Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

“Cocky,” Sare said. “I’m not too sure I like that, Thuan. But we’ll see, won’t we?”

And then she was gone, and it was just the three of them, staring at each other.

Kim Cuc was the first to move, towards the cupboard Sare had shown them. She opened it, and stared at its contents. Thuan heard her suck in a deep breath. “Well, that should be interesting.”

Thuan wasn’t sure what he’d expected—some kind of dark and twisted secrets, weapons or knives or something, but of course that was nothing more than fancies born of nightmares. Inside the cupboard were metal bowls and plates, and a series of little packets of powder.

“Is that—” Leila asked.

“Yes,” Kim Cuc said. “Flour, sugar and salt.” Her face was carefully composed again, mostly so she didn’t laugh. She looked, again, at the table in the center of the room, a fragile contraption with the curved legs characteristic of the Louis XV style, except that they’d been broken once already, and that the white marble surface was soot-encrusted. “I’m assuming we should make our best effort not to break that.”

Servants. Kitchen hands. Of course.

Leila pushed open the door of the other room, came back. “There’s a sink and a small stove in there.” Her face was closed again, pinched and colorless. “I can’t cook. We never saw all of this, outside—” On the streets of Paris, flour was grit-filled and grey, butter thin and watered-down, and sugar never seen. As tests went, it was actually quite a good one: how would you handle cooking with so much more wealth than you’d ever seen in your life?

Clever , Thuan thought, and then he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to admire the House that was his enemy.

Kim Cuc was gazing at him, levelly. “You’re in luck,” she said to Leila. “Because I can’t cook either. But Thuan was paying way too much attention to old recipes, back when he was trying to seduce the family cook.”

“It did work,” Thuan said, stung. Not for long, true. It had soured when Thuan was called to the innermost chambers of the court, and last he’d heard, the cook had found himself another lover. He’d have been bitter if he could have afforded to, but that wasn’t the way to survive in the intrigues of the imperial court.

“It always works,” Kim Cuc said. “Until it doesn’t.” She stopped, then, as if aware she was on the cusp of going too far.

“You said you weren’t keeping score,” Thuan said.

Kim Cuc shrugged. “Do you want me to?”

“No.” They’d parted on good terms and she wasn’t jealous or regretful, but she did have way too much fun teasing him.

“Fine,” Kim Cuc said. “What can we do in one hour?”

Thuan knelt, to stare at the contents of the cupboard. “An hour is short. Most recipes will want more than that. And…” The supplies were haphazard, bits and scraps scavenged from the kitchens, he assumed. He had to come up with something that wasn’t missing an ingredient, and that could be significantly sped up by three people working on it at the same time. And that was a little more impressive than buttered toast.

“Chocolate éclairs,” he said, finally. “Leila and I on the dough, Kim Cuc on the cream. We’ll sort out the chocolate icing while the dough cools down.” Time was going to be tight and the recipe wasn’t exactly the easiest one he had, but the cake—pâte à choux filled with melted pastry cream and iced with chocolate—was an impressive sight, and probably a better thing than the other teams would come up with. Assuming, of course, that everyone had been assigned a cooking challenge, which might not be the case.

The downside was that, unless they were very fast, they’d leave the place a mess. One hour definitely didn’t include time for clean-up. Better, however, to be ambitious and fail, rather than come back with a pristine room and nothing achieved.

But, all the while, as he directed Leila to beat eggs and sugar together—as he attempted to prevent Kim Cuc from commenting on his strings of previous lovers and their performances as she boiled butter and water together—he remembered Sare’s eyes, the way she’d moved when the floor in the corridor creaked.

It had been fear and worry in her gaze, something far beyond the annoyance of having to deal with the Houseless in the course of a routine exam she must have been used to supervising every year. And, for a moment, as she’d turned, the magic within her had surged, layer after layer of protective spells coming to life in Thuan’s second sight, spells far too complex and sturdy to be wasted on the likes of them.

“Something is wrong,” he said, to Kim Cuc, in Viet. They couldn’t keep that conversation up for long, or Leila would get suspicious.

Kim Cuc’s eyes narrowed. “I know. The khi currents in the wing are weird. I’ve noticed it when we stepped in.”

“Weird how?”

“They should be almost spent,” Kim Cuc said. “Devastated like the rest of Paris. But they’re like a nest of hornets. Something’s got them stirred up.”

“Something?”

“Someone. Someone is casting a spell, and it’s a large one.” Her voice was thoughtful. “Keep an eye out, will you?” Fortunately, questions in Viet sounded like any other sentence to foreigners, marked only by a keyword that was no different from the usual singsong rhythm.

“Of course.” Whatever it was, they were locked in a room somewhere near the epicenter of it.

Great. What ancestor had he offended lately, to get such a string of bad luck?

Thuan was down to making an improvised piping bag with baking parchment when Kim Cuc said, sharply, “Younger uncle.”

“Is anything wrong—” he started, and then stopped, because the khi currents had shifted. Water had given way to an odd mixture of water and wood, something with sharp undertones Thuan had never felt before.

The key turned in the lock again: it was Sare, her smooth, perfect face expressionless, but with the light of magic roiling beneath her skin, so strongly it deepened the shadows around the room. “Out,” she said. Her voice was terse and unfriendly.

Leila, startled, looked up with her hands full of congealed chocolate. Kim Cuc merely flowed into a defensive stance, gathering the rare strands of khi water in the room to herself. Thuan just waited, not sure of what was happening. Except that the ground beneath his feet felt… prickly, as if a thousand spikes had erupted from it and he was walking on a carpet of broken glass. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Enough,” Sare said. She looked at Thuan and Kim Cuc for a moment, her gaze suspicious—surely she couldn’t have found out what they were, surely dragon magic was as alien to Fallen as the sky was to fish? But then she shook her head, as if a bothersome thought had intruded. “We’re evacuating the wing, and you’re coming with us.”

“Caring about the Houseless?” Kim Cuc’s voice was mildly sarcastic, the remark Thuan had clamped down on as being too provocative.

“Corpses are a mess to clean.” Sare’s gaze was still hard. “I see both of you are equally cocky. Don’t give me a hard time, please.”

Kim Cuc grabbed him, as they came out. “It’s over the entire wing,” she said, in Viet.

“Not the House?”

She shook her head. “Don’t think so.” Her hands moved, smoothly, teasing out a pattern of khi water out of the troubled atmosphere. “This smooths out the khi currents. Got it?”

Thuan’s talent for magic was indifferent, but his memory for details was excellent. “Yes.”

“Good. Now hold on tight. This could get messy.”

In the corridor, a crowd of other Houseless mingled, waiting in a hubbub of whispers, until Sare clapped her hands together and silence spread like a thrown cloth. “We’re going into the gardens. Follow the dependents—the grey-and-silver uniforms. And don’t dawdle.”