‘With no strings attached?’ Victoire couldn't help it. ‘I'm sorry. It's just that—’
‘Everyone has come here to mock, or gain advantage, or both?’ Calyce smiled again. ‘Consider it ... kinship. And my desire to have a quiet evening that's not about politics, for once. Or the war.’ She grimaced. ‘You're doing a good job, honestly.’
‘I wish I was,’ Victoire said. She knew they were all watching her, wondering when she would finally fail, when they could take Lazarus apart for scraps. Except Morningstar: Calyce was right, he probably didn't care one way or another. ‘The only wealth of this House is our dependents, and it feels like a case of too many mouths to feed.’
‘Fallen magic,’ Calyce said with a shrug. ‘It's wealth, of a sort.’
But it couldn't create food, or even heal the gravely wounded. It couldn't give them a future, keep them together against the depredations of the other Houses, the ones busy killing each other in the streets, the ones who hungered only for power and for weapons they could use to destroy each other. ‘I just want us to be safe,’ Victoire said. Eugénie's mad dream, the one they'd all believed in, the only thought that drove her now. The House depended on her, and all she could see ahead of her was failure.
Calyce's face was dark. ‘In a time of war, safety might be too much to ask for. I wish—’ She picked up a champagne glass, twirled it between her fingers. Light spread beneath her fingertips, so that for a moment the beverage seemed liquid gold. ‘No, never mind. We weren't given peace, and we're not the ones with the power to stop any of it.’
‘Have you—’ there was no polite way to ask this, but this had gone beyond politeness, after all. ‘Have you lost many people?’
‘Too many.’ Calyce sipped at the champagne, watching the groups drift across the room. ‘Bodies is the toll we pay, isn't it? Our only wealth.’ Her voice was bitter. ‘Graveyards and alchemists' laboratories to strip every scrap of Fallen magic from their corpses and put it into service again. But we're alive. We still have a place in the order of the city.’
Whereas Lazarus—wounded and leaderless—had none. Calyce must have seen Victoire's face; she shook her head sadly. ‘You'll find a way,’ she said. ‘It's just a matter of time.’
‘Thank you,’ Victoire said. She didn't have time, and they both knew it. There were soldiers outside, fighting each other, and the moment the illusion dropped—the moment other Houses realised that Lazarus had nothing to protect them, nothing to keep them together, that conquering them would be as easy as punching through paper—then they were gone, and all the other Houses would either join in or look the other way.
Calyce set her glass aside. ‘If you'll excuse me,’ she said, grimacing. ‘My masters call.’ One of the Hawthorn delegates—a thin, dapper Fallen with horn-rimmed glasses and the lean face of a hunting hound—was looking straight at her.
Masters. Of course she had alliances. Of course she wasn't neutral. No one could afford to be, Morningstar had said. Only the strong.
Calyce was already gone: Victoire saw her bow down to the Fallen and then start talking to him animatedly. The Fallen made a small, stabbing gesture with one hand; and Calyce moved closer, bending her head to listen to him.
Victoire looked for Morningstar, and found him at the centre of a little court—five or six members of different Houses, standing entranced by him like moths in candlelight, scarcely aware they would burn alive when the flame became too intense.
If you don't show the other Houses that you're strong...
A show of strength. But strength was for the strong, wasn't it? And they didn't have anything, any wealth, any power, anything that would be convincing. Calyce was right: Morningstar moved in a wholly different world, and even his advice, well-meant as it was, was for those in his wake—the powerful, the victors.
A show of strength. She didn't have anything, except—
Except the wealth of Lazarus.
Slowly, as if in a trance, Victoire found herself walking back towards Morningstar, found the crowd parting for her—the hounds, eagerly baying for blood, eagerly waiting to see her throw herself, again and again, at the walls of her cage.
He watched her come closer, his face grave. His courtiers scattered; silence surrounded them, until it seemed they were the only two people in the room. ‘We need to talk,’ Victoire said, aghast at her own temerity. ‘In private.’
‘Of course,’ Morningstar said, and his smile seemed to illuminate the entire room until everything was drowned in its cold, merciless radiance.
