SIX

REQUIEM FOR A FALLEN

MADELEINE took a deep breath and forced herself to look at Oris’s corpse.

He lay in the abandonment of Aragon’s hospital room, opened up from neck to pubis to the searching of scalpels and scrapers; the inner organs taken out, labeled and weighed by the nurses; the face bloodless and staring upward, with a faint tinge of blue under the eyes.

There was something . . . utterly final about Fallen corpses, some irretrievable loss of lightness, of grace—the skin going blotchier, the hair losing its luster, everything suddenly becoming squatter, heavier—the mortal world’s final act of catching up, its final embrace and good-bye, a Fall more definite and eternal than their original one. What lay on the cold metal table, under the ceiling of the Hôtel-Dieu, was Oris, but Oris stripped of everything that had made him such a joy to behold; and only God knew if there was a soul, or where it had gone.

She would never again reprove him for not knowing what to do; or discuss his latest translation from ancient Greek, and argue with him over whether Fallen were exempt of the original sin—half-amused, half-angry, discussing a theology she only had scant time for. She’d always had scant time for Oris—had always fought her annoyance at him, wishing he would stop asking her questions and just get on with things.

She had always had scant time for him, and now there was no time left. None at all; and he was forever gone; forever out of reach—not until the Resurrection and its breaking open of tombs, a thought that was as much dread as it was comfort, for what would God think of Fallen, there at the end of time?

Watch over him, she thought, to her uncaring, cruel God—the one whose existence she couldn’t deny, but in whom she had no faith. Please, watch over him.

Her fault. Her own fault, for not believing him, for reassuring him that his nighttime experience had been an illusion, that he need not worry about anything; for concealing his fears from Selene because she’d been afraid of being exposed as an angel-essence user.

Coward.

Selene was standing by her side, staring at the corpse; as usual, effortlessly elegant, effortlessly arrogant. Behind her, her bodyguards leaned against the wall of the room; and the nurses were folding used sheets and clearing a table; laying on a tray the scalpels Aragon had used, and everything that had touched Oris. One of them—Pauline, the big woman with the gentle touch—smiled at Madeleine apologetically.

Of course. Of course, the tray was for her, the alchemist of Silverspires. Not one drop of blood would be wasted; the way of life in all Houses, the only one she had ever known. Madeleine took a deep breath, trying to still the trembling of her hands—trying to make the blurred world swim back into focus.

Without warning, Pauline was by her side, laying a callused hand on her shoulder. “You all right?” she asked.

Madeleine shook her head, trying to swallow the salty taste in her mouth. “I’ll—be fine,” she said, and Pauline shook her head.

“Of course you won’t.” Pauline squeezed again—a little painfully, but not unkindly. “Come by the office later, if you want. We have strong stuff.” Alcohol, of course; Cointreau or chartreuse or pastis: a pleasant way to pass the time, but not what she wanted or needed. The ache for angel essence was enough to make her hands shake—she couldn’t afford that, not now. She took a deep breath, and stilled their trembling.

“Thanks,” Madeleine said.

Pauline smiled, and withdrew.

Behind her, Selene and Aragon were getting on; of course there was no time for something so trivial, so insignificant as grief. “He was found in the cathedral?” Selene asked Aragon.

“Arms spread, clothes torn,” Aragon said, curtly. He removed his gloves and surgical mask; the magic that had been surging through him flickered and died, leaving the room a little less warm, a little less oppressive.

It was a small audience for an autopsy: Emmanuelle and Selene were there; and Madeleine, of course. Oris had been her apprentice, her responsibility.

“What did he die of?” Madeleine asked.

Aragon stood ramrod straight, putting her, incongruously, in mind of a soldier reporting to his commander. “Difficult to say. There’s nothing wrong with him, per se. The major organs are intact—everything is clean, or at least as clean as it can be for a Fallen of his age.”

“But he’s dead,” Emmanuelle said, from her place by the door. Her face was set in stone; her skin pale; her hands clenched in front of her, so tight blood had fled her fingertips. It was her, years ago, who had welcomed Oris into the House; who had seen him grow from a naive Fallen into an infuriating apprentice alchemist.

“Yes,” Aragon said. “He is dead.”

“And the pinpricks?” Selene asked. There were dozens on his arms, spaced in some frenzied, obscene pattern, dizzying in its complexity. Needle pinpricks? Except that they were too large for that—each a small, perfect circle of blood that had barely had time to smudge.

