The House of Shattered Wings

by Aliette de Bodard

  Isabelle’s hands clenched. “Selene can’t drive everyone away.”

  “Philippe, you mean?” Madeleine asked. She’d never liked him, so she couldn’t say she was sorry for him. But anything that would rile up Selene had her approval at the moment. How dare she—how–

  Her throat was closing up. She took a last look at her laboratory: at the old, battered chair she’d sat in during her wild nightmare nights; the secretary desk, with the first drawer that always jammed—if she closed her eyes, she could still see Oris, sitting at the table with a frown on his face, trying to understand what she wanted from him.

  Oh, Oris.

  She blinked back tears. She’d never been one for sentimentality: she and Selene had that in common, at least; and she wasn’t about to collapse in tears in the middle of her laboratory.

  “Madeleine?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said. She had her bag. All the containers within belonged to the House, but she didn’t think Selene would begrudge her a battered leather bag, so old it could have seen the days of Morningstar. “You should—” She closed her eyes. She couldn’t feel the House; couldn’t even reassure herself that she would be safe. And she’d had so little time to know Isabelle; but she and Emmanuelle were the one shining spot left in the desolation. “Take care of yourself, will you?”

  Isabelle smiled sadly. “That’s what Philippe said. Do you all think me such a child?”

  “No,” Madeleine said. She laid one of Isabelle’s containers on the now-empty table. “But you’ll be House alchemist. That’s a big responsibility, trust me.” One that she’d never been quite up to, she suspected; but she’d done better than her predecessor, at the least. And she’d trained a successor, in all too short a time. If only she could have stayed longer . . .

  “I know.” Isabelle shook her head. “I didn’t . . . There was no time, Madeleine.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Madeleine sought words; never something she’d been good at. “You’ll do fine. Believe me.”

  Isabelle laughed bitterly. “Perhaps. You will write, won’t you? Send news—”

  Madeleine shook her head, unsure of what to say. Tears blinked at the corners of her eyes; she didn’t move. No sentimentality. “Of course.” It was a lie; why bother Isabelle with the remnants of a sad, washed-out alchemist, a teacher who couldn’t even provide enough knowledge? “Of course I’ll write. If it makes you happy.”

  Isabelle’s smile seemed to illuminate the entire laboratory; no, it wasn’t merely an illusion; it was a radiance from her skin, so strong it cast dancing shadows upon the walls. “Not as well as your staying, but I’ll take it,” she said.

  Madeleine’s heart clenched in her chest. She couldn’t do anything more for Isabelle; couldn’t protect her, or even give her more than a modicum of the knowledge she’d gained. It would have to do; because Selene had left her no choice; but oh, how it hurt, as if she were betraying Oris all over again.

  She hadn’t had much, and hadn’t hoped to bequeath much; save for the hope her apprentices would do better than her.

  She left Isabelle in the laboratory, moodily staring at the container, and took the shortest way out, toward the ruined cathedral and its parvis.

  There was something—something in the corridors that wasn’t quite usual. On her way, she bypassed the school. She could hear Choérine’s voice, explaining the finer points of Latin, and the giggles of some of the girls, but the noise was overlaid by something else, some other sound she couldn’t quite identify. A breath, a tune she couldn’t quite catch; voices whispering words on the cusp of hearing—but, no, it wasn’t voices. It was . . . a sound that was the creak of a mast on the sea, a rustle like cloth; a breath like the wind in outstretched sails.

  None of her business, not anymore.

  People stood on the parvis. At first, Madeleine thought only to push past them on her way to the Petit-Pont; but then she saw the uniforms of silver and gray, and the sickeningly familiar insignia, the crown encircling the hawthorn tree. No. Not them, not now. She would have turned in blind panic, to find her way back into the House; but there was no safety there, not anymore, only the cool welcome they would reserve for strangers.

  Breathe. Breathe. Do not think about blood, or the hollow pain of ill-healed ribs, the old wounds that never stopped twinging. She was going to walk past them, cross the river, get on board the omnibus that stopped before the Saint-Michel Fountain; and at last be rid of Hawthorn’s ghosts in her life.

