Nadine’s expression was thin, and joyless. “I preferred you when you were a student, all things considered. Do you truly think you’re better than him?”
I’m not you. Never. “Perhaps not,” Thuan said, mildly. “But I’ll have tried, at least.”
“Just as I did.” Nadine laughed, but there was no joy in it.
Thuan shook his head. “I’m not going to argue over this.” He reached out, in his mind, found the light that was hers—and, taking hold of it, gently snuffed it out, cutting the link to the House from her.
Nadine stiffened, took a slow, long breath. A hint of panic in her eyes, swiftly crushed. Of course, she had never known anything other than the House, the omnipresence in her mind. “I see.” She bowed, stiffly. “Good-bye, Thuan. I don’t think we’ll see each other again.”
The doors closed on her, and she was gone.
“She’s right, you know. In most cases, I wouldn’t have approved.”
Thuan turned, and was only half-surprised to see the curtains drawn, and Asmodeus watching him, propped up against embroidered pillows. “In most cases?”
Asmodeus tried to shrug, grimaced, and abandoned the gesture. “I’m . . . fond of Iaris. Making an example of Nadine would have left her in an untenable position.”
“Fond.” Thuan’s voice was flat. I like you, dragon prince. More than I should. “As a master is fond of his hounds.”
Asmodeus smiled. “Do you want me to have a heart? You’d hardly be the first to make this mistake.”
He had let Nadine go, in spite of everything—to spare Iaris, when it would have been in his best interests to set an excruciating example, something that would forever dissuade people to betray him, that would clearly state to the House that even the children of his favorites wouldn’t be spared.
“I—” Thuan found his throat had gone dry again. He could feel Asmodeus in his mind—as, no doubt, Asmodeus could feel him—but it wasn’t telepathy, merely a general presence, a sense of who the Fallen was rather than of his thoughts. “I need to know.”
“What I’m going to do?”
“I would rather not wake up with a dagger at my throat. Or in my chest.”
Asmodeus laughed.
Thuan rose, came to sit by his side on the bed. The smell of orange blossom and bergamot didn’t quite hide the older, more animal one of blood and sickness. Not that he’d put it past Asmodeus to have a knife and use it, even when weakened, but . . .
“I don’t know what you did to the House,” Asmodeus said. His voice was blunt, without a trace of irony. “And I have no desire to experiment and see what would happen to Hawthorn, should one of us die.”
“Because the House is what matters. Because—” He licked his lips. “Because you would have killed me, wouldn’t you, for the good of the House?”
Silence then. He found Asmodeus’s hand, resting by his side. “You misunderstand. I will take whatever is necessary from outsiders. I will give whatever is necessary, too. But I will never ask the same of my dependents. I’m not Morningstar.” He sounded amused again, with a tinge of old, tired anger.
“The trees.” Thuan thought, for a moment.
“The eventual fate of all heads of Hawthorn.” Asmodeus shrugged. “I knew the price. I knew when I took the House.” Thuan’s fate, too, now, but that was a worry for another time.
“That doesn’t answer my question. How much can I trust you?” He found himself bending, his lips seeking Asmodeus’s, for a kiss.
Unwise.
Asmodeus turned his face up. They met, again, lips on lips, no blood or swords, just flesh on flesh, and a familiar thrill of power and desire running up his spine.
Thuan was the one who broke it; his heart in his throat. Asmodeus took his glasses off, laid them on the table by the bed. His breathing was labored, heavy, his hands clenched on the sheets.
“How much? You’re the one who stabbed me.”
“You’re the one who wanted to kill me,” Thuan pointed out.
“True. One for one.” Asmodeus smiled again, almost boyish, almost carefree. “Let’s give this a try, shall we? And see what happens.”
Thuan’s lips shaped around the word “unwise.” It remained stuck in his throat, because, sometimes, unwise things were the only ones worth doing. “Might as well,” he said, with a nonchalance he didn’t feel. “Might as well.”
* * *
MADELEINE took some flowers to Clothilde’s grave.
