The House of Binding Thorns

by Aliette de Bodard

  “There.” Asmodeus pulled away. “Now let’s get back to the palace.”

  Madeleine finally found her voice, dragging it from the back of her throat. The words tasted sour in her mouth. “Elphon—Ghislaine . . .”

  Asmodeus didn’t even flinch. “You’re the only Hawthorn dependent here.”

  How could he know? With Ghislaine, he’d lost the link, hadn’t he? And even the disk on her chest, the one that was tied to her, the same one he’d given Elphon, had barely worked until she’d boosted its powers. “You can’t know that.”

  “Yen Oanh isn’t subtle. If she had any of them, she would have dangled them in front of me as a further inducement to lure me here. Besides, I know where Elphon is. It’s an odd location, but it’s nowhere near here.”

  “Where?” Madeleine asked, but Asmodeus had already walked out as if nothing were amiss. Madeleine followed, a puppet tied to his strings.

  Outside, at the foot of the boat, Yen Oanh was waiting for them, in the middle of a tight knot that included two dozen guards, and a Fallen wearing Annamite clothes, whose face Madeleine didn’t recognize. Facing her were four bodyguards in the colors of Hawthorn, carrying slung rifles with bayonets.

  “I’ve kept my word,” Asmodeus said, curtly.

  “And I mine.” Yen Oanh’s voice was light, ironic. “Your dependent is alive and unharmed.”

  “I disagree with your ideas of ‘harm.’”

  “Whole, then.”

  Madeleine looked up. The cage where Charles had lain was still dangling from the side of the boat; a shrunken body within, holding antlers and long, serpentine limbs, the alienness of dragons laid bare in death.

  Whole. Alive. She shivered.

  “You certainly have my attention,” Asmodeus was saying.

  “And I didn’t before?”

  “I wasn’t here, was I?”

  “No. Not here, and not as vulnerable as you’ll ever be.” Yen Oanh’s face was harsh. She gestured to the guards by her side. “Take him.”

  The currents on either side became cold fingers, grasping at Madeleine’s skin, weighing her down, dragging her inexorably toward the smooth riverbed. But within her, the puppeteer’s hand stretched, dragged her upward. The cold vanished.

  Asmodeus moved, impossibly smoothly. Before Madeleine could catch her breath, he’d grabbed one of the halberds from the guards, and, reversing it in one elegant movement, dragged it across Yen Oanh’s midriff. Silk parted, and skin, and scales. Yen Oanh grunted and fell, hands doubled over the wound as if she could prevent it from widening any farther. Asmodeus withdrew the halberd and, still in that frozen, impossible moment when nobody could react, stabbed the Fallen with the point.

  One of the bodyguards grabbed Madeleine, and shoved her away from the battle. “Run,” she said.

  Madeleine ran. Slow and ponderous at first, struggling to breathe, fighting the cough. From behind her came the noises of battle: the resonant sound of metal against metal, and a noise like breaking glass, contracting the waters around her. Her legs felt like lead. One step, and then another and another . . .

  Blood in her mouth, in her lungs. A stitch in her ribs, right under the heart. And, within her, rising like an unstoppable force, the House: Asmodeus’s light, ironic presence, the thorn tree flowering in place of her spine, a maelstrom that swallowed every thought, every word, and remade her into sharp steel.

  Run away.

  Run.

  One step, then another and another. Up a small hill where fish scales crunched under her feet; past an old, ruined pagoda with a tumbled-down roof. Her feet, leaving the ground as she passed from ridge to ridge, climbing a cliff of white, oily coral—everything crumbling under her, into clouds of dust that the river carried away.

  Up. Up. Away.

  When she finally stopped to catch her breath, the link to the House sinking to lukewarm embers in her mind, Asmodeus’s presence receding to a mere omnipresent whisper, she was at the top of a small hill. A shrine crowned it: a delicate concoction of coral so fine it was like translucent porcelain, with six yellow fruits she couldn’t recognize aligned before a pitted marble statue. A smell of incense wafted from three sticks, planted in a greenish sponge flecked with mold.