  Her breath seemed to come out in short, noisy gasps as she crossed, on the other side of the vast plaza where the market was held, now all but deserted, with only a few House dependents hurrying about their tasks, their gazes studiously avoiding her. Halfway through, she threw a glance at them: so far away, they seemed like dolls, their faces all blurring into one another. They were talking animatedly, paying no attention to their surroundings. A leave-taking, that was what it had to be—she remembered something about the Hawthorn delegation staying on—a funeral, had it been? Or something close to it.

  Ahead, the bridge beckoned, and the omnibus was waiting at the stop, its horses pawing at the ground, fresh and nervous, at the beginning of their hour-long run through Paris. She was going to make it—she was—

  “Ah, Madeleine.”

  She never even heard him. One moment there was nothing; the next he stood between her and the bridge—with Elphon and another Fallen one step behind him. His glasses glinted in the sunlight; the expression in his eyes light, mocking. “Leaving so soon?”

  The wind blew the smell of bergamot and orange blossom into her face, so strong that her entire stomach heaved in protest. “Asmodeus.” She got the word out; barely. “It’s none of your business.”

  His smile was bright and dazzling. “Oh, but it is. When a House rids itself of a most talented alchemist, I cannot help being interested.”

  There was no one else; or rather, everyone was giving them a wide berth, heedless of Madeleine’s feeble attempts to signal for help. She was on her own, and she had never felt so alone. “Go away.”

  “I think not. I have a vested interest in you, after all.”

  Because she had once belonged to Hawthorn, because the House never let go of what it had once possessed, because she’d woken up at night, shaking and fearing that they would come to take her back, and now it was happening, and she was powerless to stop it. “Please—” she whispered, and Asmodeus smiled even more brightly.

  “My lord.” It was Elphon; for a wild, impossible moment Madeleine thought he had remembered, that he was going to speak up in her favor. He would— “We need to return to the parvis.”

  Asmodeus did not turn around. “For the formal leave-taking? Selene is half an hour late, and I see no sign of her coming.”

  The world had shrunk to Asmodeus’s face; to his eyes behind their panes of glass, sparkling as if they shared some secret joke. She couldn’t—she had to . . .

  Her bag. The box with the remnants of angel essence. If she could find it. Slowly, carefully, she moved her hand, creeping toward the pocket where she had put it.

  Asmodeus was talking to Elphon, and his full attention wasn’t on her yet. “I expect the House to be . . . somewhat in disarray right now. I’ll send someone with our excuses, to apologize for the impoliteness of leaving without the formal ceremony.”

  Madeleine’s hand closed around the box; undid the clasp, plunged into the essence—warmth on her fingers, a promise of power. If she could raise her hand, and swallow it. If she—

  “I’m sure Selene won’t begrudge us our departure,” Asmodeus was saying. He reached out, almost absentmindedly, and caught Madeleine’s hand in a vise. His index finger pressed down, unerringly, on one of her nerves, and her fingers opened in a shock, sending the box clattering to the pavement; and the essence wafting onto the breeze, the wind picking at her palm and fingers with the greed of a
hungry child.

  Asmodeus’s hand went upward, toward her shoulder; and effortlessly slid down the strap, divesting Madeleine of her black leather bag. “I think not. Where you’re going, you’ll have no need of this.”

  * * *

  HE sat on a bed in Selene’s room—Javier had spluttered and hemmed on the way, saying something about privacy and the need to keep this a secret, but Selene had been barely listening.

  Javier closed the door behind her as she entered, leaving them in relative privacy. Emmanuelle was there, too, her eyes two pools of bottomless dark in the oval of her face. “He was wandering the corridors,” she said, slowly, softly; as though everything might break, if she spoke too loud. “Stark naked.” There was not an ounce of humor in the way she spoke: in spite of the incongruity, the hour was not one for laughter or light-spirited comments.

  For a good, long while, Selene did nothing but stare.

