The House of Binding Thorns

by Aliette de Bodard

  It was kindness, he supposed, to attempt to modify the spell so that Thuan survived it, somehow. It never worked, because the spell needed Thuan to be weak, to be dying, in order to work. Rape, mutilation, lifelong imprisonment, his tongue torn out, his limbs restrained and atrophied, a cornucopia of horrors all weighed up, and regretfully discarded. What kind of mind would work through these, one after another, and never flinch?

  His hands were shaking. Death, after all, might be the greater kindness. Except that the choice wasn’t his. Had never been his.

  A morsel.

  To be chewed on, like fish or crab flesh, and, ultimately, dissolved. As the dragon kingdom would dissolve, becoming a mere adjunct to Hawthorn.

  He felt betrayed, in a spectacularly foolish way. It wasn’t as if he’d been owed anything. It wasn’t even as if he hadn’t been warned. Asmodeus had told him. But he’d thought—he’d hoped . . .

  I like you, dragon prince. More than I should.

  But not enough to put his plans aside. No, that was unfair. Did Thuan really want any of the alternatives Asmodeus had explored?

  There had to be something he could do, to stop this. His grasp of magical theory was good, but not the equal of a House head’s.

  The spell, strictly speaking, had already started, from the moment Asmodeus and he had stood together by the ancestors’ altar, from the moment the contracts had been signed, when he had become consort. As Asmodeus had said, Thuan was the living link to the dragon kingdom. He was its weakness. He couldn’t be sure, but his death, in some way, in any way—even if he stabbed himself with charcoal or pencils, or made a weapon from the metal in the room—would fuel the spell. It would be less elegant or thorough than Asmodeus would want, but still have disastrous effects.

  There had to be something. . . . .

  He slid, at some point, into a dark, confused sleep, dreaming of vast underwater spaces, and the silhouettes of dragons wrapping themselves around a hawthorn tree—pierced by the thorns and taking on the color and the shape of branches, until there was nothing of them left but a faint and unrecognizable memory.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Into Battle

  THUAN woke with a gasp. Morning filtered through the dark green curtains. Something was wrong. He reached out for the elaborate dressing gown by the side of the bed, wrapped himself in it, feeling very much as though he was putting on a costume designed by someone else: the role of the French gentleman of leisure in some unfamiliar play.

  The clock on his bedside table said it was past ten o’clock, but there was no tray by the door, or any sign that anyone had tried to enter. And the papers Nadine had brought him were still there, which meant she hadn’t come back, either. Why not?

  He sat down on the bed again, and listened. The House should have been full of bustle: servants through the corridors, dependents going on various tasks, the laughter or frustrated tears of children in the gardens. Instead there was . . . nothing. A profound, frightening silence that seemed to extend into every crack of the room and of the wing, as if everything lay smothered under rock.

  Thuan looked, for a while, at the khi currents in the room. They were stronger, somehow, like caged beasts that had feasted on their neighbors’ flesh. The water in particular, the one he could easily read, was at an all-time high. If he didn’t know better, he’d have thought the House was flooding.

  Things will change, in the House. Soon.

  He went into the huge tiled bathroom, immersing himself in a bath, breathing in the smell and coldness of water, a reminder of the distant, beleaguered kingdom. He didn’t bother to use the towels, letting the droplets of water dry on his skin. For a moment, as they evaporated, his dragon shape broke through, revealing scales and the shadow of antlers on his head.

  He considered, then, what to wear. The robes he’d worn when arriving in the House were familiar, but cumbersome: they were ceremonial clothes, designed to make him look like a rooster. He hadn’t packed clothes, because he’d known, even then, that being made a consort was an irreversible break with his role as prince of the dragon kingdom.

  Which left the overlarge suit, cut for someone else. Well, at least it wasn’t two sizes too small. He had a halfhearted forage for sewing supplies, but of course they wouldn’t have left needles or scissors where he could find them. Too dangerous. He could have made a needle by melting and reshaping one of the buttons on the suit with khi fire, but it would have been a crude one—ironically, probably good only for stabbing someone, if not very deeply.

