The House of Binding Thorns

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Can’t.” Her voice was a hiss.

  “You.” Françoise held her breath until the world seemed to burn and crinkle around her. “You need to root. I’m sorry. You have to.”

  Berith shook her head. Frost curled up around her, anchoring her to the ground. It was creeping up her body, turning her into a statue, like the dependents they’d seen in the gardens. “He has to let me.”

  No need to ask who “he” was. “I doubt he’s in much of a position to object,” Françoise said, through gritted teeth. “What do you need?”

  “Time,” Berith said. She stared at the grass under her, and back at Françoise. “And less fear would be good, too. I haven’t done this in—so many years. And never in a House before.”

  Françoise squeezed her hand, gently. “You can do it,” she said. “You’ve done it before. And . . . for all that’s going on, we might as well not be standing in a House. Remember we still have a game to finish.”

  Berith forced a smile, haunted and curt and joyless. “Figuring out how to beat you? I couldn’t even beat a beginner, Françoise. We both know it.”

  Not enough, then. But why had she thought it would be? “Here.” Françoise undid her scarf, and held Camille out to Berith. The baby gurgled, snuggling against Berith’s chest. Françoise kept a wary eye on the frost, ready to snatch her if necessary. “If not the game . . .”

  Berith’s eyes, flecked with faint traces of silver, were dark and unreadable. “The future,” she whispered, one hand tracing the contours of Camille’s face. “Any future.” She laid a finger into Camille’s mouth, let the baby suck on it for a while, a look of raw contentment spreading across both their faces; a heartbreaking expression, for it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t.

  “Thank you,” she said to Françoise.

  “I can give you back the magic,” Françoise said.

  Berith shook her head. “It was a gift. Here.” She handed Camille back to Françoise. Camille, scandalized, looked as though she might cry for a moment, but then her mouth opened, seeking Françoise’s breast.

  “Hang on,” Françoise said. She shook her feet to remove the frost, and undid her scarf again. Camille wailed, a short, high-pitched sound—hungry hungry—and then Françoise managed to hold her against her breast again, and the sounds of weeping gave way to profound, contented silence.

  Berith’s eyes were closed. She was whispering in a slow, harsh language that Françoise couldn’t understand, words dragging at her ears like barbed hooks. Slowly, gradually, her skin lit up, a faint, almost invisible radiance that gripped her, sharpening the silver flecks in her eyes. Beneath her, the frost was melting in a circle; and, somehow, it seemed to go beyond that boundary, everything slowly becoming sharper, more present on the path, all the way to the Seine and the shadow of the wall.

  Berith plunged both hands into the earth. They went up to the wrists, a faint blue shimmer rising around them, a smell of churned earth. “There is nothing,” she whispered. “Almost nothing. No wards. Oh, Asmodeus.” She looked as though she might weep.

  “Berith. You have to go on.”

  There was no frost left around Françoise, either. Shadows rose, around her, dark and blocky, the bookshelves of Berith’s dominion, with a faint odor of parchment and glue, and a faint memory of a thousand voices speaking. The sky was blue and clear, with no hint of pollution.

  There was no throne. But, at Berith’s back, a growing shadow that might have been wings, black, opaque ones like the ones Françoise had seen behind Asmodeus. For a single, agonizing moment she was in the flat again, lying on her back and watching both of them bend over her, limned with their power—for a moment she was in pain and dying, and denied comfort. . . .

  It passed, like a released breath. Françoise forced her heart to stop shaking, and held Camille tighter against her.

  Berith withdrew her hands from the ground. They came up with a handful of shining earth. And, as she did so, the shadow at her back became sharper and sharper, growing apart from her, slowly growing and blossoming.

  Not wings. Never wings. But the shape of a huge hawthorn tree, bearing flowers the color of ivory, its branches spread around Berith, like arms reaching out to enfold her in thorns.

  Berith’s eyes were fully silver now, with no trace of brown. She pulled herself up, slowly, gracefully. The branches of the tree moved with her, the entire structure opening up like a hundred hands. Françoise watched, transfixed.

