“I’ll handle Selene.” Emmanuelle’s gaze was hard. “If anything arises.”
An awkward silence followed, while they all looked at one another. Aragon broke it with his usual bluntness. “How are you? You don’t look as though the House is treating you well.”
Madeleine stared at the House behind them, wondering what it would be like to walk its corridors once more. “All right, I suppose. I—” And because, in spite of everything else, she was still honest: “It’s not—I mean. It’s a scrape I got myself into. I can’t really blame the House for that.” Especially not after Asmodeus had rescued her.
She was going to get used to that idea. She was. One day.
“How is Silverspires?”
Emmanuelle shrugged. “Rebuilding. Selene is cautiously reaching out to other Houses. And we’re removing branches and roots from about every damn room in the place.”
The roots of the tree had choked Silverspires, drawing out its magic until Selene had ended the curse. Madeleine hadn’t been to Silverspires since then. She hadn’t been allowed out of Hawthorn, except under close supervision.
“Is . . .” Madeleine hesitated. “. . . the hospital still understaffed?”
Aragon snorted. Emmanuelle hid a smile. It was a subject that was sure to draw his ire. “Not so much understaffed as incompetently staffed. Seriously, some of those nurses . . . We take what we can get, I guess. But if this year’s class is anything like the previous one . . .”
Abruptly, Madeleine thought of Iaris, of that desk in the lonely room, and orderlies holding her, strapping her to the bed. Her hands were shaking. She stared at them, stilled their tremor.
“Are you all right?” Aragon asked.
“Aragon,” Emmanuelle said, gently. “You know—”
“Interference can go rot,” Aragon said. “I’m not House.” He sat down on the parapet by her side. “It’s the essence, isn’t it?”
The smell of it; the feel of it, caked on her hands and arms. Asmodeus’s lips on hers, with no trace of desire or lust, the magic rising within her, filling her. And, further away, that night in House Hawthorn, the inescapable memory of standing still while everything she had ever known erupted in blood-slicked slaughter . . . She struggled to speak, but no words would come.
“I think he’s right,” she said, numbly. “I’ve never left the House.”
Aragon was quick on the uptake. “Hawthorn? You’ve returned to it. That doesn’t mean your time here was meaningless.”
Oris. Isabelle. Elphon. The dead, all lost to her.
“He is right, though,” Emmanuelle said, gently. “You need to walk away.”
From Silverspires? From Hawthorn, twenty years ago? She didn’t know. She looked, again, at the buildings that had been her life for decades. At two friends who now—for all their desire to help—were strangers with whom she wasn’t meant to speak.
“All Houses are the same,” Aragon said. He shook his head. “Hawthorn or Silverspires or Harrier. None are gentler or kinder.”
She was going to say something about Asmodeus, about Selene, and then she remembered that Selene had cast her out without a single regret.
“You can’t afford to be kind,” Aragon said. “Selene understands ruthlessness.”
Emmanuelle looked as though she was going to say something, but changed her mind. “She’s had to learn,” she said, at last.
And Madeleine, of course, would never learn, but was it such a bad thing? In her mind, the link to Hawthorn burned, slower and quieter than it had been, or was it simply that she was used to it now? “I have to go,” she said. “Thank you.”
Aragon snorted. “Don’t even mention it.”
“I’m sorry,” Emmanuelle said.
What was there to be sorry for, other than for herself? As she left, Madeleine looked at the banyan tree that now choked Notre-Dame; at the buildings, ruined by fire and war spells and constricted by roots.
She’d never left the House. The House of Hawthorn; because she knew, now, that House Silverspires was forever behind her.
* * *
MADELEINE found Elphon in one of the bars that bordered the docks. He was sitting alone at one of the rough wooden tables, watching the dockers chat among themselves in Annamite. He smiled when he saw her, but it was a wan expression, utterly devoid of joy.
“Managed to get away?”
Madeleine’s tracker disk pulsed on her skin; and the link to the House—Asmodeus’s presence—was still as strong as ever. “In a fashion,” she said, hating the hoarseness in her voice.
