The House of Shattered Wings

He stood, for a while, on the boundary between the House and the city, by the raised parapet of Pont d’Arcole, watching the oily waves of the Seine. He had feared the river once, like everyone in Paris; but now his eyes were opened to its true nature, and there was nothing to fear. Dragons ran sleek and superb beneath the water, elegant shapes racing one another; if he frowned hard enough, he could forget the broken-off antlers, the patches of dry scales on their bodies, the dark film that made their eyes seem dull, like gutted fish at a monger’s stall. For a moment; an impossible, suspended moment, he was back on the banks of the Perfumed River; with the smell of jasmine rice and crushed garlic, and the sweet one of banana flowers, all the things he should have set aside when ascending.

Past, all of this, gone by. There was no point in grieving for faded things.

Aragon had said he should forget it all; that the way to Annam was closed forever; that he should accept that his new home was in Paris, and act accordingly. But Aragon, who liked to call himself independent and unbound by loyalty to any House, still lived through his services to them; still drew a salary from Silverspires, and the lesser Houses he helped. Aragon could no more envision a world without Houses than he could stop breathing.

And Isabelle . . .

No, he couldn’t think of Isabelle now; or of what she might have meant to him. He couldn’t afford to.

What he was sure of was this: he would rather die, or forsake any hope of ascending ever again, than be forced into service once more.

Isabelle might have given in, but he wouldn’t. He threw a piece of broken stone into the river, and watched the ripples of its passage until they faded away. Then he shook himself, and went to look for the nearest omnibus stop.

*

MADELEINE tried not to brood, but it was all but impossible. Her mind was an empty place; a yawning abyss opening onto the night of the coup; and now she had neither angel essence nor the House’s protection to dull the knife’s edge of memory. In her dreams she smelled blood, the thick, sluggish, sickening odor of a slaughterhouse; and remembered Morningstar’s measured steps: the fear, shooting through her, that he would pass her by, that he would leave her to die in the darkness. In her dreams she never made it to Silverspires; or she stood on the Pont-au-Change and watched the ruins of the House, with the acrid smell of magic in her nostrils. In her dreams Asmodeus laughed, and whispered that he had won.

She lay alone in her room. She supposed Selene had given orders that no one could visit her; it would be just like her, drive home the sheer soul-destroying misery of her situation. Or perhaps no one wanted to see the pariah; to think on how their own existence within the House depended on its master’s whims.

Aragon, when he did come, was brusque. She gathered she wasn’t the only one he needed to take care of, or perhaps it was the atmosphere of the House, finally getting through to him even though he wasn’t bonded to it.

“I can’t do anything for you,” he said. His lips were two thin lines in the severity of his face. “Your lungs are all but gone.”

Madeleine suppressed a bitter smile. “How long do I have?”

“You know as well as I do. A few years maybe? Unless we’re talking some kind of miracle.”

“Miracles never happen here,” Madeleine said, with terrible bleakness. “Not in this city, not in this House.” She had felt it; the change to the fabric of Silverspires; the worm, gnawing away at the layers of protections Morningstar had painstakingly laid out during the founding of the House. Perhaps it was better if she left; soon there wouldn’t be any refuge here anyway. But where else would she go? There was nowhere, nothing; and the thought of taking Claire’s charity in Lazarus was a draft too bitter to be swallowed.

“You should have told me,” Aragon said, finally, as he was about to leave: the professional reserve peeled away, to reveal—what? Anger? Hurt? She couldn’t read him, never had been able to. “You didn’t have to—”

Madeleine thought of Elphon; of blood, warm and sticky on her hands; and the ghost of pain in her hip, the acrid memory of fear as she crawled out of Hawthorn. “There are some things I can’t live with, Aragon.”

“There are some things that will kill you, and you should have known that.” Aragon stared at her for a while. “See me before you leave. I can give you a few addresses and names. You don’t have to head into the unknown.”

“Thank you,” Madeleine said, but she was too drained, too hollow to care. Silverspires had been her life, her refuge; and now, soon—all too soon—it would be gone, leaving only a bitter memory in her thoughts. She needed . . . a plan, something she could cling to; but nothing seemed to penetrate the gloom around her.

*