Dân Chay hauled him up. Philippe, struggling, managed to touch the ground again—but it was only the points of his feet, and he couldn’t push against them or find any strength at all. As Dân Chay lifted him once again, he saw Javier moving away from Isabelle, something passing between them. No, no, no, that wasn’t what was supposed to happen.
Isabelle rose, graceful, impossibly lithe. Her face was roiling with the light of Fallen magic. In her hand was the knife Javier had used, except it wasn’t a knife, but a slender cane that stretched as she did, like the rattan ones used for beatings in Annam. No no no. She struck the ground with it, once, twice—and where it touched, threads became dark and dull. The ground shook—and Dân Chay let go of Philippe, snarling, took one, two steps backwards, towards the second weave.
The ground shook again. The threads holding Philippe grew still—and before he knew it Isabelle was kneeling by his side, pulling them off him.
“Isabelle…”
Ahead of them, Dân Chay was on his haunches on burst cobblestones. The orange threads were flowing from the second weave to him, a light that filled him from inside, his entire skin translucent amber, streaked with darker stripes. Philippe expected him to become the tiger again, but instead his face was sharper and more angular, and aside from the skin he’d never looked as human as he did now—except that he was growing tall and bright and terrible, and the fingernail guards on both his hands were as wickedly sharp as needles. The air was taut, a dry, oppressive heat pressing against them until breath was a struggle. Gathering himself for a fight.
Against Isabelle.
“It doesn’t have to be you,” Philippe said, desperately. “Javier could…”
Her voice was gentle. “It’s our mess. Javier was very clear about the conditions.”
“Isabelle…”
He’d wanted her to be safe. To be… anything but this, flush with the light of Fallen magic and headed into the kind of battle that had killed her in House Silverspires.
She smiled. “You don’t approve.” She reached out, touched his hand. “I know, Philippe. I’ve known for a while.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It wasn’t the ritual of resurrection that failed, was it? You made me mortal.”
His stomach clenched. But she didn’t seem angry. Just sad. In a way, it was worse.
She said, “You can’t keep making choices for me, Philippe.”
“I…” The words were bitter on his tongue. “I can’t keep you safe.”
“No.” She rose, holding the cane much as she would a sword. “But you don’t have to.” And, more gently as she withdrew from him, “We all grow up. You learn to let go.”
He got up, struggling to breathe. “Isabelle!”
If I’m not a prisoner, what does that make me?
A child.
We all grow up.
He knew that, but he didn’t want to.
“Isabelle!”
But she was already gone, and his hand grabbed only air.
She said something to Dân Chay as she caught up with him. His smile was sharp, gleeful, as he rose from his crouch and she switched the cane from one hand to another.
“House-bound.”
Isabelle moved, lashing out. Dân Chay wasn’t there when she struck. She made a small, frustrated noise at the back of her throat, and the light around her intensified.
She was everything he’d feared. Every nightmare he’d had about her—the memories in which she stood, hard-faced with Fallen magic streaming from her, coldly and casually saying that only the House mattered, that all others could die in agony for its sake. She was again the Fallen he’d run from, because he couldn’t bear what she’d become. As she danced with Dân Chay, she was once more bright and terrible, with the shadow of dark wings at her back—Morningstar’s heir in all the ways that mattered.
Someone was pulling at him. Javier.
“You can’t help her.”
Philippe turned, trying to keep his voice level—and failing.
“You gave her magic.”
Javier’s face didn’t move. “It’s a Fallen artifact. Of course I gave her magic to use it. Or it’d have burned her to cinders.”
Philippe tried to speak—but fear choked the words in his mouth. He’d wanted her to be safe. To be away from House Silverspires and the death that had found her, once—back when he had failed her. But… But he’d wanted so many other things for her. For it to be different.
You made me mortal.
Isabelle was trying to reach Dân Chay with the cane; but he danced out of her way gracefully, time and time again. His smile was grim.
“Is that all you have, House-bound? Do you think it’s going to be enough to hold me?”