“They didn’t kill him,” Aragon said. “They’re too small, and the blood is clean.”

“What are they?” Selene asked.

“They look like snakebites,” Aragon said. “That is, if there were a venomless snake that could reach to man height to strike repeatedly. It’s certainly not a behavior I’ve seen in animals. It could also be a weapon of near that shape, though that raises the question of why it’d be used.”

Snakebites. Bite marks. Claire’s warning. The five deaths.

“Animals can be controlled by spells,” Madeleine said, softly; still struggling with the fact that this was happening. That Claire had been right. She should have passed Claire’s warning on to Selene, but there had been no time; no time at all before Oris died.

“No doubt,” Aragon said. “There is no trace of magic on the wounds whatsoever, though. And, in any case, that’s not the culprit. It’s almost as if . . .” He paused, shaking his head.

“Go on,” Selene said.

“Fallen are an impossibility,” Aragon said. “Bones that fragile can’t support the body, even if we weigh less than humans. And no back muscle, no matter how strong, would have powered wings; and yet Morningstar wielded his metal wings like a weapon. But—”

“But we have magic.” Emmanuelle’s voice had the sharp intensity of a dagger slipping between ribs.

“Precisely. Magic, in a very real sense, is what keeps us alive. It’s never been proved, of course, but I suspect that lack of magic is what eventually kills us, the Fallen equivalent to dying of old age.”

“And?” Madeleine asked.

“It’s as if he ran out of magic all of a sudden—and his body went into deadly shock,” Aragon said.

“Anaphylactic shock?” Emmanuelle asked.

“Something like that, yes, except that something was taken away rather than added.” Aragon made a grimace; he hated using layman approximations. “And the magic is back now—it’s a perfectly normal Fallen corpse. So it makes no sense.”

“Why not?” Selene asked. “I trust you. If you think that’s the explanation . . .”

“Yes, yes,” Aragon said. “But there is no spell that has this effect. By their very nature, spells bring magic. They don’t cut it off.”

“Perhaps we don’t know everything about magic yet,” Emmanuelle said, gently.

Or perhaps they weren’t asking the right person. Claire’s dead had been humans, not Fallen, but the similarities were enough to be more than a coincidence.

“He’s not the first,” Madeleine said.

“The first?” Selene’s smooth face creased in puzzlement.

“Claire said—” Madeleine started, swallowed the bitter taste in her mouth—“Claire said there had been other victims.”

“Claire of Lazarus?” Selene’s voice was harsh. “You didn’t tell me you had met her.”

Madeleine shrank back from the cold anger, scrambling for excuses that seemed to have disintegrated. “There was no time—”

“There is always time.” Selene pursed her lips, as if deliberating punishment. “You should have—”

“Selene.” Emmanuelle’s voice was gentle. “You can’t change what’s past.”

By Selene’s sharp gaze, she clearly wished she could. Madeleine had never set herself against her, had never been overly concerned with the future of the House; but standing by Oris’s corpse, she became aware, uncomfortably so, of how little she and Selene had in common. She’d loved—no, love wasn’t the word; one couldn’t love that kind of person—she’d respected Morningstar, who could be kind; who had carried her all the way into the House when she lay wounded and dying. But to Selene he had passed nothing of his random bouts of gentleness; of his amused humor. Merely the arrogance, the overweening pride of all Fallen.

“You will tell me everything Claire told you.” Selene’s voice was clipped, precise.

When Madeleine was done with her halting tale, Selene remained staring at the corpse; though her gaze was distant, and Madeleine doubted she saw Oris at all, except as one of her possessions. “They weren’t Fallen,” she said. “So that can hardly be the explanation. Nevertheless, it is something that should be explored.” She pursed her lips. “Javier is busy with something else, but I’ll ask Alcestis—”

“Alcestis isn’t concerned with this,” Madeleine said, sharply.

“Alcestis doesn’t need to be personally concerned with this to be efficient,” Selene said.

“I could do it,” Madeleine said. “Oris was my apprentice.”

“Indeed,” Selene said. She didn’t need to speak up; her gaze said, all too clearly, that she wouldn’t trust Madeleine. “But you’ll be busy training your new apprentice.”

“Who?” Madeleine asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Selene said. “Possibly young Isabelle.”

She hadn’t bothered to ask for Madeleine’s opinion; or for anything from her but thoughtless obedience.

