Someone grabbed her, and pulled her away from the press of people.
“What are you doing?”
Darrias smiled at her. “You look like you need a break.”
“But Selene…”
The Annamite woman she’d seen earlier with Philippe was bearing down on Selene with the determined air of someone who’d spotted prey.
“I’m sure she’ll cope,” Darrias said. “Come on.”
She dragged and cajoled Emmanuelle all the way to the back of the cathedral, to a small garden overlooking the devastated Seine. They sat on a broken stone bench, looking at the skies. Out of nowhere, she produced a metal flask full of liquor, which she handed to Emmanuelle.
“Here. Drinks always help.”
“Getting drunk at a funeral.” Emmanuelle snorted.
She sipped at the liquor—it was some kind of sweet herbal one she couldn’t place. It was weird, to be waiting for him in her office in the archive—to expect, at any moment, the light of his magic. To remember his voice, grave and reassuring. I’ll stand by you no matter what happens.
But she’d been the one, in the end, who couldn’t stand by him.
“There are worse things than being drunk.” Darrias’s face was deadpan. “How are things?”
A shrug. “Too many people, and not enough time.” She was on a cross-faction committee, organizing food supplies—her own, inadequate way of making amends. “You?”
Darrias shrugged. “More people than I’d thought,” she said. “We’re going from flat to flat looking for survivors. I thought it’d be mostly corpses, but life has a way of holding on.”
Didn’t it just.
“How is your family?”
Darrias shrugged. “All right. They’ll get better.” Her face was set. “Virginie still gets that look on her face, sometimes. I’m sure she wakes up at night, but she doesn’t want to bother me.”
Emmanuelle opened her mouth, closed it. “I’m sorry.”
“Platitudes.” Darrias emptied the flask in her mouth. “I’m not.”
“Not sorry that you killed him?”
They were alone now. She hadn’t told Selene, though who knew how much her partner might have guessed on her own. Selene had been dealing with many who were unhappy with Morningstar and what he’d set in motion.
“He’d had it coming for a while,” Darrias said. “After what he did—”
“What I did, too,” Emmanuelle said sharply.
She’d told Selene that, and got a look that could have shriveled stone, followed by a stern rejoinder never to mention it again.
“You know I’m not talking about this.” Darrias had the same look as Selene on her face. “Will you forgive me, for what I’ve done?”
She didn’t mean killing the Fallen who’d stolen her family, but taking a friend from Emmanuelle.
A friend who’d harmed, again and again—for her sake, for the sake of the House, caring little for decency or consequences. She’d never known him well, had she?
“I could have stopped him,” Emmanuelle said.
Darrias handed her the flask. “You did.”
“Only when it was too late.”
A silence.
“You know what I learned, when Guy cast me out on the streets? ‘Could’ and ‘might’ are stones around your neck. The present is all that matters.”
“I…” Emmanuelle took a deep, shaking breath. At any moment she still expected the sound of wings to fill the cathedral’s gardens. “I don’t understand how you can forgive yourself.”
Darrias’s voice was grave. “You don’t. You try to make things better.” A bitter laugh. “Not that I’m a good example, mind you.”
Emmanuelle looked at the ruined stones, at the melted stained glass windows. The air was crisp, sharp with a faint taste of ashes.
How do you forgive yourself?
You don’t.
Try to make things better.
“I can do that.” The words tasted almost alien on her tongue.
“Firebrand,” Darrias said, fondly.
She rose, tucking the flask in the folds of her vest.
* * *
A knock at the door. Philippe, startled, looked up. He’d expected Grandmother Olympe or Aunt Thuy, with more papers about the hospitals, and which buildings they could hastily convert into more bed space for patients.
But it was Hoa Phong, followed by Dân Chay. They both wore court clothes: the colors were sharp and crisp, the embroidery on their five-paneled tunics intricately detailed in a way he’d almost forgotten—a reminder of what it had been like to be part of that world, several lifetimes ago.
“We came to say goodbye,” Hoa Phong said.
