The House of Shattered Wings

by Aliette de Bodard

  He was silent, mercifully so—except that she could hear the sound of a blade, negligently scraping on stone—scratch, scratch, scratch, a sound that seemed to grow until it was her entire universe—each movement peeling her as raw as if it had been her skin under the knife, her muscles and veins laid bare to the water’s biting kiss.

  The last thing she wanted was to speak up, but he wouldn’t be satisfied until she did. “What—what do you want?”

  “Why, what has always been mine to take. Did you not know that?”

  The knife was still moving; the stone still scraped raw. Madeleine tried to calm the trembling of her hands, and failed.

  “No,” she said. And, because she had nothing else to lose: “You have Elphon.” She didn’t need to look up to imagine his smile, lighting up his face like a boy’s.

  “You’ve noticed, haven’t you? As loyal to me as if nothing had ever happened.”

  “Something happened.” Madeleine laid her hands in her lap, tried not to think of the twinge of pain in her unhealed leg. “You killed him.”

  “I prefer to think of it as the result of an unfortunate picking of sides,” Asmodeus said. “One cannot rise to the top of a House without bloodshed.”

  “You didn’t have to rise to the top of the House!”

  Silence; and a cold touch against her hand; and the smell of orange blossom, sickeningly close. Raising her gaze, she found him holding the knife against the back of her hand, driven down until he’d broken the skin. “You forget yourself,” Asmodeus said. His hand, wrapped around the knife’s blade, was utterly still; but why would he have trembled? “But never mind. It’s not Elphon I am concerned about.”

  “Me?” Madeleine watched the blood—a vivid red, like Asmodeus’s tie—smear itself against the paleness of her skin. She ought to have cared. She ought to have felt pain, but she was just so tired. “What could you possibly want with me, Asmodeus?”

  “A washed-out alchemist addicted to angel essence?” He smiled at her shock. “Do credit me with a reasonable information network, Madeleine. You belong here. It’s high time you came back to us.”

  As what, a corpse in a coffin? As a blank-minded, obedient fool like Elphon? But she’d known all along—Hawthorn, and Asmodeus, never let go of what was theirs—and what were twenty years to a Fallen, after all? “You might save yourself the trouble,” she said. “Kill me and resurrect me, like Elphon.”

  “I would, if it worked on mortals.” He smiled, again. “Which leaves me with . . . more prosaic tools.” The knife tensed against her hand, but did not draw further blood.

  “You ought to know that won’t work,” Madeleine said. She wished she had the confidence to believe that; and he knew it.

  “You’d be surprised what does work. In the depths of pain and darkness, what kind of spars people can seize and never let go of . . .” Another sharp-toothed smile; and then, to her surprise, the knife withdrew. “But I have other means.”

  Magic? Could he use a spell to render her docile? Not impossible, after all; there were precedents. . . .

  But he cast no spells. He didn’t move. She felt the air between them fill up with magic, with radiance and warmth like a summer storm; a feeling she remembered from her meeting with Morningstar; that sense of vast insignificance and terrible satisfaction at the same time, that transcending joy that someone like him should have noticed someone like her . . .

  No.

  “A truth like a salted knife’s blade . . . Tell me, Madeleine, does your calf still pain you?”

  Madeleine’s hand moved toward her leg; stopped.

  Asmodeus bent forward, the warmth becoming so strong it was almost unbearable. “I know every wound you bear from that night, Madeleine—the knuckle-dusters that shattered your ribs, here and here and here . . .” His hand lingered, quite softly, on her three broken ribs, the ones that hadn’t quite healed, that would never heal. “. . . the knife that slipped into your calf, here and here”—a touch on the scars of her calves, heedless to the trembling in her entire body—to have that obscene parody of love, of friendship that wouldn’t stop—to know he wouldn’t stop, even and especially if she said anything, the effort of holding herself silent and still through her rising nausea—“and the other cuts, the ones on your arms and chest, the ones that healed”—a touch here, a touch here and there; his hand, with fingernails as sharp as a blade, resting on her chest, just above the heart. “You haven’t asked me how I know.”

