The House of Binding Thorns Read online

  Surely Sare had seen him. Surely she would know. . . . But her face was still filled with that distant, mild suspicion. She wanted to pin something on him, but couldn’t.

  Thuan closed the box, with an ostensible sigh. “Never mind.”

  Sare moved, came to stand by his side. She opened the box, peered at its depths.

  Thuan knew, rationally, that he’d taken so little from it that it would hardly show: much, much less than the dose an addict would have needed, or what he could sell for a reasonable price. But the moments Sare spent looking into the box, silently, stretched to an eternity. She didn’t speak, but she didn’t need to. She’d seen . . .

  At length, Sare shook her head. “I’ll never understand you.” She closed the box, and the cupboard, with a very pointed look. “You just like flirting with danger, don’t you? You should be careful, Thuan. You’ll get burned, one day.”

  In the very near future, if his disguise failed him. Or in the marginally less near future if he screwed up and had to report to Second Aunt. He winced at the thought. It was a nice distraction from worrying about whether Sare was going to insist on searching him. The khi net would be invisible and intangible to her, like all khi elements were to Fallen, unless their wielder chose to make a dramatic spell. But still . . .

  Still, he didn’t relax fully until he was out of the laboratory, well out of earshot of Sare; and back in the safety of his rooms, where he transferred the essence he’d stolen from the net to a folded piece of paper.

  Thuan stared at it, for a while. It felt almost innocuous, in such small amounts. Not a promise of power, or anything—not that it would tempt him, in any case. He could use Fallen magic because he’d been taught the rudiments of it, but he was not interested. The power he wanted would be given by Second Aunt’s favor; or, possibly, in the far distant future and if things changed drastically at court, by the council of officials that would confirm the designation of an heir. Not that it would happen: Thuan was realistic enough to know he was only a minor relation; the youngest son of a youngest sister, born in genteel poverty and called back to court only because Second Aunt had found a use for him.

  His life had been spent waiting, and he certainly had no time for something that corrupted and shortened life spans.

  But he did have a mission, and now he was one step closer to accomplishing it.

  He slid a hand under the ancestral altar, and got out a small, lacquered box with a picture of a plum tree and bamboo. If pressed, he would have said it was the ashes of his grandmother: an absurd, ludicrous fabrication, but there was no one in the House capable of gainsaying him. When he flipped the lid open, a fraction of the warmth he’d felt in the laboratory brushed against his fingers: there was more essence in that box than the small pinch he’d been able to steal from Sare; and he already knew how dangerous it was, because he’d seen the effects on others.

  Thuan shivered again, thinking of broken-off antlers, and rot.

  Then he drew on the khi currents in the room—water, there was so much water in Hawthorn, the breath of the Seine at the bottom of the gardens, the element that came easily, smoothly into his hands: the power of the river, ready to be harnessed. His hands shimmered, sharpened into claws, and a thin tracery of scales shone beneath his skin. He’d closed and locked the door, for otherwise, anyone who might have seen him would know he was not what he pretended to be. A touch of khi earth, taken from the wasted gardens: the center, the fulcrum around which everything was balanced, and the element of loyalty and faithfulness . . .

  A thin, pulsing line rose between the essence in the box and that on the piece of paper, gaining body and heft with each passing moment, water and earth mingled in unbreakable strands, the silhouette of a thin, elongated dragon leaping from one to the other, its body rising from the parquet floor of Thuan’s room like steam from an invisible vessel of boiling water.

  Thuan brought his hands together, and snuffed out the spell. The line remained for a brief moment, like the aftereffect of a great light blown out; and then it, too, faded.

  There was no doubt. The essence was not quite the same—the Fallen bones from which it had been refined must have come from different dead bodies—but it bore, quite clearly, the mark of the same alchemist. The same maker.

  Except, of course, that Sare had said it came from another House.

  His gut feeling told him that, different House or not, that essence was the one that ended up in the dragon kingdom. It was too much of a coincidence already: the two had to be linked.

