The House of Shattered Wings

Selene rose, feeling the weight of the earth against her bones: that odd, awful sensation that everything should have been lighter, easier on her. “Angels but touch the earth,” Morningstar had said, but his smile had been bitter as he said it—he who had felt the weight of age and loss more keenly than most, who had watched so many centuries pass by, patiently gathering his kin to him—as Paris grew from a small town to the bloated capital of an empire; and from this arrogant, conceited city to the devastated wreck huddled around the dark waters of the Seine. At least he’d disappeared before he could see how far the damage ran; how far the House he’d founded had tumbled.

Though, damn him, she still missed him: she’d wake up in the morning and remember that the House was hers, that he was not there to offer biting comments or advice; that he had walked out of the House twenty years ago and never come back. They’d searched for him, of course—turned the House upside down, gone into every nook and cranny, and never found anything, a body or a hint of where he might have gone—Selene didn’t even know if he was still alive or not, or if he was truly lost, truly beyond any meeting she might have dreamed of.

“Fallen have no parents,” Selene said, extending a hand toward the girl. “And no kin, beyond those that are willing to claim us. I will give you what my mentor once gave me: a name of your own.”

Morningstar had liked old-fashioned names, drawn straight from the pages of some of the obscure books he’d favored: Selene, Nightfall, Oris, Aragon; even Emmanuelle had been called Indigo before she changed her name.

Selene chose something far simpler. “Isabelle,” she said. “It was the name of a queen once. Wear it well.”

“Isabelle.” The young Fallen sat very still, repeating the name to herself as if testing it for suitability. Her gaze, for a moment, was disturbingly adult, as if Philippe had contaminated her. “It is a good name. Thank you.”

Selene nodded. “You have the run of the House. Use it well.”

She watched Isabelle leave the room. She heard voices outside, guessing that she’d be talking to Philippe. The link between those two concerned her; but if it was Isabelle’s choice, what right did Selene have to interfere?

“She’s strong, this one,” Emmanuelle said behind her.

Selene turned, only half-surprised. Emmanuelle had thrown open the curtain that lay between her office and her private quarters, and stood wreathed in the light of the lamps. “You should rest,” she said.

Emmanuelle walked into the room, and laid a hand on Selene’s cheek, briefly, affectionately. “I’ve rested enough for a lifetime. Or several of them. Have you given thought to the young man?”

“He’s no Fallen,” Selene said.

“He said he was born abroad.” Emmanuelle’s face was thoughtful. “Who knows what this might mean? There were other creatures in Annam, and other rules of magic—before the French came over and brought the word of God to those benighted shores.” Her voice was lightly ironic. Emmanuelle manifested as an African woman. Most people mistook her for a Senegalese, though they couldn’t place her in a precise ethnic group.

“I don’t know anything about Annam,” Selene said. They had people there, of course; got the occasional shipment of silk and rubber, but she hadn’t had any reason to focus her attention on the colonies. Travel after the war was slow, expensive—boats to Asia almost inexistent, and communications difficult and infrequent. Heavens, it had taken them ten years and an armed battalion to get back Calixta, and she’d only been stuck in London. Asia might have been another world entirely.

“Indochina,” Emmanuelle said, distractedly. “Once called Viet Nam. Annam is just one of the five regions, but everyone calls them Annamites anyway. Not that most French can make a difference between an Annamite and a Cochinchinese. He might just be one of the witches trained by French schools, you know.”

Witches, even Annamite ones, shouldn’t have been able to stop her magic. Perhaps younger, more remote areas retained a vitality that old, bloated cities like Paris never could recapture. Selene sighed. Either way, she would find out more about Philippe and his magic; and how best to use him for the good of the House.





THREE


BURIED DARKNESS


IT was a hard spell to untangle.

Back in his rooms, Philippe had sought traces of what Selene had done to him. He found, without too much trouble—Fallen magic was never subtle or hidden, especially not House magic—the magic that Selene had woven.

It stretched around his neck, an invisible collar that trailed around his entire body before earthing itself into the floor of the House—a tangled labyrinth of ten thousand threads, each of which burned like living fire when he tried to touch them. When at long last he managed to get hold of one of them, heedless of the pain it caused him, it was only to discover that it went straight into the heart of the tangle, where he lost it.

He tried severing the threads closer to the ground, to burn them with the little fire in the House, to dry them out with metal. Each time, he felt the pain of his own spell reflected back at him; until, shaking, he had to stop and suck in burning breaths, waiting for the agony to pass him by; and the threads merely re-formed, seconds after he had burned them.