The House of Binding Thorns

by Aliette de Bodard

  “To be fair”—Françoise’s voice was sarcastic—“he was trying to kidnap me and Camille.”

  “I think you’d better explain—,” Elphon started.

  He never got to finish that sentence. The link to the House flared in Madeleine’s thoughts, like a warning that a dependent was in mortal danger, except ten times stronger: a knot of pain in her head that became a red-hot spike. Elphon’s face was locked in a grim smile: he felt it, too. It came from outside. The southwest, where the House stood.

  Madeleine made for the table, gripped it. The wood, splinters and all, still felt more reassuring than anything within her. It was ebbing away, leaving only a sour aftertaste in her mouth, but what replaced it was wrong.

  There was no other word for it. It was as if the tree of thorns in her thoughts, the omnipresence of Asmodeus’s amused cruelty, had been replaced by something else. Something that looked right, that even felt right, but that, on closer look, wasn’t. Something that . . .

  She’d felt it, once before. That gaping emptiness at the heart of her thoughts, a sense that the world had collapsed. “It’s not here,” she whispered. “The House.” Please God, no, not the House. Not again.

  “Houses don’t just vanish.” Elphon’s face was oddly still. Fighting the same panic as she was. “There’s something. . . .”

  There was. But it wasn’t Hawthorn. It wasn’t—God help her—it didn’t even feel like a House. “We have to go back,” she said.

  House Astragale. The dragon kingdom. The rot within the House. Clothilde. Someone, or something, had been working against them from within. She thought of the hawthorn flowers, scattered along the basin, of the mold flecked on their petals.

  Berith’s voice was grave. She said, to Françoise, “I need you to tell me everything that the woman said before dying. What do you remember?”

  “Something about a grove and a harvest of bodies. It didn’t make a lot of sense. I thought she was delirious,” Françoise said.

  “She was.” Berith shook her head. “But it doesn’t mean there was no truth in it.”

  Françoise said, finally, “Something about an heir, and poison distilled for decades? And a body that would make everything right. I remember that much. Why?”

  “The heir.” Madeleine clung to the only thing that made sense. It was hard to breathe. It was—if she paused, if she stopped thinking for a moment, it was going to overwhelm her with the sheer wrongness of it all. And yes, it was Asmodeus; it was a House that had given her nothing but fear and pain. But she was on the verge of the abyss, and reason didn’t help. “Uphir’s heir. Ciseis.” The woman who would have succeeded Uphir, if Asmodeus hadn’t seized the House first. Who had sought sanctuary in House Astragale.

  Berith said, slowly, “You reap what you sow. Do you know what the grove is?”

  “No.” Elphon was taking deep, shaking breaths. “Does it matter?”

  “It depends how much the future of Hawthorn matters to you.” Berith’s voice was amused.

  “I don’t care,” Françoise said, abruptly.

  Berith shook her head. “Françoise.”

  “I know.” Françoise made a face. “She said they were coming.”

  Berith rocked the baby gently, one hand supporting the back of the neck. “You can’t stay here. We’ve already had this discussion.” Judging by Françoise’s closed face, not happily. And, to Madeleine and Elphon: “Neither can you. House Astragale is coming for me. Soon . . .”

  Elphon said, “Tell us about the grove. Please.”

  Berith looked at Françoise. “He’s my Fall-brother. I—”

  “It’s all right.” Françoise’s tone suggested it wasn’t, not quite.

  “I don’t know everything,” Berith said. “But the grove . . . the grove is where Hawthorn lives, and dies. Where heads of Houses die, and where their killers—their successors—take control of the House, if they so choose.”

  “You mean Ciseis is trying to take Hawthorn?” Elphon said.

  “Or ensure Asmodeus no longer has Hawthorn. Or both.” Berith leaned against the wall, looking winded and tired. She looked almost human, and not in a good way. “That’s where Ciseis will have to take Asmodeus. But you won’t find the grove easily.”

  Elphon’s face was a study in horror. “It’s stories,” he said, slowly. “They’re . . .” He shook his head, as if to dislodge a persistent thought. “They’re not meant to be true!”