Isabelle lunged. Once, twice, but she was too slow. Too weak, and would it even have made a difference if she’d been Fallen.
They’d lost.
A wind rose behind him, carrying, not the smell of smoke or rot, but a distant, heartbreaking one of flowers. Petals fluttered past him, the golden color of New Year’s Eve flowers.
Hoa Phong.
She’d risen, trembling, from the circle where she’d fallen. She was all petals now, with only the faintest suggestion of a woman at the center of them all—only the flaring sleeves of her dress, and the unbearably sharp golden color. The wind rose, became stronger. As Isabelle danced, futilely, with Dân Chây, desperately trying to reach him, Hoa Phong’s petals came to the barricades, touched the back of them, lightly—and plunged towards Dân Chay, glistening with the substance she’d smeared across the furniture.
In the circle, Hoa Phong’s shape barely held constant. Philippe held his breath. Dân Chay snarled as the petals swirled closer to him. He moved, fluid, inhuman; but he couldn’t avoid both her and Isabelle. Petals stuck to his hands. He grinned, moved away—making no move to brush them away. Hoa Phong was almost spent: he probably felt her presence like insect bites, if at all.
Isabelle lunged again. Dân Chay moved beyond her, towards the last of the walls, their last line of defense against the fire’s reach. In her circle, Hoa Phong screamed, long and shuddering—and completely disintegrated, a whirlwind of petals going straight for Dân Chay’s face.
He sidestepped, or tried to. His claws batted petals away, and where he struck them blood fell on the ground, and the storm of petals shuddered and almost came apart—but it didn’t. It held—and, in that single moment when he failed to avoid them, Hoa Phong managed to cling to his face.
His mouth opened. Hoa Phong’s petals thronged to fill it, swallowing up his scream. He raised his hands to claw her away, and the petals still clinging to the backs of them—shining with blood and charred ashes and the faint bluish tinge of Hoa Phong’s wounds—flowed away to join the others in a loose patchwork on his face and neck. The petals clenched, tightening around his neck like a vise. Dân Chay shivered, hands clenching, once, twice—stopped, immobile for a bare moment.
Isabelle’s cane connected with him. A sickening crunch, and welts of blood opening on Dân Chay’s chest and shoulders. Hoa Phong’s petals still clung to his face and his neck—it had to hurt, as the cane struck at her again and again, but she didn’t move.
Once, twice, and Dân Chay was falling back, snarling, his clothes in bloodied, shredded tatters. Isabelle came at him again. As the tip of the cane trailed on the cobblestones, they split asunder, the threads in the cracks growing dull and cold. Dân Chay’s breath came fast and heavy and ragged—they could hear it from where they stood, choked and on the verge of faltering. Hoa Phong’s petals finally scattered away from his face and mouth, reforming into the prone, burned shape of a woman on the ground, at the foot of the remaining wall. Where she’d touched him, his skin was mottled with the rot of Fallen magic. His eyes were swollen shut, their contours bluish and rotted, the exact same color of Hoa Phong’s wounds.
Isabelle’s next strike sent Dân Chay sprawling to the ground—stretching, lithe and fluid, struggling to escape her.
The ground under him was now red—a luminous, shifting thing that could only be blood. In the silence, they heard his ragged breath. His smile was terrifying.
“House-bound,” he whispered.
When the cane fell again it smashed through the hands he’d lifted to protect himself. A crunch like bones breaking—he screamed then, an inarticulate half-pitched thing, but Isabelle was already raising the cane, again and again and again. The sound it made was liquid now, sinking into pulped flesh—and still she beat at him. The air was tight with the smell of blood and charred flesh.
A hard knot was growing in Philippe’s chest.
“She’s not going to stop, is she?”
Javier said, “He wasn’t going to stop, either. He leveled half of Paris, and she’s only doing what needs to be done. What did you think was going to happen, when you asked us for a weapon?”
Not this, and again words, too many and too jumbled together, failed him.
House-bound.