  Never mind. There were still small things he could do, with careful application of khi fire and khi water. Sleeves could be cut, albeit not very elegantly. The cloth at the back, over the shoulder blades, could be tightened, and the same at the waist.

  When the key turned in the lock, Thuan was sitting in the armchair by the desk, looking over Samariel’s sketches. He rose, slowly, carefully, with all the presence his tutors had despaired to ever instill in him.

  As he had thought, it wasn’t Asmodeus, but Iaris and Sare, and Nadine behind them, her face unreadable. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  Iaris watched him, for a while. “How much of this did you plan?” she asked.

  “Plan? I didn’t plan anything.” Other people—Asmodeus, Nadine’s mysterious faction—had planned around him. But no longer. “I don’t have any idea what’s going on. Other than it not being normal.”

  Iaris stared at him, hard. Thuan, who had, on this front, nothing to hide, stared back. At length she said, grudgingly, “Lord Asmodeus went out late, in something of a hurry. He hasn’t come back.”

  “Surely that’s not unusual?” Thuan asked. He didn’t move, didn’t do anything that would lessen the impression of control and strength that he projected.

  “In and of itself, no,” Sare said. “But there’s something wrong with the link to the House. And . . .” She hesitated and looked at Iaris, who nodded. “There is no path going out of the House.”

  “I don’t understand,” Thuan said, mildly.

  “There is nothing beyond the gates,” Sare said. “The stairways to the quays don’t lead to the river, either. Just to a wall. A dark, impenetrable wall.”

  “A wall?”

  “It’s hard to describe. You’re quite free to take a look at it if you want.”

  They were desperate: adrift, with their only source of certainty removed, and under an attack they couldn’t explain. Thuan looked at Nadine, who hadn’t said anything. She looked relaxed, for the first time in a long while.

  “You mean you want me to take a look at it,” Thuan said. “In case I can do something?”

  “You’re his consort,” Iaris said, a touch of impatience in her voice. “You must have some power.”

  The power of dying. But that wasn’t the matter at hand. “Perhaps,” Thuan said. “I’m also a prisoner of the House, so you can understand why I’m less than motivated to help.” Among other things.

  “You resent being stuck in here with us?” Nadine’s smile was fierce. “You did spy for the dragon kingdom. That was not exactly loyal.”

  Was he the only one who could hear the bite in her voice? Iaris didn’t appear to take anything amiss, and Sare was too busy looking at every corner of the room, as if she suspected Thuan had booby-trapped it. Which would have been rather pointless.

  “Fine,” Thuan said. “Let me out, and I’ll take a look.”

  “Of course,” Iaris said.

  He raised a hand. “I don’t mean just so I can see the problem for myself. I mean not being locked in this room anymore.”

  Iaris grimaced. “I had understood. I could force you, you know. The Court of Persuasion . . .”

  “. . . would take some time to get results from me,” Thuan said. In a way, sparring with Asmodeus had liberated him. He could no longer find any room for fear within him. “And perhaps I can’t do
magic at all if you start harming me.”

  “Or perhaps you can.” Iaris’s voice was mildly amused: it was easy to see where she got her mannerisms from. “But never mind. In the scheme of things, I would rather have you running loose in the House than not know what we’re facing.”

  Intrigue. Treachery. And him, at the center of it all, still struggling to make it come into focus, to understand enough of what was going on to survive. “Show me,” he said.

  * * *

  THE gardens were deserted, too: the children sheltering on the steps before the main building of the House, running a subdued game of tag under the watchful eyes of members of the Court of Birth.

  Thuan looked up, as they headed toward the Seine. The sky was blue with no trace of clouds or ashes, more disquieting than he’d expected. The air was crisp, cold, his breath hanging in the air. That feeling of something not quite right followed him as Sare pushed through thin, cracked branches, her feet crunching on the debris-strewn gravel.

  And then they reached the stairs going down to the quays, and he saw what they’d meant.