“I worried about you.”
Elphon shrugged. He wore a worker’s faded blue bourgeron and a cap, and coarse cotton trousers; he looked much as he always did, oval face, sharp cheekbones, eyebrows creased in mild concern. It was Madeleine who felt stretched and hollowed out, somehow made different by her imprisonment in the dragon kingdom. “I followed Ghislaine,” he said.
“Here?”
Elphon rose, grabbing his coat from the chair. “Come.”
They walked in silence to a building at the end of the docks, a makeshift assemblage of corroded sheet metal and patched-up wood. The dockers and the House guards thinned: no ships there, no stacks of crates or unstable cranes unloading barges. If it was a warehouse, it was one of the run-down, broken, or booby-trapped ones.
The single, bored Senegalese at the entrance of the building nodded at Elphon. “You again,” she said.
Elphon bowed, an intricate and terribly old-fashioned gesture that brought an amused smile to the woman’s face. “Mind if I show my friend?”
The woman shrugged. “It’s not like she’s going anywhere.”
The building wasn’t heated. Madeleine imagined many Houseless ones weren’t, but in this case it was clearly deliberate, because all it contained was bunk beds with bodies on their lower beds. For a moment she was back in Yen Oanh’s house of death, gagging on the putrid smell of angel essence and dying dragons. And then it passed, and she saw that the beds all held corpses. The smell in the air was the normal one of decay: familiar and comforting, the same background to her days as House Silverspires’ alchemist, stripping corpses for magic and spells.
“The morgue?” she asked.
Behind her, the Senegalese said, in the accents of the street, “The docks are a dangerous place to be. People drown, or are blown up on protective spells. Or something else. If no one comes to claim them . . .”
Elphon was already headed to a bunk at the back of the room. “Here,” he said.
It was a woman of indeterminate age, with long, fair hair, and swarthy skin. Death hadn’t been kind to her; or rather, what had happened before death had not been kind. Bruises, and—Madeleine reached out for gloves, stopped herself—where would she find gloves, here?—and simply laid her hand on the chest, in the odd concavity above the midriff. “Broken ribs,” she said.
Elphon nodded.
“That’s Ghislaine.” The wrist was bare, with the dragonfly and water lily tattoo Clothilde had shown them. There was a circular, charred imprint on her chest. Madeleine pulled out the tracker disk she had on her, laid it against the imprint. No wonder Asmodeus or Clothilde hadn’t been able to track her. If the imprint was any indication, the disk was ashes by now, its spell incinerated.
“As you can see.” Elphon sat on one of the empty bunks, unaware or uncaring that it had, in all probability, held a corpse in the recent past.
“How did you find her?”
Elphon’s smile was tired. “I asked questions. Of a lot of people. Dragons. Houseless. Dockers. She was trying to hide, but I fear she made quite an impression, all the same.”
“And someone found her, in the end.” Madeleine’s fingers itched for a sheet; for something they could draw over the wreck of the body, to preserve whatever little dignity was left. She hadn’t known Ghislaine at all,
but it didn’t seem fair that she’d lie unclaimed and unmourned, without the House being even aware that she had died.
“You . . .” Madeleine struggled to speak. “You told me not to bring Clothilde.”
“And you didn’t.”
“Why?”
Elphon sighed. “Because a House dumped the body here.”
“A House—?”
“Astragale.”
House Astragale? It meant nothing to Madeleine: one of the large suburban Houses, making its fortune on the small shipping traffic they could manage to get through to Paris.
“It’s been a busy week on the docks,” Elphon said. “Dependents of House Astragale have been hanging around, both here and in la Goutte d’Or. Ostensibly looking for a dependent who stole from them. Except that the description they gave was Ghislaine’s.”
And they’d found her. And dumped her again? “They wanted her dead.”
Elphon’s smile was bitter. “Yes. Once they were sure of that . . . they didn’t burden themselves with a body.”