  She spoke, dragging her voice from the faraway past. “Why would I?”

  “Oh, Madeleine.” Asmodeus shook his head. He didn’t withdraw, or make any effort to move his hand. “It was a dark, lonely night, and the citizens of Paris were keeping their heads down, as they always do when it’s obviously House business.”

  “Someone was there,” Madeleine said. If she moved, if she pulled away from him, would he drive that knife into her chest? And would it matter quite so much? Perhaps that was the cleaner ending, after all, the death she’d craved for all of twenty years. “What does it matter, Asmodeus?” She didn’t say she had no more patience or fortitude for his games, but if she had broadcast the thought, it would have been a scream.

  “Because I was there,” Asmodeus said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You heard me quite correctly. I was there. I carried you, all the way into Silverspires.”

  “That was—that’s a lie,” she said, more sharply than she’d meant to. “Morningstar—”

  Asmodeus’s laughter was darkly amused. “Morningstar was away. Do you really think he came halfway across the city to find you dying on the cobblestones? Why? Because he smiled to you once, gave you the charm treatment? He was like that with everyone. He wouldn’t have known you two seconds after his back was turned.”

  He had been kind to her; had offered her the asylum of the House—no, no, that wasn’t it—memory, merciless, conjured the scene again; Morningstar’s distant, distracted courtesy.

  “This is the first and greatest of Houses, Lady Madeleine. The safest place in Paris.”

  A boast, nothing more: as Asmodeus had said, a grandiloquent statement of pride in himself, in his House.

  No. No. That couldn’t be.

  She’d heard—footsteps—she’d felt—the warmth of magic—hands, taking her, the grunt as her body shifted and he bore her full weight—and the world spinning and fading into darkness. “No,” she said. “No.” That’s a lie, she wanted to say, but what reason would he have for lying?

  “You were in Hawthorn,” she said.

  Asmodeus still hadn’t moved. His eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses were unreadable. “You remember nothing, do you? It was almost dawn when I found you, Madeleine. It was over by then, in Hawthorn; had been, for a long time. I was head of the House.” He said it quietly, calmly, with no inflection to his voice; not even pride.

  “Why would you—”

  “I had business. In Silverspires. Did you never wonder why you had lost the link to Hawthorn?”

  “I—” Madeleine took in a deep, trembling breath. “Uphir died—”

  “Oh, Madeleine. Do you think it’s that easy to break a link to a House? I broke it—before I dropped you off.”

  “I don’t understand,” Madeleine said again. Stupidly, like a lost child. “Why would you—” Why would you carry me to Silverspires? Why would you let me live?

  His smile was wide, dazzling. “Call it . . . a whim. Or a loan, for safekeeping, while I purged the House of all remnants of Uphir’s days. But all loans are called, in time. All whims run their course.”

  He withdrew, but the feel of his hand on her chest remained, sharp and wounding and God, oh God . . .

  She was going to be sick, this time: the cough was welling up in her lungs; and she was on her knees in the damp grass, not sure if she was vomiting or coughing—breathing hard whe
n she was done, nauseated and drained and utterly unable to move. “Ah yes. The little matter of the angel essence. We’ll have to do something about that. Can’t have you addicted this badly.”

  “Why—” Madeleine whispered. He shouldn’t have heard her, but of course he did. Of course he always did.

  “To remind you,” Asmodeus said. “That you owe nothing to Silverspires, or to Morningstar. Your place is here, Madeleine. It’s high time you accepted it.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  FOR THE GOOD OF THE HOUSE

  SELENE sat in her office, staring at the wall. In her mind, low-key yet inescapable, the melody of the House’s destruction played itself through, from its insignificant beginnings to where they stood now, beleaguered and besieged.