  Finally, Berith exhaled. There were no bruises under her eyes, no trace of fatigue. She looked almost unearthly, shining with a faint light. Like a Fallen, a House-bound, someone who would never bother with the likes of Françoise. And then she frowned, and it was all gone, familiar annoyance and worry taking over.

  “Berith.” Heart in her throat, Françoise walked to her, hugged her, hard. Frost had died around them, the hawthorn tree sharply defined in the midst of bookshelves.

  Berith smiled, stroking Camille’s head. “It will be fine.”

  “How?” Françoise forced herself to speak; found words that wouldn’t come. “The House.”

  Berith took her hand, laid it, gently, on the trunk of the hawthorn tree—and Françoise felt a bare hint of warmth, in the midst of ice and cold and stillness. A hint of the thaw, which became a distant, sarcastic, and all-too-familiar presence, struggling to pull himself together.

  “Now we wait,” Berith said. “It’s not over.”

  * * *

  TIME seemed to slow down to treacle; suspended, as Asmodeus pulled himself to his knees. Behind him—beyond him—Clothilde was still fighting Yen Oanh, with less and less energy, the little magic she’d taken with her running out.

  The lenses of his glasses were fogged with frost, his eyes barely visible beyond the fog. He laid one hand onto the earth of the grove. Frost shriveled and died around it, a thin contour of mud in the overwhelming whiteness around them. Without thinking, Madeleine held out a hand, to help him stand.

  He smiled, and it was a fraction of his old expression, amused and cruel.

  “Madeleine. Still no bandages for the bleeding?” His touch should have been like fire, should have brimmed with thoughtless power, the same thing that had filled her back in the dragon kingdom. But there was nothing. Dying embers. The link to the House in her mind, barely palpable. It had all been for nothing; she’d walked through water and the dead just to watch him fall. . . .

  Asmodeus gripped her hand, and pushed, so strongly it almost sent her back to her knees. He was upright now, and couldn’t hide the tremor running through him. She could hear—labored, slow—his breathing, when she’d never heard anything from him before. He’d always been silent as a hunting cat, making no noise or warning.

  “Tell me you have something,” Madeleine said. “Tell me . . .” Tell me we’re not doomed. Tell me it was worth it.

  Yen Oanh had forced Clothilde to the ground, and was straddling her, one hand on her throat, ice spreading from her outstretched claws to cover Clothilde’s skin above the straight collar of the tunic.

  Asmodeus didn’t move, for a while. “Do you trust me, Madeleine?”

  She feared him. She loathed him. And yet, despite that—“You keep the House safe,” she said, slowly. “I don’t have to . . .” She didn’t have to like him. She didn’t have to be less afraid of who he was, of what he would do. She would never not be afraid of him, never attain the easy familiarity of Iaris, the unthinking devotion of Elphon. “What do you want?” she asked, instead.

  Asmodeus laid a hand on the hawthorn tree that had almost killed him. His lips were still red with dried blood, cut by the branches he’d spat out, his voice a thin, reedy whisper of sound. “The trees are the foundations of the wards. The strength of the House. The strength of its head.” His expression was still distantly amused. “And there is a new tree, in the House, new roots extending into my dominion. . . .” The fog on
his glasses was melting, and something passed from the tree into him, not the light of angel magic, but something that made him look sharper. Better defined, as if more than frost had melted from his shoulders.

  “You want me to distract Yen Oanh,” Madeleine said, heavily. It wasn’t as if that were new.

  Asmodeus looked, for a moment, at Yen Oanh and Clothilde—Clothilde’s arms, scrabbling, ineffectively, to push Yen Oanh off her, the shadows around them fading into featureless white. His mouth tightened. “You misunderstand.” He knelt, picked up the knife; rose. The tremor was barely visible this time.

  And, without another word, he walked away toward Yen Oanh, leaving Madeleine at the foot of the hawthorn tree.

  “Killing the weak?” he said, to Yen Oanh, as he neared her.

  “The corrupted,” Yen Oanh said. She took her hands from Clothilde, and stood up. Clothilde wasn’t moving, but perhaps there was still a chance. . . . Madeleine dug her fingernails into her hands, to prevent herself from running to Clothilde’s side.

