The House of Shattered Wings

Isabelle’s voice was quiet. “A House took you. It wasn’t this House, Philippe.”


As if it made any difference—how could she not see it? How could she—? “No,” Philippe said. “It wasn’t. But, deep down, they’re all the same. Can’t you see? Morningstar betrayed Nightingale for what? Two deaths? An advantage with Hawthorn that didn’t last the winter? Houses all think lives are cheap.” Pointless. It was all so pointless, their little games like children’s fights in school, with no more rhyme or reason than their meaningless professions of charity and care for the weak.

They didn’t deserve anything—except to crumble and fall.

“We don’t,” Isabelle said. “I—I—”

“You don’t, or you don’t think you do.” He sighed. She looked bewildered once more, her preternatural maturity gone. She’d always been like that, hadn’t she, a child who had seen too much to remain one? But children were cruel, too; casually tearing the wings from flies, mocking and hurting one another and never knowing when to stop. What would she do, with Morningstar’s powers, and some of his memories? What would she think of? He didn’t want to find out. Better leave now, with some of his illusions intact.

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you. How do you appease a ghost, if they’re right? I can’t believe the House is worth saving.”

“I have to believe.” Isabelle drew herself up, gathering light around her like a mantle; appearing, for a bare moment only, as she must have when in the City, her black hair ringed with radiance, and with the shadow of huge, feathered wings at her back. Like the wings of Asmodeus in his prison cell, he thought, hands shaking. Even if everything else had been different, he couldn’t live with that. “Don’t you see, Philippe? I have nowhere else to go.”

“I know.” They wouldn’t budge, either of them. It was futile. “Let’s agree to disagree, shall we?”

Isabelle said nothing. He could have done something then; could have found words to comfort her, could have laid a hand on her shoulder and told her that it was all going to be all right. He didn’t, because he couldn’t lie to her anymore. Because there was still darkness in his heart; and underneath the House, the soft, crushing sound of that huge thing hungering to reduce the foundations to dust. Because the sound of the wind through the corridors was no longer a lament, but that of an oncoming storm.

She’d be strong enough to weather it—she had Morningstar’s magic; and the protection of the other Fallen in the House. He didn’t need to worry; or to listen to the treacherous voice in his heart that reproached him for leaving her. “Be well, will you? I—I would hate for you to come to harm.”

Isabelle shrugged. “It happens,” she said. “To Fallen.”

“To mortals. You’re not anything special.”

Her smile was bitter, wounding. “Hunted for magic in our bones, in our breath? We didn’t ask to be made special, Philippe. But we have to live with it, all the same.”

While he—he had asked to become an Immortal, of course; had starved himself until he was whiplash-thin, meditated until all the mountains blurred and ran into one another like watercolors under rain. He couldn’t blame an accident of birth; he had made a deliberate choice.

But then, so had she, one she couldn’t remember—the one that had driven her from Heaven. “I guess this is good-bye, then. Fare you well, Isabelle.”

“And you.” Her gaze was clear, distant; the radiance of the wall soft, like water, like tears. “Fare you well, Pham Van Minh Khiet. I hope we meet again.”

They both knew they wouldn’t; or that, if they did, it would be under very different terms.

*

SELENE might have wished to keep her grief private, but news of Morningstar’s death filtered through the House, leaving dependents in a state of stunned shock. No one had believed Morningstar could die, just as the sea or the wind couldn’t die—and, if he could die, was the House truly as invulnerable as Selene assured them?

The news filtered elsewhere, too—and in another part of the House, a dusty, disregarded cellar that hadn’t been opened in twenty years, other people set to work.

Asmodeus knelt in the center of a circle much like the one that had been traced in the crypt; with the same kind of flowing tracery that had adorned its edges, the same alphabet that was the language of power. He had removed his usual, elegant finery; the letters flowed across his broad torso, like writhing snakes outlined in the light of another world—slowly descending along his arms toward his hands, and from there into the floor, linking the two halves of the circle together.