Emmanuelle spoke up. “Madeleine could—”

“No,” Selene said. “Madeleine will act as this House’s alchemist, and strip the corpse, and wait for further orders. There is no way”—her eyes were cold—“I will let a witch untrained in House politics walk into Lazarus. The potential for diplomatic incidents is too high.”

“You could have some trust,” Madeleine said, stiffly, but it was pointless. Selene had already made her decision; and it probably meant Madeleine would be stuck with Isabelle, too. Not that she had anything against Isabelle, but it was the imposition of her that galled.

Madeleine bowed her head. “Fine. I’ll strip the corpse.” She’d known this was coming, of course. First and foremost, she was House Silverspires’ alchemist, and it was the duty of an alchemist to see that no fragment of Fallen magic was lost. “And I will await further orders.”

Selene appeared not to notice the terrible irony in her words; she was apparently deep in thought, possibly planning the next step in her relations with House Lazarus. “Come,” she said to Emmanuelle. “There is no time to be wasted.”

Aragon and the nurses followed them out of the room—Pauline lingering for a moment, making a gesture that reminded Madeleine the drinks were still waiting for her in the nurses’ office, cold comfort for after she was done.

And now, she was alone with Oris.

Strip the corpse. Such casual words, for such a routine thing, for part of her trade—she thought of knives taking flesh apart, of hair saved in small boxes, of bones scraped clean and burned in the incinerator—of her work, now so sickeningly empty of meaning. Later, she’d go back to her room and get high on angel essence; feel the surge of power within her, strong enough to obliterate grief.

But for now, there was only the cold: the merciless clarity rising from her wrung-out lungs; the sharp, biting awareness that she could trust no one but herself.

It had been her fault, from end to end. And she might be dying, she might be weak and incompetent in House politics, as Selene had said; but she knew exactly where her responsibility lay.

She would go to see Claire at House Lazarus, and get what she needed to make sure that Oris was avenged.

*   *   *

IN the end, as he’d known he’d have to, Philippe crept back into the cathedral—because it was the only way he would understand what was going on in the House, and fulfill his deal with Samariel.

The place was as bad as ever; the magic swirling within strong enough to make him itch all over. If anything, it seemed to have gotten worse since Oris’s death, though that was absurd. There’d been nothing but the usual Fallen magic on Oris’s corpse, and that would have been recovered; the body scraped clean by Madeleine until hardly a trace remained. Unlike former Immortals—who lived long but died, in the end, the same as any mortals, rejoining the eternal cycle of rebirths and reincarnations—Fallen never left much of anything on Earth.

Nevertheless, Philippe gave the blood-spattered stone floor at the entrance a wide berth, before walking closer to the throne.

It stood limned in sunlight, its edges the warm, golden color fit for an emperor; and somehow, even timeworn, even broken, it loomed over the entire cathedral, made his breath catch in his throat—as if, for a moment, a moment only, he had stepped back in time and stood in the cathedral of his visions, and Morningstar still sat in the throne with the easy arrogance of one to whom everything had been given—power, magic, the rule of a House that was the first and largest in the city, destined to stand forever tall and unbroken.

He crept rather than walked, fighting a desire to abase himself; to crawl on the floor as if he were in the presence of Buddha or the Jade Emperor; and when he reached the throne, and touched it, the warmth leaped up his arm like an electric shock, leaving a tingling like that of blood flowing back into emptied veins.

The mirror and the parchment were still where he’d left them, tucked under the throne. He took them out, and laid them in the sunlight.

What could he make of them?

The mirror was a simple affair, engraved with the crest of House Silverspires. He’d seen the same in Madeleine’s bag, and a dozen others like it on the stalls of the marketplace. Reaching out, cautiously, to the khi currents in the area, Philippe found them only the thinnest thread of water curled around the glass: a confirmation that whatever was inside now lay dormant or dead. There was the hint of another thread, too; a bare trace of wood and its attendant anger: a shadow of something that had once been much stronger, a watered-down image of a flame with none of its heat or vibrancy.

He didn’t practice Fallen magic, but he’d learned enough about it; because he had to, because it was a matter of his survival. It had been a powerful spell, held together by a trigger, and it had completely disappeared—drained, all of it, straight into him when he’d touched the mirror; and perhaps elsewhere, if he’d only been the conduit for it.

It had summoned something, something that was loose in the House. He couldn’t take the spell apart or intuit what it might do, but he could try to trace it back to its source.

