The House of Binding Thorns

by Aliette de Bodard

  Isabelle. “No one can—”

  “I can.”

  Philippe wasn’t sure what Berith did; he couldn’t see. But the books flapped in an invisible breeze, and, as they shifted and moved and stretched, like a living thing, he saw fragments of words, in French and Viet and Chinese; fragments that came together in his mind for a moment. And, for a moment—a mere moment only—he stood on the edge of a circle etched in the stone floor of a broken-down cathedral, and he knew what he had to do, from beginning to end; knew the writing to carve around the circle; the spell that he needed to speak, the khi elements to weave together, the precise location and timing of the wounds he would need to inflict on himself; and how his blood, dripping down within the confines of the circle, would stretch and coalesce into the shape of a Fallen, dark-haired and with olive skin, not the corpse he had buried, but one who would open her eyes, and look at him with the confusion of the newly born.

  And then the moment snapped away from him. The books were just books, and the words they contained incomprehensible, and the memory in his mind, so sharp just a few minutes before, blurred away into meaninglessness.

  “This is my dominion,” Berith said, again. “Magic, and rituals, and your heart’s deepest desire.”

  “I—” He struggled to breathe. Illusion. It had to be illusion, like all Fallen promises, like all their vaunted magic: useless in the end, a canker that had already destroyed the city. But. But the memory of that spell lay in his mind like a sword. It had felt real. More real than anything he had achieved, after months of running into dead end after dead end.

  I know enough.

  Enough to bring her back?

  Morningstar’s voice in his mind was grave: not mocking, as he remembered it, but that of a teacher asking a question of a presumptuous student.

  And he knew—if he was honest with himself, which he strove to be—what the answer was, what the answer had always been. “And you’re offering me this in exchange for walking into a House.”

  “You don’t like the Houses.” Berith didn’t sound surprised.

  “Who does?”

  “Not I.” Berith shrugged. “The House is Hawthorn. And my Fall-brother is easy enough to find. He heads it.”

  The head of the House. The head of House Hawthorn. Asmodeus.

  No.

  Light glinting on glasses in a room with beige wallpaper, and the smell of blood everywhere, and someone screaming and it was him—it had always been him—“You’re . . .” Philippe ought to have been flippant, or nonchalant, or sarcastic, but he couldn’t even breathe. “You’re his sister?”

  “Brother, once.” Berith shrugged again. “Things have changed. I Fell into the wrong body, but I fixed this long before the war. No matter. You’ve already had dealings with him.”

  He’d have been tortured to death by Asmodeus, if Isabelle and the head of House Silverspires hadn’t intervened, if he hadn’t run away on shaking legs, his breath rattling in his chest—crawling, in the end, into the dragon kingdom to die of his wounds, only to find himself miraculously healed. But even miracles had their limits, and none of them could erase those sharp, terrible memories.

  Françoise’s voice was low, and toneless. “He won’t do it.”

  It wasn’t that he wouldn’t do it. It was that he couldn’t walk into Hawthorn, couldn’t face that green-eyed gaze again, that smell of orange blossom and bergamot, overlain with that of a charnel house. . . . “You don’t understand,” he said, struggling to breathe. “Asmodeus almost killed me. Not even in Hawthorn, in another House altogether. I—I can’t protect Françoise against him.”

  “Asmodeus tried to kill you?” Berith’s voice was mildly curious. “Why?”

  Shadows, smoothly gliding on the walls of House Silverspires; Morningstar’s shade by the four-poster bed, his massive sword in his hand, the light of his golden hair falling on the bed, throwing every bloodstain into sharp contrast . . . “I was in the room where his lover died. Samariel.”

  He met Berith’s gaze: she didn’t need to voice her doubts to make them clear. “I didn’t kill him!” he snapped, unsure of why he was so ashamed of himself. The darkness within him—the curse of House Silverspires, the source of the two ghostly presences in his life—had been the cause of Samariel’s death, but he wasn’t about to mourn for a Fallen.

  “You didn’t.” Berith watched him, for a while. “You hated him, but you didn’t kill him.” She made a gesture, with her hand, and the air within the room went slack, as if a storm, rising, had suddenly burst.