Behind her, Dân Chay was silent. It was hard to reconcile the courtly, elegant man with the lined, kind face of a scholar official, with his other face—fanged and limned with fire, laughing as they died.
Kindness.
Humaneness.
Forgiveness.
He still couldn’t be sure it was the right choice; but they hadn’t had much of one. Short of imprisoning Dân Chay again, and the only jail they could draw around him would have been Silverspires’ and Harrier’s, which had broken him before.
“You don’t always get what you want,” Dân Chay said, as if he’d guessed Philippe’s thoughts. His voice was sharp.
Philippe said nothing.
“You can still change your mind,” Hoa Phong said.
It would be a long trip back to Annam. He couldn’t even be sure the boats were still running, and that they wouldn’t end up going overland, making their slow way home.
But that wasn’t what stopped him.
“I’m not going.” He gestured to the battered table, the sheet of oiled paper over the window, the steaming baskets holding Isabelle’s latest attempts at buns. “This is home.”
Hoa Phong was silent, for a while. How can you bear it? she’d asked, once. But she was young, and freshly arrived, and she couldn’t understand, not yet.
“As you wish,” she said. She used the pronoun for a high-ranking official.
Philippe laughed. “Not that one.” He bent, and rubbed his nose against her cheek, as if he were an older relative of hers. Dân Chay, leaning against the wall, made no move to come forward. “Safe travels, child.”
After they’d left, he stared, for a while, at the table. He wasn’t aware of time passing until footsteps on the cracked stairs brought him out of his reverie. It was Isabelle and Tade, laden with the empty baskets they used to carry supplies to the refugees. Petals still clung to Isabelle’s one: she must have insisted on taking people flowers again, to fill their homes with something bright and colorful.
Philippe’s eyes focused on Tade, on the tattoo on his arm. It had gone dark again. He’d noticed it at the funeral but hadn’t had time to ask.
“Your tattoo…”
Tade shrugged. “You remember it’s the mnemonic of the creation myth? I think it could sense primal energy from the creation building up, and it responded to that. Protecting me with energy of its own, so I could defend my own home.”
Philippe’s face burned. Home. Such a loaded word: never just the land of your birth, but the place you settled in and built so many hopes and connections into.
“I see.”
Tade smiled, to smooth over the blank in the conversation.
“Who knows, it might come in handy again one day. You look idle, Philippe. Daydreaming?”
Isabelle was more observant. “They left, didn’t they?”
“Yes.”
Philippe felt… strangely empty, a stretched hollowness that was almost familiar. An edge to the world. And then it came to him: it was that same feeling he’d had when he’d been fasting, before he’d ascended.
“And you’re still here,” Isabelle said.
“So are you,” Philippe said, though she’d become their unofficial liaison to House Silverspires—the patch of the House’s crest on her arm was proof of that.
&
nbsp; Isabelle said nothing for a while. She withdrew the baskets from the stove, and opened them up to reveal lopsided dumplings.
“Ah well. I thought these would come out better.”
“Not the way you shaped them,” Philippe said, before he could think.
She laughed. She handed a basket of dumplings to Tade, who sat down with a sigh.
Finally she said, and her voice was grave, “They offered to make me a dependent again.”
Philippe was silent for a while.
“It’s your choice.”
The words would once have burned him—now they came easily, like an exhalation of air after a breath held too long.
Isabelle looked at him, weighing words. “Yes, it is. You were talking about home, and I don’t think mine is in Silverspires. It was once, but I died.” Her face was grave. “Things have changed. Everything has changed.”
So home was here. Something squeezed Philippe’s heart in his chest, made breathing painful and burning.
“You’ll get used to it.”
“We always do, don’t we?” Isabelle rubbed the patch on her arm again, thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’m ready for this just yet. One day… who knows?”
We. She’d used we, deliberately.
Philippe picked up a dumpling, bit into it, letting the sweet, earthy taste of carrots and mold fill his mouth. It didn’t taste like anything he’d ever eaten in Annam; but that didn’t mean it was wrong. It just was the way things were—the way they were made, with what they had.
