The House of Shattered Wings

Philippe’s face was pale. “Keeping them at bay. Can’t . . . do much. The power . . . is weak here.”


Isabelle was kneeling, inscribing a ward across the dais, a blinding radiance streaming from her skin; rushing through the now translucent stone, illuminating every crack and every blackened spot from within. “They’re shadows,” she said. “Every shadow is cast by something.”

She’d been right. She didn’t want to know; or to inquire how either of them knew. The noise was stronger now; there were words, if she paid attention; whispered curses, vicious hatred . . .

“All you hold dear will be shattered; all that you built will fall into dust; all that you gathered will be borne away by the storm. . . .”

“You said he was here,” Isabelle said. “Where?”

“I don’t know!” Madeleine said. He’d gone there, yes, twenty years ago; but the church was a ruin now, with barely any shelter she could see. “I didn’t say I had the answers!”

Philippe was standing, pale, disheveled, before the throne, watching the shadows pool together in the aisle between the ruined benches—a rising smell like rotten fruit, a cold, biting wind that seemed to flay them to the bone. . . . “It’s Morningstar’s dead apprentice—I don’t know who they were, but they died betrayed, and now they’re taking their revenge.”

“I don’t understand,” Madeleine said. She breathed in the last scrap of essence; tried to believe in the comforting warmth that spread through her belly and lungs.

“Morningstar betrayed one of his students,” Philippe said. “He loved and cherished them, and then gave them away to buy peace with Hawthorn, left them to rot in the cellars of the House. They died . . . angry.” He shivered.

No. Morningstar wasn’t like that. He wouldn’t . . . She thought of the leisurely footsteps, the warmth of hands lifting her; the slow, sure sound of his breath. He’d rescued her when he didn’t have to, had welcomed her to the safety of the House. “He wouldn’t . . . ,” she started, and then stopped. It was pointless. He might well have liked her, might well have shown favor to her—on a whim, a moment’s thought on his way to nowhere—but she’d heard enough during her time in Silverspires to know he’d been Fallen through and through.

Isabelle’s eyes were jewel-hard. “He did it for the House.” On the floor beyond the dais, the shape was becoming clearer and clearer: wings, an elongated face, hands that curled like claws . . . She knew, instinctively, that they didn’t want to be there when it finally became defined. But still . . .

Still, there was something about that shape; about the leathery wings, the hiss of snakes, the perfect circle . . .

“Of course. Isn’t that always the excuse? ‘For the House.’” Philippe’s voice was biting. He leaned against the throne, cradling his light between his hands. “Anyway, that’s what they want. The destruction of Silverspires, the deaths of all of us if they can manage it. The unquiet dead.” He laughed, bitterly.

The death of Silverspires. Violence begets violence, death begets death: a perfect circle around that single point, that unthinkable break in the skin of the world, pressed tight until blood welled up, dark and red and still quivering with the memory of a heartbeat . . . And Madeleine knew where she had seen the circle, after all; not in the medicine thesis, but in the Greek play Emmanuelle had been so painstakingly restoring. Orestes. Clytemnestra. Kin betraying, murdering kin. And what was a House, after all, but an overlarge family? “Not revenge. Justice.”

“That’s not different,” Isabelle said, forcefully, but Philippe stilled her with a gesture of his hands.

“What do you mean?”

“Erinyes,” she whispered. Justice for the murdered, the betrayed, the silenced; the unquiet dead, hungering from beyond the grave. “The Furies. That’s what they summoned.”

“And that helps? How do you stop them?”

“I don’t know!” Madeleine said. “It’s not even supposed to be possible!” Sentences from Emmanuelle’s books swam in her head, a jumble of information she could hardly keep a leash on. She knew about the Furies; every child in every House learned about them; but as a remnant of the past, of the things that were gone and could no longer be summoned.

How did you stop the Furies?

Spilling blood; granting them revenge . . . all things that seemed beyond them now.

But . . .

Morningstar had come there once, to stop them. To cast a spell, Ngoc Bich had said. A ritual of power, to safeguard the House.

There was nothing here—just broken stained-glass windows, the burned remnants of pews, cracked stone, and cracked columns—nothing that could serve as a shelter or as the basis for a spell.

Nothing aboveground.

The Furies were the past; the buried creatures from the history of Paris, so deep they were beyond the reach of Fallen and humans alike—and where else would you defend against them but underground—near the foundations of the House you’d sworn to protect?