The House of Shattered Wings

“I would never dare.” Selene gently disengaged herself from her lover’s embrace, leaving only one hand trailing in Emmanuelle’s hair, running braids between her fingers like pearl necklaces. “But you can’t fool me, either. What didn’t you tell me?”


Emmanuelle grimaced. “I underplayed it, Selene. It wasn’t easy to search the cellars. Everything was . . . covered in roots. And they weren’t exactly friendly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Try fighting your way through a thornbush. One that hits back. And it’s big now. Entire corridors are starting to look like the underside of a particularly nasty kind of tree, yes.” Emmanuelle picked at her torn sleeves, her face grim and distant. “At this rhythm—”

“I know,” Selene said. “The entire wing will become unusable.” She didn’t need Emmanuelle to tell her that: the magic of the House was flickering, being squeezed and choked into nothingness in so many places. In too many places.

All that you hold dear—vanished.

“That’s assuming it stops at the wing,” Emmanuelle said.

Which was, on the face of it, rather unlikely. “It said, in the crypt, that it would destroy us all.” Selene stared at her hands. What could she do? She should wake Morningstar, ask him what they should do. Surely, even amnesiac, he would know. . . .

Pathetic. He had said it himself. She was head of the House now, and it was her responsibility. “Get me Isabelle,” she said to Emmanuelle. “We need to destroy this before it destroys us.”

*

LATER, much later—or perhaps it wasn’t, but time seemed to have blurred between a series of unbearably sharp tableaux, like teeth, biting over and over into her flesh—walking over the Pont Saint-Michel, watching the omnibus she’d hoped to catch move away from her, the sound of the hooves like thunder in her ears—a brief conversation before a line of black cars, Asmodeus gesturing to her, Elphon prodding and pushing her into the same one as his master—the car pulling away, and the spire of the ruined cathedral dwindling farther and farther away in the distance.

“You’re much better off with us,” Asmodeus said. He was polishing his glasses with a yellow cloth; his eyes on the window, on the House that was his rival and enemy. “See? Over Notre-Dame?”

There were . . . clouds, but clouds didn’t gather so dense and dark, didn’t form that almost perfect circle that ringed the two ruined towers like a crown. And clouds didn’t reach down: those were extending tendrils, wrapping themselves around the ruined stone, until the entire cathedral seemed tethered to the Heavens.

“It’s survived such a long time, hasn’t it? Fire and floods and war. But this, I think, will finally break it.” He sounded thoughtful, not gloating or satisfied, as she would have imagined. His eyes rested on her; in earnest for once, with none of the mockery she was used to. “So silent? Have you nothing to say?”

Madeleine, too weary for words, rested her head against the polished, darkened glass of the car window, and watched her safe haven of the past twenty years vanish into the distance, leaving her alone with the master of Hawthorn.

*

ISABELLE, when she came, didn’t seem entirely happy, or entirely at ease with her new charge as alchemist. “Madeleine knew better than I,” she said.

Selene shook her head. The last thing she needed was people questioning her decisions. “Madeleine is no longer with us. There are only a few laws in Silverspires; and she broke one.”

“So you don’t forgive,” Isabelle said, slowly. She was more sharply defined, somehow, the light from her body radiating more strongly than it should have. Was she on essence, too? But there were no signs of any external sources: merely Isabelle as she’d always been, impossibly young and impossibly old at the same time. “That’s good to know.”

“Do you have objections?” Selene said. She hesitated, for a fraction of a second only, and decided to make this her show of strength. “You can leave if you disagree. I’m sure there are other Houses that are far less vigilant about enforcing their laws.”

Isabelle looked thoughtful. For a moment Selene thought she’d misjudged, that Isabelle would indeed leave, seek out Hawthorn or Lazarus—but then she nodded. “Your House, your law. I don’t approve, but it’s only fair.”

Something in her tone was sharper than it should have been—as if, for a brief moment, she’d seriously considered challenging Selene for the leadership of the House. “Tell me what you know.”

“I don’t,” Isabelle said, serenely. “Madeleine knew they were the Furies. Philippe and Emmanuelle figured out it was Nightingale. I—” She shrugged. “I don’t know much, other than that Morningstar died.” The light around her flickered, throwing distorted shadows on the walls.

“About that—” Emmanuelle said, but she didn’t have time to finish, because, in that moment, Morningstar pulled away the curtain that separated Selene’s living quarters from her office. “I heard something about my death?”