“I still don’t understand what this has to do with Clothilde.”
“No,” Elphon said. “You haven’t been in the House long enough.” He sighed, an expression that tugged at Madeleine’s heart, so, so familiar, a remnant of a time long gone by. “Do you remember Ciseis?”
“Lord Uphir’s heir.”
“Yes. She was meant to die in the coup that took Hawthorn from him, but she escaped.”
It was ancient history, the coup that had torn her life apart. But she’d never paused to consider its politics, and hadn’t been in Hawthorn in the aftermath: she’d already found refuge in House Silverspires. “And was hunted down and killed?”
Elphon’s face was grim. “We wouldn’t be talking if that were the case. No. She fled, and asked for asylum within another House, where Lord Asmodeus couldn’t hope to touch her without reigniting a war.”
“Astragale,” Madeleine breathed, slowly. “I still don’t see what Clothilde has to do with any of this.”
“Clothilde was a loyalist.”
“So were you!”
His expression was unamused. “Yes. And I died. I don’t remember anything.”
Not that long, endless night where thugs with orange scarves had roamed the House, killing all those who opposed them; bursting into the servants’ quarters, slashing and stabbing while Madeleine stood shock-still, trying to make sense of it all. Not Madeleine, or anything they’d shared, or the moment of his death, when the light had fled his body, and Madeleine had known that she had lost him forever. “No,” Madeleine said. Her heart felt as though it were going to burst in her chest. She wanted angel essence; just a whiff of it, something, anything, to keep the pain at bay. “You don’t remember.”
Elphon’s face didn’t move. “Sometimes, it’s best to forget.” His voice was almost gentle. “The past is past, and there is no salvation to be found in rehashing old grievances.”
Asmodeus’s mocking voice, a long time ago. You never left, Madeleine, did you? Always crawling away from the wreck of the House, never leaving the shadow of the past.
And where did that leave her now, trying to protect a House that had changed beyond recognition, a House now run by the Fallen who had turned every good memory of it into ashes?
She didn’t have answers.
“You . . .” Madeleine shook her head. “You think Ciseis is up to something. And Clothilde is helping her.” She looked, again, at the corpse, at the bruises, the broken bones, the burn on the chest. How much pain had Ghislaine been in, at the end?
Justice. That was something she could understand; and the rest, all the weight of it, all the unappraised consequences, could wait.
“I don’t know,” Elphon said. “Samariel plucked her from the cells, twenty years ago. Insisted to Lord Asmodeus that she would be loyal. As I said, I was dead, so I don’t really know what happened. But Samariel is dead now, and something or someone prevented Ghislaine from returning to House Hawthorn.”
The prospect of being caught by Clothilde?
More than that. “Someone beat Ghislaine up. To silence her? House Astragale said they stole something from them.”
“Yes,” Elphon said. “But it might have been a convenient excuse. I don’t know.”
Madeleine touched Ghislaine’s body again. How long had it been in the morgue? It was cold outside, and she’d hardly decayed. One, two days? “I can find out where she died,” she said, slowly. “Maybe there’ll be something there that can help us.”
Elphon nodded. “Do you need anything from me?”
“I brought some things.” Madeleine no longer carried the large leather bag that had held her alchemical supplies—Asmodeus had taken it from her, before he took her back into Hawthorn—but her small green bag held a charged mirror. She broke the clasp, inhaled the magic within. Thank God, it wasn’t Asmodeus who had infused it. The warmth that ran through her had no trace or characteristic of him, no distant amusement, nor that feeling of being taken over by a puppet master. But, equally, no searing warmth spreading to her entire body; no familiar comfort, no giddy rush from angel essence.
Her vision swam, showed her the world with new underpinnings. Or would have, if there had been any magic to see. But here, among the Houseless, there was nothing to find: not even Ghislaine’s link to the House, long since scattered and gone.
She knelt down, and traced a circle around Ghislaine, marking each cardinal direction with the flat of her hand and whispering the words of a spell. The magic within her sloshed, gently, showing her every wound on the body, every bruise, every bone that had cracked. Ghislaine had not died easily, or fast.