  “Find someone else,” Philippe said. He tried very hard not to think about the ritual in his head, about the tantalizing possibility that there might be a way to resurrect Isabelle.

  It was Françoise who spoke up. “You’re not defenseless. Even without Fallen magic.”

  “He fought Asmodeus.” Berith’s voice was speculative. “And he’s still alive.”

  “And I’d like to keep it that way,” Philippe said. And not so much “fought” as was pummeled.

  “Mmm,” Berith said. Something stroked Philippe’s wrist, a touch like warm embers that dredged up the fragments of the threads that had brought him here, water and metal beating on the rhythm of his heart.

  “Stop.”

  Berith raised a hand. “Listen to me. Asmodeus is head of the House. No one can stand against him in his own domain, not even the most powerful of magicians. But you—”

  “I told you he almost killed me.”

  “But you didn’t have my magic,” Berith said.

  Her magic. Philippe clamped his lips on the reflexive “no.” He didn’t want Fallen magic within him, but of course he was going to end up wielding it, no matter what happened. What else did he expect Berith’s spell of resurrection to be?

  “I’m his Fall-sister,” Berith said. “Even outside my dominion, my magic is strong. Not strong enough to hold him at bay, but, combined with your own powers . . .”

  The thread on his wrist became unbearably tight: Philippe snapped it into harmless scraps before he could think. He raised his gaze, met Berith’s mocking one. But she didn’t ask more questions about his magic, or how it worked. “So you pump me full of your magic, and send me to do your dirty work in Hawthorn,” he said.

  “I prefer to think of it as the work I’m not capable of doing,” Berith said, calmly, utterly unriled by his insults. “And in return, I can give you your heart’s desire, Philippe. Well? What do you say?”

  He opened his mouth to say it was the height of foolishness, and no thinking person would ever say yes, and then he saw Isabelle again: leaning against the lamppost on rue de Jessaint, haloed in light, with the two bloody wounds in her chest. He saw her corpse again, framed by two metal wings, looking like an angel finally come to rest—the corpse he had buried near the Grands Magasins, making her the promise that he would find a way to resurrect her.

  He wanted no part of House politics. He wanted no Fallen magic. And, above all, he wanted to stay away from Hawthorn and Asmodeus. But in the end, he owed Isabelle something he could never return, and all his unbending principles had ever brought her was death.

  Berith was Fallen, but not House; and that, perhaps, was all the grace he was ever going to be granted, in the end, by a God who wasn’t his and whom he had no interest in worshipping.

  “I—” He took a deep, shaking breath. “I’ll do it.”

  EIGHT

  Masks and Essence

  MADELEINE had expected the introduction to Prince Phuong Dinh to be a private audience, but it turned out to be an informal lunch. For given values of “informal”: they set a large circular table in one of the pavilions, filled it with all manner of dishes, and sat Clothilde and Madeleine with Ngoc Bich and a number of dignitaries—Thanh Phan and Véronique, and another few that seemed to be new, or whose faces Madeleine couldn’t make out. Clothilde made effortless
small talk with Ngoc Bich. Madeleine found herself wedged between Thanh Phan and the prince.

  Phuong Dinh was a large, pleasant man with a lean face, and even Thanh Phan seemed to like him. It wasn’t anything like the prickly respect she showed Ngoc Bich, but rather the fondness one had for a friend’s child.

  He, in turn, watched Madeleine struggle with the food: some kind of pungent mixed meat, smelling like rotten fish; something chewy that had to be innards, but so salty it was almost inedible; and cucumber that turned out to have a sharp, bitter taste. “You don’t look like you’re appreciating the food, Lady Madeleine,” he said, with a hint of a smile in his eyes.

  Madeleine stopped herself before she could say what was really on her mind. “I’m not used to your customs.”

  “That is certainly . . . visible.” Phuong Dinh pointed to one of the serving bowls in the center of the table. “These buns are sweet. You would probably enjoy them more. And do feel free to use the spoon. It’s not polite, but then, neither is waving your chopsticks as though you’re going to stab someone with them.”