It was on a knoll above the drowned gardens, in a row with all the other new ones, the graves of the dependents who had fallen to Yen Oanh’s attack. Everything around her smelled of rain and water, an oppressive smell that reminded her, all too keenly, of her time in the dragon kingdom—of her time in a cell in a laundry barge, of angel essence on her skin, and the inescapable knot of fear in her belly.
There was a headstone, simply engraved with two wings, and a hawthorn flower, and Clothilde’s name. She knelt, for a while, feeling the pain in her unhealed calf, the slow rhythm in her mind of the link to the House, something slower and different, sleepy waters mingled with Asmodeus’s presence. And a prayer in her mind, to the distant God who might, or might not, be watching over them all.
“Be kind to her,” she said. She and Clothilde had never been close, but it felt wrong not to acknowledge her, after what had happened in the grove.
“Still as sentimental as ever, I see.”
She hadn’t heard Asmodeus approach. He stood on the knoll, leaning on a cane with a silver pommel, his grip on it tight. Still recovering, then. His face, though, was its old self—the one from her nightmares, lean and sharp, gray-green eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.
“I—” She stared at him, for a while, and wasn’t sure, afterward, why the words came welling out of her mouth. “I don’t know what she would have wanted.”
“To survive,” Asmodeus said. His smile was bright and terrible. “To live, for the future of the House. Don’t we all?”
The House. At the foot of the knoll, she could see Thuan, kneeling in the water, the waves curling around his hands like snakes.
Do you trust me?
You keep the House safe. I don’t have to trust you.
“The future.” She couldn’t stomach the thought of essence anymore, but her lungs were still wasted, her life expectancy counted in years rather than decades.
“You have one that doesn’t end today, or tomorrow. Be thankful.” Asmodeus sounded amused again.
“Because you won’t end it?” It was rote, reflex, almost without fear to it.
“Why would I?” He shrugged. “In other circumstances, it would have been you, in that grave.”
Loyal dependents. Defending the House. “I had no choice,” she said at last. It was a lie, and he knew it.
Asmodeus was silent for a while, facing the grave. “You did well. For all that I failed you,” he said, finally—to her, or Clothilde, it wasn’t clear. And walked back to the foot of the knoll and the waiting Thuan, without saying anything more.
The air smelled of rain and mud and rot, and a faint memory of orange blossom and bergamot, already fading.
“The future,” Madeleine said, again, tasting the word on her tongue: odd, alien, and unknown; and—in spite of everything—heady and exhilarating, and just a little bit addictive.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank everyone who helped this book come into shape: Alis Rasmussen, Dario Ciriello, and M. Sereno for their fast and enthusiastic beta reading, Vida Cruz for her comments on the opening, Tade Thompson for his comments on the first chapters and his very helpful suggestions on the history of medicine, hospital routines, and doctors in general.
I would also like to thank Karlo Yeager Rodriguez, Benjamin C. Kinney, T. Jane Berry, Anatoly Belilovsky, and Steve Bein, for helping me brainstorm a (hopefully) accurate death me
thod for Ghislaine, as well as Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, Anatoly Belilovsky, Wendy Nikel, J. Kathleen Cheney, Amy Sisson, S. L. Saboviec, Katie Sparrow, Kate Heartfield, and Diana Pharaoh Francis for brainstorming childbirth complications for Françoise. And thanks to Cheryl Morgan for helping me with Berith’s character.
DongWon Song very kindly provided me with an on-the-spot Word conversion so I could reread the manuscript on my iPad while traveling.
For general support, thanks to D. Franklin and Zoe Johnson, Zen Cho, Cindy Pon, Karin Tidbeck, Nene Ormes, Alessa Hinlo, Isabel Yap, Kari Sperring, Stephanie Burgis, Fran Wilde, Ken Liu, Elizabeth Bear, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Victor Fernando R. Ocampo.
On Twitter, I had numerous conversations ranging from weaponry to sorting out French translations into English: I would like to thank everyone who contributed, most particularly Alan Bellingham (for tactics and firearms, propping up the scene where Madeleine and Clothilde attack the wall), John Hopkins (for sorting out the translation of bateau-lavoir as “laundry barge”), and Margo-Lea Hurwizc for numerous helpful comments. Thanks as well to Boudewijn and Irina Rempt for brainstorming and dinner, and to Christian Steinmetz for the best author photo ever as well as translations of all the House mottoes into Latin.
