But she was so exhausted—warmth leeching out of her with every passing moment, and the fatigue from killing the birds, and it would be so much easier to lie down, to sleep. Marianne and Cassiopée were faraway thoughts, ghosts she couldn’t keep fixated on. And even if she had—what could she possibly do?
The child was gone, and it was just her, sinking into a cold deeper than the winter nights without fuel. Falling asleep…
And then, with a shock like a jolt in her bones, she saw that the child wasn’t gone, but that it was staggering towards Virginie with three-fingered hands outstretched, a white trail of ice filling the ground under it.
No.
Not that.
She pulled herself up, shaking, caught a glimpse of Frédérique’s face, frozen in a horrified and heartbreakingly familiar expression, something that tugged at her but barely made its way through the pain. Beneath her feet, ice bloomed, festooning the edges of the tracks in killing flowers.
“Stop,” she said. Her voice was rough, scraped from within a tomb of cold. “Stop!”
The child of thorns didn’t waver.
Aurore ran. She was moving through treacle—staggering, her feet skidding on the iced ballast and rail sleepers. She fell, once, twice, picked herself up again, and every time it was like pushing against a heavier descending weight. It was colder and colder. She couldn’t feel her hands or her feet, and even her heart felt sluggish—a rising silence in her ears. Her thoughts slowed, scattered. She had to run. She didn’t remember why, but she had to run.
She…
Virginie.
She kept running. A heartbeat—an eternity—later, she stood, trembling, between the child of thorns and Virginie.
“No,” she said.
Stand aside.
It was coming apart—its branches unraveling, brittle and thin, under the weight of the ice, its face gleaming with the crystals lodged in every cavity.
“She’s not yours,” Aurore said, coldly.
A pause. She could have sworn the expression on its face was surprise.
But she is ours. She is yours. Is she not your sustenance?
She remembered the trembling joy she’d felt when draining Niraphanes—the desperate hunger sweeping through her, vast and unbearable, and her shocked realization that it had always been there. Frédérique had said that power changed things to its shape, but the truth was that this power also took the shape of those who wielded it. It sharpened their flaws into weapons to crush the weak. It was anger and hunger and resentment and cruelty. It was the desperate desire to protect people at all costs; the arrogant, innate belief in the superiority of the Fallen. It was her own anger and resentment and her desire to hurt others as they had hurt her. And always—always, in the end—it was the inability to renounce power once you had it, to become smaller and weaker once again; that impossible, terrible desire to keep things the way they’d always been, forever.
“No,” she said, again—and, with the last of her strength, grabbed the child and held it to her chest, locking it in an unbreakable embrace. She fell to one knee, shaking—ice seized up her heart, choked her chest with its crystals like a hundred pinprick wounds.
You will die, the child said, its voice vicious and angry.
Aurore—trembling with the effort to keep it against her—didn’t speak. Her thoughts ran sluggish and slow. She felt Marianne held in her hands again, wet with birthing fluids—heard the familiar sound of Cassiopée leafing through books as she fell asleep in their small flat—smelled the distant odor of steamed buns, the juice of mushrooms flooding her mouth.
You will die.
But she’d looked at death already, and had found no fear left in her.
The cold spread. Under her, the tracks turned a silvery gray. The child slowly fell apart, branches crackling as they broke, thorns glistening with ice as they fell away—its face contorting as water pushed it out of shape, its limbs bursting apart, a shower of wood shards clattering over the ground of the yard and the metal shells of trains.
Aurore sat down, feeling the barrier slowly disintegrate behind her—and within her, something large and essential fall to pieces, leaving her reeling and struggling to breathe. The ice felt permanently lodged in her; all she wanted was to sleep.
Hands on her shoulder; a hesitant touch that felt unlike Frédérique’s or Nicolas’. Virginie. The child’s small face was creased in thought; and the faint light of magic still played beneath the planes of her skin.
“Are you all right?”
No, Aurore wanted to say, but she didn’t have energy for words.
They could leave her here. It would only be fair.
