The House of Shattered Wings

“You were in Hawthorn,” she said.

Asmodeus still hadn’t moved. His eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses were unreadable. “You remember nothing, do you? It was almost dawn when I found you, Madeleine. It was over by then, in Hawthorn; had been, for a long time. I was head of the House.” He said it quietly, calmly, with no inflection to his voice; not even pride.

“Why would you—”

“I had business. In Silverspires. Did you never wonder why you had lost the link to Hawthorn?”

“I—” Madeleine took in a deep, trembling breath. “Uphir died—”

“Oh, Madeleine. Do you think it’s that easy to break a link to a House? I broke it—before I dropped you off.”

“I don’t understand,” Madeleine said again. Stupidly, like a lost child. “Why would you—” Why would you carry me to Silverspires? Why would you let me live?

His smile was wide, dazzling. “Call it . . . a whim. Or a loan, for safekeeping, while I purged the House of all remnants of Uphir’s days. But all loans are called, in time. All whims run their course.”

He withdrew, but the feel of his hand on her chest remained, sharp and wounding and God, oh God . . .

She was going to be sick, this time: the cough was welling up in her lungs; and she was on her knees in the damp grass, not sure if she was vomiting or coughing—breathing hard when she was done, nauseated and drained and utterly unable to move. “Ah yes. The little matter of the angel essence. We’ll have to do something about that. Can’t have you addicted this badly.”

“Why—” Madeleine whispered. He shouldn’t have heard her, but of course he did. Of course he always did.

“To remind you,” Asmodeus said. “That you owe nothing to Silverspires, or to Morningstar. Your place is here, Madeleine. It’s high time you accepted it.”





TWENTY-ONE


FOR THE GOOD OF THE HOUSE

SELENE sat in her office, staring at the wall. In her mind, low-key yet inescapable, the melody of the House’s destruction played itself through, from its insignificant beginnings to where they stood now, beleaguered and besieged.

They had lost the East Wing, and the North Wing; and in the H?tel-Dieu Aragon’s office was a mass of impassable roots. On the upper floors, branches and leaves were sprouting, a verdant mass that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a tropical country. In the buildings that remained, people were jammed together, three or more to rooms that hadn’t seen use in decades or centuries: the children sleeping on unrolled mats on the floors of sitting rooms, the corridors a mass of refugees, the ballrooms hastily rearranged to accommodate makeshift tents.

Aragon had muttered something about working conditions, and had left. He might be back; or he might not: after all, he wasn’t a dependent of the House, merely doing them a favor in the name of some long-forgotten debt to Morningstar.

Emmanuelle came in; and Isabelle, and Javier: all of them looking as though they had not managed a night’s sleep. They probably hadn’t.

“Morningstar?” she asked.

Javier shrugged. “He said he had something to do, and that he would come by later.”

Selene nodded. She wasn’t sure she could look Morningstar in the eye these days—because she’d lost him, because she was losing his House; because, if she’d had any thoughts to spare, she would have wept, for how far he had diminished from the Fallen she had known.

There were whispers, of what Morningstar’s return meant; but no time to prevent their spreading, or to coach people into an acceptance not tinged with fear. She would have to see to it later, if there was a later. If there was a House by then.

How could this have happened? Weeks before, they’d been a proud House: teetering, like all other Houses, on the edge of an abyss opened by the war, but it was nothing that should have worried them. And yet. And yet . . .

“Tell me,” she said to Emmanuelle.

Emmanuelle shook her head. “I don’t have much else to report. You know about the North Wing.”

“All too well,” Selene said, wryly. “And the H?tel-Dieu. And the parvis?”

“That’s still free of roots,” Javier said, pale and with the taut features of the sleepless. “They just might not like sunlight.”

They might as well have had faith and believed that God and His angels would swoop down and save them. Selene bit her lips to prevent the words from escaping them. They did not need, or deserve, her sarcasm.

“I don’t have any artifacts left,” Isabelle said, in the silence.

“I’ll have every Fallen drop by the laboratory, later.”

Isabelle nodded, but she didn’t look happy. Probably worried raw, like all of them: she was the closest thing to an alchemist the House had, and woefully untrained, with one dead predecessor and one banished one.