“All done!” Caroline stood, proudly. Behind her, the desk was covered in books — she’d been too small to make piles of more than two or three, and had had to expand to either side — a good thing Selene hadn’t yet sorted out the paperwork on her desk, because Caroline had pushed things left and right to fit the books where she could, heedless of whether that disturbed anything.
“Very good,” Emmanuelle said, while Selene made a deliberate effort not to step forward and pile everything properly. “Now go find Choérine, will you?”
“Thank you,” Selene said gravely to the little girl.
Caroline nodded. “I’ll tell all my friends I helped you with House business, Lady Selene!”
To which Selene had no answer; except watching the little girl rush away while Emmanuelle struggled not to laugh. “She means well.”
“I know.” Selene smiled, then gathered all the books into a pile, which she slid onto one corner of her desk, atop the older reports, the ones she always put off reading. “I presume you didn’t come just to deliver books.”
“Of course not,” Emmanuelle said. “Knowing you…” She pulled a chair, and sat down. “Consider they come with a reading guide. You asked about Annam, and what it was like.”
“Yes,” Selene said. If Philippe wouldn’t talk, and if she couldn’t analyze his magic, she’d find another way to discover what he was. “Tell me.”
Emmanuelle closed her eyes — gathering her thoughts for a recitation. When she opened them again, she spoke without hesitation. “What do you know of the beings who ruled the world before the Fallen?”
Beyond Europe, before the mad rush to colonize other countries and bring their wealth back to the motherland, there had been — other beings, other Houses: the nahual shape-shifters of Mexico, the jinn of Arab countries, the Jewish shedim and nephilim—and once, a long time ago, the demigods and heroes of ancient Greece and ancient Rome — long since vanished and crushed by newer magics, their creatures cannibalized to form the constructs of the war, or buried so deeply in the earth they required a painstaking and dangerous summoning that no Fallen would dare undertake. The other beings in other lands, too, had either yielded to Fallen rule, or been killed. “Much. But not about Annam.”
“Annam… is a land of spirits,” Emmanuelle said. “Magic is tied to the land — there’s a spirit for each village, for each household — for mountains and rivers and rain.”
“Rain,” Selene said. “Really.”
“Don’t laugh,” Emmanuelle said. She held up one of the books, where an engraving of a huge, serpentine animal circled text — all the way to the maw, which was huge and fanged, like that of tigers. It had a mane, too; like a lion’s, and deerlike antlers — and it looked… wrong, as if bits and pieces of animals had been jumbled together by a creator with little common sense. “They call them rong. Dragons. They live in clouds, or at the bottom of rivers and seas.”
Not the dragons of Western lore, then — not that anyone had summoned one in centuries, too dangerous…. Even the one on House Draken’s arms had been a fiction; a mere statement of power without substance. “I take it they’re not friendly.”
“No.” Emmanuelle laid the book back on the desk. “But they’ve withdrawn now. According to the books, they haven’t been seen in several decades.”
“Mmm,” Selene said. “And you think… Philippe is a dragon?”
Emmanuelle laughed. “No, of course not. They can take human form, but they always have scales somewhere — or a pearl below their chin, in some of the more… dramatic drawings.”
“I see,” Selene said. She didn’t; or, more accurately, she felt she knew more, but not enough to help her. “Was there anything else?”
“There are other spirits,” Emmanuelle said. “Flower fairies”—she raised a hand to forestall Selene’s objections—“they’re not cute and small, trust me. Also, fox spirits, in Tonkin; and Immortals, though no one has ever seen these. Apparently they all live in something called the Court of the Jade Emperor — who rules over all the other spirits — and they never come down to Earth.”
That didn’t sound very promising, either. And she had other preoccupations, too — with the market coming to Silverspires, there were things she needed to go over with Javier and Diane, the head of security for the House….
She was about to dismiss Emmanuelle and go back to her reports, when something else happened. At the back of her mind — where the dependents of the House were all lined up like lit candles — a light flickered, and went out.
“Selene?”
Selene closed her eyes; felt for the shape and heft of the missing dependent. Théodore Ganimard; one of the informants who kept her apprised of what was happening in other Houses, and in the rest of the city. “Someone just died.”
“Oh.” Emmanuelle said. “Is it… bad?”
Selene shook her head. Being an informant was a dangerous business; and in a bad year she would lose half a dozen men and women. But still… it was odd, that she’d never even felt that Théodore Ganimard was in danger — as if he’d died so quickly and brutally that it had never had time to register with the House’s protections. Like many dependents of Silverspires, he had a tracker disk; but all it told her was that he had been out in the south of Paris, near the ruins of Hell’s Toll.
The market was arriving the next day, and there were other things requiring her attention; but she wasn’t about to let the death of one of her dependents slide past.
“I don’t know how bad it is. Can you get me Javier? I’ll ask him to look into this.”
* * *
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…