“So you’re here,” he said. “With me.” There. He’d said it out loud.
Isabelle looked away. “I can ask someone else in the community to offer me a room, if you’d rather not. But…” She spread her hands. “But I’d still like to learn from you, if I can.” A heavy silence. “There’s so much I don’t know, isn’t there?”
Philippe stared at her, measuring exactly what was being offered. Everything he could think of was too heavy—would so easily break a moment that was as fragile and trembling as a spider’s web across a river.
“Here.”
He grabbed the khi water and khi fire around the room, laid it on the table in an intricate weave—exaggerating his movements so they’d be slow and deliberate, his intention unmistakable.
“It’s like your buns,” he said finally. “Bound to get better if you practice.”
Isabelle sat down, staring intently at the khi currents—and slowly started weaving her own pattern in answer to his.
“Home,” Philippe said, almost to himself.
The word felt large and fraught and almost unfamiliar; but slowly melting on his tongue like the sweetest rice.
* * *
Thuan had walked to the grove.
It was churned earth now, with frozen hawthorn trees slowly shriveling under the weight of the ice, the older bodies crumbling into shards when the wind caught them. The hole had been fenced off as best as they could. Amidst the myriad things they were dealing with, the last one they needed was a Silverspires or Houseless envoy falling down a black mysterious hole in the center of their gardens.
Not, mind you, that the other Houses were faring any better.
He crouched, for a while, by the fence; watching the darkness. A faint smell of rot, and the clean, sharp feel of ice in his throat. No children, or that sense he was being watched. The House was a large, silent emptiness in the center of his mind, a hole in his world as large as the one in front of him. Somehow, he kept expecting it to spring up again—it had survived so many things, so why not this?
But he knew the answer already.
His day had been meetings, and committees: who needed food, who needed shelter; the Hawthorn delegation to the common hospitals complaining of a lack of respect; Phyranthe running, grimly, through those (thankfully few) dependents who’d harmed others to steal their possessions; Iaris trying, again, to run circles around him over medicines she thought would serve Hawthorn best. And all the while he’d felt as though he was trying to function with a hole in his heart where the House had been. He’d look up, half-expecting to see the children or feel a dependent in need, and hear only final, unbroken silence.
With a sigh, he rose and walked back to the ruins of the House. Silence there too. The wards were dead, and they’d only redrawn hasty, less powerful ones. Asmodeus had said something about making things better, but they’d both known that was as protected as they’d ever be.
He felt raw and pummeled and defenseless.
“Unka Thuan, Unka Thuan!”
Two young children barreled towards him on the ruin-covered lawn—Camille babbling her usual collection of incomprehensible syllables, and Ai Nhi changing, at the last minute, into a dragon and wrapping herself around his legs. He stroked her mane, gently.
“Where is your auntie?”
“She’s admitted defeat, I think,” Asmodeus said. He came up behind the children carrying a bottle of wine and two glasses.
Thuan looked at him, hard, but saw neither Berith or Françoise. “They left you in charge of the children?” He grabbed Camille as she tottered forward, and put her on his shoulders—to squeals of delight.
An amused snort. “Françoise and Berith are having a meeting of the Parental Relief Committee. The children are a change from former Houses. At least I only have to deal with stolen toys.”
The other Houses had come out worse off than Hawthorn had—cannibalizing their own Fallen, magicians and dependents before finally dying of magical starvation. But the weaker they were, the more aggressive they got. Asmodeus had thrown himself into the role of enforcer of the new, fragile peace with such glee Thuan half-suspected him of making up half the quarrels he ruthlessly solved.
Asmodeus held out the glasses. Thuan was about to ask if it was the best time for a drink, and then stopped. It was never going to be a good time.
They sat on the lawn, sipping the wine. Thuan watched, warily, the two children racing each other, sidestepping the debris with almost supernatural agility. Ai Nhi had gone dragon again, and she was attempting to lift Camille off the ground.