  “Of course they are,” Berith said. “They always are. You need to get to the grove and stop Ciseis. It’s hard to find. But not impossible, if you know what you’re looking for.”

  Madeleine’s hands still gripped the table. She tried to think, to process something, anything, through the fog of her thoughts. Ciseis was going to kill Asmodeus. She wasn’t going to weep over this, over any of it.

  But.

  But he had come back for her. Mocking, sarcastic; out of his own self-interest, he had said, looking to set into motion whatever complex plans he’d had for the dragon kingdom and his consort. But still.

  As principled as ever, Asmodeus’s voice whispered in her mind, but it had none of the usual bite to it. Do I still have your loyalty?

  She didn’t know. She didn’t know, not anymore.

  * * *

  THERE was no fast way to get back to Hawthorn. They took an omnibus, and that got bogged down in traffic, and all the while Madeleine could feel the altered link at the back of her mind, could feel it rubbing at her thoughts, sharp as jagged shards of glass. Elphon leaned against the window, staring at nothing. They were jammed in with artisans, and the occasional House dependent, but no one from Hawthorn that she could see. There had to be someone, anyone, from the House, who could help them. . . .

  The omnibus dropped them at Pont de Passy, and they walked the rest of the way. But, even as they neared the straight line of the quays, it became obvious what was wrong. Where the House should have been, at the intersection of Pont de Grenelle and avenue de Versailles, there was nothing. A mist had risen from the river—dark, tinged with greenish reflections—and swallowed everything behind an impenetrable wall.

  Madeleine stared at the shards of the halberd, now cutting a line into her hand, and back at the wall.

  The boundary between life and death.

  “The rebels aren’t seceding,” she said. “The wall—they built it around Hawthorn.”

  Footsteps, behind them. The disk against Madeleine’s flesh pulsed and twisted, as if it’d been jolted alive.

  “Well, well, well.” It was Clothilde, coming up the stairway leading down to the quay. She wore a cloak over a flowing dark gray dress with stripes of silver highlighting the narrowness of her chest. Her face still looked smooth and ageless, but her eyes were deep-set, angry. “I thought you two would come back from your little jaunt, at some point.”

  “You—” Elphon leaped for her. Clothilde didn’t even move. She twisted—and, for a moment, something large and dark seemed to accompany the movements of her arms—and Elphon stumbled, and went down on one knee.

  “Elphon!” Madeleine was up and running, kneeling by his side. Blood ran from his nose and mouth. His eyes stared at her, slowly focusing on the gray skies above.

  Clothilde glared at Madeleine, as if daring her to do something. “No?” she asked, shaking her head. “You’re pathetic. Both of you. The dead Fallen, and the essence addict who doesn’t know which way to turn. All I have to work with.” She cocked her head, looking at the wall. “Well, this is obviously not coming down on this side. We’re going to need to tackle its foundations. In the kingdom. Great. I could have done without facing Yen Oanh’s little band of rebels.”

  “You—” Madeleine started, stopped. “Elphon told me—”

  “That I was a loyalist? The operative word is ‘was,’ Madeleine. I’m not a fool. No one wants another three years of purges
.” Her face was harsh, but her voice dipped, a little, on those last words, as if she was remembering unpleasant memories.

  “There’ll be purges anyway,” Elphon said. He pulled himself out of Madeleine’s embrace; stood up, woozily. “Because someone in the House is working with Ciseis and Yen Oanh. And if it’s not you . . .”

  Clothilde rolled her eyes, as if the comment were too stupid to dignify with an answer. “I’m loyal. Whether that’s enough for him . . .” She let the words hang in the air for a while.

  “You were Samariel’s,” Elphon said. He tore up a strip of his shirt, used it to stanch the flow of blood from his nose. It turned a bright, painful red. “Lord Asmodeus will never forgive you for that. But he’ll not hold it against you.”

  “Because he’s fair?” Madeleine couldn’t help the words. “You forget that he’s the one who killed you.”

  “I haven’t.” Elphon’s voice was weary. “I told you, we can’t keep fighting a twenty-year-old war.”