  He had no proof. Asmodeus, if pressed, would simply place the blame on that other House. He would say that they were the ones involved in the traffic, not his people. Never mind that he was the one who found an advantage in weakening the kingdom, the one who needed the dragons subservient so they would accept the alliance he offered them with only a bare minimum of negotiations, desperate for any lifeline that could save the kingdom. And why should Asmodeus not bring in another House, or several others, if his own couldn’t sustain the high amounts of essence to be smuggled into the dragon kingdom?

  It made terrible sense. But it wasn’t enough.

  Now what?

  They had something to hide, which meant that they would be on the watch for anyone who might be getting close to it. Sare was suspicious now: the laboratory might as well be closed to him, because she would watch him like a hawk whenever he set foot in it. Not to mention the open question of whether anyone had seen him run away from Asmodeus’s rooms, a distinctly unpleasant prospect.

  He needed more evidence, but he would have to tread very, very carefully; or he would see the inside of Hawthorn’s cells rather too closely for comfort.

  SEVEN

  Heart’s Desire

  THE room was exactly what Philippe had expected: cramped, with cracks in the warped walls, smelling of smoke and cooked shallots—a small burner over a fire the only kitchen, and the metal frame of a bed rusted through and through. The window was cracked, too, and had been patched over with what looked like an old, faded counterpane.

  The pregnant woman had let him climb the muddy, narrow steps ahead of her. She closed the door as she entered; and, on that sound, the person seated in the plush blue armchair turned to face Philippe.

  She was small, unremarkable, thin and starved, with bruised eyes, and cheekbones peaking sharply under the skin of her face. Her dark hair fell to her waist, shot through with so many white streaks it appeared paler than it was. Mortal, Philippe would have said, and then she shifted, and the pale light of Fallen magic shone beneath her skin.

  “Fallen,” Philippe whispered. She was the source of the magic that permeated the pregnant woman. Had to be, in spite of the fact that she barely looked the part: no skin made translucent by the light of magic, no burning gaze, no hint of coiled power or unearthly grace. Just a faint smell of myrrh, as she bent to get a better look at Philippe.

  “Welcome,” the Fallen said. “My name is Berith, and this is Le Thi Anh Tuyet, though she prefers Françoise.” Her Viet was surprisingly good, slow and deliberate but properly accented.

  “I’m Philippe. Pham Van Minh Khiet.”

  Berith looked . . . frail, old, something unheard of in Fallen, who enjoyed insolent, ageless good health. “Philippe.” Her eyes narrowed, and focused on him.

  They were brown, quite ordinary, until something shifted, and he saw that they were flecked with silver, with a dozen—a hundred—shards caught in the irises, as if someone had thrown a handful of metal slivers into her face. The world wobbled and shifted, and her gaze was the only thing holding him steady.

  “Pham Van Minh Khiet.” Her voice was a song, a soaring, uplifting harmony. The room around them widened; no longer small or cramped, but filled with the shadow of wooden bookshelves: nothing cracked or moldy or burned, but a smooth, dark, and rich color that had never known fire or magic, or even the touch of time. The armcha
ir had grown and stretched, becoming a straight-backed throne on a dais; and instead of a gray shirt over a long skirt, she was now draped in an ermine-lined coat the deep blue of the sky, embroidered with lilies and apple flowers. Her face, transfigured, was a blur of light that hardened her features into a different cast, with only the eyes unchanged, her gaze still holding him, now burning with the intensity of a wildfire.

  “You . . .” He forced himself to breathe, to speak. “That’s what I felt. On the bridge, rue de Jessaint. I would have died if you hadn’t anchored me.”

  The Fallen spread her hands, gracefully, to encompass the throne and the bookshelves and the impossibly blue sky above, the deep color of approaching evening at summer’s end. “This is my dominion.”