  He had the radiance of newborn Fallen: a light so strong it was almost blinding, so oppressive she fought a desire to sink to her knees; and the eyes he trained on her were guileless, holding nothing but the blue of clear skies. “Selene?” he asked, quietly. “I was told you were Head of the House now.”

  Selene swallowed, trying to dispel the knot in her throat—she wasn’t sure if it was relief, or anger, or grief, or a bittersweet mixture of all three. “Glad to see you, Morningstar.”

  TWENTY

  LIKE SEEDS, SCATTERED BY THE WINDS

  EMMANUELLE came in with Javier: the priest looked much older, much more brittle than Selene remembered. “We found the place,” Emmanuelle said. She looked grim; her sleeves slashed in multiple places. “A cellar with a circle—like the one under the cathedral.”

  A circle of power, like the one he had originally traced. Had he always intended to come back, then? Had he . . . engineered his own death and resurrection? “I see,” Selene said. She didn’t look at the curtain that separated her living quarters from her office; afraid that she’d see Morningstar in repose once more, with that serene, otherworldly expression: innocence personified, jarring from someone who had never been innocent, or even young.

  “No, you don’t.” Emmanuelle’s face was hard. “It was full of roots, Selene. I think . . . I think the circle was a crack between life and death; and a crack in the wards, too—an opening big enough for the curse to exploit. The roots must have descended from the first floor and gone into the foundations through the circle.”

  “Morningstar would never do that,” Selene said, startled.

  “No,” Emmanuelle said. “If I understand correctly, he was dead at that point.” She bit her lip. “He had a plan, I’m sure, Selene. I just don’t think it played out as he wished it.”

  No; or he would be back as he had been. But the dead didn’t trace circles, or cast spells. Someone else had done this for him.

  Asmodeus. Her hands clenched, in spite of herself. “Has Hawthorn left?”

  “They’re gone,” Javier said. “With apologies for taking their leave so . . . abruptly.”

  And no wonder, if what she suspected was true. Except, of course, that she had no way to prove it—and what would she do, even if it were proved? Accuse Asmodeus—who would no doubt laugh at her, and tell her that spells of resurrection were a fantasy? In any case—she had bigger problems on her hands.

  “Did you—” Choérine swallowed. “Did you learn any more?”

  Selene shook her head. “He says he doesn’t remember anything. As if he were a newborn Fallen.” And she was inclined to believe him. If it was an act, some game put on for their benefit, it was an impossibly good one.

  Choérine shook her head, once, twice; her dark eyes burning against the porcelain-white tones of her skin. “What’s going to happen, Selene?”

  I don’t know, she wanted to say; she wanted to surrender to the pressure, to bow down and admit that she wasn’t worthy of this mantle, that she never had been. But she stopped herself, with an effort of will. Ignorance or indecisiveness was not what Choérine needed to hear. “We will talk,” she said. “See where the future of the House lies. It’s a good thing he’s back; we could badly use his insights.”

  “Yes, of course.” Choérine smiled, some of the fatigue lifting from her eyes. “I’ll go see to the children.”

  After she was gone, Emmanuelle pulled away from the wall she’d been leaning on, and came to rest her head against Selene’s shoulder. “A good lie,” she said.

  Selene breathed in Emmanuelle’s perfume: musk and amber, heady and strong, a reminder of more careless days. If she closed her eyes, could she believe they would go to bed now; would kiss and make love with the fury and passion of the desperate?

  But, of course, there had never been any careless days. There was war, and internecine fights; Emmanuelle’s addiction, and Selene’s hours of crippling self-doubt. “What else could I have told her?” Selene asked.

  Emmanuelle didn’t move. “It wasn’t a reproach. But if you think you can fool me . . .”

  “I would never dare.” Selene gently disengaged herself from her lover’s embrace, leaving only one hand trailing in Emmanuelle’s hair, running braids between her fingers like pearl necklaces. “But you can’t fool me, either. What didn’t you tell me?”