  She flopped down, the rush of energy that had sustained her leaving: a puppet with cut strings, lying on that odd, mossy carpet of brown algae.

  She couldn’t see anyone. Above her, the sun shimmered through that impossible sky, bending and wavering with the shifts of the mass of water that separated her from the surface. Behind her, distant shouts and cries, a pursuit that wouldn’t be so easily deterred.

  Time must have passed. The sun’s light darkened and shifted, casting long, dancing shadows over her. She had to get back to the palace, but she didn’t know which direction to travel in. She didn’t even know where she was.

  Run.

  Great advice.

  Voices, cresting the hill. Madeleine pulled herself up, every muscle in her body protesting. She didn’t have the energy to run anymore. What was she going to do—face them down? As if she could even fight.

  It was Asmodeus, and two of his bodyguards. Asmodeus looked odd, his jacket in disarray, with three deep, bloody gashes across the shirt. Red oozed into the water around him like splashed paint. The bodyguards didn’t look much better—one of them distinctly pale, stumbling rather than walking, leaning on one of the dragons’ halberds, probably the one Asmodeus had used to down Yen Oanh. The last one, the woman who had pushed Madeleine to run, was carrying a rifle, and the prone body of the Fallen Asmodeus had stabbed.

  Asmodeus smiled when he saw her: sharp, predatory; no better than Yen Oanh, after all. Run, she needed to run, except that she had nowhere else to go. “Ah, Madeleine.”

  The tracking disk pulsed against her skin, slowly, lazily, like a second, diseased heart. Of course he would find her, wherever she went. Of course she would always belong to Hawthorn, now and until the hour of her death—at his hands, most likely, when she ceased to amuse him. “Asmodeus.” Her voice scraped her throat raw, every word still tinged with his smell.

  “The palace is that way, about two days’ march, if the geography of the place doesn’t decide to give up on us. Come.”

  And she followed, because she no longer had any choice.

  * * *

  WHEN darkness fell, they were in the hollow of yet another hill, within a landscape of endless rolling hills, all in various states of decay: the fish scales brittle and dull, the algae rotten, the coral bleached, or overrun with large black and brown pockmarks. Everything smelled of mold, though at least it wasn’t the sickly smell of dragons on angel essence.

  Madeleine sat with her back to a small, shriveled coral outcropping, too winded to talk. She watched shoals of fish bank, high above them, giving them all a wide berth. Asmodeus was conferring with the two remaining bodyguards. The female one, Valchior, had handed her a chunk of bread, which she nibbled on despite not feeling really hungry, or thirsty. Merely emptied. Like a tree hollowed from the inside out.

  It felt unreal. A dream she was having while high on essence, while dying in the cage where Charles had died. It—

  If she stopped to think, if it ever became real, she would feel its claws digging deep into her heart, and she wasn’t ready for that. For any of it.

  At length, Asmodeus came to sit by her side. A cloud of broken coral rose as he wedged himself against the same outcropping. “You’re holding up reasonably well, considering.”

  Considering she’d been dying.

  “Here,” Asmodeus said. He held out a small package wrapped in paper. Essence? Of course it couldn’t be.

  Madeleine unwrapped it. Within were four of Iaris’s pills, the ones she took against the cough.

  “Valchior should have some water,” Asmodeus said. “Considering the state of the Seine, I’m not overly
keen to investigate drinking the atmosphere, even if we could.”

  “I—” Madeleine stared at the pills. He’d come for her. She kept running, again and again, against this one inescapable fact. “You’re wounded.”

  Asmodeus glanced at the three gashes on his chest. “These? Not much you need worry about.”

  She wasn’t worrying about them. Or maybe she was. He was her only chance of making it back to the palace now. And she couldn’t help but notice that although they weren’t deep, they were still bleeding. Which, considering Fallen healed fast, was . . . Well, perhaps worrying was the right word. “You should bind them,” she said.

  He said nothing, merely waited. For her to minister to him? Something finally rebelled within her, a core of steel buried under the layers of numbness.

  “I’m not a doctor. Or a nurse.”

