The House of Binding Thorns Read online

  ALSO BY ALIETTE DE BODARD

  The House of Shattered Wings

  ACE

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Aliette de Bodard

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bodard, Aliette de, author.

  Title: The house of binding thorns: a Dominion of the Fallen novel/Aliette de Bodard.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Ace, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016046109 (print) | LCCN 2016054795 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780451477392 (hardback) | ISBN 9780698409934 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Magic—Fiction. | Angels—Fiction. | Paris (France)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION/Fantasy/General. | FICTION/Fantasy/Historical. | FICTION/Fantasy/Epic. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6102.O33 H66 2017 (print) | LCC PR6102.O33 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016046109

  First Edition: April 2017

  Jacket illustration by Nekro

  Jacket design by Adam Auerbach

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of

  the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  To my son the Librarian,

  for waiting until this book was done before deciding to come into the world

  Contents

  Also by Aliette de Bodard

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Acknowledgments

  Further Reading

  About the Author

  ONE

  Death over Fear

  IN the House of Hawthorn, all the days blurred and merged into one another, like teardrops sliding down a pane of glass. Madeleine couldn’t tell when she’d last slept, when she’d last eaten—though everything tasted of ashes and grit, as if the debris from the streets had been mixed with the fine food served on porcelain plates—couldn’t tell when she had last woken, tossing and turning and screaming, reaching for a safety that wasn’t there anymore.

  And she couldn’t tell, exactly, when she had last had angel essence, but she didn’t need to. It was an emptiness within her, a feeling that someone had torn out a chunk of her heart and hadn’t bothered to kill her afterward. It was . . . the presence in her mind like a tree of thorns, the inescapable knowledge that he was with her no matter what she did—that he had found her, dragged her there, that he would never let her go.

  Asmodeus.

  Madeleine stared at her hands, and found them shaking.

  “You have to do better,” Iaris said. Her smooth, ageless face was creased in a frown; the white of her doctor’s coat in sharp contrast to the olive tones of her skin.

  The door was, as always, locked, the windows barred, with only a pale, sickly light coming through. At least this time Madeleine wasn’t strapped in the chair, but Iaris would do it again if she thought it was useful.

  Everything seemed unbearably real, unbearably sharp: the red flowers on the wallpaper, the embroidered trees and birds on the bedcover, and the faint smell wafting from Iaris, bergamot and orange blossom and some exotic wood.

  His scent.

  Her hands were shaking again.

  In front of Iaris, on the mahogany desk that stood between them, was a container filled with a fine light-colored dust: angel essence. Madeleine had hardly paid attention to it during the first part of the interview, but now she could barely see anything else—could feel the power, trapped and roiling in that small space—could almost taste it, the warmth of a storm sliding into her belly, the magic that would fill her to bursting, that would make her feel safe again. . . .

  “Lord Asmodeus retrieved you from House Silverspires,” Iaris was saying. “Twice.” Her frown was disapproving again. “It wasn’t so you could waste your life away.”

  Madeleine tried to speak, found only ashes on her tongue. She tried again, dragged words from some unbearably faraway place. “I didn’t ask to come with him.”

  Asmodeus had linked Madeleine back to the House—without her consent, of course; he’d never stop for anything so trivial as that. He’d taken her back, made her his possession again, and imprisoned her here, to mold her to his wishes. To make her his tool, his weapon, and there was no place in his grand plans for an addiction to essence.

  Iaris’s face didn’t move. “What you want is irrelevant. You’re here. You’re a dependent of Hawthorn. Not an angel essence junkie.” She was human; Madeleine was sure. In spite of her name, in spite of the smooth skin of her face and hands: she didn’t have the light, effortless way of moving of Fallen, their innate elegance, sliding through the fabric of the world like sharpened blades. But somewhere in her youth, she’d been too close to a Fallen, too long, and some of their agelessness had rubbed off on her, creating that odd, unsettling effect.

  Madeleine didn’t remember Iaris. But then, she’d paid so little attention to other people before she’d run away from the House.

  “You will clean up,” Iaris said. “Otherwise you’re so much useless chaff, Madeleine. And no one in this House has time for the useless.”

  “I know,” she said. She could imagine they did not, that Asmodeus had little time for anyone who did not do as he wished. She didn’t need the threat, didn’t need to feel the fear again: the threat-laden conversation they’d had shortly after he’d dragged her back, the touch of his hand on the scars of her calves, the knife resting, oddly still, against the skin of the back of her hand, drawing just enough blood. . . .