  There was nothing, where the river should have been. The stairs trailed off halfway through, and the quay had vanished. It was like a mist or a curtain of snow, if snow had been mixed with smoke and cinders. The khi currents swirled in front of it, turning back when they reached the wall. That was interesting: he’d expected them to be cut off if this was some kind of obstacle, but it was as if nothing existed beyond that wall.

  Thuan didn’t go down the stairs. He just stood behind the low stone railing, staring left and right—yes, it stretched on and on, and curved inward, at what he imagined were the boundaries of the House. They were quite neatly cut off from the city. As Nadine had said: not very comforting that he was included in the “them.”

  On the left side, all the way at the boundary of the House with the streets, something that drew his eye: he couldn’t have said what exactly, but for a moment, the mist seemed to part, and he saw the skeletal silhouette of a tree with bloodred fruit, and something hanging from it, far too large to be a fruit.

  No. Nonsense. That was just Nadine’s stories getting to his head.

  Sare, Nadine, and Iaris were waiting for him just a little way off. “What happens if I touch it?” Thuan asked.

  Iaris grimaced. “Try.”

  Great. Moral support. Thuan reached out, cautiously. It was like touching cold stone, if cold stone had been ghostly and allowed his fingers part of the way through, all the warmth of his body absorbed into the endless mist. And a gaping emptiness that threatened to swallow him whole—no, that wasn’t it—it was the hungriness, the stillness of khi earth; and the slow choking of khi metal, laced with something that wasn’t either of these elements, wild and uncontrollable, and desperate, the magic of the lost and hungry.

  Fallen magic.

  Stone, and khi elements, and Fallen magic, all woven together. He closed his eyes. Thought, again, of that table where his fate had been decided; the conversation between Second Aunt and Asmodeus.

  The khi elements that choke, that bind, that bury.

  Few things are as absolute as the boundary between life and death.

  “The wall,” he breathed, aloud. It wasn’t the kingdom they’d been trying to cut off. It was Hawthorn.

  Near unbreakable, Second Aunt had said.

  “Well?” Iaris asked.

  “I . . .” Thuan looked at Nadine, who gazed back levelly. She wasn’t worried by anything he would do. Which meant that she either trusted him or thought he couldn’t break the wall, or both. Both, probably. Nadine was nothing if not methodical. “I don’t know. I can look it up, if you give me access to the library. And Asmodeus’s office.”

  Neither Iaris nor Sare looked surprised. He still wasn’t going to get used to seeing them on the verge of panic. During all his time in the House, they’d both been cool and competent, and always assured. But, then again, he’d never lived with a link to a House in his head. What would he do if it abruptly went wrong?

  What would he do, full stop?

  As they left, he inclined his head toward Nadine, making a small gesture with his hands. We need to talk.

  She smiled back at him, tight and controlled. Of course.

  * * *

  PEOPLE stared as Elphon and Madeleine walked deeper into la Goutte d’Or. Thin, starving faces; grimy children running across ill-paved streets; people wrapped in torn, mismatched layers of clothing, carrying heavy loads. The smell of alcohol—absinthe?—wafting from drunks huddled against buildings. Doors falling into ruin, repaired with flimsy wood; windows taped shut with patchworks or oiled papers; buildings where entire walls had collapsed, and where families still thronged, the wail of babies piercing the air like sword strokes: the misery of the Houseless, laid bare for all to see.

  No angel essence, no magic: it was all too expensive for anyone here.

  And, at the back of her mind, the link to the House, fiery and roiling once more, as if she were in mortal danger again. What was going on? By Elphon’s barely concealed grimace, he felt it as well.

  The House. The House was in danger.

  Elphon asked directions from a young Annamite child, who couldn’t have been more than five or six years old, thin and mud-pale, though her belly wasn’t puffed up. She looked like a walking skeleton, her wide, almond-shaped eyes taking up all of her face above the sharp cheekbones. “Here,” Madeleine said, and gave the child the little money she had in her purse.

