The House of Shattered Wings

He rose, brushing the dust of Morningstar’s bones from his trousers. “Come,” he said to Isabelle. “There is nothing left here.”


They were halfway to the stairs, carrying Madeleine between them, when he heard the footsteps—he didn’t turn aside, or move; what would have been the point, in a confined space with no other exit?—and they’d almost got to the exit when the first head came into view—Father Javier, his face carefully blank as he descended, and behind him . . .

Selene.

The Lady of Silverspires wore incongruous clothes, an orderly’s white overcoat tossed over embroidered silk pajamas. She must have come straight from the hospital, with no time to put on anything more appropriate. It would have been a comical sight, if not for the pressure of the magic swirling around her, gathered from every room, every corridor, every ruin of the House. She was followed by three guards, one of whom held a light.

“You—” Selene took a deep breath; her gaze pausing, for the briefest of moments, on Madeleine, though she didn’t appear to be entirely happy to see her. “You will explain. Now.”

Philippe would have spread his hands, in a gesture of peace; but he would have had to let go of Madeleine. “I came back,” he said. “To see if I could—”

“Finish what you’d started?” Selene remained where she was. The light from above pooled around her head, like a memory of what she must have looked like in the Heavens; in another lifetime, centuries ago.

“You—” Philippe took a deep breath. “You bound me. You treated me like a curiosity to be dissected and discarded. Do you really think you have any kind of authority over me?”

“The authority of power.” Selene’s voice was mild, but the pressure in the room had intensified; a wrong word, a wrong gesture, and it would push outward, shattering the pillars and stone bed, burying the crypt out of sight. “I thought you’d be able to recognize that, if nothing else.”

Philippe pulled fire from the ground, let it dance on the tip of his nose.

Selene’s face didn’t move. “Party tricks,” she said.

Party tricks that had absorbed her magic, once. Let her try . . .

Javier’s voice floated back to him, out of the darkness. “This place is old. I had no idea—”

“Javier. This isn’t the moment.”

“Oh.” There was silence for a while; the sound of feet scraping on stone. Then Javier said, “I think you should come and see, all the same. You two can kill each other afterward.”

Selene raised an eyebrow. Philippe didn’t, but he was as surprised as she. In all the time he’d been in Silverspires, he had never once heard Javier defy her. “What is here?” she asked; it wasn’t clear if the question was to Javier or to him.

“A circle,” Philippe said, cautiously. “A grave.”

Her face was tight, her lips pinched to a sliver of gray. “Whose?”

“Morningstar’s,” Isabelle said, before Philippe could stop her.

Selene didn’t move. Her face didn’t, either. It seemed to have frozen, in the exact same configuration as a moment before: the eyes unblinking, staring rigidly at the darkness, the mouth set in its thin line against the pallor of her skin. “Morningstar,” she said. Her voice conveyed some emotion, but Philippe couldn’t name it.

“His bones were on the stone bed,” Philippe said. “They’re dust now. The magic is gone.”

She should have asked where; if she’d been in anything like her normal state, she would have. But she still stared ahead of her with that same eerie stillness to her face, her lips the only part of her that still seemed to have life. “He’s dead,” she said.

“He died for the House. He inscribed a circle. . . .” Isabelle’s voice was low and fierce.

Selene raised a hand, and a wave of silence spread through the room: magic unfurling, pushing the words back into their throats with a taste like bile. “I don’t want to know,” she said. “Javier?”

“Yes, my lady?”

“Bring them to the ballroom,” she said. “And get Choérine or Gauthier and a few guards to watch over them.” Her eyes drifted to Madeleine, who still lay limp between Philippe and Isabelle. “Belay that. Get them to the hospital wing. And make sure Asmodeus doesn’t find out about them. Not yet.” She didn’t have to work very hard to make it sound like a threat; and Philippe didn’t have to work much, either, to find the fingers of his hands clenched, and to feel a convulsive shiver take hold of his entire body—remembering Asmodeus’s face, twisted with hatred; the methodical snapping of his fingers one by one—the nightmare memories of dying that had seized him, that had sent him crawling and weeping into the night. . . .

Asmodeus? No. No. “You told me he was gone,” Philippe said. “You said—”

Isabelle started to say something, but Selene cut her off.

“I don’t know what your game is,” she said. “Right now, I don’t want to know. We’ll talk more after I’m done here.”

There were too many people, and they could no doubt summon more. Better to obey.

For now, at any rate.