The House of Shattered Wings

A month after Philippe and Isabelle’s arrival, the Great Market came to Silverspires—or rather, just outside the House, in the vast square that had once been the parvis of Notre-Dame. During the Belle Epoque, it had been held in the same place week after week—Les Halles, the belly of the city, the exuberant display of abundance of an empire that had believed itself immortal against all the evidence of history. But the squat, majestic pavilions of glass and iron had been destroyed in the war; and the fragile magical balance that had followed led to an arrangement where the Great Market rotated between the major Houses.

Madeleine took Oris, Philippe and Isabelle with her while she went shopping for magical supplies; keeping a wary eye on Philippe as Selene had instructed. But, other than his being moody and brooding, there seemed to be nothing extraordinary about the young man.

Isabelle, on the other hand, looked at everything and everyone—fascinated by the bright, colored jewelry on a stall; by the vast array of cheeses and hams in the food section, from blue-veined Roquefort to the large, heavy whole rounds of Emmental, their interior peppered with holes like a thousand bubbles; from the glass bottles and mirrors that alchemists used to trap Fallen magic, to trinkets that shone with nothing more than glitter and cheap crystal.

Madeleine watched Isabelle, not sure whether to be amused or affected. She was so young; so careless—like Madeleine in another lifetime, when she’d still been a child in Hawthorn, running wild in the market under the indulgent gaze of her teachers. Back then, she’d never even dreamed of Silverspires or of another House: her duty had been to her family and to Hawthorn, and to nothing or no one else. And now, of course, she was older—she wished she could say wiser, but her wasted lungs and life on the knife’s edge of fear told her otherwise. Her parents were a distant memory—she had been barely talking to them before Asmodeus’s coup; and, of course, after the coup, even the thought of sending a message back had made her sick—that roiling fear that Asmodeus would intercept it—that he would remember her existence, remember that she was still worth claiming; and come to Silverspires with his mocking smile, to kill her as he had killed Elphon . . .

With an effort, she shook off the past, and focused on the present.

The crowd was colorful and variegated: delegations from other Houses; gang lords in leather, swaggering through the market with their entourages; and a host of grimier, poorer people who congregated in the food sections, haggling for basic necessities. There was not much danger in the crowd, as long as they remained together: the Great Market was a place of truce (which, of course, didn’t mean their purses were safe from opportunistic thieves). Children chased one another, laughing, under the wary eyes of their parents or their minders.

As they stood before one of the stalls, waiting for Oris to complete a purchase of a small mother-of-pearl container, Philippe spoke up.

“It was bigger during the war,” he said.

“Wasn’t everything?” Madeleine said. She hadn’t been born when the city was devastated; those days, you pretty much had to be Fallen to have survived. Sixty years was long in human lifetimes, and most of those who had breathed in the air of Paris in the aftermath had not recovered well. But he wasn’t Fallen, and still he remembered. Odd.

“They had entire stalls like these,” Philippe said, fingering a lacquered box with a pattern of flowers. “Exotic woods from the Orient, and incense, and all the rubber you could ever want, for manufacturing car tires for the front.” His voice was lightly ironic.

“We still have those. But they’re mostly from our existing stock. More expensive,” Madeleine said, unsure of what to answer. He was a native, of course; he would disapprove of the empire, if there was still such a thing after the war—with communications and travel so difficult, the colonies had all but become independent kingdoms by now, with the French colonists still in charge. She . . . she didn’t like the idea of invading countries, but she was no fool: the empire had made them rich and powerful, and even its bare, pathetic remnants after the war brought them riches and standards of living far above those of the street gangs or other Houseless. Sometimes, you did what you had to, in order to survive.

He gave no sign of noticing her hesitation: he nodded, gravely. “It was another age.”

“And yet you’re still here,” Madeleine said.

His face closed, as if a cloud had darkened it. “Through no fault of my own,” he said, bitterly, and wouldn’t speak up again.

“Madeleine!” A voice made her look up as they approached the eastern area of the parvis.

It was Claire, the head of House Lazarus; surrounded, as usual, by a gaggle of unruly children. Lazarus, among all the Houses, was the only one ruled by a human; Claire had been its head for thirty years, and Madeleine had known her for about half of that. She was small and plump, the image of a gray-haired, kindly grandmother; though of course one did not get to be the head of a House through kindness alone. Claire was ruthless, and many of her tactics would have put a Fallen to shame.

“I see you’ve grown an entourage of your own,” Claire said, wryly. Her gaze took in Isabelle and Oris, and stopped at Philippe.

“They belong to the House,” Madeleine said, acutely embarrassed.