The House of Shattered Wings

“They have come to take you home,” Ngoc Bich said. “The Fallen in particular was most insistent.”


“I’m not surprised,” Philippe said, wryly. Isabelle looked to be haranguing Madeleine, though he wasn’t clear why—knowing her, he suspected the whole trip was her idea. Madeleine was too . . . staid for such a thing.

“What will you do?” Ngoc Bich asked again, and he had no answer. Whenever he thought of Silverspires, he thought of the darkness, of vengeful eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses, of bright and cruel and knowing smiles; of a pain that seemed to spread through his entire being, laying him flat on the ground and holding him there, as surely as coral spikes.

He swung himself away from the slab, and found Isabelle. Her gaze met his without flinching.

“I can’t come back,” he said.

Isabelle shook her head. “You must. You owe Silverspires.”

“For a cage?” Philippe said. He raised his hands—almost shocked to find that they worked, that his once broken fingers flexed, that his shattered bones held everything together; and, in answer, Isabelle raised hers, showing him the gap where two of her fingers were missing—and nausea rose in his throat, sharp and biting.

Some things, after all, could never be healed. “No,” he said. “This isn’t that debt.”

Isabelle’s smile was bright, terrible; the same as Morningstar’s, in the visions. She had known, or suspected. She had seen Samariel; had warned Philippe—though presumably she hadn’t had time to see Selene, or it would have been quite a different story. “You wounded Emmanuelle,” she said.

“I—what?” He vaguely remembered running out of the room, shoving the archivist out of his way; losing himself in the darkness, crawling his way through a haze of pain. “You’re lying.”

“She’s not,” Madeleine said. The light of the tomb played on her face: she looked terrible, gaunt and drained of all vitality, ten or twenty years older than the woman he remembered. “You left a mark on her. A circle with a dot in the center.”

“I don’t see what you’re talking about.”

“The dead,” Madeleine said. “The other ones. They all had the same mark.” She looked at him, angrily; and he still had no idea what she meant.

He shook his head. “Madeleine—”

“Never mind,” Isabelle said. “Will you come back to Silverspires, please? For Emmanuelle’s sake.”

“By now they’ve all left,” Madeleine said. “The other Houses. Selene was seeing them all off. Asmodeus won’t be there anymore.”

“I— Look, even if I wanted to, I can’t do anything for Emmanuelle. I can’t—” He didn’t understand what he had in him; or if he was really the only carrier. There was something else loose in Silverspires, something that went beyond his visions and memories.

“He shouldn’t go,” Ngoc Bich said, gravely. Behind her, the ghost of her father had spread his hands, mouthing again what he’d said to Philippe, that it was stronger than him.

Philippe bristled. “So the alternative is? Staying here?”

Ngoc Bich didn’t blink. “I had hoped you would,” she said. There were no tears in her eyes; she held herself with the pride of a queen. “But if you don’t want to—then I would leave, if I were you. Go home, or elsewhere; but don’t take what you have back into Silverspires. You might live, then.”

“Should I take it back to Annam, then?” Philippe said. He’d dreamed, once, of returning home—the dream Isabelle had instilled back into him—but, alone with Chung Thoai under the mausoleum, he had tasted the darkness at the heart of the curse; and had seen that it would not go away. “Is that your idea, Ngoc Bich?” To think of Morningstar striding across the land of his birth, of his casual arrogance while watching the women bowed under shoulder yokes, the peasants in their rice paddies, the colorless imitations of Chinese porcelain sold to the ruined imperial court . . . “No. It’s not a possibility.”

Ngoc Bich shrugged. “As you wish. But you have been warned, Philippe Minh Khiet. The thing within you—it will be satisfied with nothing less than blood, the blood of Silverspires.”

“I don’t care about Silverspires,” he said, and both Isabelle and Madeleine winced. “It’s not my home. It’s a place where I was imprisoned and tortured and betrayed and left for dead. Tell me, where in there do you see a cause for gratitude?” It could go hang, for all he cared; could burn itself to ashes, or go to war with other Houses and be destroyed, like Draken. He owed it nothing.

Ngoc Bich’s eyes were unreadable; the shade of mother-of-pearl, illuminated only by the lanterns on either side of the door to the tomb. “Then don’t go back to Silverspires. As I said, that would be wise. The thing within you wants blood. It might take yours.”