He reached out, and cautiously traced the threads. They might be small and innocuous, but the shards of something this powerful could still be potent. There was . . . sorrow, and the roiling anger of a just cause. . . .

Revenge, then. Someone, somewhere, had had a grudge against Morningstar, or against the House.

Philippe touched the mirror again, following the khi currents. They had decayed so much he’d have been hard-pressed to put an age to them, but such decay was the work of years, decades, which meant an old spell. A Fallen, perhaps—to whom the years would be as nothing—or a human who was old by now, with the satisfaction that his vengeance would come to pass. They had left the mirror here, hidden away—never thinking that Morningstar would never come back, that the throne would gather dust and never be touched, and that their spell would only be triggered years and years after it had been put together.

He tugged at the thread of wood, gently unspooling it from around the mirror: loop after loop of thin, shimmering green light that hung on his hands, with a sharp touch like a spring breeze. Then, breathing slowly, carefully—inhale, exhale, inhale, whispering a mantra from bygone times—he withdrew his awareness from his body, and let the thread carry him where it willed.

For a while, he hung suspended in time and space; back to a serenity he’d thought lost, doing nothing but letting the world wash over him, every sensation diminishing until he was once more in that quiet, timeless place where his enlightenment took root.

Gradually—and he wasn’t sure why, or how, or when—it all went away, a slow slide from featureless bliss into something stronger, darker; shadows lengthening over the House, until he stood in a room lined with bookshelves, the only furniture of which was a red plush armchair.

Morningstar sat in the chair. Or rather, lounged in it like a sated tiger, his wings shadowing the sharpness of his face. His pale eyes raking Philippe from top to bottom. “So good of you to come. Shall we start, then?” He inclined his head, and between his spread hands magic whirled and danced, a storm of power that pressed against the bookshelves, stifled the air of the room—cut off Philippe’s breath until it was all he could do to stand.

“I can’t—” he started, and Morningstar shook his head.

“This is power. Embrace it, or others will do it, and leave you gasping in the dust.”

Philippe shook his head, or tried to. He couldn’t seem to move, and Morningstar’s presence was as suffocating as ever—lead pressing on his chest, on his fingers—until it seemed that his nails would lengthen and sharpen, becoming the claws of Morningstar’s own hands. . . .

“Come,” Morningstar said, smiling. “There isn’t much time.”

And he found his feet moving of their own accord, his hands reaching for the magic Morningstar was offering; he took one faltering step into the room, even though his skin was being peeled away from muscle and fat, from bones and glistening veins: one step, then another, straight into the growing maelstrom. . . .

Philippe came to with a gasp. He was standing in a room he had never been to, though he recognized it instantly. It was the same room as in his vision, except that it had badly aged. He had vague memories of exiting the cathedral through a side door, following corridor after corridor; gradually leaving behind the more crowded areas until the House became entombed with dust, gray and bowed with the weight of its true age.

A thread of wood; a thread of water and fire, all curled up and dormant: a vision from the past. Memories. Someone else’s memories. He hadn’t been really interacting with Morningstar; merely seeing someone else do so, in some faraway past.

The same person who had laid that mirror under the throne, in all likelihood—someone who had admired, and feared, and hated Morningstar. Was Philippe’s reaction to Morningstar memories, too, or would he have felt the same in the actual presence of the Fallen? There was no way to know.

The bookshelves hadn’t been maintained, and the dry smell of brittle paper rose all around him. The flowers of the wallpaper were speckled with rot, and the oaken parquet bore only the imprint of his own footsteps. The armchair was still there, its colors faded and worn; and there was a smaller chair in front of it, carved from rich mahogany, the only thing in the room that didn’t seem to have deteriorated. He could sit in here; in fact, he had sat on it, sometime in the distant past—no, that couldn’t be. That wasn’t him. He had never been in this room, and his memories stretched back centuries.

Across the threshold was a very faint line of magic, which itself came from two small vials on either side of the frame. A few Fallen tears, sealed in glass and used for a spell, and he didn’t have to touch them to know who they’d have come from: the same suffocating presence that haunted his dreams.

Morningstar.

He crossed the line; a faint resistance held him, but not for long. When he looked at the room from the outside, it would waver and wriggle, trying to squirm its way out of his field of vision, out of his memory. The spell, then, was still there; obscuring the room from sight, though it had been much stronger, once.