  Madeleine tried to hold her chopsticks more delicately, and then gave up and reached for the spoon. The bun piece, when she bit into it, proved insipid, almost without seasoning. Elphon hadn’t come back in more than a day, and Clothilde might not seem worried, but that was unduly optimistic. Anything could happen in a place like this. “I’m not a lady,” she said. Just Asmodeus’s pet experiment, and where that placed her in Hawthorn’s hierarchy God only knew.

  “I know,” Phuong Dinh said, but Thanh Phan cut him.

  “You are an envoy of Lord Asmodeus.” Her face was severe. “As such, we owe you respect.”

  Phuong Dinh looked as though he was going to tell her to lighten up, but said nothing.

  Madeleine wasn’t about to be stared down by a crab, especially one that looked like a walking skeleton, and whose idea of their interests included hiding danger from them. “Someone owed Ghislaine respect, and it didn’t prevent her from disappearing.”

  Thanh Phan closed up immediately. “You impugn us. We had nothing to do with her disappearance.”

  “Didn’t you? She was scared,” Madeleine said. “As all of you are. What is going on here?”

  Clothilde looked up sharply, and made a gesture with her hands that Madeleine knew only too well: Don’t make waves, and please for the love of God shut up. But it was too late to take the words back.

  “Lady Madeleine.” Phuong Dinh’s face had quirked into an amused smile. “This is an old, old place, and it has its share of half-remembered myths and histories. And some of them . . . bite.”

  Great. Madeleine nodded, and tried to focus on the food. If only every dish hadn’t been such an unpleasant surprise. She stared, instead, at the table under the tray, at the greenish mold that had crept across the inlaid nacre palaces and bridges.

  Phuong Dinh went on. “You say you’re unfamiliar with our customs, but you know more than the others, don’t you? You don’t seem as surprised as you should be.”

  She was the one whose expressions were written all over her face. “The others aren’t surprised.”

  “Aren’t they?” Phuong Dinh’s expression was unreadable. “Being rather louder than they should, rather more aggressive. I should think they’re hiding it better than you, which is a different thing.”

  Madeleine said nothing, and silence dragged on. At length, because it made her uncomfortable, she said, “I knew someone, once. An Annamite. You’re not that different from him.”

  “A mortal?” Thanh Phan’s contempt was obvious. No solidarity between countrymen, then. But why had she thought there might be?

  “I’m not sure,” Madeleine said. She’d never worked out, or been allowed to know, what Philippe was exactly. “A magician.”

  Thanh Phan snorted; clearly, being a magician wasn’t much of a recommendation, either. “You’ll find they don’t have much in common with us. The mortal Annamites.”

  Madeleine disagreed, but she really wasn’t feeling like arguing over it. “I wouldn’t know.”

  After the meal was over, Madeleine made to join Clothilde, but a hand on her shoulder stopped her. It was Véronique, the official dressed in French garb, smiling at her with blackened teeth. “Prince Phuong Dinh asks if you will walk with him.”

  One of those invitations, wrapped in velvet, that could hardly be refused. Madeleine glanced at Clothilde, who was deep in conversation with Ngoc Bich. “I think we’re supposed to look at some papers in our rooms.”

  The hand rested, lightly, on her shoulder; steered her, gently but firmly, toward the other end of the pavilion: fingers that were too thin, phalanges too long, too hard, to be human. “They can wait, I should imagine.” Her eyes under the bonnet were slightly too round, slightly too much away from the face, as if something within the orbits was pushing them out. “Come.”

  Madeleine looked at Clothilde, who still wasn’t looking in her direction. “You’ll tell her where we’re going?”

  Véronique gestured. Another official in French garb, top hat and all, appeared as if from nowhere. “Tell Lady Clothilde that Lady Madeleine is with the prince.” He nodded, and made toward Ngoc Bich and Clothilde, while Véronique continued steering Madeleine toward the exit.