  Asmodeus’s gaze held hers—gray-green, the color of a stormy sea in bygone times. She’d gone too far. He was going to turn on her, relapse or no relapse.

  At length, after what felt like an eternity, he nodded, and shrugged off his jacket and shirt, carefully peeling the cloth back from his wounds. Red pooled, lazily, against his skin.

  Asmodeus tore the shirt into strips and, wedging one of them under his shoulders, tied a knot into a crude bandage. The muscles of his torso were taut, and a thin white line ran from his heart to his hips, a scar from something that hadn’t healed well. Madeleine was—had been—an alchemist, dissecting Fallen for their magic. She knew the only wounds that didn’t heal well were those that removed body parts.

  He must have noticed her staring. “Yes. I have no heart. Well-known fact.”

  He was making a dark, twisted joke at her expense, speaking metaphorically rather than literally: he had to have a heart in his chest, for not even a Fallen would have survived with the heart taken away. But ribs? Around that telltale line of the torso, you could remove one or two, and it wouldn’t bother him much, would it? Had this happened under Uphir?

  Asmodeus put on his jacket again, and buttoned it up, all the way to the straight, embroidered collar. “Don’t get maudlin,” he said, with a cold, easy smile. “Everyone has scars. I ran into some bad company when I was young, that’s all; before I knew how to protect myself, and what was mine. And I didn’t come for you out of sentimentality. I do need to know, after all, what is going on in the dragon kingdom, to be capable of making my move.”

  Not out of sentimentality. Well, that made things easier, didn’t it? Greed and plots, and self-interest, except she didn’t know, anymore, what was truth and what wasn’t. “You killed Yen Oanh,” she said.

  “Did I? You’ll find that dragons are extremely hard to kill. I doubt I’ve done more than mildly inconvenience her.” Asmodeus took off his horn-rimmed glasses, and rubbed them clean on the lapel of his jacket.

  Was that what had led him to ask for the alliance? But the kingdom was weak and in disarray; surely, even so close to Hawthorn, it wouldn’t be much of a threat? She wasn’t good at politics, had never been, and even less at the cutthroat games of Houses. But he seemed to be in a good mood, insofar as he ever could be. She gathered her courage, and said, “You said—you said you had always known they were there. The dragon kingdoms. Why has no House tried to deal with them before? Morningstar knew, too.” He had gone into the dragon kingdom looking for help Ngoc Bich had been unable to give him.

  Asmodeus watched her for a while. At length, he shrugged, as if what he was going to say mattered little. “Morningstar knew because I told him.”

  “You—?”

  “Remember our little chat in the gardens?” The one when he’d pierced her hand, when he’d threatened her, when he’d told her he had always intended her to come back to the House, that twenty years were as nothing to him. “I said I had business in House Silverspires, the night Uphir fell. When I brought you to their doors and left you there.”

  “Yes,” Madeleine said, through speaking was a struggle. “I remember.”

  “You would. I struck a bargain with Morningstar, that night. He was desperate to safeguard his House, at any cost.” He sounded . . . disapproving? He didn’t like Morningstar, for reasons Madeleine couldn’t fathom. He treated all other heads of Houses with amused contempt, but Morningstar seemed to have touched a nerve. “And, of course, I knew that the location of the dragon kingdom would interest him. Such raw, alien power right beneath his nose. He would seek it like a man dying of thirst.”

  “You—”

  “Hawthorn is close to the river. We’ve had to deal with the kingdom for a while, but they were strong then. There was little interest in telling other Houses we were beholden to them.”

  “But you told Morningstar.”

  “For a price,” Asmodeus said. “For a prize. Something to make every spell or magic of mine pale in comparison. An investment for the future, you might call it.”

  A spell. An artifact, something infused with Morningstar’s magic—the magic of the first and most powerful of all Fallen, a burning sun compared with pale, faraway stars, enough magic to reshape the world to his will. “What—?” Madeleine started, but Asmodeus shook his head.

  “I have my own schemes,” he said. “That’s all you really need to know.”