The khi currents in the room were stronger: roiling wood; and a burst of metal, subsuming the other three. Metal. Tears, sadness; the act of contracting, of looking backward—the past. And wood. Wood was for anger; wood was the wind, the vegetation bursting through the ice of graveyards. It wasn’t visions that he was having; no prophecies, no cryptic dreams requiring him to swear allegiance to Morningstar. They were memories. Someone’s memories, encased in so much anger they’d been preserved with the force of a storm.

Revenge, then.

That didn’t help much. Philippe stood in the room, staring at the stool; wondering who had sat on it, and why they had hated Morningstar so much. He’d taught them, hadn’t he—who wouldn’t be glad to have such a teacher?

But, then, this was the West, and they’d never had the proper respect for their elders.

Whoever it was, they had lived for a long time: he’d caught enough glimpses of enough time periods that they spanned centuries. A Fallen, then, whom the years barely touched—humans could have used magic to lengthen their life spans, but not by this much. A Fallen student of Morningstar; with a grudge.

Was this of use to Samariel? Possibly, if he had more information—on whom it was, and what the curse was. He would only have one chance to give this information, one moment of the other’s time, so that the spell on him could be removed. He wasn’t fool enough to believe that Samariel would care for him beyond that.

He needed more information, and he knew exactly where to find it.

*   *   *

PHILIPPE went to see Emmanuelle early in the day. He knew from experience that she’d get up at dawn and head straight to Father Javier’s Mass in the small chapel of the North Wing, before setting to work. He went, therefore, to the library, and found it already buzzing with activity. The archivists—Raoul and others he couldn’t name—were busy, carrying piles of leather-bound books from one shelf to the next and arguing about proper placement, the location of a lost volume, or the latest finds on the history of the House.

He found Emmanuelle behind her desk, staring dubiously at a wobbling pile of books from which arose a strong smell of rot. Two children—they couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old—were kneeling on the floor, setting books aside and having an argument about which books fit where. “Emmanuelle, Emmanuelle,” the youngest—a girl with dark hair and brown eyes the color of autumn leaves—“Pierre-Alain says this one isn’t interesting—”

The boy—Pierre-Alain, who looked enough like her he had to be her brother or cousin—scowled. “It’s too badly damaged. We should throw it away.”

“We can fix it,” the girl said, holding the book against her as though it were beyond worth. “I’m sure we can, Emmanuelle. Please?”

Emmanuelle knelt and gently pried the book from the girl’s fingers—carefully turning the pages in a rising smell of mold. “Mmm. It’s pretty wet. Can you get some absorbent paper from the back shelf? And put a sheet of it between every wet page?”

“Of course! Come on, Pierre-Alain!”

When the children were gone, Emmanuelle rose. “Market finds,” she said, with a shrug. “I’m pretty sure there’s not much worth salvaging in there, but one never knows—and Caroline loves feeling useful. Did you want something?”

Philippe pulled a chair, and sat next to her. “You said to come to you if we had any questions—”

“Oh, yes.” Emmanuelle pulled the topmost book from the stack—it had a stylized, naturalistic design reminiscent of the art nouveau buildings in the city—and blew on it absentmindedly.

“I wanted to know more about Morningstar,” Philippe said. “You knew him when he was . . . here, didn’t you?”

“You could say that,” Emmanuelle said, cautiously. “I wasn’t there for very long, though: a century, at most, and he never paid attention to me, not the way he did to others.”

“Like Selene?”

“Yes.” Emmanuelle set the book aside. “Selene was his student; the last among many. He was . . . different. Most Fallen don’t exude more than a trace amount of power, but with Morningstar you felt as though you stood in the presence of a furnace.”

I know, Philippe wanted to say, and bit his tongue, lest he betray himself. “So he taught many students in the House?”

Emmanuelle shook her head. “He taught them for the House, yes, but—” She bit her lip, uncomfortable. “The war came.”

The war. Philippe thought of the clamor of explosions; of huddling in the doorways of ruined buildings, peering at the sky to judge the best moment to rush out; of his lieutenant in House colors, urging them to lay down their lives for the good of the city; of his squad mates buried in nameless graves, on the edge of Place de la République. Ai Linh, who had a laugh like a donkey, and always shared her biscuits with everyone else; Hoang, who liked to gamble too much; Phuong, who told hair-raising stories in the barracks after all lights had been turned off. “I don’t know what the war was like, inside the Houses,” he said, and it was almost the truth.

