s say it’s true. Let’s say it all happened, exactly like that. It’s still not your fault.”
“You don’t understand,” Emmanuelle said, frustrated.
She’d known. She’d known when she’d asked that he wouldn’t have a quiet chat with Guy. And when he’d told her to flee the House… She’d known it wouldn’t be small, or innocuous. No, she hadn’t known the specifics, but she’d unsheathed a sword. She couldn’t claim innocence when it killed.
In the silence, a sound, rising. A slow, ponderous beating of wings. Another memory—but no, Darrias was rising too, keeping her eyes on the skies.
“Darrias—”
“Run,” Darrias said.
But she’d barely managed three paces before the sky filled with them: a heaving flock that seemed to color the sky with shades of bricks and chimney mantels and wallpaper, all the colors and textures of Harrier. Emmanuelle forced herself to run through the fear gripping her– and found herself ringed by hawks, a never-ending weave of birds circling her, weighing her down as surely as chains, passing close enough that she could feel them, could feel the magic tight in the air, hungering for her end.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 35