Philippe had wanted her to be mortal, not because he wanted her to die or to be weak, but because what he’d feared most was her cruelty. Because what he’d tried to teach her, this time around, were the things the Houses never stopped to consider. He’d wanted her to be whole and balanced and… He groped for words, and only found an antique, almost desperately old-fashioned word in Viet. Nhan. Humane. Compassionate.
You have to let go.
She’d wanted to make her own choices—and in that he had failed her. But it didn’t mean he had no advice or reminders to offer her. He remained, after all, her teacher. Her guide.
Her friend.
“Isabelle!”
She didn’t even turn—too wrapped up in beating a spirit to death. So he caught the khi currents around her, and conjured out of khi wood and khi water a memory from an earlier, quieter time: the ghostly pages of the papers they’d found in Diamaras’s museum, with their detailed diagrams on how to make a living weapon. How to make a monster, he would have said, except that the monsters were also the ones holding the cages’ keys.
He wanted to run to her, to catch the hand holding the cane; to push her away from Dân Chay. He forced himself, instead, to walk. To go towards her slowly and deliberately across the wasteland of the street, his eyes on her all the while. Hers were on the images he’d conjured, one hand going to her mouth in that familiar, surprised gesture. The other still held the cane—used it, effortlessly, to hold Dân Chay. The quivering mass under the cane, bleeding and heaving, was barely human or tiger anymore. Even the light was draining from it, from translucent amber to dark, rotten blood.
“Isabelle.”
He stood, waiting, stilling his urge to move. It cost him.
She didn’t move. At length she said, without looking at him, “He would kill us all, and not bat an eyelid. You know this. As long as he lives, he’ll try again and again.”
“Yes.” Philippe weighed words in his mind. Finally he said, “This isn’t about him.”
She turned, to face him. Her eyes were bottomless holes in the paleness of her face.
“I’m not like the people in those papers.” And, in a lower, slower voice, “Am I?”
House-bound.
A silence. The clatter of the cane as it left her hands, falling to the pavement. He’d thought she would collapse, but she remained rigidly upright, staring at him with that brittle look that meant she’d snap at any time.
“What now?”
He walked to her, hugging her, as the cane glimmered in the light, begging to be picked up. To be used, always hungering for blood and magic and destruction. In his mind, the darkness of Silverspires’ curse stirred, stretched ghostly hands for it.
No.
He supposed he was meant to be tempted, but he was too old, too tired, to want more than to destroy it just as Dân Chay had destroyed all the other Houses.
Instead, he knelt by Dân Chay’s side. Light, sickly and dark red, was pooling in the hollows of the cobblestone.
“I know you can hear me,” he said.
Silence. At length, a low, wheezing sound that felt like Dân Chay was coughing his lungs out.
“You… have… my… attention.”
“You talked about a bargain, earlier. You said you kept your word.”
He’d spared Javier, even though he didn’t have to, earlier.
Another amused wheeze. “What… did… you have… in mind?”
“Go home,” Philippe said. The irony of saying that to an Immortal who’d been there longer than him wasn’t wasted on him. “The Court of the Jade Emperor needs you.”
Philippe looked back, for a brief moment, at Hoa Phong’s body, scattered petals and cloth. He couldn’t even be sure if she’d survived—but then he saw that the petals were quivering in the breeze, slowly flowing back together. Still alive; though what would they get, when she was in human shape again?
If she was in no shape to travel, the duty would fall to him.
Out of the ruin of Dân Chay’s face, two eyes, tawny and slitted, stared back at him.
“Do they?” A low, amused laugh. “This is… justice, isn’t it?”
No. It could never be. The Houses had made Dân Chay into what he was, but that was no excuse for what he’d done—for what he’d tried to do. Justice was death, but the only way to kill him was to beat him, as Isabelle had tried. Atonement? But Philippe didn’t believe in that, either.
“This is… mercy.” He’d thought the word would be hollow and bitter, but it wasn’t. “Kindness.” Not a Confucian word this time, but tu, the Buddhist one. “Do we have a bargain?”
