The House of Shattered Wings

And still linked to him, obviously.

“But you have it. Morningstar’s magic.” The link they shared had faded, become fainter and fainter with time; and his plunge into the death shadows of the dragon kingdom had all but killed it. But he could still feel it; the distant heat of molten metal, a sense that it would all become unbearable if he were to come closer.

Isabelle took a deep, trembling breath. “Yes. If I don’t hold it in—like a wild horse, like a breath—then I don’t know what will happen.”

She’d destroy the crypt, and the cathedral, and perhaps a good part of the House around them, but he didn’t tell her that. Either she’d worked it out for herself and there was no point; or she hadn’t, and he didn’t need to add that kind of pressure to the balancing act in her mind.

Philippe walked back to Madeleine, to check on her. Her breath came in slow and deep; her eyes were closed, bruises in the oval of her face. She was shaking. No, it wasn’t her; it was the ground under them. Something was moving, deep within the earth: not a quake, something far slower, far more persistent, like some kind of burrowing worm. . . . Morningstar had kept it at bay, whatever it was.

“How is she?”

“She’ll live.” Philippe grimaced. “Though she’ll probably spend some time in the infirmary with Emmanuelle.”

Isabelle grinned. “Aragon will be furious.”

Philippe couldn’t help the smile that came to his lips as he imagined the uptight doctor’s face. “Oh yes.” He rose, drawing the cloak back over Madeleine. “We should go . . . Wait.”

He walked to the circle he’d seen earlier. Now it stood like a crack in pristine porcelain, surrounded by broken pieces of the floor. It had been large, wide enough to encompass the bed; and the letters themselves hadn’t been disturbed by the Furies’ attack. He walked toward it; looked at the letters—a crabbed, prickly handwriting, though the writer had clearly been in supreme control: not a letter was smudged or out of place, and they all had the same expansive curves. He’d never seen Morningstar’s handwriting, but he imagined it would look something like this. A scuffed noise behind him: Isabelle was kneeling on the floor, running her hands on the letters, her eyes shining with a reflection of the light that had engulfed her earlier on. “He carved them,” she said, the wonder in her voice that of a child—it had used to make him smile, but now he felt vaguely queasy—was it Morningstar that she was awed by, or was it the lure of power that, in the end, drew all Fallen?

“I know. Can you read them?”

It was an incongruous sight: crouching in a crypt and betting that his senses were right, that the Furies were gone: there were so many smarter things he could have done, starting with running away, far from Silverspires and its ghosts. . . .

Isabelle frowned. “No,” she said at last, sounding surprised. “But it’s a spell. A very powerful one.”

As if anything handled by Morningstar would be pale and faint, running like old dyes. Philippe closed his eyes. There hadn’t been any mark on the body; though it was hard to remember anything more but the blinding radiance that had surrounded it. You, he thought to the ghost of Morningstar, hovering in the room. You never make things easy, do you?

There was no answer, but then, he had never expected one. He bent forward, letting his hands rest on the carvings, the coolness of the stone on his fingers; and the slow thrum coming from below the House, the worm that was gnawing at its insides. Something growing, ever patient, ever persistent: step after step after step, until it was all done, the House swept from the memory of men. . . .

Let it be, he thought, savagely. It doesn’t deserve to be remembered.

He could feel Morningstar’s disapproval, but with Ngoc Bich’s healing it was faint, barely perceivable; not the storm that would have caused him to bend the knee in abject submission.

There were khi currents, clinging to the inside of the circle: wood, for spring; fire, bright, ever-expanding. Protection, warding; and the desperate love one feels for the doomed; the feeling that would seize a man on seeing a beautiful flower, a perfect sunrise, a piece of sculpted ice, knowing it was all destined to wither and fade.

He died for the House, Isabelle had said. Had sat there, painstakingly carving all those letters by hand: there were no marks, no scuff traces, nothing to indicate that he’d done anything but sit down, and written the words of a perfect circle into the stone. A spell; a powerful one, controlled only by the ruthless force of his will; something that had kept the House safe through the long years after the war.

But even safety, it seemed, came to an end.