The House of Binding Thorns

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Yes,” Olympe said. “But they need to earn a living. I can’t tell them to avoid the docks.”

  No. Françoise thought about what Philippe had said. “They say dragons live in the Seine.”

  She’d expected Olympe to laugh, to tell her that was children’s stories and fairy tales, that there was no such thing. Instead, Olympe went deathly still, her wrinkled face frozen in something that might have been anger, or longing. “Do they? Who told you this?”

  “Philippe,” Françoise said, slowly. Who was, she knew, more than he seemed, able to draw on khi currents the same way magicians drew on Fallen magic. “But surely . . .”

  “Vo Thi Dieu Huyen,” Olympe whispered.

  The name meant nothing to Françoise. “I don’t know her.”

  “You wouldn’t. She died three years ago. But she said, when she was dying . . . she said that a woman dressed in mourning clothes brought her back the three incense sticks that she offered to the spirits of the river. She said that the woman gave her the blessing of the Seine.” Olympe shook her head. “It’s impossible. Dragons are spirits who watch over us. Why would they take people?”

  Françoise thought of the black, oily surface of the Seine, the water writhing as if in the grip of a storm. “Perhaps we haven’t been very effective at placating them. But they already take their toll, don’t they?” They didn’t need circles, or spells, or anything like that. The Seine was already dragging people from bridges and quays, spitting out drowned, mottled bodies.

  It made no sense. If the woman woke up, in their flat . . . but Philippe had said that was unlikely. The woman. Nemnestra. Her thoughts went back to House Astragale, and the threats they’d made. Focus. She needed to focus on the more pressing problem. She needed to be back at the flat. She needed to talk to Berith. “We can talk about this later. I’ll be back.”

  * * *

  SHE’D expected Berith to shrug off the threats made by House Astragale, as she’d shrugged off those made by the gangs. But Berith listened intently, and then said nothing for a while.

  Françoise had thought her stomach couldn’t plummet any further, but it did. The baby writhed and kicked within her. She had to sit down to catch her breath. “You’re . . . afraid of them?”

  Berith sighed. “They’re a House, Françoise. I can’t set myself against them.”

  “You—” Françoise had always thought—she’d always believed that, for as long as they were alive, Berith would protect her. That this, at least, was something she didn’t need to worry about. “I thought we were safe,” she said, finally. She couldn’t keep the reproach out of her voice.

  “No one is ever safe.” Berith went back to her armchair, wincing. “I made a choice to live outside the Houses, years ago, in full knowledge. I’m sorry. I assumed you knew.”

  “I—” Françoise tried to think of something, of anything, to say—all the words pressing themselves against the dryness of her palate, and they all came tumbling out like water from a broken dam. “I’m not House, Berith. I’m not Fallen. You might live and breathe politics like the rest of them, but I don’t! Whatever made you think I did?”

  “You never asked!” Berith’s face was taut. “And I’m not like the rest of them.”

  “Aren’t you?” There wasn’t much space in the flat, with the dying woman on the bed. “She said all that stood between us and oblivion was the fear of what Asmodeus would do if you were attacked.” The glint of light on glasses, and that insufferable sense of superiority, offering the protection of the House, when he had to know—he had always known—that some of it was already extended to her. “Is she right?”

  “Françoise.” Berith extended both hands to her.

  “No,” Françoise said. “Tell me. Now.”

  “I haven’t had anything to do with him in years,” Berith said. “But yes, it would make sense.”

  “And you counted on that?”

  “No,” Berith said. “But it happened, regardless.”

  “It doesn’t change anything!”

  Berith was silent, for a while. “I’m still linked to him. Family bonds don’t break just because I don’t care for them. If either of us ever has a burning need, the other will feel it. A bit like the link to a House. And yes: he learned, early on, that power and defending what was yours was the only thing that mattered in this city.” There was almost affection in her voice. Françoise felt sick.

  “You’re not supposed to care for him anymore.” Even before she’d finished saying it, she knew how petty, how small it sounded.