  Emmanuelle grimaced. “I underplayed it, Selene. It wasn’t easy to search the cellars. Everything was . . . covered in roots. And they weren’t exactly friendly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Try fighting your way through a thornbush. One that hits back. And it’s big now. Entire corridors are starting to look like the underside of a particularly nasty kind of tree, yes.” Emmanuelle picked at her torn sleeves, her face grim and distant. “At this rhythm—”

  “I know,” Selene said. “The entire wing will become unusable.” She didn’t need Emmanuelle to tell her that: the magic of the House was flickering, being squeezed and choked into nothingness in so many places. In too many places.

  All that you hold dear—vanished.

  “That’s assuming it stops at the wing,” Emmanuelle said.

  Which was, on the face of it, rather unlikely. “It said, in the crypt, that it would destroy us all.” Selene stared at her hands. What could she do? She should wake Morningstar, ask him what they should do. Surely, even amnesiac, he would know. . . .

  Pathetic. He had said it himself. She was head of the House now, and it was her responsibility. “Get me Isabelle,” she said to Emmanuelle. “We need to destroy this before it destroys us.”

  * * *

  LATER, much later—or perhaps it wasn’t, but time seemed to have blurred between a series of unbearably sharp tableaux, like teeth, biting over and over into her flesh—walking over the Pont Saint-Michel, watching the omnibus she’d hoped to catch move away from her, the sound of the hooves like thunder in her ears—a brief conversation before a line of black cars, Asmodeus gesturing to her, Elphon prodding and pushing her into the same one as his master—the car pulling away, and the spire of the ruined cathedral dwindling farther and farther away in the distance.

  “You’re much better off with us,” Asmodeus said. He was polishing his glasses with a yellow cloth; his eyes on the window, on the House that was his rival and enemy. “See? Over Notre-Dame?”

  There were . . . clouds, but clouds didn’t gather so dense and dark, didn’t form that almost perfect circle that ringed the two ruined towers like a crown. And clouds didn’t reach down: those were extending tendrils, wrapping themselves around the ruined stone, until the entire cathedral seemed tethered to the Heavens.

  “It’s survived such a long time, hasn’t it? Fire and floods and war. But this, I think, will finally break it.” He sounded thoughtful, not gloating or satisfied, as she would have imagined. His eyes rested on her; in earnest for once, with none of the mockery she was used to. “So silent? Have you nothing to say?”

  M
adeleine, too weary for words, rested her head against the polished, darkened glass of the car window, and watched her safe haven of the past twenty years vanish into the distance, leaving her alone with the master of Hawthorn.

  * * *

  ISABELLE, when she came, didn’t seem entirely happy, or entirely at ease with her new charge as alchemist. “Madeleine knew better than I,” she said.

  Selene shook her head. The last thing she needed was people questioning her decisions. “Madeleine is no longer with us. There are only a few laws in Silverspires; and she broke one.”

  “So you don’t forgive,” Isabelle said, slowly. She was more sharply defined, somehow, the light from her body radiating more strongly than it should have. Was she on essence, too? But there were no signs of any external sources: merely Isabelle as she’d always been, impossibly young and impossibly old at the same time. “That’s good to know.”

  “Do you have objections?” Selene said. She hesitated, for a fraction of a second only, and decided to make this her show of strength. “You can leave if you disagree. I’m sure there are other Houses that are far less vigilant about enforcing their laws.”

  Isabelle looked thoughtful. For a moment Selene thought she’d misjudged, that Isabelle would indeed leave, seek out Hawthorn or Lazarus—but then she nodded. “Your House, your law. I don’t approve, but it’s only fair.”

  Something in her tone was sharper than it should have been—as if, for a brief moment, she’d seriously considered challenging Selene for the leadership of the House. “Tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t,” Isabelle said, serenely. “Madeleine knew they were the Furies. Philippe and Emmanuelle figured out it was Nightingale. I—” She shrugged. “I don’t know much, other than that Morningstar died.” The light around her flickered, throwing distorted shadows on the walls.