  “Now, there is no substitute for angel essence,” Iaris was saying. “We’ve weaned you off the drug. Whether you get strong again, whether you eat, whether you sleep, whether you relapse, is all up to you.”

  Madeleine wanted to relapse. She wanted, so badly, to reac
h out for the container with the essence—to lose herself in it, to forget where she was, why she was there. And yes, it would gnaw away at her lungs again, would kill her centimeter by slow centimeter, fill her breath with blood, but it was still better than whatever awaited her inside the House. Still better than belonging to Asmodeus.

  It took all she had to hold herself still. Because they would never give her that container. Because it was a test, as everything else had been; something Iaris could write in her report, a little chart of how well behaved Madeleine was, day after day. Of how close she was to being normal, functional, if either of those words still had a definition that made sense.

  “You have to learn,” Iaris said, softly, “what makes you reach for essence. You have to recognize what kindles your need.”

  “I don’t need to learn,” Madeleine said, wearily. “I know.”

  Iaris raised an eyebrow. At last, she put down the paper she was holding, and looked at Madeleine as if seeing her for the first time. “Let’s say you do know. Most addicts don’t. They just want their next fix, the next rush of power, caring little what it costs. But, assuming you do, Madeleine, knowing is not enough.”

  Madeleine—aware, all the while, of the link to the House in the back of her mind, of Asmodeus’s presence chafing against the least of her thoughts—said, softly, “I don’t want to be cured.”

  “You would prefer to kill yourself slowly?”

  She’d wanted to die. She wanted to say this, but the words wouldn’t leave her throat. A death of her own choosing; a slow slide into oblivion, to a place where fear, and where old memories, didn’t matter.

  Iaris said, almost gently, “You’re the House’s now. And things have changed in the past twenty years.”

  They had. Another head of House, the purges almost a distant memory; the floors pristine waxed parquet, every trace of blood expunged, all the dead forgotten. But not Elphon.

  She didn’t need to close her eyes to hear his screams; to see, again, the spray of blood as the swords slid home into his chest, and to see him again, walking behind Asmodeus as if nothing had happened. As if he had not died, and risen again through a magic Madeleine couldn’t claim to understand.

  “You’re safe here,” Iaris’s voice said, floating to her out of the darkness. “The House takes care of its own, Madeleine.”

  Iaris didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand. She hadn’t stood in the drawing room watching Frédéric and Zoé and Elphon and all the other gardeners be cut down. She wasn’t the one who had crawled through the streets of Paris, the cobblestones slick with her own blood, every movement awakening fresh pain in her calves, in her broken ribs, every agonizing gesture underlined with the same fear that he would find her, that his thugs would finish what they had started.

  Twenty years. She’d escaped, had gained twenty years of freedom away from Hawthorn, but twenty years were as nothing to a Fallen. Of course Asmodeus had come for her, taken her back to the House.

  “You’re safe here.”

  She wasn’t. She had never been. Here was everything she had been running away from, and she was back again, locked in a room and awaiting the pleasure of the Fallen who had made her life a living hell. There was no safety anywhere.

  The smell of angel essence was unbearable now; the familiar promise of power. She reached for it without realizing she did so, feeling the warmth of it in her hand, the weight of the container. It didn’t make any false promises, didn’t tell any lies, would merely slide into her lungs with the ease of long habit, and the power of Fallen magic would fill her from end to end, banishing the darkness—

  “Madeleine!”

  Hands, trying to pry hers from the essence. She batted them away, struggled to raise the container to her mouth all the same. A trickle of power like honey down her throat—a sense of rising relief as it took hold—and then pain flaring up in her fingers and her palm, and she was on her knees, nursing a hand and wrist that felt torn apart, the warmth in her belly receding, ebbing away to leave only the sharp, sickening presence of the House in her mind.

  She was hauled to her feet, roughly. Iaris stood, holding the container, angry.

  “I told him this was a waste of time,” Iaris said. She clenched her hand, grimaced as if something hurt. Had Madeleine harmed her? She couldn’t remember what had happened in the tussle for the essence. “Once a junkie, always a junkie. No one has ever shaken an essence addiction.”

  Madeleine hung, limp, between the orderlies that held her. She tried to remember what it had felt like, to be free of fear, to soar, even for the briefest of moments. But everything smelled of citruses and bergamot, and all she could feel was the nausea, rising to swallow her whole, and there was nothing to bring up but bile, its taste drowning the distant fire of angel essence.

