Aliette de Bodard - The House of Shattered Wings

“Isabelle gave me this,” Emmanuelle said. “She says she and Philippe found it, and that it’s what started it all.”

Selene closed her eyes. “The source of the curse?” She didn’t ask whether Isabelle could be trusted; how the loyalties she still very obviously held both for Philippe and for Madeleine impacted on this. She had to trust Isabelle, because she had no other choice. “You mean to destroy it?”

“Symbolically,” Emmanuelle said. Her face was set. “In a place of power, in the hollow of the banyan. If that doesn’t work—”

If that didn’t work, then they’d all be out of a House, but it was all they already faced. “Even if you could get there—” Selene’s lips moved, silently, as she contemplated the consequences. “She will be there, won’t she? You said it was the place of the spirits.” Of ghosts; and of the restless, unavenged dead. “Waiting.” And Selene doubted it would be easy to defeat her. The Furies might be gone, but Nightingale would have other tricks up her sleeves.

“Nightingale?” Emmanuelle nodded. “That’s almost certain. I haven’t found a solution to distract her.”

Selene turned her gaze to Emmanuelle, resolutely; refusing to stare at Morningstar or at the wings that so fascinated him. “I have,” she said, slowly, carefully.

They were his weapon, and he had retained the mastery of it. What they cut would not regrow — she knew it in her heart of hearts. And, more important, he was the only one who could provide what they so desperately needed.

A distraction.

“Morningstar?”

“Yes?” Faint bewilderment, nothing more, in the voice. Isabelle might have unlocked some memories, but he didn’t know; he couldn’t know what it had been like, when he was head of the House.

She thought of Asmodeus, telling her she was too squeamish to be head of the House; and of the enormity of what she was about to do. They barely had had time to get used to his presence again, and here she was: a jumped-up apprentice who had become head of the House only because everyone else had died or disappeared, and she would dare…

She had to. It was the only choice. “You have to go,” she said to Morningstar. “It’s what you started. It’s you who should fix it.”

Beside her, Emmanuelle took a deep, shocked breath; held it. “You know—” she started, and Selene squeezed her shoulder so hard that Emmanuelle gasped. Not now, she mouthed.

Morningstar’s face was puzzled. “Go where?”

“Inside,” Selene said. She looked up at last. There was only guileless innocence in his blue eyes, and she tried to swallow past the salty taste in her mouth. “I need you to open the way to the banyan’s heart. They’re your wings. You’re the one who should wield them.”

Morningstar looked puzzled — for a moment she thought he would see it; that he would comprehend the magnitude of what she had just done, but he simply nodded. “I see. Is there no one else?”

“You’re the most powerful Fallen we have,” Selene said, simply; the lie tasting like ashes on her tongue. He was the most powerful, but also the most naive, the one who couldn’t master his own powers. He was the one they could spare. “We need you.”

Surely he wouldn’t believe that — who did? Surely…

But he merely nodded; and she knew, then, that her old master was dead and buried; that she had already grieved for him in the crypt beneath the chapel; and that there would be no return. “I’m honored by your trust.”

Emmanuelle spoke up, at last, her voice as dry as dust. “Selene — you’ll still need someone—”

“I know,” Selene said.

“You can’t go,” Emmanuelle said. “I’ll do it.”

Selene shook her head. “I’ll find Isabelle. Or someone else.” Someone powerful, someone else they could spare — as if there was such a thing. “I’ll send them right after you,” she said to Morningstar.

It was enough. It would be enough. Nightingale thought Morningstar was dead; taken away by the Furies. She would be surprised; and they would have a chance.

A small, insignificant chance they’d need to grasp in the moment it was offered; but it would be more than anything they’d had so far.

Morningstar shrugged. “Don’t wait too long.”

“I know,” Selene said.

Emmanuelle closed her eyes. “Isabelle isn’t on the grounds right now.”

“What—?” God, not another loose cannon somewhere. She was tired of dealing with those. “Does no one in this House know how to obey orders?”

“It’s a House, not an army,” Emmanuelle said. But then her face grew more serious. “I could go.”

“That’s out of the question.”

“I can do my duty to the House, just as you do.”

No. She had lost the House, or almost as good as; she wasn’t going to lose Emmanuelle as well. It was selfish and ill-placed, and she was aware that she would have sent Emmanuelle if there had been no one else, but in this case… “Locate Isabelle, wherever she went; tell her she is to come to Silverspires, immediately.”

“I will. But if she doesn’t come back in time…”

“Let’s not talk about it,” Selene said.

“As you wish,” Emmanuelle said, but she sounded dubious. And disappointed. Selene knew the feeling: powerlessness, slowly watching the House being choked to death. For once, they could do something — even if it was such a stab in the dark, even if it was just a likelihood of success rather than a certainty….

She watched Morningstar heft the wings; and slowly and awkwardly adjust them onto his back; watched him assay a few thrusts here and there: they were astonishingly graceful, proving that the body, if not the mind, remembered something of what it had been before. She could have looked away, but she didn’t.

After all, she’d just sacrificed him, as callously as he’d once sacrificed Nightingale.

You’d be happy, she whispered to the memory of Asmodeus. I have taken the decisions that needed to be taken, for the safeguarding of the House.

And, in her mind, Asmodeus merely smiled, showing his white, pointed teeth; and said nothing.

MADELEINEdidn’t know what she’d expected when Asmodeus summoned her again, but she certainly hadn’t bargained for Isabelle.

They were in a room of the House that she couldn’t place, a sitting room with a harp and pale green conversation seats. It certainly wasn’t part of Asmodeus’s quarters, merely a place he had chosen to talk to his current guest; by the looks of it, trying to make it as uncomfortable as possible for her, giving her a metal chair with a high back, set in the middle of unadorned parquet floor. He lounged, as satisfied as ever, in a much more comfortable chair, his hands gracefully resting on the teak desk in front of him.

Something was wrong with him, though: it took Madeleine a moment to realize that the unreadable expression on his face was as close as he would ever come to showing shock.

Isabelle, by contrast, looked utterly out of place; and yet not — radiating a magic that had passed beyond Asmodeus’s reach long, long ago. Something had changed; or perhaps it was something that had always been there: a harshness to the planes of her face, coalescing into sharp focus through the last few days. “You have some nerve,” Asmodeus said, softly, “walking in here and asking me this.”

Isabelle smiled; a sharp, wounding expression that Madeleine had never seen on her. “What bothers you so? It’s business between Houses.”

At length, he raised his eyes to Madeleine; pinned her where she stood, fighting the urge to turn away, the rising nausea in her throat. “You are aware,” he said, slowly, softly, “that to bargain from a position of weakness is demonstrably inefficient.”