Emmanuelle stared at him for a while, her pleasant face almost hard. Did she suspect how he’d come to be here; what the war had been like for him? “Our magicians turned into soldiers,” she said at last. “Our students into thoughtless killers, and our best men into corpses. When the war ended, most of Morningstar’s students were dead, as were so many in the House.”

Philippe remembered the fall of House Draken; remembered retreating down corridor after corridor, as armed mortals and Fallen overwhelmed every inch of available space, and the lieutenant breathed down their necks, screaming at them to resist, to show that House Draken died with honor; he remembered thinking that he was the House’s possession, not its cherished member, that he had no honor and no desire to acquire any.

There had been so many corpses, by the time the House had succumbed; so many corpses in the abandonment of death; and he had not wept for a single one of them.

“But Morningstar—”

“Morningstar wasn’t on the front lines. He was always more comfortable manipulating people, after all. Not that it was unpleasant; people loved following his orders: who wouldn’t? It was such . . . terrible bliss, from what I have heard.” Her voice was resentful; it wasn’t clear whether she was angry at Morningstar’s behavior, or jealous that she hadn’t been singled out for that bitter honor. “Selene was lucky; he was teaching her at the time and didn’t want his efforts to go to waste before she was ready.”

So he’d sent students to their deaths. “So they died. And were happy. And those who survived?” Philippe said cautiously.

Emmanuelle frowned. “There were two, I think? Leander and Oris, and Selene, of course.”

“He taught Oris?” Philippe asked. That he’d seen something in Oris—of all people—

Emmanuelle shrugged. “Did you think Oris was always that way?” She smiled, but the look never reached her eyes. “Morningstar was . . . like living fire,” she said at last. “It can fill you up and make you shine harder than you ever did, or it can seep through every crack and burn you from the inside out.” She closed the book. “Selene . . . took it well, I think, and Leander . . .” She thought about it for a while. “Leander was always a bit odd, and it never changed him, though from time to time he’d look up and there’d be this odd light in his eyes. Cracks.”

Were there cracks, too, in Selene’s mind? What must it be like to succeed that kind of Fallen, and forever try to live up to their image? Living fire, Emmanuelle had said.

“I’ve not met a Leander,” Philippe said.

“You wouldn’t,” Emmanuelle said. “He’s been dead for decades.”

“An accident?”

“Old age,” Emmanuelle said.

A mortal, then. An odd choice for Morningstar, but then again, who was he to judge? What had the Fallen looked for, in his students—and what had he found? What had made someone burn with that twisted, dark anger he’d felt, when touching the mirror?

Leander was dead, which ruled him out. And, of course, Selene was out, because she’d been in the vision.

“You’re sure there were no other students of his who survived the war?” Taking students like commodities; bewitching them and sending them to slaughter: it was powerful and plausible motivation for someone to hate Morningstar, perhaps enough to doom his entire House in the process. But if everyone was dead or ruled out, then it left only Oris.

Who was also dead.

A terribly convenient coincidence, if it was a coincidence at all.

“That’s an awful lot of questions,” Emmanuelle said. Her eyes narrowed. “Why the curiosity?”

Demons take him; he’d pushed her too far. He couldn’t let her press further; she was perceptive enough to realize that he was hardly asking about Morningstar for the good of the House. “I guess I’m trying to understand Selene,” he said, falling back on the first excuse that came to mind.

Emmanuelle stared at him for a while, but he’d had lots of practice staring Ninon and Baptiste down. “I see,” she said. “Don’t get any ideas, Philippe. I’m not the pathway into her mind.”

“No,” he said, glibly, and left her staring at her book—going back to his biography of Morningstar.

*   *   *

ISABELLE found him, hours later, halfway through the book and not much more advanced. The names of Morningstar’s students were in there, all blurring together like glass on a windowpane: Hyacinth, Seraphina, Nightingale, Leander, Oris . . .

Hyacinth had been a minor mortal of the House, a laundry servant vaguely dissatisfied with his life but not overly power-hungry: after Morningstar was done with him, he’d risen to be the personal valet of a high-rank Fallen, and, insofar as Philippe could see, had remained in that position all his life. Seraphina had been found by Morningstar himself, on a night when he was prowling the city—lying weak and helpless in the wreck of the Arc de Triomphe, and taken in tow like a child until he had grown bored with her. Nightingale had been mortal: one of the House’s minor witches, noted for her wild theories about spells and her unorthodox way of doing magic—probably what had drawn Morningstar’s eye in the first place. Leander was mortal, too, and ambitious—unlike Nightingale, he had been steadily rising through the ranks, becoming one of the House’s foremost magicians, powerful enough to rival Fallen. And Oris . . . Oris had already been an alchemist’s assistant, and after Morningstar gave up on him, he’d simply gone back to his beloved artifacts and charged mirrors.