  “This experiment is terminated,” Iaris said, with grim satisfaction. “He’ll have to find some other use for you.”

  No. She knew, all too well, what only other use Asmodeus could have for her; what only other use there was, for the weak, for the useless, the disobedient. No no no. She tried to speak, to get words out from the emptiness in her. But nothing came.

  * * *

  THEY strapped her to the bed before they left, tightening everything so much she could hardly breathe. Iaris’s petty satisfaction, for it wasn’t as if the room, with its furniture bolted to the floor, held anything that Madeleine could have used to hurt herself.

  As Madeleine lay staring at the ceiling, braced against the sound of footsteps in the corridor, closing her eyes and trying not to think what might happen now, everything seemed to blur and recede into some faraway land. The flowers on the wallpaper became featureless shapes, the dim light from the window darkened into night, and the ghosts of the past rose to watch her with their empty eyes.

  The gardeners: Elphon, with his hands covering the wound in his chest; Frédéric and Pierrette, their homespun shirts drenched with blood. Oris, her shy apprentice in Silverspires, with his arms marred by snakebites.

  And the last one, who had not belonged to Hawthorn, who would never belong there.

  Isabelle.

  On the Fallen’s chest were the two bloody holes that had killed her, but her eyes were the same—that brittle innocence that had gone too soon, that bright and feverish gaze of one not meant for this world.

  Madeleine. Her voice was the keening of the wind, and she swayed and faded, as if a mere breath would have been enough to dispel her.

  She didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t need to. She’d come back so that Madeleine could live, could save House Silverspires; to give her hope, a thing so small and so fragile it was doomed to be crushed.

  Madeleine.

  “I can’t,” Madeleine whispered to the emptiness of the room, and turned her face away from the blurred vision, praying to a God she only distantly believed in to forget her, too.

  * * *

  SHE must have slept—must have slid, unaware, into the yawning darkness—but she couldn’t tell when the ghosts became dreams, or if they had been real at all. When she woke up, struggling to take deep breaths, the straps digging into her skin, her arms and legs deadened, day had crept into the room again, and it was empty.

  Faint birdsong came from outside: Hawthorn’s famed gardens, almost intact despite the war that had devastated Paris. The quiet gurgle of a fountain in the background—a statement of power that, in an age of polluted rivers and corrosive air, the House could afford to waste running water on an ornament—and, farther out, the giggles of children racing after each other in another, alien world.

  Were children truly happy, in the House? Asmodeus was Fallen: he would never father anything on anyone, would never care for anything or anyone. She’d been happy as a child; but that had been in Uphir’s time; before the coup that had raised Asmodeus to be head of House. Before the fear.

  There was
no warning, no footsteps or creaking of the waxed parquet. But the door opened.

  She knew it was him before she saw him, when the smell of bergamot and orange blossom wafted into the room. She would have fled, if she could do more than futilely struggle against the tightened straps.

  He was light on his feet. She heard his footsteps only when he neared the bed—a brief touch that made her want to scream, and the straps were undone, one by one—her lungs burning as they filled up with the air they’d been denied. She pulled herself up, trying to massage some feeling into arms and legs that had long gone dead, and he sat on the side of the four-poster bed, close enough to touch.

  “Madeleine.” He smiled, showing the sharp teeth of predators. “Take your time.”

  His face was smooth, ageless like that of all Fallen, his gray eyes shining with magic, his movements effortlessly graceful. He had square horn-rimmed glasses, his particular affectation: like all former angels, he had perfect eyesight. His hands were fine, elegant, with the long fingers of a pianist, though he played no instrument beyond the ecstasy and pain of others.

  “Asmodeus.” His name tasted like ashes in Madeleine’s mouth. And, because in spite of everything, she still clung to what life she had, she added: “My lord.”

  “Respect? How charmingly adequate.” He smiled again, as if he knew exactly how respectful she was. And why would he not? She’d never been a good liar. “Iaris came to see me. She was . . . angry.”

  Madeleine didn’t dare speak.

  “Mostly because you hurt her pride, I suspect,” Asmodeus said. He patted the bed by his side, as if he expected her to sit there, but she didn’t move, and he didn’t make any comment. “And because—let’s be honest—she never believed you would come through.”

  “And you did?” She couldn’t hold back the words. They were unwise, especially said to someone used to unthinking obedience.

  “Mortals can be surprising, more so than Fallen. You strive against so much in your brief lifetimes. I try not to make hasty judgments.”