“She’s not.” Frédérique paused, for a while. “Come on. We have to get away from here.”
Virginie rubbed the disk on her chest. “This—”
“I know what it is.” Frédérique’s voice was hard. “But I don’t think anyone here can take it from you.”
“It’s almost loose.” Virginie frowned, and pulled at the disk. Her hands moved; Aurore couldn’t see what she did. “There.”
She started peeling it off, and then paused—inhaling a sharp, shocked breath.
“It’s hurting you,” Frédérique said. “Leave it.”
Virginie’s face set. “I can take pain. I’ve done it before.” She tore it from her chest, leaving a bloodied circle of skin on her chest. Her voice, when she spoke again, was shaking. “I’ll be fine. Let’s go.”
Someone lifted Aurore—Nicolas, throwing her over one shoulder.
No, she thought, but everything blurred into unconsciousness.
* * *
Emmanuelle was sinking to the ground, struggling to breathe under the weight of the birds on her shoulders. The link to House Silverspires was growing sharp and panicked in her mind, begging her to run with energy she didn’t have anymore.
Warmth flooded the cobblestones under her: a sharp, radiant, familiar light flowed over her, and the birds’ talons digging into her flesh abruptly vanished, leaving only a faint taste of ashes in the air.
“Let her go.”
He stood at the entrance of the small street, limned in light, the shadow at his back like huge, spread wings, his fair hair shining like a beacon. His eyes were hard.
“Morningstar?” Her voice was only a croak. The storm of wings within her chest remained; as if she would at any moment disintegrate into birds. “What are you doing here?”
Guy turned, then. As he did his body fuzzed at the edges, became the outline of hundreds of wings.
“Such a busy place.” His voice was sarcastic. “Rescuing your dependents?”
“You forget.” Morningstar’s voice was grave. “I’m no longer the head of the House.”
“I didn’t forget,” Guy said, and his voice was sharp. “Running after her, are you?”
Morningstar’s only answer was a blast of power that sent Guy reeling back, birds detaching from his body with raucous cries.
Emmanuelle, shaking, trying not to choke on the storm within her, made her slow way to Darrias. Guy’s liveried people were moving towards Morningstar—who didn’t even spare a glance for them.
Darrias was on the cobblestones, sprawled out. Her face was pale, drawn. Emmanuelle laid her hand on her wrist—felt her pulse, which was the slow, lazy beating of raptors’ wings. No no no.
She had magic. It could not heal—it could never heal—but perhaps it could cleanse. Shaking, she started to say the first words of a spell: a variant of the one Darrias had used, a lifetime ago, to boil water in Harrier. A thin sheet of fire danced on her fingers, passed beneath Darrias’s skin. Emmanuelle’s hands shook: she didn’t have much left within her. Selene…
She wanted, so badly, to go home.
Come on come on.
Darrias convulsed under her hands. The ghostly shapes of birds flashed beneath her skin. A distant shriek, and then they were fading. Darrias coughed, spluttered—what came up was only gray balls like bunched up feathers, and fragmen
ts of pinions.
Come on come on.
Darrias’s eyes opened—unfocused and filled only with confused panic. Her mouth shaped a word—Emmanuelle’s name? She couldn’t be sure. Then her eyes closed again, her head lolling back, utterly relaxed. She seemed to be sleeping. Her pulse was slow; but at least it was a Fallen’s pulse again, and the light of magic streamed, once more, from beneath her skin—trembling and weak, an unbearably faint radiance.
She was alive.
A hand on Emmanuelle’s shoulder.
“You should think of yourself as well, you know.” Morningstar’s voice was low and amused.
His magic ran through her—a faint fire coursing in her veins, a tingling that seemed to expand into flames in her chest. The world suddenly became fire and smoke and she couldn’t breathe. She gasped, desperately inhaling and hearing only pointless wheezing in her nostrils—and then it passed, and she was on her knees, coughing up fragments of bricks and cobblestones and feathers herself.