I also owe thanks to everyone who read, reviewed, and/or spread the word about The House of Shattered Wings, and made me feel like a minor celebrity by attending my events of 2015/16.
Like the previous one, this book wouldn’t have come into existence without Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s encouragement and suggestions. Thanks as well to my agent, John Berlyne, and my editors, Gillian Redfearn at Gollancz and Jessica Wade at Ace, for firming up the structure and closing up plot holes; Alexis C. Nixon, Sophie Calder, and Jennifer McMenemy for putting up with my wild promotion ideas; and both the teams at Gollancz and Ace for all the work from cover art to marketing (and to Nekro for the gorgeous cover art that adorns the U.S. edition).
Finally, this book wouldn’t have been what it is without my family: my sister, who tirelessly brainstormed titles with me and fed me dim sum and pizza while I hammered together Madeleine’s journey into the dragon kingdom; my parents; my grandparents; and Ba Ngoai for all the books.
And to my husband, Matthieu, and my two sons, the snakelet and the Librarian, many thanks for helping me write this one, too!
Further Reading
I based the relations between the dragon kingdom and the Houses on the early history of French ingerence into Vietnamese affairs in the nineteenth century, as well as on the opium traffic run by the British into the Chinese empire that led to two Opium Wars. The court and its various factions are based on a sinicized version of the Nguyen court of that time period, in order to reflect the earlier origins of the dragons. It is of course vastly more equalitarian gender-wise!
The geography of Paris and its suburbs in the Dominion of the Fallen series is roughly that of the late nineteenth / early twentieth century, though shifted to take into account the changed history and context. Historically, there is of course no Annamite community in la Goutte d’Or, and the city had changed quite a bit by the time the large migration from Vietnam started in the late twentieth century. I took the liberty of putting the Annamites in la Goutte d’Or for plot purposes, and as a deliberate nod to Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir, which deals with the precarious life of the working class in an era of glamorous salons coexisting with crushing misery.
The interior and the layout of House Hawthorn are based on period hôtels particuliers on a much larger scale, though there is of course no equivalent to the interlocking system of courts and their attendant responsibilities.
* * *
SOME (but not all!) books and articles I read in the course of researching The House of Binding Thorns:
Ton That Binh, Life in the Forbidden Purple City
Marc Breitman and Maurice Culot, La Goutte d’Or: Faubourg de Paris
Geoffrey Chamberlain, “British Maternal Mortality in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99 (November 2006)
Caroline de Costa, “St. Anthony’s Fire and Living Ligatures: A Short History of Ergometrine,” The Lancet 359 (May 18, 2002)
George Dutton, Jayne Werner, John K. Whitmore, eds., Sources of Vietnamese Tradition
Anne Martin-Fugier, La place des bonnes
Hien V. Ho and Chat V. Dang, Vietnam History: Stories Retold for a New Generation
Huynh Sanh Thong, An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems
Huynh Sanh Thong, The Tale of Kieu
Alexandre Lalande, Histoire des ports de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France
Fabrice Laroulandie, Les ouvriers de Paris au XIXè siècle
Le Huu Tho, Les Vietnamiens en France: Insertion et identité
Nguyen The Anh, Monarchie et fait colonial au Vietnam
Erica J. Peters, Appetites and Aspiration in Vietnam: Food and Drink in the Long Nineteenth Century
Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity
Nghia M. Vo, Legends of Vietnam
Choi Byung Wook, Southern Vietnam under the Reign of Minh Mang
Photo by Eric de Bodard, 2010
Aliette de Bodard is an engineer, a writer, and a keen amateur cook. Her love of mythology and history led her to speculative fiction early on. She is the author of The House of Shattered Wings, the first Dominion of the Fallen Novel, plus numerous short stories, the Aztec noir trilogy Obsidian and Blood, and the award-nominated On a Red Station, Drifting, a space opera based on Vietnamese culture. She has won two Nebula Awards and a Locus Award. She lives in Paris with her family, in a flat with more computers than warm bodies.
Connect Online
aliettedebodard.com
twitter.com/aliettedb
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