The House of Binding Thorns Read online

  The time for subtlety was gone then.

  He ran. He took corridors in a blur of movement, two, three steps at a time, looking up merely to make sure he didn’t slam into a wall, trying to make as little noise as possible, but he couldn’t be fast or silent enough—with luck he might have turned enough corridors that Asmodeus wouldn’t find him—he might have put enough distance between him and the magic, and found safety among others. . . .

  Familiar doors around him now: the sounds of bells and alarm clocks, and moans and curses from people unwilling to get up. The wainscoting had given way to green wallpaper with the imprint of flowers, and the smell was no longer citruses or bergamot, but soap and leather, and the faint, sweet one of the coffee éclairs he and the others had shared around a tarot game, underlain with the sharp, familiar scent of mildew. He was back in the part of the House that he knew, where he had his rooms.

  And doors were opening, farther away—Slow down. He had to slow down, lest he attract attention. If he could just breathe normally, make it not so blindingly obvious that he had just been running. If he could find again the carelessness with which he had wandered the House . . .

  “Thuan? What are you doing up at this hour?”

  His heart lurched within his chest, and then he realized it was only Nadine, accompanied by Leila, the other student she tutored. “Hello, Nadine. Couldn’t sleep.”

  Nadine snorted. “That’d be a first. You’re the world’s worst morning person.”

  Second Aunt was up at dawn, or before. Thuan had never mastered that skill: whenever he attended to her, he would always find her ensconced with a pile of annotated state papers, and she would pointedly refrain from saying anything about his being hours late. He wasn’t sure that really made it better. “I can get up early if I want to.”

  Leila hid a smile. “You were late for exams, Thuan. If they disqualified students for that—”

  “Shut up,” Thuan said, mock-punching her in the shoulder. “I passed, anyway.” Not that it mattered much.

  “Luck.”

  “Maybe. What are you doing up? I’ll grant that you might be better than me”—he exaggerated the grimace—“but it’s still very early.”

  Nadine made a face. “Infirmary duty, remember? You’re not a real nurse, so you’re excused, but we need someone there at all times.”

  “Oh.” Thuan breathed in, out, trying to calm himself. It felt almost surreal to be speaking to Nadine, to reengage with the small concerns of everyday life inside the House. It should have made his experience with the magic feel unreal, too, but nothing would make that less vivid or nightmarish.

  Nadine’s eyes focused on him. “Are you all right, Thuan? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Restless spirits, for all their vindictiveness, would have been almost a relief in comparison. “I thought—” He took a deep, shaking breath. “I thought I heard—” He didn’t have to try very hard to convey fear and surprise, and just a little hint of the stomach-churning dread he felt. “It’s nothing. I’ll be fine, when I’ve had time to breathe.” Neither of them looked very convinced. “Did you have breakfast yet?”

  Leila shrugged. “We’re just going to grab something from the kitchen. Coming?”

  He definitely could use something to steady his stomach. He didn’t, daren’t turn around to see if anyone was following him, if anyone had seen where he’d come from. In this House, he wouldn’t have any warnings of what Asmodeus did or didn’t know until guards showed up to drag him from his bed to the cells. There was no point in worrying about it.

  That would have been the rational approach. Unfortunately, he was feeling less and less rational by the minute.

  In the small, dingy kitchen for their floor, Nadine grabbed a chunk of bread from the assortment of food on the table and spread it with a thick layer of jam. Leila found some dried tea leaves, old and moldy, the kind Thuan wouldn’t have drunk for all the jade in Annam, and set some water boiling, whistling a slow, rhythmic melody between her teeth. Thuan found a few scraps of dried ham, and ate these with his piece of bread. He’d never had much of a sweet tooth, and most definitely not in the morning. The salty, pungent meat slid into his stomach, where, as expected, it did absolutely nothing to quell the seething nausea and fear.

  “This is horrible,” Leila said, grimacing, as she stared into the teapot. “Are you sure we should be brewing this?”

  “The tea?” Nadine shook her head. “Be thankful for what you have.” She stared at the box of tea leaves. “No. You’re right. I wouldn’t drink this even if you paid me.”