Morningstar held her, gently, until it passed. Warmth and magic, trembling on her skin—all the comfort of the familiar, the memories of how it had been, before Harrier, before Hawthorn. A taste of the home she so desperately craved.
“Sssshh. Breathe. Slowly. Breathe. You’re all right.”
“Guy…” she said, looking up through tears.
His face was hard. “Dealt with.”
A body lay on the cobblestones behind him, turning into shrieking birds; and those of Harrier’s people, sprawled broken and bloodied. So much waste. So much destruction.
“He was weak. Too many pieces of him lost. A House needs a head to be strong.”
He winced as he moved. He made it sound simple, but she could see he was shaking; that his skin was not the familiar milky paleness but an unhealthy gray, his light sunk to the level of warm embers instead of the blinding radiance that usually surrounded him.
“What…?” Emmanuelle found her voice. “What are you doing here?”
“I had a few mishaps.” Morningstar shrugged; winced as he did so. “I ran away from an angry magician. It looks like he’s gone now.” An amused, disbelieving snort. “Annamites. Full of unexpected surprises. Come on. Let’s go home.”
“Home.”
The word sounded alien and distant to her, an impossibility.
“The Houses are ruins. Only Silverspires remains. There’ll be no one to stop us.” A thoughtful pause. “There are some people I need to get first, though.”
He… He’d destroyed Harrier, and the others. And she had let him.
“Morningstar—”
“Ssh.” His hand squeezed her shoulder. “It’ll be all right, Emmanuelle. No one can harm you anymore. I promise.” He glanced at the unconscious Darrias. “We’ll take her with us. Give her refuge. Hawthorn isn’t in a position to protect her. Silverspires is now the only House left, and has mastery over Paris.”
Emmanuelle finally found her voice. “Is it why you did it?”
“Did what?” His voice was mild.
“Destroyed Harrier. Destroyed the Houses.”
A silence. She found herself braced against the answer.
“You asked,” Morningstar said. “You’d never pleaded for help. I’d never seen you look so desperate.”
“I didn’t ask you to—”
“You don’t choose the terms under which help is given. Nor could I choose what could or could not be done.” A silence, then, “I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier, when you almost died in Harrier. I thought you’d got out of the House.”
“I didn’t,” Emmanuelle said.
There seemed to be no words that would cover the nightmare of walking the ruins; of meeting Guy; of the birds’ wingbeats rising behind her, the utter certainty they would catch her.
Gone.
They were gone, and she was left with the consequences of what she’d done.
There will be no one to stop us.
That was all he saw among the destruction; among the deaths; among the utter overturning of the order of Paris.
“Come on.” Morningstar rose—disguising the shaking of his hands—offered her his. “Let’s go home.”
She could take that hand. She could remain silent. She could follow his lead—as she’d once done in House Harrier.
“No,” she said. The word caught in her throat.
A pause. Light flickered on the planes of his skin.
“No?”
“It can’t be that way,” Emmanuelle said slowly. “There…” Her voice caught again. She kept it under control. “There are consequences.”
“Are there?” His voice was amused, puzzled.
He didn’t see. He never had. Asmodeus had once told her Morningstar couldn’t tell the difference between removing a splinter and setting fire to the hand. She’d reflexively denied it, but now—much too late—she saw it for herself.
“We’re not setting ourselves up as the ruling power of Paris. We’re going to help them.”
To atone, though really, how could she atone for any of it?
Another raised eyebrow. “You’re not the master of the House.”
No, but she was Selene’s lover, and she knew that Selene had never wanted to rule.
“Neither are you,” Emmanuelle said. “Morningstar…” She pulled herself up, shaking.
Morningstar’s voice was flat. “I did all of this for you. Made tenuous bargains with a being who could have burned me alive, been hunted by Harrier like an animal, left my safe haven to come to your rescue even, whatever it meant facing, under whatever terms. And now you have the gall to say you’re unhappy with it?”
