“I’m glad,” Madeleine breathed. At least they had succeeded in that. At least… “Philippe—”
“He left. Isabelle went after him,” Emmanuelle said. “She has some foolish notion that she can change his mind.” Her eyes — her eyes had changed somehow. They were… older, as if something had made her age in the space of a few hours. What had happened? Had Philippe healed her? She was standing, and didn’t seem to be in any pain other than extreme weariness. Surely that meant they had succeeded; but then, why did she seem so distant? Something…
The House, she realized, and felt as though something was squeezing her heart. Something was wrong with the House. She could feel it, even through the tenuous link she had with it.
The House’s magic was coming apart.
A commotion: Aragon’s raised voice, and then steps, getting closer to her. “I know she’s awake,” Selene said. “You should have notified me before.”
If Emmanuelle looked ill at ease, Selene looked unchanged. She was dressed in her usual men’s swallowtail and trousers, regal, apparently unaffected by whatever seemed to have oppressed the atmosphere. “Madeleine.” Her voice was cold, cutting. “Will you leave us?” she asked Emmanuelle.
Emmanuelle winced. She cast a hesitant glance at Madeleine, but withdrew; her mouth shaped around words she never did get to pronounce. An apology? But what for?
“You’re going to chastise me for lacking to do my duty,” Madeleine said. “We were trying to help Emmanuelle.”
Selene said nothing.
“Isabelle thought that, if we could find Philippe, we could convince him to help—” It sounded small and pitiful, when she said it; with none of the hard-edged certainty she’d felt when she went with Isabelle; as if whatever magic had flowed out of her had utterly, finally gone, leaving only the taste of ashes in her mouth.
Selene’s face had not moved. She let Madeleine’s awkward, spluttering speech fade into silence. Only then did she speak, and her voice was entirely emotionless. “I would reproach you for that in ordinary circumstances, yes. I expect the alchemist of House Silverspires to be available when I have need; and not gone into God knows what senseless adventure with her apprentice, whom you’re supposed to keep an eye on, not indulge, may I remind you?”
“In ordinary circumstances.” Madeleine struggled to think through the layers of cotton wool that seemed to fill her mind. “I don’t—”
Selene raised a hand, and power crackled in the room like the prelude to a thunderstorm. “You will remain silent. How could you be such a fool, Madeleine?”
“I don’t understand—”
“Don’t insult my intelligence. You knew. You knew the rules, and you flaunted them. How long has it been going on?”
“I—” She knew. The only thing that came to Madeleine’s befuddled mind was the truth. “Five years. Nights are hard, when you remember the past. It’s—” She took in a deep, burning breath. “The dead and the dying and the bloodbath at Hawthorn—”
“Be silent. I don’t want your excuses, Madeleine.”
“Then what do you want?” She knew, even before the words were out of her mouth, that they were a mistake; knew it when Selene’s face hardened like cooling glass, impossibly brittle and smooth at the same time.
“You know exactly what I want. I’m not throwing you out of the House in your current state, which Aragon tells me is probably so poor because of your use of angel essence. But I want you gone, Madeleine.”
Gone. Cast out from Silverspires; stripped out of her refuge, her last rampart against Asmodeus and the nightmares of the night Uphir had been deposed. Her worst nightmare coming to meet her, and she couldn’t even seem to muster any energy for fear; for anything but the sick feeling in her belly. “But — I have nowhere else to go.”
“You should have thought of that before you got addicted to essence,” Selene said. She snapped her fingers, almost absentmindedly; and something was gone from Madeleine’s mind, a noise she hadn’t been aware of, but whose lack was overwhelming, a glimpse into the abyss. “I withdraw from you the protection of the House. Go your own way.” And with that, she turned and left — that… that bitch. Emmanuelle had been an essence addict, once; and she’d been allowed to clean up her act, to go on as if nothing were wrong; but Emmanuelle was Selene’s lover, and of course she’d be favored over everyone else. Of course.
She couldn’t seem to think straight — as in the dragon kingdom, except that it wasn’t serenity that plagued her this time. Her thoughts kept running around in circles, around the gaping wound left by the loss of the House; couldn’t seem to coalesce into anything useful. But still…
Still, she was damned if she’d let Selene have her way. “Selene?” She forced the words through a mouth that felt plugged with cotton.
Selene didn’t turn, but she did pause for a moment.
“You’re not Morningstar,” Madeleine said. “You’re not even a fraction of what he was.”
“Perhaps not,” Selene said. “But I am the head of this House, Madeleine. And nothing will change that.”
* * *
PHILIPPE came out of the House under the same gray, overcast skies of Paris. He barely could remember a time when they hadn’t been thus, when he had come in from Marseilles under a sun reminiscent of the shores of Indochina, a long time ago, in another lifetime.
He carried a basket of figs, dry-cured sausage, and bread that had been forced upon him by Laure when he went to the kitchens to say good-bye — Laure hadn’t said anything or accused him of anything, merely shaken her head sadly, like a mother whose chicks had had to flee the nest far too early. He’d tried, then; to warn her; to tell her she should leave the House before it collapsed around her, and realized that she’d lived for so long in it that nothing existed outside its boundaries. It had been… sobering — and made him think, again, of Isabelle and what she had become.
He stood, for a while, on the boundary between the House and the city, by the raised parapet of Pont d’Arcole, watching the oily waves of the Seine. He had feared the river once, like everyone in Paris; but now his eyes were opened to its true nature, and there was nothing to fear. Dragons ran sleek and superb beneath the water, elegant shapes racing one another; if he frowned hard enough, he could forget the broken-off antlers, the patches of dry scales on their bodies, the dark film that made their eyes seem dull, like gutted fish at a monger’s stall. For a moment; an impossible, suspended moment, he was back on the banks of the Perfumed River; with the smell of jasmine rice and crushed garlic, and the sweet one of banana flowers, all the things he should have set aside when ascending.
Past, all of this, gone by. There was no point in grieving for faded things.
Aragon had said he should forget it all; that the way to Annam was closed forever; that he should accept that his new home was in Paris, and act accordingly. But Aragon, who liked to call himself independent and unbound by loyalty to any House, still lived through his services to them; still drew a salary from Silverspires, and the lesser Houses he helped. Aragon could no more envision a world without Houses than he could stop breathing.
And Isabelle…
No, he couldn’t think of Isabelle now; or of what she might have meant to him. He couldn’t afford to.
What he was sure of was this: he would rather die, or forsake any hope of ascending ever again, than be forced into service once more.
Isabelle might have given in, but he wouldn’t. He threw a piece of broken stone into the river, and watched the ripples of its passage until they faded away. Then he shook himself, and went to look for the nearest omnibus stop.
* * *
MADELEINE tried not to brood, but it was all but impossible. Her mind was an empty place; a yawning abyss opening onto the night of the coup; and now she had neither angel essence nor the House’s protection to dull the knife’s edge of memory. In her dreams she smelled blood, the thick, sluggish, sickening odor of a slaughterhouse; and remembered Morningstar’s measured steps: the fear, shooting through her, that he would pass her by, that he would leave her to die in the darkness. In her dreams she never made it to Silverspires; or she stood on the Pont-au-Change and watched the ruins of the House, with the acrid smell of magic in her nostrils. In her dreams Asmodeus laughed, and whispered that he had won.