  “It’s prestigious,” Leila said, deadpan. “A symbol of riches, and of all Hawthorn has that others don’t.”

  Thuan suppressed a snort. The dragon kingdom had tea the color of cut grass, with a delicate taste that lingered on the palate. “Go ahead, poison yourself in the name of prestige.”

  “Enough.” Nadine emptied the kettle into the sink. “No one is getting poisoned. For starters, the infirmary is full and I don’t need any more patients.”

  Leila put a hand over her mouth, but her eyes were twinkling. “Anyone who drinks this tea is going to get a fungal infection from whatever gives it this horrible smell. Fungi are rather hard to deal with, too. Extra work.”

  “Leila! Anyway, you’re not due in the infirmary this morning, Thuan,” Nadine said. “As a helper, I mean.”

  “No,” Thuan said. “I thought I’d wander around a bit.” He put the ham back on the table. He really couldn’t stomach the thought of more. “I’ll be seeing you later?”

  “For sure,” Nadine said.

  He could feel her gaze, and Leila’s, following him all the way out of the kitchen. He was reasonably sure they had no suspicions, but also reasonably sure they were now worried about him. It was touching, but hardly what he needed.

  One thing at a time. He needed to see Sare first.

  * * *

  THUAN found Sare in her usual spot in the laboratory: standing in the middle of the cavernous room, smelling faintly of various chemicals, with the familiar, faint odor of mildew that underlay everything in Hawthorn. She wore a white coat over her clothes and was utterly focused on the container on the large metal table. A couple of her assistants were busy among the shelves; and a half-dismembered Fallen body lay on one of the dissection tables, while other assistants busied themselves filling containers with body parts, saving what they could of the angel magic before it left the corpse altogether.

  Sare looked up when he entered, round face shifting from a frown to a hint of a smile. “Thuan. How are you doing?”

  He had an uneasy rapport with Sare. The Fallen was the one who had “found” him on the streets: to him, she had been a means of entry into the House, but he owed her a debt he could have done without. She insisted on mothering him: another thing he could have done without, as he was having more and more trouble sticking to the deception.

  Duty to Second Aunt—who was the ruler of the kingdom, and his flesh and blood—outweighed any considerations of filial duty. But still . . . “I’m doing fine,” he said.

  “Not stellar at your courses, I hear.”

  Mostly because he had little motivation. “Yeah, I guess. I try my best.”

  “Do you?”

  “I need to know,” Thuan said. He put just the right amount of worried earnestness in his voice. “What happens if I’m not chosen, at the end of the year?”

  “To be a dependent?” Sare set the container she was looking at aside, and looked him in the eye. “Oh, Thuan. Don’t tell me you’re having sleepless nights over this.”

  She sounded genuinely concerned, and she probably was. “No one taken by the Houses ever comes out,” he said, stubbornly, as though he already suspected the answer to his question. “And the others have been talking. About the cells, and the cages . . .” He let his voice trail off, and he didn’
t have to fake the fear. As part of the mission briefing, he’d been shown, extensively, House Hawthorn’s cells, and what Asmodeus did to those he thought disloyal to him. As a warning to tread carefully, or as a reminder he shouldn’t get too attached to House Hawthorn, he wasn’t sure.

  Sare’s face twisted. “Thuan. That’s for traitors. You can’t possibly think—” And then she stopped, and composed herself, visibly upset by his invented worries.

  He felt terrible.

  It’s for the kingdom. For all the river people dying of essence addiction, the ones who would die unless he could confirm the source of the traffic. The alchemists of the kingdom weren’t House ones: they didn’t preserve the magic of angels, but rather analyzed and dissected it, trying to make sense of where everything fit in. They had looked at what found its way to them, and confirmed that all the new and deadly essence was distilled in the same place.

  This place. It had to be. Essence weakened them, and being weak made them vulnerable to Hawthorn’s predation: the House’s unreasonable demands, and ancestors knew what other plans Asmodeus had for them, in the long run. It certainly wasn’t an alliance of equals that they wanted.