  Berith rose, came to stroke her hair, gently. “We can’t exist without Houses.” Her touch was like fire, a warmth that grew in Françoise’s belly and spread to her lungs, to her heart. “They hold all the power in the city. It’s naive to think that we can stand apart from that.”

  Just as illusory as the idea she could stand apart from the rest of the community? “No,” Françoise said, stiffly. “And we’re not giving up our guest, either.” She wouldn’t survive for long, but Houses had a way of making people pay for the slightest offense, even the dying.

  Berith didn’t move. At last, she said, “No. I wasn’t suggesting that, either.” She sounded regretful. “But I wasn’t expecting this would set us against a House. I can uproot and relocate to a new flat, but it’s costly, and would leave me defenseless.”

  “I’m not asking you to.” The words rang hollow in Françoise’s mouth.

  “I know. But we might need to brace ourselves for incursions.”

  From House Astragale. From Nemnestra. Françoise took another deep, shaking breath. “I love you,” she said, and it sounded trite, and slight, and insufficient.

  Berith kissed her, gently, deeply. “I love you, too. We’ll find a way. Come on. Dinner is almost ready, and you can help me translate something.”

  The game again. Françoise sighed. She’d tried to think of her next move all day, but her brain seemed to have turned to mush. At least translating was going to be easier than actually moving a chariot or an elephant across the board. “Where are you?” She waddled toward the board, shifted it so that they’d have space to eat. The book was closed, with no bookmark.

  “End of chapter one,” Berith said, scooping dirt-flecked rice from the pan on the stove. “I’m starting to wonder if I should write a translation to refer to. Would be easier.”

  “You can if that helps. Maybe Aunt Ha—”

  “Françoise.” Berith’s voice was gentle. “We picked this because we needed something to do together. I play enough games with Aunt Ha already.”

  “I can’t keep up,” Françoise said, forcing a smile. It came more easily than she’d thought, the tension of the day slowly receding to bearable levels. She flicked through the book, staring at the small drawings of the board demonstrating the values of different openings. Oh yes. The chariot sortie, and here was the diagonal move of the adviser in answer to avoid checkmate. “And you said you needed easier adversaries, after all.”

  “Hahaha.” Berith was busy mixing fish sauce with a dash of vinegar to make a dipping sauce for the rice. She nearly always got the taste right. It had to be magic, given their dearth of ingredients, but Berith didn’t ever seem to use anything but her hands. “You really think Aunt Ha is a worse player than you?”

  “I don’t know,” Françoise said. “Evenly balanced, I think. But we don’t think the same way. Which bit didn’t you understand?”

  “Last paragraph,” Berith said. “Every word makes sense, but the whole doesn’t.” She grimaced. “At least I think so, assuming I got the separation of syllables right.”

  Françoise snorted. “Your Viet isn’t that bad.”

  “It is with unfamiliar words.”

  Françoise moved to the last paragraph, stared at it for a while. She’d learned from a similar book, once, but hadn’t actually read one in a long time. So
me of the older people in the community enjoyed passing around chess problems, but she’d never taken part in puzzling them out. “It’s a saying,” she said. “A Chinese one, so no wonder you’re having issues with it. It would translate to . . .” She thought for a while. “‘You’re a poor player if you don’t use a chariot within your first three moves.’”

  Berith laid out chopsticks by the side of the chipped bowls. “Ah. Makes sense. The chariot is a powerful piece. Long attack range.”

  “Mmm,” Françoise said. She looked to the next page. “The next chapter walks you through some of the less common openings, but there are plenty of drawings. Should be easier.”

  “Except for the part where my brain twists into knots trying to work out the logic,” Berith said. “All right. We can eat now. Thank you.”

  “Sure.” Françoise closed the book, and moved toward the table, but stopped. “Hang on. I just want to check in on her.”

  “It’s not as though dinner can grow colder,” Berith said, with a deliberately impassive face.