  They had lost the East Wing, and the North Wing; and in the Hôtel-Dieu Aragon’s office was a mass of impassable roots. On the upper floors, branches and leaves were sprouting, a verdant mass that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a tropical country. In the buildings that remained, people were jammed together, three or more to rooms that hadn’t seen use in decades or centuries: the children sleeping on unrolled mats on the floors of sitting rooms, the corridors a mass of refugees, the ballrooms hastily rearranged to accommodate makeshift tents.

  Aragon had muttered something about working conditions, and had left. He might be back; or he might not: after all, he wasn’t a dependent of the House, merely doing them a favor in the name of some long-forgotten debt to Morningstar.

  Emmanuelle came in; and Isabelle, and Javier: all of them looking as though they had not managed a night’s sleep. They probably hadn’t.

  “Morningstar?” she asked.

  Javier shrugged. “He said he had something to do, and that he would come by later.”

  Selene nodded. She wasn’t sure she could look Morningstar in the eye these days—because she’d lost him, because she was losing his House; because, if she’d had any thoughts to spare, she would have wept, for how far he had diminished from the Fallen she had known.

  There were whispers, of what Morningstar’s return meant; but no time to prevent their spreading, or to coach people into an acceptance not tinged with fear. She would have to see to it later, if there was a later. If there was a House by then.

  How could this have happened? Weeks before, they’d been a proud House: teetering, like all other Houses, on the edge of an abyss opened by the war, but it was nothing that should have worried them. And yet. And yet . . .

  “Tell me,” she said to Emmanuelle.

  Emmanuelle shook her head. “I don’t have much else to report. You know about the North Wing.”

  “All too well,” Selene said, wryly. “And the Hôtel-Dieu. And the parvis?”

  “That’s still free of roots,” Javier said, pale and with the taut features of the sleepless. “They just might not like sunlight.”

  They might as well have had faith and believed that God and His angels would swoop down and save them. Selene bit her lips to prevent the words from escaping them. They did not need, or deserve, her sarcasm.

  “I don’t have any artifacts left,” Isabelle said, in the silence.

  “I’ll have every Fallen drop by the laboratory, later.”

  Isabelle nodded, but she didn’t look happy. Probably worried raw, like all of them: she was the closest thing to an alchemist the House had, and woefully untrained, with one dead predecessor and one banished one.

  “You’re doing great work,” Selene said, and it wasn’t a lie. Isabelle was reckless, and ill inclined to take advice, but she seemed to have come into her powers at last—they wouldn’t have made it this far without her.

  A knock at the door heralded the arrival of Morningstar: he came holding a wrapped package that was twice as large as him, and half as tall again. “What is that?” Selene asked, and then Morningstar let fall the cloth that served as a wrapper, and she forgot she had ever asked.

  Once, the head of House Silverspires had had wings, and a sword. Both had been lost when he vanished—gone with him, Selene had assumed—what would have been the point of looking for them, when only he had known how to wield them?

  Beside her, Emmanuelle drew a sharp, wounding breath. “I didn’t think—” she said, softly, slowly.

  The wings were huge, and unadorned: they were not a toy or an accessory, but the rawest embodiment of a weapon; their serrated edges catching the light like the blades of scimitars: it was all too easy to imagine the wearer lunging, shoulder extended forward; and the sound of flesh tearing in the wake of a wing’s passage.

  Morningstar laid them on the floor, gently, keeping only the matching bladed gauntlets in his hands. They looked like the spines of a fish, except that was a faintly ridiculous comparison, and there was nothing faint or ridiculous about those, either. Everything about them seemed to hunger for blood. “I remembered,” he said. “I hid them once. . . .” He frowned; and for a bare moment he looked like his old self again, tall and fair and terrible to behold; and so achingly familiar Selene’s world blurred around her. “Buried them in the earth for safekeeping, so that no one would lay claim to what was mine.” And then the moment was gone, and he was just a newly born Fallen, bewildered and lost—and Selene blinked back her tears. It was a hard thing, to stand by the side of the dead.

  “And the sword?” Emmanuelle asked, slowly, softly.

  “The sword wasn’t there,” Morningstar said. He frowned, again. “It doesn’t matter.”