* * *
He was waiting for her at the entrance to House Lazarus, his fair hair ruffled by the wind, his metal wings casting a long, blurred shadow on the steps. ‘Lady Victoire. What a pleasure.’ His presence was ... like a storm, like wildfire—she wanted to walk closer, to be taken apart piece by piece, remade into one of his weapons, to feel that gaze on her, flaying layer after layer of skin with exquisite pain. Except, of course, that she held no interest for him. Not today.
‘My Lord,’ she said, bowing, as Calyce had bowed to the delegate of House Hawthorn.
‘Shall we?’ Morningstar asked.
They were all gathered below in the courtyard before the House: all her youngest Fallen, her children, Eugénie's children—Nerea and Thau and Mavadeus and Sativer, Luscene and Celeste and Zeni and Kaila—all the names in her nightmares, a litany of loss. Eight of them, all so young, so achingly naive—like Nerea, like Thau—unaware of all the ways the world can reach out and wound them, again and again, in places they didn't even know existed.
‘I can't—’ Victoire started. Amaranth crushed her hand, and the words shrivelled in her throat. She could read Amaranth's expression: she might disapprove of the decision, but she would die before she allowed Victoire to show weakness.
Amaranth didn't understand, not really, that it was too late. That what had been required all along wasn't a show of strength; but a show of weakness, something that showed them as small and insignificant and unworthy of the other Houses' attention.
She didn't understand that it was a surrender.
‘Half,’ Victoire said slowly, carefully, her voice a croak.
‘Of course,’ Morningstar said.
‘You—’ Be kind to them, she wanted to say, and he must have guessed at what she would say because he smiled.
‘That will no longer be your concern, Lady Victoire. I'll do as I please.’
The wealth of the House. Not its money or its influence or the spells they might have mastered, but its children. Its Fallen children.
Victoire bowed gravely to Morningstar and stopped halfway down the stairs. She watched him pace before the lines of young Fallen, watched them flinch at first and then bend towards him, caught in the maelstrom of his presence—Thau's face glazed, frozen in fear; Nerea holding herself straight, playing with her rings to hide the tremor in her hands; Mavadeus smiling, as if unaware of the tension in the air, but he had to...
Half. The half that Morningstar judged fit for service—the young, the vulnerable, the ones he could mould as he wished—and she didn't know what he was going to use them for. She didn't even know if he was going to take them apart for their magic.
Amaranth was waiting behind her, silent, disapproving. Victoire had to—she had to walk behind Morningstar, to show that it was her decision too, to look them in the eye as they were weighed and labelled like meat at market. She owed them that, at the least.
Was this how you wanted to be remembered? Amaranth had asked, and she had no good answer. Had never had any because there had been no other choice. Because there was a price to pay to be safe; a show of weakness to be made, rolling over like a dog offering itself for slaughter. Because even the ones who weren't chosen and dragged to Silverspires would remember, now and forever, that they had stood in line before the House, that Morningstar had prowled before them and passed them over. That Victoire had let it happen, and no amount of explanations and justificat
ions—no matter how right she was in the end—would erase that. There were no excuses she could offer to the sacrificed.
‘We will survive,’ she said—to Amaranth, to Thau, to the darkened skies above her, to whatever ghosts might be watching her. ‘The House will survive.’
It was paltry reassurance, a thin comfort that had nothing of warmth; but it was all she had, all she could cling to against the encroaching darkness, against the choices of the war.
Slowly, deliberately—as ramrod straight as a queen in her own country—Victoire gathered the folds of her skirt, and descended the steps towards the courtyard to walk beside Morningstar—to stand before her children in that frozen instant before she lost them forever.[GdM]
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a dayjob as a systems engineer. In her spare time she writes speculative fiction—she won two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and a British Science Fiction Award. This is set in the devastated Paris of her novel, The House of Shattered Wings, which is published by Gollancz in the UK and Roc Books in the US.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9941659-8-5
Copyright 2015 Grimdark Magazine
Grimdark Magazine Issue #5 ePub Page 9