The House of Shattered Wings

“You presume.” Selene was looking through Madeleine again, as if she didn’t really matter. “It was good of you to sit with her, but don’t think this entitles you to familiarity.”


What was it that they’d whispered, at the banquet she’d attended? Something about decline, and Silverspires being inescapably weak? It had been a terrible thing to say, but perhaps it was the truth; perhaps Selene’s vacillating leadership wasn’t what the House needed, after all.

“You’re right,” she said, bowing to Selene. “I apologize.”

But doubt, like a serpent’s fang, remained buried in her mind, and wouldn’t be excised.

*

PHILIPPE’S dreams were dark, and confused. He lay in a covered bed, watching light filter, opalescent, through a ceiling that kept shifting—there was a face bending over him, almost human, except that it had green, scaled skin, and a thin mustache, and teeth that were too long and sharp—there was another light, sickly gray, and a voice saying words he couldn’t quite focus on, but with a lilt that was familiar, that ached like a wound in his heart. . . .

Attendants moved soundlessly beyond the veils that hung over the bed: men with pincers instead of hands, with scales and fish tails, with hair the color and hardness of mother-of-pearl, everything billowing in currents he couldn’t see.

I was there once, he thought, struggling to dredge thoughts through the morass of his brain. Swimming through pagodas of coral and algae, in gardens of basalt where volcanoes simmered, making the water warmer for just a moment; going over bridges with fish swimming under the rail, watching octopi nestle on gongs and drums, calling the faithful to worship . . .

He had been there once: a familiar memory, except that it wasn’t quite what it should have been. He couldn’t pinpoint why, but there was something—something he should have remembered.

As the fever sank down to a whisper, he saw more and more: the patches of dead scales on the skin of the attendants, that same oily sheen on the mother-of-pearl; the curious deadness in their eyes; the broken nubs of antlers at their temples.

Beyond the veils, the darkness waited. In every reflection on dull nacre, shadows lengthened, stretched, gathered themselves to leap, and he lay on the bed, too powerless to stop them—and every now and then Morningstar’s dreadful presence would press against his brain until he thought his head would burst. He wouldn’t actually see the Fallen, merely guess at the massive silhouette, sitting quietly just beyond the bed: watching, reproaching him for not using his powers, for being weak; for being all but dead, lost to the world.

One morning, or evening, he woke up, and his head was clear. He lay in bed, too spent to move; but alive, and not hovering on the cusp of Hell. His ribs had been bandaged, and smelled of camphor and mint; his hands likewise, and though flexing his fingers was mildly painful, it was nothing like the excruciating pain he’d once had.

“I thought we had lost you,” a voice said. The curtains of the bed parted, and a woman bent over him.

She was the same one he had seen by the bridge: dressed in a five-panel tunic, the pearl under her chin shining faintly in the gloom. Deer antlers protruded from her temples, and scales mottled her skin, here and there—here and there flaking off, like dried skin.

Dragon.

“There are no dragon kingdoms in Paris,” he said, slowly. “You don’t . . . You don’t need a dragon king to oversee the floods and the rains. You don’t receive prayers and offerings from anyone. How can you possibly—? How can you possibly live?”

The woman smiled, revealing sharp teeth. “You’re not the only one to have traveled far from the land of your birth,” she said. She opened her hand, to reveal three sodden incense sticks: they smelled like the rot of the Seine, with a faint afterodor of burned incense. “And there are still those who offer prayers, to stay the wrath of the Seine. Hawthorn, for instance, is built on low ground, and they have cause to fear floods.”

It was all too much to take in: that, and his near escape, and the visions he’d had. . . . He closed his eyes, willing himself to breathe slower. “What’s your name?”

“Ngoc Bich,” she said. Her voice effortlessly put the accents on words, giving meaning to things he hadn’t heard in years.

“Jade,” he breathed. “It’s a pretty name.”

Ngoc Bich made a face. “Father is very traditional,” she said. “At least it wasn’t ‘Pearl’ or ‘Coral.’”

“You knew my name,” he said. Not the one House Draken had given him on the conscription grounds; but the one he’d worn, all those years ago when he was a child, which still rang true even though he hadn’t used it in decades. “My real name.”