  “The kingdom of diseased coral and decaying palaces.” Asmodeus’s voice was slow, hypnotic. He had the knife in his hand, but made no move. Simply stood, watching her. At his feet, frost melted, slowly, gradually, the trunks of hawthorn trees returning to shades of brown, flecked with fungus and mold. “You have odd notions about corruption.”

  “Ask yourself how we came to that point.”

  “Isolation. The delusion that you could stand apart and hidden from the city forever.”

  “We could have. The wall—”

  “All walls come down, in time. And all edifices have flaws.”

  “Like Hawthorn?”

  “We’re no different. And I claim no moral superiority.”

  It was like watching him with the leader of the soldiers when they’d fled Yen Oanh after her imprisonment. Poking and needling and playing on fears—or, in this case, Yen Oanh’s anger—until he could strike. And yet . . .

  And yet, he’d wanted something from Madeleine.

  A distraction?

  You misunderstand.

  Do you trust me?

  He had the knife. He was going to stab Yen Oanh, for why else would he have picked it up? But he was weak, and slow, and would summon nothing of the effortless speed and elegance he’d had—and even that, in the dragon kingdom, had failed to do more than slow Yen Oanh down. She was going to move away, and let him exhaust himself, and start, again, the slow process of killing the House.

  He was the distraction. The one person Yen Oanh wouldn’t take her eyes from, the symbol of everything she wanted to tear down.

  “Your House certainly has flaws.” Yen Oanh’s voice was malicious. “Do you think you’ve earned more than a reprieve? You’re weakening as we speak.”

  “Not quite that fast,” Asmodeus said, mildly. “Or that conveniently.”

  There was a hawthorn tree behind Yen Oanh, the one that held Uphir’s frozen shape. No. If Asmodeus held her attention long enough, it wasn’t going to be frozen anymore. The magic spreading from him would have banished the frost on that, too.

  Blood. The blood of heads of Houses. Of dependents.

  Of dragons.

  “And what do you hope to achieve, even if we die? Your wall is broken, and other Houses will rush to fill the vacuum we leave. You’ll fall, one way or another.”

  “You know nothing.”

  “On the contrary. I’ve had several mortal lifetimes to watch power games.”

  The line of brown reached the branches where Uphir hung. Madeleine took a deep, burning breath, and started to run. She’d have screamed, but she had no energy left in her wasted lungs. Not that it mattered: Yen Oanh looked up at her—a fraction of a second—and then dismissed her as no threat, and focused back on Asmodeus.

  Who moved, feinting, the blade in his hands aiming for her chest. Yen Oanh danced away, once, twice, again and again, smiling coldly all the while. Asmodeus’s hands were shaking, his face pale again. Yen Oanh had been right: he was going to collapse again; there was no time left. . . .

  Madeleine covered the last of the distance separating her from them—and, heedless of the knife weaving its way in and out of the fray, grabbed Yen Oanh. Borne by her speed, she pushed her against the trunk of the hawthorn tree and held her, panting, for a fraction of a second.

  Yen Oanh’s lips moved. Not enough, she was going to say, mockingly. Not enough to defend much of anything.

  But then Uphir’s pale, thin hands reached down, the entire tree stretching, branches extending like thorny arms, wrapping themselves around both of them, and pulling.

  For a moment—a single, timeless moment—Madeleine hung sideways, as if flying, and then the thorns were biting into her flesh, and pain shot everywhere—a scream scraping her throat raw—the grove, seen upside down, the frost receding from Clothilde’s body. Fire on her skin, a hundred—a thousand—bites on her arms and legs, and branches wrapping themselves around her chest, cutting off her breath—it hurt to breathe, but she was still struggling to get some air—to live, in spite of it all.

  Do you trust me?

  Of course she couldn’t. Of course, the good of the House always came first. Blood for wards, blood for spells, blood for the strength of its head.