  “Oh, shut up. I won’t be long.”

  Françoise went to kneel by the woman’s side. Her face was paler, her breathing shallower. She probably wouldn’t last the night, if that long. Berith, for all her protestations, had also left the table. She ran her hands over the burn between the woman’s breasts, marking its contours with the tips of her fingers. It started, faintly, to glow, raised ridges brought into sharp relief by the light. “It was a tracker disk,” she said, finally. “You can still see the edges of the engraving.”

  “So she is House.” Françoise shook her head. It wasn’t as though that was a surprise. “I wonder what she stole, that they’d want her back so badly.”

  Berith shrugged. “Trifles, for all you know. Houses aren’t forgiving, or inclined to let go of what’s theirs.”

  “Nemnestra said . . .” Françoise closed her eyes. “. . . that House Hawthorn’s goodwill might not last. Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” Berith said. “You can’t trust anything they say. Hawthorn is on the rise, and Asmodeus isn’t a fool. House Astragale, for all their posturing, is a newcomer at this.”

  “Of course.” Françoise wished she had Berith’s confidence. And that she knew where that left them—possessions of House Hawthorn? Stakes in House Astragale’s plots?

  She wished she had an answer.

  * * *

  IN the middle of the night, Françoise woke up soaked. The baby must have kicked her bladder while she slept—again—and her throat felt as parched as a desert. “Sssh, ssh,” she whispered, getting up and rubbing her belly as the baby stretched, bumping into some organ and leaving an odd, twisting feeling within her. Berith was sleeping in the armchair, her head drooped on her chest. Her breath was slow, regular.

  “Let’s get you some water,” Françoise said to the baby, rubbing her hands against the fullness of her belly.

  She stopped.

  Because, on the bed, the woman was awake, her pale, glistening eyes open, though she hadn’t sat up or moved. She merely lay, staring at the ceiling. More slowly than she’d have liked, Françoise made her way to the woman’s side, and crouched down. It was going to be hell to get up, but no one ought to be alone in moments like these.

  “You’re safe,” she said. “It’ll be fine.” A blatant lie, but it wouldn’t matter for long.

  The woman’s eyes rested on her, and moved away as if she were part of the furniture. Françoise exhaled, and removed the wards that kept Berith’s magic contained. A surge of magic filled her body, swift, exhilarating, that misguided feeling that she could do anything, take on anyone.

  She raised a glowing hand, laid it on the woman’s forehead. It was ice-cold, and even the magic didn’t warm it. Not long, then. “You’re safe.” And, because she had to try, “Who harmed you?”

  The woman’s eyes held hers. At last she said, “I stayed too long. That was a mistake.” Françoise had expected her voice to be thin, or incoherent, but it had the firmness of someone giving a lecture to recalcitrant children.

  Stayed too long. “In the House? In Astragale?”

  “She’s smart,” the woman whispered. “Patient, weaving her cloth of lies and betrayal piece by piece.” She shuddered.

  “Who?” Françoise asked. She let out a little magic into the woman, but there was only a gaping emptiness on the other side: she might as well have tried to fill an abyss with a glass of water.

  “I tried to—but I couldn’t return to the House. The rot is inside, you see. Like a worm, gnawing away at the foundations. The seeds of twenty years, poison distilled in alembics and drawing rooms. The heir.” The woman laughed. It was high, unfocused; and utterly, completely bone-chilling. “Building a field of ruins, a wall of dreams. It won’t work. Nothing has ever worked.”

  “You’re . . .” Françoise started to say she wasn’t making any sense, and then gave up. It would have been churlish, and unconstructive.

  “In the grove there’s a harvest of hanging corpses in place of fruit.” The woman laughed again. “That’s what she wants, the heart of the matter, the history she carries with her. To add one more body to that parade—to hoist it up, like a strung puppet, to dance to her tune, flayed skin and eyes pecked out by crows . . . The body that will make everything right.”