  Unless, obviously, you were Ciseis. You reap what you sow, Berith had said.

  “If you two are finished . . .” Clothilde made an imperious gesture toward the steps. “We have a wall to bring down.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Ruin of Lives

  GOING into the dragon kingdom should have felt familiar, like a taste of the home Philippe had left behind a long time ago: words spoken in Viet, the smells of fish sauce and rice and sea-things; the embrace of khi elements, and a magic that was weak and exhausted in the rest of Paris.

  How it felt, ultimately, was draining.

  His captors locked him in the barnacle-encrusted cabin of an old barge, and left. The wood was smooth, everything saturated with khi water, the old, old kind, all claimed by dragons or crabs or other sea creatures.

  And, everywhere, there were ghosts. The smell of death, rising around him, a dank, gagging odor that filled his lungs to nausea, and white figures coalescing out of the wood, dripping like pus through the oeil-de-boeuf window, rising from the slick, moldy parquet like miasma.

  They spoke to him, once more. The wall between life and death was thick, but it was there; it could be reached; it could be breached. If he could find the missing piece . . .

  “You’re going mad,” Asmodeus said, matter-of-factly.

  He was propped up against one of the walls, where they had left him. Blood was soaking through his jacket. His face was pale and bruised, almost alien in its naked hunger—little of the effortless, frightening elegance he always displayed.

  “And you’re dying,” Philippe said, before he could think. Three ghosts were bent over each of his bare arms, featureless faces touching his skin. He could hardly feel the blood they were drawing from him.

  “Not yet.” Asmodeus’s smile was bright and terrible. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. . . . What did Berith give you?”

  He could have sparred, endlessly, with the Fallen, but they were at the end of the road, and there was so little left to either of them. “A promise. That death should have no dominion . . .” The words rose from a deep place in his mind, a memory of some missionary’s preaching, somewhere in the Mekong Delta, of a church by a village’s communal house, cramped and miserable. . . .

  Asmodeus’s smile didn’t leave his face. “Poisoned gifts. Oh, sister mine. I’m afraid she’ll have to fend for herself, eventually, against House Astragale, and the new House Hawthorn.” He sounded almost worried. Weary.

  Not that it changed anything he had done, or would do if he were free. Philippe stared at the wooden surface under him, soaking up words that slowly coalesced into meaning.

  The door opened. The pair that came through them was as unexpected as the one he made with Asmodeus. A dragon in dark orange robes, her head bare, with no cap or insignia of rank, and a Fallen, side by side and with hardly any animosity. The dragon was glaring at Asmodeus with ill-disguised fury, the khi currents around her curled into points.

  Asmodeus spoke to the Fallen. “Ciseis.” His face didn’t move. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

  “As planned.” Ciseis was small, slight, with long, flowing hair so fair it was almost white. Her eyes were also pale: a blue like ice or a midday summer’s sky. “You’d do the same if our situations were reversed.”

  “You’d be dead,” Asmodeus said. He moved, to curve around his blood-soaked midriff. “Much as I like . . . prolonging some pleasures, I have no desire to see my position challenged.”

  “Oh, but it is,” Ciseis said. “Challenged. Won, even.”

  Asmodeus said nothing. It was the dragon who spoke. “Vulnerable,” she said in a hiss. “If we didn’t need you alive—”

  “Yen Oanh, I trust that halberd thrust has healed?” Asmodeus grunted, as the khi water in the room tightened around him.

  “Yours,” Yen Oanh said, with a touch of malice, “has not. Because Fallen magic doesn’t heal. Can’t heal. It’s a cancer, gnawing away at the foundations of the world.”

  Ciseis strode into the room, still keeping a wary distance between her and Asmodeus, and knelt close to Philippe. The ghosts scattered in her wake, briefly, before congregating around her again. He stared at her—tried to, but the weight of the ghosts was bowing him down again, and all he could hear was their whispers. “This one doesn’t look like he’s going to last much longer.”

  Yen Oanh snorted. “Mortals are so fragile. Not that it matters much. The wall is almost finished,” Yen Oanh said.