  Within her, the link to the House flared into life, a pyre that consumed every thought, made the blood in her veins liquid fire. Her hands spasmed, fingers stretched past endurance, arms and legs bending into painful, impossible shapes. The tree was taking her in, branches weaving over her lips and clogging her nostrils, a hundred prickles under her eyes as thorns climbed up her cheeks—they were going to sew her eyelids shut, or to puncture her eyeballs, or both.

  And then it all vanished. The tree let her go, and she was falling, clinging to the trunk, scraping her palms against its surface. Hands grabbed her, threw her away. She scrabbled upward into a sitting position.

  Asmodeus detached himself from the tree, took a few, shaking steps out of its reach. He watched her, for what seemed like an eternity, gray-green gaze transfixing her like a spear. Behind him, in the tree, Yen Oanh hung—brown eyes open, antlers covered with a thin network of cracks like broken eggshells—her flesh pale and sickly, her body twisted out of shape by the branches that held her, her mouth open in a scream that looked as though it would never cease.

  Her. It would have been her, too, endlessly kept alive for the good of the House she had tried to destroy, sucked dry to replenish the wards that kept Hawthorn safe.

  Nausea welled up, uncontrollable, knifing Madeleine in the stomach, and she was on her knees again, vomiting, coughing up fragments of twigs and thorns mingled with bile.

  “Such a shame,” Asmodeus whispered, each word cutting into her flesh like a knife blade. “A waste of strength, some might say. But I always stand by loyal dependents.”

  Madeleine, still with the curdled taste of vomit in her mouth, raised her head.

  Slowly, inexorably, Asmodeus sank down to one knee in the midst of the half-frozen grove; and didn’t rise again.

  * * *

  THUAN was almost at the Seine when he stopped.

  Ahead of him was the abruptness of the wall. The dark surface was now shot through with cracks, like eggshell porcelain, or the walls of the palace in the dragon kingdom. There was also a larger opening, a door that seemed to lead back to the Seine, though he could see nothing but darkness within.

  Except . . .

  His eye was drawn, again, to the left, at what should have been the boundary of the House with the streets. It was still wreathed with mist, but he caught a glimpse of the same thing he had before: hints of skeletal trees from which dangled large, indistinct shapes, and berries the color of fire. Something . . . something was pulsing, softly, in that direction, drawing the blade in his hand toward it, as surely as a hound scenting blood.

  Power brimmed
within him, slow and dark and cruel, the desire to reshape everything to his will. He could easily push through, go back to the kingdom and find Second Aunt.

  It would have been the sensible, reasonable thing.

  Instead, Thuan found himself walking toward the mist.

  Like the frost, it shriveled around him. He was hardly aware of channeling angel magic into it. Cutoff khi currents flailed, and awkwardly reshaped themselves into smaller, weaker eddies, and still he walked.

  Ahead of him, the trees became sharper: hawthorns, some in flower, some in fruit—and some bearing twisted, contorted bodies that held only a passing semblance to life. The outermost were covered in frost; as Thuan walked deeper into the grove, the layers of frost became thinner and thinner. Hands and branches reached down, slowly, trying to scoop him up, but withdrew as if scalded when they neared the blade.

  Ahead, nothing but silence; but at last he reached two trees that were entirely free of frost, and a circle of green grass and churned mud. And, within . . .

  Three women: two dead, the khi currents around them saturated with metal and water, and one on all fours, coughing and struggling to breathe. And a little way from them, Asmodeus.

  He was on one knee, head bowed, both hands driven deep into the earth. Magic—faint, insubstantial—rippled out, currents of khi water shriveling and dying around him. He didn’t move, not even when Thuan walked closer: too weary, too spent to do so.

  Thuan looked up, at the tree behind Asmodeus—saw Yen Oanh caught there, her mouth open in a soundless scream, her entire body twisted and contorted.

  “Asmodeus.” Thuan’s voice came through a dry, burning throat.

  Still nothing. Then, at last—at long last—a slow, ponderous rising of his head, gray-green gaze focusing on him. His face was pale, skeletal, cheekbones sharp, lips chapped and reddened with blood.

  “Dragon prince.” The voice was low, spent—raw. It made Thuan feel as though someone were scooping his innards out with a hook. “What a surprise—always showing up at . . . inconvenient times.”