  She grinned, which should have made her seem younger, but merely made Madeleine want to scoop her up and take her with them, never mind that it was impossible, that the House had no time for her or her ilk. “Thank you, Elder Aunt.”

  The building they sought was at the intersection of two streets, one going up and one going down. It had this peculiar, eye-watering effect of being crooked. Madeleine couldn’t be sure whether that was the case, or if it was simply the difference in elevation. The entrance door was missing, filled with a large piece of wood that wouldn’t lie flat against the opening.

  Inside, the courtyard was filled with debris, and an odd, sharp smell suffused the place. It took Madeleine a while to realize it was the smell of Annamite cooking, the same as in the dragon kingdom, only poorer and watered down.

  Atop the small, claustrophobic stairs, they hammered on the door, and got no answer. “It’s tightly warded,” Elphon said. “I don’t even think we could break through—”

  The door opened, on the frowning face of a woman who looked deathly ill. “Yes?”

  Elphon sucked in a sharp, noisy breath. “Apologies,” he said, bowing lower than Madeleine ever remembered him do. “I didn’t know—”

  “—that I was Fallen?” The woman looked amused.

  She didn’t look like a Fallen. Her eyes were sunk into her face, her movements slow and deliberate, as if she could break at any moment, and there was none of the unearthly light that came out at random moments when magic surged through them. “I’m Elphon. This is Madeleine. We’re from—”

  “House Hawthorn. Yes. I can read coats of arms.” She sounded amused again. “I suppose you had better come in.”

  As she crossed the threshold, Madeleine felt a strong resistance, as if she were pushing back against a wall, and then the Fallen woman gestured, and it lessened.

  Inside, it was cramped and small, and the smell of cooking didn’t quite disguise the sharper one of blood. The mattress that exuded that was still on the ground, and the color of rust, and it was immediately obvious why: in the blue plush armchair that was one of the only furniture pieces in the room, an Annamite woman was breast-feeding a newborn baby.

  “I’m Berith, and this is Françoise,” the woman said. “The baby is Camille.”

  Madeleine bowed. Françoise looked deathly tired, too, though no wonder, if the birth had gone badly.

 
“We’re not here for the baby,” Elphon said.

  Françoise’s laugh was low and bitter. She didn’t let go of her hold on the baby.

  Madeleine said, slowly, “A woman who died here. A while ago. Ghislaine. She was from Hawthorn, though you might have been told she was from House Astragale.”

  Berith and Françoise looked at each other. They said nothing. At length Françoise got up, handing the baby—who had finished feeding—to Berith, who took her cautiously. Françoise rummaged in a broken-down cupboard until she found a chipped bowl. “Here,” she said. “We had two of these. House Astragale took one. They were more interested in this than they were in the body.”

  Inside were green shards, all too familiar, with that same odd feel to them as the one she’d handled in the dragon kingdom. “Ghislaine came to us gravely wounded,” Françoise said. She settled in the armchair again; or collapsed into it, her legs incapable of supporting her for long. “And she died in the night, without saying much that made sense. I’m sorry.” She frowned. “She spoke of a rot within the House, something that had been festering for twenty years. I thought she meant Astragale, but it was Hawthorn, wasn’t it?”

  “You have a graver problem,” Berith said, shifting the baby so that Camille’s chin rested on her shoulder, and then gingerly patting the child’s back. “House Astragale has taken Asmodeus.”

  It was as if someone had punched Madeleine in the gut. “How—what—”

  “Françoise saw it,” Berith said. She didn’t venture any more information.

  The link to the House, as taut as a bowstring. “Elphon—”

  Elphon glanced at Madeleine. “I don’t know,” he said, gravely. “Something is wrong with the House, but . . .”

  Berith shrugged. “I don’t have any stakes in this. Asmodeus and I parted ways some time ago.” She sounded casual. Too casual.

  “But Françoise happened to be there when he was kidnapped?” Elphon’s laughter was high-pitched, nervous. The same panic Madeleine felt now, rising within her. It was one thing to fear Asmodeus, to know that the House was a dark and unfriendly place, but it was still a House.