  If it hadn’t been the flat—if it had just been a street, and the dark around them—Françoise would have started backing away from her, death or no death.

  The woman shuddered again, and then her eyes opened again, and she saw Françoise. Really saw her this time. “It’s all right,” Françoise started to say, but the woman’s hand went upward, and gently pulled her hand from her forehead, and held it like a lifeline.

  “It’s dark,” she whispered. “I always thought . . . there would be light, at the end. Light . . .”

  Françoise was still holding that hand come morning; but it had gone limp within hers, and she had no need of Berith’s calmly kneeling by the woman’s side to know that she would never wake up again.

  THIRTEEN

  Question and Answer

  THE world had shrunk.

  Help me, please—the words running, over and over, in her mind, to Hawthorn or God or whoever else was listening, but there was no answer.

  There was only the sweet, sickening odor of essence; the bouts of coughing, which left her spread on the floor, struggling to breathe, the taste of blood in her mouth; and, on the edge of her field of vision, bright, pulsing colors, merging and melding into one another, expanding until they filled her.

  A door opening, in some faraway universe. No footsteps, that she could hear, but someone knelt by her side, and, for a moment only, the smell of bergamot and orange blossom overwhelmed everything else—no, not him, not him; she tried to crawl away as far as possible, but none of her limbs would answer her. And then the smell of essence fell again, obliterating everything else.

  “You’re a mess.” Asmodeus’s voice held the sharpness of a blade. Magic pulsed on her skin: an insistent, warm touch that clawed at the caked essence on her clothes and her hands, whittling away at it until nothing was left.

  Madeleine took a deep, shaking breath, held it. Nothing in the air now but citruses, the trembling, stomach-clenching smell of Hawthorn. “I—I didn’t—” A fit of coughing wracked her. She struggled for purchase on the slats of the boat’s floor, even as splinters dug into her skin.

  Hands—his hands—pulled her up, into a sitting position, forced her upright, to stare at him. Asmodeus wore his usual swallowtail jacket in the colors of the House, with a silver scarf at his throat, and looked as comfortable as if he were sitting in his own office.

  “I—didn’t—,” she tried again, had to stop again. She had taken just the pinch of essence she needed for the spell, and no more—had just lain on the floor, her life seeping away, rather than face him drunk on essence.<
br />
  “Oh, Madeleine.” Asmodeus shook his head. “Do you really think that’s the main concern, as things are?”

  “You—you came. You—” Words seemed to have scattered in her brain, to come out mangled no matter what she tried to say. “You knew it was a trap.”

  Asmodeus raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t get to be head of House Hawthorn by being a fool. Can you walk?”

  Madeleine drew a shaking breath. “I . . . think so.”

  His face didn’t move when she rose and tottered to the door, but he stopped her with a raised hand. “This is not going to work. May I?”

  The words in his mouth made no sense. “May you what?”

  “Give you magic. It’s either that or essence, and magic won’t corrode your lungs any further.” He didn’t say anything about the addiction, she noticed.

  And then her thoughts finally gathered themselves from where they’d fled, and she understood what he was asking for.

  A touch or a breath, but a breath was so much more effective, and so much more potent. He was offering her the choice. “You could leave me here.”

  His smile was dark and amused. “Do you really think whatever they have in store for you is any kinder than what I will do if you relapse? Besides, I made you a promise. The point of those isn’t that you abandon them when they’re inconvenient.”

  “But—” She closed her eyes, sought words that failed her. He was waiting for her answer. She guessed he could have done what he wanted without it. A small kindness. She ought to have been grateful. “Do it.”

  He bent, and his lips brushed hers. To call it a kiss would have been obscene. Something passed between them: warmth, fire, the living, breathing power she’d get drunk on at night, pretending that it was hers for the taking. But what filled her, slowly spreading from her mouth to her heart, and from her heart into every limb, felt like fingers stretching to fill the holes of a glove, pushing the cloth taut until only a thin, almost debased layer of it remained.