  “How—how are you alive? How—” Philippe sought words. A Fallen. She was just a Fallen, as careless, as arrogant as the rest of them. But he could feel wind on his face, and smell the musty smell of old books, reminiscent of a grander, less damaged Silverspires library.

  “People have sought to kill her,” a voice said, behind her. “She’s hardly defenseless.”

  Françoise was leaning against one of the bookcases—her face no longer the pinched, starved one he saw everywhere on the streets, but smoother, transfigured, too, into something rich and strange and oddly wonderful.

  No. It was Fallen magic. It was Fallen that had torn him from his home, kidnapped him on the streets, and sought to make use of his powers for their own ends, and Berith was no better than any of them. He had to—he had to remember that—but it was hard, standing under that gaze.

  “Your dominion,” he said, each word feeling as heavy as a stone. “Other Fallen congregate into Houses. You don’t.”

  “My dominion is always with me, wherever I go. You’ve met others of my kind. Lucifer Morningstar. Guy. Asmodeus.” Berith’s voice lingered on that last name. Philippe wished it hadn’t, because all he could remember about Asmodeus was pain, and broken fingers, and crawling under the merciless light of the stars.

  “I’ve met some of them,” he said, cautiously.

  “Then you’ll know we are different. Morningstar only understood usefulness. Guy divides the world in terms of superiority. And Asmodeus, of course, only thinks of ownership.”

  “And you?”

  “Let’s say what I understand is desire.”

  She was worse than Morningstar, in so many ways. He had been raw power, careless, heedless dominance, easily asserted, and expected the entire world to bring him his due. Berith didn’t expect anything. Didn’t want anything. Someone who simply . . . offered? But no. Everyone wanted something; Fallen more than anyone else, reaching and grasping and taking all they could from a world that they only lightly touched.

  They’d reached and grasped once, before the war: rolling into Annam with their rifles and their magic, taking what they wanted from the land, their magic spreading to cover everything. The guardian spirits and the Immortals like Philippe had died in their assaults, or retreated into mountain fastnesses to recover, banning all contact with the mortal lands that were now under the sway of Fallen, where the khi elements were now weak and almost inexistent, subdued and made powerless by the wash of alien magic.

  And, of course, when the war had gone badly, when they had needed all the bodies they could spare, they had taken people from Annam—like Françoise’s parents, like Philippe—to be more cannon fodder in their endless internecine fights, and left them to fend for themselves in the devastated city after the war had ground to a halt.

  “I don’t want anything.” He tasted ashes, and bitter dregs, on his tongue. “I’m the one who owes you. For the bridge.”

  “An honest man.” Her voice was light, ironic, Fallen through and through.

  “I—” He turned, to look at Françoise. “I owe you. I can deliver the child, for you, when the time comes.”

  “Not long now. A month,” Berith said. “But we have a midwife already.” She looked at Françoise, who shook her head.

  “You’ll forgive me, but doctors tend not to be very effective when it comes to childbirth.” Some of Berith’s light, ironic tone had crept into Françoise’s voice. “About one in ten women in Hospital Lariboisière’s maternity wards comes out in a coffin.”

  “I’m not just any doctor,” Philippe snapped, and stopped. He’d just admitted he was using magic. But then again . . . she already knew.

  “The magic?” Berith asked, and smiled. “You hide it very well, normally. But I felt it on the bridge. I know what you are. You radiate power as easily as you breathe, when you set your mind to it.”

  “What magic?” Françoise asked.

  “Enough to change the world, isn’t it?” Berith’s voice was light, sarcastic. “Something Fallen neither understand nor care for.”

  As if she was different from her kind. As if she understood. “You only care if you think it’s of use.”

  “Of course,” Berith said.

  “Magic or not, I’d rather have someone I trust deliver the child,” Françoise said. She was looking at him thoughtfully as if trying to work out something, the darkness of her skin washed away by the magic that suffused the room. “But, if you have magic that’s not Fallen . . . there is something else you could do for us.”