Then, bracing herself, Madeleine rose and came to stand by the body again, and said the final words of the spell.
There was pain, a low, diffuse thing that was almost background, and a gaping maw of emptiness within her, the place where the link to the House had been, before it was burned from her—before she tried to cross the wall, to walk into the grove and straight back into Hawthorn—and found herself facing only death, and ghosts, and a burning feeling as they reached for her, feeding on everything magical until nothing remained.
There was darkness, and cold, and the smell of jasmine rice. A woman’s voice, softly speaking, asking insistent questions, oblivious to the rising numbness in her midriff, and the darkness getting deeper and deeper, and the rising fear, the sharp realization that oblivion beckoned, without any kind of recourse . . .
Madeleine came to with tears streaming from her face, struggling to breathe, her hands gripping the edge of the bed. So alone. Ghislaine had been so alone, at the end, so aware that her House was as unattainable as a promise of Heaven.
Madeleine had lost a link to a House once, but she hadn’t been wounded and dying.
Elphon was waiting patiently for her. She raised a hand, touched the body. A thin thread of light shimmered into existence for a split second, streaking out of the warehouse, and straight into la Goutte d’Or, and into a building, and a flat, the images burning themselves into Madeleine’s mind.
“Let’s go,” Madeleine said. She felt full. Bursting with nightmares and agony, and things that weren’t hers, and God knew she had enough unpleasant memories as it was.
They came out of the warehouse under the bored eye of the guard. There appeared to be some kind of a commotion: the dockworkers were all gathered by the edge of the basin, staring at the water.
What—?
“Madeleine.” Elphon’s voice was grave. “Look.”
On the surface of the basin, drawing a long, curved line toward the Saint-Martin Canal and the Seine, were dozens—hundreds—of sodden white flowers, all wilted and bruised, and flecked with dirt—no, not dirt, but the same grayish blue mold that had overtaken everything in the dragon kingdom.
“Hawthorn,” she whispered, trying to
make sense of it all. “They’re hawthorn flowers. And they’re all dying.”
* * *
PAIN came and went, in waves that seemed to grow no closer. At first Françoise managed to pace up and down in the small space, while Berith sat in the armchair watching her with burning eyes. Then she stopped every few steps, riding a wave of stillness that seemed to cut the breath from both her and the baby. And then she was the one in the armchair, breathing in searing air, struggling to speak.
She didn’t need to see Berith’s pale face, or Aunt Ha’s, to know that it wasn’t going well.
“Midwife Thuy—”
“We’ve sent for her,” Aunt Ha said. She and the other mothers had fanned around the armchair, their meager score of advice long since exhausted. The flat was overcrowded, but for once, Françoise didn’t mind.
“She’s coming,” Berith said, but her face said otherwise.
Françoise waited for the contraction to pass, and said, stubbornly, “Tell me.”
“There’s another delivery,” Aunt Ha said. “And it’s not going well at all. She said she’s doing all she can.”
“I see,” Françoise said. She knew the meaning of that: knew better than to hope.
“I’ve sent for Philippe. I didn’t know what else to do,” Berith said. “But—”
But it hadn’t been their bargain. He didn’t have to come, didn’t have any interest in helping her, now that Berith had given him what he wanted. . . .
Françoise leaned against the back of the armchair. There had to be a position that was comfortable. There had to be something to stave off the pain, which had been growing until it was unbearable, except that it kept changing and growing again. And, each time, between each contraction, a long, drawn-out moment when she forgot, briefly, how bad the pain had been when it had seized her.
No words for it, anymore.
It could last hours, Aunt Ha had said, and one of the other mothers—whose name Françoise couldn’t remember—had nodded, speaking of two days’ labor.
Berith’s hands were clenched, so tightly the thin, skeletal fingers had gone white. “We’ll find someone. We have to.”
The House of Binding Thorns Page 26