  They would never have dealt with Hawthorn in ordinary circumstances. But the kingdom was weak, the Houses brasher and brasher. An alliance was their only chance at survival, and no one was under any illusion Hawthorn’s offers were going to be worse than any other House’s.

  At length, Sare spoke. “You were taught a rule, in class. Or will be taught—I don’t know what they say when. If you do right by the House, the House will do right by you. You may not be a dependent, but you’re still working for us. Or will be, one day. If you’re not chosen?” She shrugged. “Hundreds of people here aren’t dependents. Before the war, they’d have come into the House every day. Now there are rather fewer day laborers, because the House needs to keep them safe. Most people are given a room here, but without the privileges that come with dependency.”

  “So I’d stay here?” A faint hint of hope, but not too much: he was meant to still be suspicious of what they were offering him.

  “With a menial job. But better that than the streets?” Sare said.

  Thuan nodded. He didn’t need to fake that, either. He’d spent only one night on the streets, and he had no desire to relive any of it.

  “Was that all that was troubling you?” Sare asked.

  Not by a long shot, but it was a good excuse for him to barge into the laboratory at a ridiculously early hour. “I . . . guess,” Thuan said. Again, not too much enthusiasm. Just the right amount. And he was going to feel better about all the lies he was telling her. Any moment now. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Sare glanced at the dissection table. “Don’t forget to trim the nails,” she said, sharply. And then, turning back toward him, “Sorry. Recent death. Father Arsène has finished with the last rites, which means we can finally start.”

  Thuan glanced at the walls, where icons of the Virgin Mary and the saints hung between the heavy wooden cupboards. Fallen tended to be arch-cynical, like Asmodeus (and from all stories his lover Samariel), or in earnest, like Sare, genuinely believing in God and trying to discern what was right to do on earth. How she reconciled this with the Houseless, or what was happening in the kingdom, he didn’t know.

  “Unexpected death?” Thuan asked, fascinated in spite of himself. The face, what little he could see of it, pale and with long, fair hair that was almost white, was utterly unfamiliar.

  “Difficult assignment involving House Harrier,” Sare said. “We can’t prove anything, or else Lord Asmodeus would already be demanding reparations, but Harrier probably killed her, too.”

  Thuan grimaced. “You know, from the outside, we always think things are better inside the Houses. Not that you’re at each other’s throats like gangs fighting for territory.” Or like factions of scholars in the kingdom, seating and unseating officials with memorials and gossip.

  “If you believed that, you’re a fool,” Sare said. “A House is merely a bigger gang. We don’t have moral superiority, though some do make that claim. We’re merely more powerful, which gives us a duty toward the weak.”

  “Can I—” Thuan swallowed. “Can I take a look?” The mere thought of getting closer to that corpse—the corpse they were busy desecrating, mutilating with scarcely a second thought—was a knife’s blade in his mind. But it was the conversation opener he needed. “I’ve never seen one up close.”

  “Fallen die outside Houses,” Sare said, mildly, not disbelieving, not exactly.

  “You have to be high up in the hierarchy to see a corpse before they cart it away,” Thuan said. “Or really lucky.” Accurate, if not applicable to him. Rather, no Fallen had ever died within the boundaries of the kingdom, and Thuan hadn’t left the kingdom in decades.

  “Feel free,” Sare said. “It’s not like anyone is going to protest.” She sighed. “And we really could have done without the extra work.” She went back to her container.

  Close up, the corpse was less gruesome than he’d feared. It was hard to tell how she’d died, or even that she’d been Fallen. Her innards were opened up like a flower, her lungs already scooped out from between snapped-off ribs, and her diaphragm was being gently disengaged by one of the assistants. Thuan exhaled, carefully. He didn’t have much in his stomach and would rather it remained there.

  He kept his eyes open, but repeated, silently, the mantras the monks had taught him, back in the kingdom: the pathways to meditating, to freeing his mind and climbing higher on the hierarchy of awakened beings. It was hard, with the smell of raw meat around him, and that elusive sense of the magic brushing against him, as frail as a butterfly’s wing, and growing fainter with every passing moment.