  On her throne, Berith frowned. “Françoise—”

  Françoise walked up to her, laid a hand on her wrist, and gently squeezed, with the familiarity of a lover rather than a friend. “Please.”

  Berith lowered her gaze to stare at Françoise, an odd hunger etched on every line of that perfect face. “He won’t do it. Too many risks.”

  “Won’t do what?” Philippe asked.

  “Then we won’t be worse off than we are now, will we?” Françoise shook her head. “It’s worth asking. Please.”

  Berith was silent. The bookshelves wavered and vanished, and Philippe was standing once more in the cramped apartment, watching that frail, skeletal body ensconced in the chair, with Françoise still clinging to Berith’s arm. “Sometimes,” Berith said, “angels Fall together. It’s extremely rare. A bit like live twins, among mortals, and like twins, these Fallen remain close all their lives. Which are much longer than mortals’.”

  “Thanks,” Philippe said, not bothering to keep the sarcasm out of his voice. “I think I know one thing or two about Fallen by now.”

  Berith didn’t smile. “I had a Fall-brother. Once. We quarreled, a century or so ago. Perhaps more.” Françoise’s hand on her wrist had tensed. “I found my way here, eventually. Found this life. Found Françoise.”

  Much longer than mortals’. Françoise was—what?—thirty years or so? Hardly more, and Berith much, much older. What would they do, when she grew old? Though by the looks of it, Berith might actually die before Françoise. Philippe had never seen a Fallen look so ill.

  “That’s a sad story, but I’m not too sure where you want me to fit in.”

  “It’s been a long time,” Berith said. “And I’m dying.” She said it simply, matter-of-factly. So much for Philippe wondering. She grimaced, an expression which made her skin stretch over the bones of her face, until a death’s-head grinned back at Philippe. He stood his ground. “Wounds sustained during the Great Houses War, because I was Houseless and an easier target than the House-bound. I’ve lingered long, but everything has its end.”

  “You’ll heal.” Françoise’s voice was low, tired. They’d had this argument before, and she clearly didn’t believe it anymore.

  “No,” Berith said. “I might live long enough to see our grandchildren born.” She smiled, wearily. She looked so mortal. So vulnerable; it was hard to remember what she was, where she had come from. “Anyway. I have regrets. I want—” She paused. “Reconciliation, before it’s too late.”

  Philippe still didn’t see where he fitted in, but he held his tongue.

  Berith shifted again. “I
won’t move from here.”

  Not because she didn’t want to, but because she couldn’t, Philippe realized. Because whatever had happened to her during the war, it had made her the Fallen equivalent of an invalid. “Tell me what you want.”

  “Françoise can go plead in my stead. But I won’t send her alone. I want you to escort her.”

  Into a House? “No,” he said. It was gut reflex. He’d been almost killed the last time he’d gone into a House: taken and used and discarded, with his lungs pierced and every bone in his body shattered. He forced himself to breathe.

  “It’s not as dangerous as it sounds. An audience comes with a safe-conduct,” Berith said.

  “Because Houses respect that kind of thing?”

  Her face told him all he needed to know. “He . . . does keep his word, usually.”

  “‘Usually,’ unless it suits him otherwise.” Like all Fallen, for whom rules were only tools of the oppression of others. “I’m sorry, but no. I owe you, but not that much.”

  Silence stretched on, long and weighty and uncomfortable. At length, Berith said, “I can offer you something else in exchange.”

  “There is nothing you can offer that would—”

  Berith stretched, and shifted; and for a moment, the shadows of bookshelves were at her back again, and the outline of great, golden wings, and a smell of myrrh as if in a church. “Is there? As I said, my dominion is desire, and magic. And what you want burns within you like a wildfire, Philippe.”

  “You know nothing.”

  “Don’t I?” Her voice was mocking, an echo, for a moment, of Asmodeus’s facile nonchalance. “You want things to branch differently, in a long-ago past. For a dead friend to come back to life, and walk once more upon the earth.”