  “Fair point.” Ciseis made a gesture he couldn’t see, and he was half dragged, half carried by guards through the door.

  Outside, light, layers of shimmering radiance the color of ice. Khi water, swirling around him but escaping his grasp; a heart-wrenching drop over the side of the laundry barge. And he felt it, long before he saw it.

  It rose step after step from the silt at the bottom of the river, looming over him, the weight of its presence pressing down on Philippe’s shoulders like invisible, implacable hands. He flopped in his captors’ arms, his eyes streaming with tears: so many ghosts, pressing themselves against a dark, impassable wall the color of jade, the color of blood.

  Philippe.

  It was Isabelle’s voice. There was a hole in the wall, a door that had been left open, and she stood on the threshold, watching him with burning eyes. Behind her was the shadow of Morningstar, the Fallen’s fair head ringed with khi fire, his sword shining in the darkness—and behind them both, the dark shadow of thorn trees.

  “Isabelle.” He was on the ground, struggling to breathe under the weight of ghosts, watching Ciseis and Yen Oanh and Asmodeus cross the threshold, and dark, featureless silhouettes scurrying. And then his vision cleared for a moment, and he saw they were Annamites, just like him.

  Someone kicked him. “Get up.”

  Philippe pulled himself up, legs wobbling. A swarm of ghosts came with him, clinging to his skin.

  “No scroungers. You work, just like the others.”

  It was Viet, but drowned out by the song of the ghosts, and his eyes were still on the door, on the fading shape of Isabelle. Workers were carrying bricks of quarried jade, shimmering with khi earth and khi metal, and slotting them into the opening. He fell in with them, moving mechanically.

  There was a hole in the ground, where packed earth and coral were shaped together into bricks. He carried one such brick, then another, to the end of the line, where a dragon in human shape and a Fallen in the colors of a House he didn’t recognize laid their hands on the coral until it became the sleepy green of jade.

  Philippe.

  One brick, then another—the workers were speaking to one another in low voices, the familiar cant of Viet, all but drowned out by the whispers of the ghosts. Faces swam by: he must have seen them in his surgery, workers coming in for twisted backs, or broken arms, or the myriad things that could happen on th
e docks. He must have . . .

  Hands steered him away from the bricks, and sat him down by the side of a small knoll. Everything reeked of death, and ghosts. Two workers watched him, looking worried. One of them, whose face was vaguely familiar—had he treated her, once?—handed him rice pressed into the shape of a roll, and algae that smelled of rot and mold. “Here, doctor. You’ll feel better,” she said.

  Philippe looked up, struggling to breathe. The ghosts had latched on to his chest, slowing his heartbeat, and he could barely move for the weight of the wall on his shoulders. The two workers were watching him, warily. “I’m fine,” he said in Viet. “Thank you.” They relaxed a fraction, but still watched him.

  “He’s with us,” a familiar voice said. “Child? Child, speak to me.” And then, more firmly, “Pham Van Minh Khiet.”

  “Olympe?” The word tasted wrong on his tongue, dried paper instead of meat.

  “You shouldn’t have gone to Berith,” Olympe said. She sounded . . . sad? Angry? He couldn’t tell, anymore.

  “What—” He tried to say something, but his tongue felt dry and bloodless in his mouth, like burned paper.

  “This is where we end up.” Olympe’s voice was mirthless. “Where our myths, and our guardian spirits, and our fairy tales, all end. Where they take us as needed, and discard us like so much chaff.”

  Like the French, recruiting workers to cut into rubber trees, to bake bread, to lay down roads and railway tracks.

  “What . . .” Every word hurt. “What happens now?”

  “I don’t know.” Olympe sounded weary. “They invited me and a few others to join House Astragale.”

  “And you said yes?”

  “I’m not a fool.” The words were sharp, cutting. “I asked them what would happen to the rest of us. They said ‘too many mouths to feed.’ I doubt the rest get to go home. Workers have died, already. The first were buried in the foundations. Now they just dig graves by the wall, and dump them in.”