  Madeleine lowered her gaze, staring at the sand at her feet. It was more information than she’d expected, truth be told. And still none of her business: probably connected to Asmodeus’s plans for his consort and the kingdom; plans not even Clothilde would discuss. Perhaps she didn’t know.

  “They’ll be after us,” Madeleine said, finally, to change the subject.

  “Of course. But first they have to find us. And they also need to sleep, when night falls. Nothing I’ve seen or heard indicates that they can see in the dark better than we do.” He smiled, sharp, lazy. “Get some sleep. Valchior will keep watch. She’s good at that.” He rose. Something glinted in his hand: the unsheathed blade of a knife.

  “What—?” she asked, but she already knew what he’d say.

  “I’m going to get some answers, and I’m sure you’d rather not hear what happens before that Fallen talks. Although . . .” He shrugged. “Who knows? He might break early. Some do.”

  He was right: she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to hear, and the only thing she could think of, over and over, was that she was glad it wasn’t her he was going to use the knife on. Such bravery. Such naive, conceited morality.

  She swallowed one of the pills; she’d been doing this for so long she hardly needed water. Then she turned her face away from them all, and closed her eyes, and slid, almost without noticing, into a dark, tumultuous sleep shot through with the screams of the living.

  * * *

  SOMEONE knocked at the door.

  Françoise expected Laurent and Alexandra, teenagers who hung out in the streets and had agreed to dump the woman’s body by the docks, well away from the flat and any evidence either of them had ever been implicated in this. “Come in,” she said.

  “Françoise.” Berith’s voice was a hiss. “No.”

  Françoise got up, ponderously. Opened the door, and found Nemnestra, and the gaunt man with long fingers—Célestin?—staring at her with the unpleasant smile of tigers who had just found their prey.

  A fist of ice tightened around her stomach. “Nemnestra.”

  “We were told to see you,” Nemnestra said. “About a runaway woman.”

  “Who—?” Françoise started, and then shook her head. It didn’t matter. Too many people had seen Olympe and the dockers with the body.

  Berith rose from the blue armchair. Something had shifted: her eyes became flecked with silver, and her entire frame seemed to expand. She went toward the bed, and picked up the body of the woman. “This is what you are here for, I trust?”

  Nemnestra said nothing. Célestin’s gaze was cold, and hungry.

  “Here.”
Berith hoisted the body on her shoulders, without apparent effort, and carried it to the doorway. “Stay out of the flat, and out of my affairs. We have no interest in your House quarrels, Nemnestra. Neither of us do.”

  “But you still took her in.”

  “We took in a dying woman,” Françoise said. “And she never woke up.” She left out the delirium. Far better for them to think they had nothing. She went to the cupboard, and took out one of the bowls they’d collected the jade shards into. “She was holding this.”

  Célestin knelt by the body, but it was perfunctory: taking the pulse and making sure she was dead. Nemnestra held out her hands to receive the bowl, which Françoise passed to her through the doorway—careful, Françoise noted, to remain on the side of the stairs. “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

  Even if she had, Françoise wouldn’t have admitted it. “No. Berith is right. We have no interest in your plots.”

  Nemnestra smiled, and Françoise fought the urge to flee. House-bound. House dependents. The unthinking arrogance of the powerful, taking what they wanted from others. They could never hold out against that. “Even that won’t be enough to save you.”

  “Is that a threat?” Françoise asked, with a nonchalance she didn’t feel. This was someone powerful enough to worry Berith.

  “Merely a promise,” Nemnestra said. “Staying out of fights isn’t your path to salvation.”

  “You think we should take a stand against you?” Berith asked, coldly. She’d come by Françoise’s side, one hand resting on her shoulder.

  “You could,” Nemnestra said. “If you want to lose.” Her hands were limned with cold, blue light. She laid them against the surface of the doorframe, pushing gently, carefully. Pain—sharp, unexpected—rose within Françoise, every bone aching under the pressure.

  Berith grimaced, but didn’t move. “You’ll find I’m no easy prey,” she said.

  Nemnestra continued probing for what felt like an eternity, while Françoise braced herself for what she could do, if they managed to break in. At length, Nemnestra shook her head. “Not yet.”