That wheeze again. Flesh was knitting itself back together. Watching wounds that should have killed him slowly narrowing to thin slivers of scabbed blood—Dân Chay’s breath caught as they closed. It was neither painless or easy. Philippe wanted to say Dân Chay had deserved it, but what would that make him?
“Done.” Dân Chay laughed, and it rattled amidst broken bones. “Kindness.”
Behind them, Isabelle still stood, staring at the cane, holding herself very still, the light glinting on the tears in her eyes—and, behind her, the devastation Dân Chay had left in his wake, the city that was now ruins and blown-open buildings, with one single tottering House still standing.
Kindness. Compassion. Humaneness.
Not what Philippe or Dân Chay wanted—not what Dân Chay deserved—but perhaps, in the end, all they could hope for.
* * *
Under Aurore’s fingers, the disk was growing paler and paler; but so was Virginie, skin stretched over high cheekbones, bones protruding through the atrophied muscles. It was what she wanted. What she deserved. The cost of power she’d accepted.
No.
No.
Power was a thing, and she was its master.
She withdrew her hands. It took everything she had, and they continued to shake. She’d never wanted to reach out again so badly; to touch the disk and feel the magic sliding down into her chest again, the sweetness of it, like air to choked-out lungs.
“I can’t do it,” she said. “Let’s get back.”
“You said you would.” Frédérique’s voice was a mixture of anger and fear. “He’ll find us, if you don’t take it off.”
“You…” Aurore tried to speak, felt again the power welling through her.
Her hands moved of their own accord, stretched towards Virginie again. She put them behind her back. The child of thorns had its own hands hovering over Virginie’s face.
“No,” Aurore said sharply to it.
The child didn’t move. It gazed back at her, unperturbed.
You know the price.
“You have to take it off,” Frédérique said.
“You don’t understand,” Aurore said. Every word felt uttered through tar. Power flowed through her and choked her. “I’ll kill her, if I do it.”
She found her hands in front of her again.
No.
She moved away from Virginie, stood on the tracks, pacin
g up and down and listening to her own footsteps ringing on the metal.
“So you can’t control it.” Frédérique’s voice was flat. “Power, always changing things to match its shape.”
She—she was the magic. She was everything she’d ever wanted to be. In her mind, she could still feel the thorns, piercing her—could remember how it had felt, to open eyes gummed with blood onto a world that felt hers for the taking. She could feel the power coursing through her—the sheer satisfaction of destroying one bird after another until she knew with absolute certainty the House would never come back.
And yet… And yet, she’d drained Niraphanes before she could think. And it was only because Virginie was a child—because some gut reflexes had kicked in—that she’d stopped. Even now… Even now, her steps were taking her back towards Virginie.
She opened her mouth to argue with Frédérique, but a sudden, piercing pain stabbed through her entire body, and sent her to her knees, gasping to breathe.
“Aurore?” Frédérique, from a wary distance. “Aurore!”
The pain stabbed her again—knives, driven again and again into her. No, not knives but something thinner and colder—ten thousand needles infusing into her flesh and muscles a cold so deep it burned. She managed, struggling, to lift a hand: saw red, inflamed skin, in the instant before the pain struck again, and fatigue fell on her like a shroud. She hit the ground: her limbs flopped, out of control, on the tracks. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t focus on anything except the enormity of the pain consuming her.
Someone was shaking her—the child of thorns—and the pain within her was so great she couldn’t even feel the prickles from its sharp hands.
You have to help.
“I don’t… understand,” Aurore said. The words tasted like blood on her tongue.
He’s killing us.
Cold was stealing over her, stealing all feeling from her limbs. Somewhere—somewhere distant and hazy, the House was freezing. The House was dying, and she couldn’t bring herself to care.
Help us. It’s your life, too.
She’d done it once. She’d stood up, shaking, in the alleyway behind the House with bruises and cuts and every part of her body feeling broken. She’d carried Cassiopée to la Goutte d’Or. She could do it again.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 41