  As they approached the building where Prince Phuong Dinh was waiting for her, Madeleine cast another glance backward. Clothilde and Ngoc Bich appeared locked in conversation; just as she and Véronique passed under the building’s doorframe, the official Véronique had sent managed to signal his presence to Ngoc Bich, who waved him over.

  And then the shadows of the building closed over her, and she couldn’t see any of them anymore.

  Véronique steered her between red-lacquered pillars with paint peeling off, through a courtyard with two large bronze urns, and then a maze of buildings that all started to blur into one another, until they reached a wide, open expanse overlooking a cliff planted with coral and gray anemones, their nests of tentacles streaming in invisible currents. Shoals of gray, sickly fish swam over the crags. Every so often, one would flop down, and not swim back up again.

  Prince Phuong Dinh was waiting for her on the stone path that led to the cliff. “This isn’t a trap,” he said, in an amused voice. “Merely a chance to talk without the diplomatic masks.”

  As if Madeleine knew what a diplomatic mask was. She forced a smile. The entire palace made her feel ill at ease, but this area was creepier than the others.

  Isolated, she realized. There were no courtiers here, no officials going on errands with parasol-holding servants, no lacquered trays or heaps of papers being carried. Rather, an odd, contemplative, terrifying silence, with only the slow sounds of the river; and, high above, clouds drifting, covering the rippling, blinding sun and throwing the entire hill into darkness. “Come,” Phuong Dinh said, and started toward the hill, slow and stately.

  Madeleine walked to him, trying to project a confidence she didn’t feel. “You want to talk about Ghislaine,” she said, finally. She didn’t think he did.

  “Perhaps. But first you can tell me about Asmodeus.”

  “You’re joking,” Madeleine said. A cold current rose, buffeting her against the side of the path. Ahead was only the prince, with his thin, translucent antlers, his yellow silk clothes, threadbare and patched, a mouth that had lengthened, slightly, in the beginning of a snout. “Why . . . ?”

  “Arranged marriage doesn’t mean blindness,” Phuong Dinh said. “To all intents and purposes he will be my husband. My . . . consort.” He inflected the word as though he really meant “master.”

  So he did know, or appreciate, what he was getting into: Hawthorn, the casual cruelty of the House, and whatever plans Asmodeus had for him. Abruptly he looked small, and forlorn, and vulnerable, nothing Madeleine would have imagined moments earlier.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

&nb
sp; “No masks.” His voice was slightly mocking. “What is the use of them, in a time and place like this?” His hands were curled into claws, their fingers tapered and short. Something in his pose, in his face, was familiar, in a way Madeleine couldn’t place. What was going on here?

  She dragged her voice from an infinitely faraway place. “He will own you. He will consider you his possession, to use or discard as he sees fit.” Or to frighten into submission, or brutally shape into the steel that he needed. She thought of Samariel, Asmodeus’s dead lover—tried to remember what they had been like, the two of them. “He’s a widower. His lover died, a few months ago. I expect he’s not doing this to find love.” She didn’t know why Asmodeus was doing it at all. A few dragon magicians and a permanent delegation hardly sounded worth bothering with. There had to be something bigger, larger, at stake.

  “Oh, Lady Madeleine.” Phuong Dinh snorted, gently, blowing bubbles into the never-ending stream of fish around the hill. “Do you think I’m doing this for love?”

  “I don’t know you. I can’t tell.”

  “Necessity. Duty. Family. We do not expect love to feature very highly in our marriages. But I thank you for your candor.”

  If only it didn’t sound like an insult, or a source of amusement to him. She was badly out of place here, had known it since the beginning. The disk against her chest, the physical reminder of Hawthorn’s presence, was warm, like a living heart. “You knew Ghislaine,” she said.

  “Did I?” Phuong Dinh looked up. They were halfway to the foot of the cliff: from close up, she could see some kind of building atop it. An altar, or a shrine?

  “She left a message.”

  Phuong Dinh said nothing for a while. At last, he set his foot forward again, toward the cliff. “Favor for favor, Lady Madeleine. Envoy Ghislaine . . . meant well, but she played with fire.”

  Here, in this kingdom where everything was damp and miserable? Madeleine clamped down on the words before they could escape her. “How so?”