  He waited, patiently, for the oldest of the assistants to snap off one of the ribs, and carry the fragile bones to the alembics in the corner of the laboratory. The smell here was acrid, fiery and roiling, the air as tight as before a storm. Then he settled down to watch the distillation, again very ostensibly. Sare glanced at him, but she appeared satisfied that all he was displaying was natural curiosity at the process.

  What he was truly interested in happened some time after that, when the assistant came back to collect the gray dust that had collected at the bottom of the second container. He carefully poured it into a small box, and walked off with it toward one of the closed cupboards. Thuan followed, keeping his face smooth; mildly interested, but not desperate.

  It was hard.

  Because this was likely his only chance to see where they kept the essence, his only stab at getting some of it so he could compare it with the one in the kingdom. If he messed this up . . .

  No, don’t think about this. He couldn’t afford to. He needed to be utterly focused, as he had been for his official examination, letting the words of the classics pour through him onto the page—his world reduced to the paper and the painting brush, and the soft grinding sound of the ink stick against stone.

  The assistant reached for a box on a shelf, and opened it. Thuan caught only a glimpse of it, but it appeared mostly empty. Then he poured the dust into it, carefully, as if it were going to bite him, and left. Thuan let out a breath he was hardly aware of holding.

  The shelf was inside a cupboard, which would normally be sealed, but because they were busy filling it with all sorts of magical containers, no one bothered to properly close it after they were done. What was the point, when they knew they’d be back in a moment?

  On the shelf with the angel essence were two containers: one was the almost empty one Thuan had seen. The other was different: instead of being a small case, just big enough to hold a ring or a pendant, it was much larger; and it was made of wood instead of leather, with an intricate set of carvings that had seen better days. Most of them had been cracked, or outright torn off. The only distinguishing feature was a stylized star, not at all like
the ones he had seen on Asmodeus’s bedroom doors, but an elaborate set of unfamiliar engraved lines. It was closed, and Thuan couldn’t see any way to open it without attracting attention.

  Time for the backup plan.

  “You don’t seem to have much essence,” he said, aloud. He’d known that, already: vast amounts were being moved by House Hawthorn, but what they were funneled into was a mystery.

  Sare looked up, suspicious, but met only Thuan’s bored, disinterested stare. “What, do you want to sell it on the black market?” The sarcasm hardly had any bite to it. “We’ve had an essence addict in the House. It’s been a bit of a drain. And Clothilde insisted—” She sighed. “That woman will drive me crazy before we’re done. Anyway, not much, no. We’ve had to buy most of our essence from elsewhere.”

  Thuan ran a hand on the box, negligently. “This one?” he asked. He flipped open the lid, ignoring the rapid beating of his heart. This was it. This was his chance. His only one.

  There was, again, little inside, though it had once been full. Thank the ancestors the shelf it was on was relatively low; and that Hawthorn, lying close to the waters of the Seine, was saturated with strands of khi water. He gathered these to his fingers patiently, wove a tight net that got thicker and thicker, until nothing, no matter how small, could have passed through the interstices.

  Sare’s gaze rested on him, for a while. Thuan didn’t move, forced himself to stand still, to hold his breath steady, his hands unmoving, his face impassive. “You’re not an addict,” she said.

  “No!” Thuan said. The word was forced out of him before he could think.

  Sare didn’t take her gaze off him. “Why the interest, then?”

  “Curiosity,” Thuan said. He shuffled his feet.

  “Really.” She wasn’t convinced.

  “I was . . . I had a bet with someone,” he said, at last, falling back on the last of his prepared excuses. “To look at some of it.” As he spoke, his hand dipped, lightly, toward the top of the box—stopped, not touching it; but his fingers, spreading out, sent the khi net tumbling down into the box, a small scoop that trapped angel essence within. He withdrew then, making a pretense of being made uncomfortable by the heat; the invisible net coming with him—palmed swiftly, and shifted to his breast pocket in a well-practiced gesture. “To know how it felt.”