He’d died, and been reborn. He wasn’t the Fallen who’d once ruled his House with a fist of iron, and sacrificed dependents as casually as pawns on a chessboard. Not the one who saw dissent as rebellion. Except that for a moment the mask he wore wavered, and she saw his old self laid bare. The cost of defying him was annihilation, or worse.
And in her mind was his voice, from long, long ago.
Emmanuelle—you and Selene always do what’s needed.
“No,” she said, again. “I am grateful for it. But asking for your help doesn’t mean you’re above criticism. It doesn’t mean we’re above judgment or regret.”
“Judgment? You think yourself better than me? You, who are always prim and proper and unwilling to pay the price for what you want? Your friend would have died, Emmanuelle.”
“I knew,” she said, quietly. She rose, shaking. She ought to have felt powerful and decisive, but she was small and scared. “I knew the price when you left the room. When you told me to run. I could have stopped you. I didn’t. And the worst…”
The worst was that, if it happened again—even knowing all she did, knowing how it all turned out, the price they all paid—she’d still be tempted.
“I still want it to happen. I’d still want Guy to pay.” She’d always thought of herself as kind, as caring—but she could hate so much, so deeply. She’d hated Guy and his delighted cruelty. It was like a jolt of acid in her veins: self-knowledge acquired too late, at too great a cost. “But it’d still be wrong.”
Beneath her, Darrias’s eyes fluttered open again: watching, shocked.
“Please, Morningstar. You have to stop.”
“You…?” He stared at her. “You’re telling me to stop?”
“Someone has to.”
What friends were for, she thought, soberly, bitterly.
“And what are you going to do if I don’t?”
“You don’t understand,” Emmanuelle said. “If all that stops you is threats and fear…” She held herself straight, ignoring the shaking that had seized her entire body. “Then how much of a person are you, really?”
A silence.
Then Morningstar said, slowly, carefully—as if putting together the pieces of something infinitely fragile, “I would have died for you.”
“I know. I’m not asking you to.” And then, softly, “You asked me if I thought myself
better than you. I don’t. I know that I’m not. I know we all Fell. I know we’re all sinners. What matters is what we do with that knowledge.”
A low, despairing laugh. “Redemption?”
“No one ever said it was impossible,” Emmanuelle said. “No one ever said it was wrong to strive.”
A long, weighing look from him. She thought, for a moment, that he would gainsay her—that he would say he remembered Heaven and its City, and what the Fall she couldn’t remember had truly meant.
But instead, he said, with a bitter laugh, “I wish it were that simple. But who knows, really?” A pause. He looked at her gravely. “I’ve gone too far, haven’t I.”
It wasn’t a question. Emmanuelle didn’t make the mistake of giving him an answer.
“You’re wrong,” Morningstar said finally. “Some things can’t be atoned for.” He shrugged, and for a moment the shadow of great, shining wings seemed to move with him. “Go home, Emmanuelle. There’s one last thing I have to do.”
“Morningstar…”
He was already walking away from her. Emmanuelle threw a glance at Darrias—who’d pulled herself to her feet but still looked groggy—and cursed.
“Morningstar!”
Footsteps, getting near. Annamites?
No.
A disheveled, pale group: a woman carrying a toddler, with olive skin and hair as short as a man’s, who reminded Emmanuelle of a more brittle Selene; a man with dark hair, carrying an unconscious woman over his shoulder; and a girl wearing the colors of a warded magician of Harrier, who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old. They stared at Morningstar with an expression of such abject fear that Emmanuelle’s heart constricted in her chest. The girl’s legs clenched as if she’d flee, but then she turned, defiant, to face him.
Some things can’t be atoned for. What else had he done?
Morningstar had spread his arms, not looking at them.
“I mean you no harm. I’m sorry—”
The girl threw something at him, which bounced off his chest. It was a wooden disk Emmanuelle couldn’t see clearly, but she was close enough to see the circular, bloody imprint on the girl’s chest—three layers of torn cloth through the uniform, all the way to the skin it had fused to. The girl’s mouth opened, shaping on words that choked her.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 42