Thuan said, “You do miss it.”
“The House?” Asmodeus was silent, for a while. He drained his glass, and set it on the lawn, then pulled a knife out of his jacket pocket and played with it, eyes carefully away from Thuan. “It’s a hard thing to give up.”
But Thuan had seen, before Asmodeus looked away: a shadow of that unbearable anguish he’d had in the roots of the House, the grief he carried with him and didn’t know how to deal with. And it wasn’t the first time, either: he’d watch Asmodeus talk to a dependent while walking in the gardens, and see the way his gait was a fraction less assured, a fraction less cat-like, how from time to time his husband’s face would smooth and become a brittle, hollow thing. He didn’t know how to deal with it. His own grief was one thing, but seeing his husband weak was unsettling.
He realized Asmodeus was speaking to him.
“I’m sorry?”
“I asked if you missed it.” Asmodeus’s voice was sharp.
Like a yawning gap in the world.
Thuan said, finally, “I’d been part of it for a few months.”
“A year and a half.” A sharp, amused smile, a mask taut over pain and grief. “I counted. Some things will fill the world, given half a chance. Grief isn’t a function of time.”
Thuan reached out, squeezed Asmodeus’s hand. He half-expected Asmodeus to stab him, but Asmodeus merely squeezed back, gaze distant.
“Are you giving me permission to weep?”
A shrug. “In a manner of speaking. You know what I mean.”
Thuan did. He was silent for a while, his whole self straining again for something that wasn’t there; because he’d killed it.
“It was the right thing to do, though.”
“Are you looking for reassurance? I wasn’t aware you were so sentimental.” The glib mask was back on.
Thuan couldn’t help himself. He snorted. “You realize,” he
said, finally, “that we didn’t have to do any of this.”
“Helping the Houseless?”
“We came out ahead. Not as much as Silverspires, but…”
Asmodeus put the knife in his pocket.
“Are you trying to understand why we’re being kind?” He said the word as he would weak. “You’re the decent one in this relationship.”
Thuan almost choked on his wine.
Asmodeus said, finally, “We could have ruled. But the situation would have been untenable. Too many people and not enough of us. There is such a thing as overreaching.”
“You don’t know what that word means.”
“I’m a fast learner. Besides, influence is a handy substitute for direct power. And you have to admit—fields of ruins lack attractiveness, as a dominion.”
“Such as our own field of ruins, you mean?”
“That,” Asmodeus said, “will be sorted out.” He put the knife back in his pocket jacket, and strode towards the now fighting children, sharply separating them. When he came back up the lawn, followed by two chastened little ones, he said, “I do wonder how it will all turn out, though.”
Thuan stared at the river spread below them; and back, for a moment, at the buildings with broken roofs and stone-choked corridors. The air was no longer dark with smoke, but the smell of ashes and dust clung to the city. In his mind was only desolate emptiness where the House had been.
He said, slowly, carefully, trying each word on as if it were new clothes, “What it will it all become? Something, I think, that none of us have seen before.”
Something as fragile and as new as seeds blooming in the ruins.
A note on French and Vietnamese transcriptions
This book includes significant portions of both French and Vietnamese, both languages that use the Latin alphabet, but with diacritics that are by and large seldom used in English. I figured that French would pose few problems, so it’s rendered exactly as it would be written, though I translated part of the names to make the story flow more easily: hence La Villette Basin rather than Bassin de la Villette.
Vietnamese was always a trickier proposition, as it has higher diacritics complexity: it doesn’t just use letters like é, ă, ô, đ, etc. but it also combines them with tonal accents on words, which means that words like thế giới are commonplace. I made the choice to continue stripping the diacritics from all Vietnamese words to preserve the continuity with the rest of the series, as in both The House of Shattered Wings and The House of Binding Thorns. This prevented characters like Thuan suddenly becoming Thuận, but obviously has drawbacks in that it obscures somewhat the original meaning of the words.
The House of Sundering Flames Page 44