  It did matter, because they would need to find it eventually, to know if it was merely Morningstar not remembering what he’d done with it, or someone else moving it; but right now, they didn’t have the time. . . .

  “These will cut through anything, if properly used,” Morningstar said.

  Properly used. With muscles that only a Fallen could have: muscles, unused in years or decades or centuries, that still remembered what it meant to fly. “You remember?” Selene asked, not daring to hope.

  “Some,” Morningstar said, curtly. Beside him, Isabelle was watching the wings, fascinated; reaching out to touch them, and withdrawing as if their mere sharpness had drawn blood. “I’m not sure it will be enough.”

  “It won’t be,” Emmanuelle said, gently. She pushed aside a mahogany chair to kneel by the wings; like Isabelle before her, she ran a finger on the serrated edges, heedless of the risk—Selene fought the urge to snatch her away, before she cut herself too deeply for mending. “Don’t you remember, Selene? They were infused with magic, once.”

  Oh yes. Like Morningstar, they had radiated the terrible warmth of raw power: what else could they have done, bathed day after day in his presence?

  “It’s all gone,” Emmanuelle said.

  “Then we’ll give breath, and whatever else is needed,” Selene said. “Isabelle—”

  “I can’t!” Isabelle’s eyes were wide; her words halfway between a protest and a disappointed cry. “I’m no alchemist.”

  God, the last thing they needed was her falling to pieces. Selene said, gently, “You were my choice, and the House’s choice. You have the skills.”

  “I don’t. We all know I don’t. It was meant to be Oris, except that he died, and that left only me. There was no time, Selene.” It wasn’t despair, after all; merely a bald statement of fact. “Madeleine could—”

  “Madeleine is no longer part of this House,” Selene said, more sharply than she’d intended to. She had no desire to be reminded of her failure—she probably wouldn’t have been able to stop Madeleine’s addiction, but she could have found out earlier. She could have avoided Claire using it against her, at a time when the House was already in disarray. Her fault. “She’s probably part of Hawthorn again, by now, if Choérine is right.” Certainly she had left at the same time as the Hawthorn delegation, and in the company of Asmodeus and his henchmen.

  “I doubt by choice,” Emmanuelle said dryly.r />
  Selene didn’t say anything. Whether it was by choice or not, there was nothing she could do for Madeleine. The House was certainly not in a position to go making demands of anyone. And she had abdicated responsibility for Madeleine. She had to remember that. If she did not stand by her decisions, who would? “Whatever the case,” she said. “We can discuss this when we survive. If we survive. Isabelle, I’m sorry. I know you deserved more time. I know you didn’t have it, but right now you’re my only choice, and our only hope.”

  Isabelle said nothing. She nodded at last, but didn’t sound remotely happy. “I’ll try,” she said. “Will that do?”

  As long as she didn’t do anything rash. Selene made a mental note to ask Emmanuelle or Javier to keep an eye on her. “As to the rest—” She took a deep, deep breath, not looking at Morningstar. One had to recognize when one was beaten, and plan accordingly. “I’m sorry it has come to this, but we will have to evacuate the North Wing as well, and regroup around here.”

  Here. Her office. Her living quarters. The center of the House; and, it seemed, the place where they would make their last-ditch attempt to defeat Nightingale’s curse.

  * * *

  PHILIPPE’S return to the gang had been anticlimactic. Bloody Jeanne had smiled, and hugged him; though perfunctorily, with an expression that suggested she would stick him in the ribs if it served her purposes. Baptiste and Alex had been more circumspect, but everyone had seemed almost happy to have him back. It ought to have touched him; or to make him feel wary, or something—anything, but it didn’t.

  He sat down in the little courtyard at the back of the shop, watching the flowers on the arbor, as if, with enough attention, he could still time enough to watch them grow: he had done this once, in another lifetime, in another land; but this felt so far behind him it might as well be dead.

  Aragon had been right: for him, there would be no return to Annam. That dream was gone, nipped in the bud before it could ever blossom; crushed in the egg before it could stretch legs or wings.