Without preamble, Isabelle pulled a wooden chair toward her, and sat facing him across the low table. “You owe me a few explanations.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

Isabelle shook her head. She wore pale clothes, which only emphasized the cast of her olive skin, and the mortar-and-pestle insignia of alchemists sat uneasily on her breast—skewed, showing large swaths of the adhesive patch that was meant to keep it in place. “I came here to listen,” she said. “Like what you were doing with House Hawthorn.”

Philippe set the book aside, and looked up. They were alone in this section of the library—where the bookshelves were half-empty; the books torn and stained, not painstakingly put back together by Emmanuelle’s hands; and the smell of rotten, wet things rather than comforting mustiness.

“That’s my own business,” he said at last.

Isabelle smiled, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes. “I thought I could trust you.”

He hadn’t seen her since the market—he’d have said she was avoiding him, but he was, too—not sure of what he could tell her.

“You’ve changed,” he said, slowly. “What has Madeleine done to you?”

She sat straight-backed—her skin a pale golden rather than the shade he was used to, but her bearing regal. “Madeleine? Nothing.”

“Oris—”

Her gaze remained steady. “I had to take Oris apart. Madeleine was trying not to cry the entire time. It wasn’t so bad for me—I didn’t really know him, after all.” She worried at the hole on her left hand; the two missing fingers—how did you scrape flesh and muscle from bone, with half a hand? Badly, he guessed.

“But it wasn’t easy. I’m sorry.” It was rote, and thoughtless, and it was the absolute wrong thing he could have said.

“You’re not. And don’t change the subject, please.”

What could he tell her? He ought to lie; ought to make life easier for himself; but staring into those wide, shining eyes that still reflected the light of the City, Philippe found himself unable to twist the truth. “I’m not House, Isabelle. I’m only here under duress. You know that.”

“So you want to escape.” There was no condemnation on her face; only an odd kind of thoughtfulness, as if she’d found a behavior she couldn’t quite explain. In a way, that was worse. “Into another House.”

“No,” Philippe said. Anywhere but Houses. Back on the streets, or into Annam—waiting, as she herself had said, for a boat, for regular traffic to resume, or security on maritime commerce to grow slack. “But I can’t stay here, not on Selene’s terms. You have to see that.”

“I do.” Isabelle’s voice was still thoughtful. “I do understand. But this can’t be the right way to go about it.”

“Then give me another one.”

Isabelle flinched; but did not draw back, or apologize, as she might have done once. She had changed; carbon pressed together until it became the first inklings of a diamond.

“I can’t—I don’t know enough, Philippe.”

“I know,” he said, wearily. “But I need a way forward, Isabelle.” He needed—freedom? The same sense of weightlessness he’d once enjoyed in Annam, in the court of the Jade Emperor; when he moved among bejeweled ladies and haughty lords, drinking pale tea in celadon cups as fragile as eggshells—a feeling that was now lost forever. In that desperate longing he wasn’t so different from Fallen, after all: a frightening thought.

She sat still for a while, staring at him; biting her lip, young and bewildered and lost. “I—I know. But you’re playing with fire, and I can’t. I need the House, Philippe, or I won’t survive. I can’t allow you to damage it, even if I understand why you’re doing it. I have to tell Selene.”

“No. Please.”

He was hurting the House, or planning to—it wasn’t a bad place to be, insofar as Houses went, and the people—Laure, Emmanuelle, the kitchen staff—had been kind to him. But it was a House—built on arrogance and blood and the hoarding of magic—and its master held the keys to his chains. He had . . . He had to be free.

“I won’t tell her it’s you,” Isabelle said. “But she needs to know what Hawthorn is doing.”

As if Selene wouldn’t guess which of her new arrivals was being unfaithful. “She’ll flay me,” Philippe said, reflexively; but something within him, something older and prouder, whispered, Let her try—and the voice was Morningstar’s.

What? No. That wasn’t—that wasn’t possible.

Isabelle shook her head. “She’s not like that. You don’t know her—”

Of course he knew her. She’d do anything to preserve her chosen Fallen and mortals, and let everyone else rot—and he couldn’t tell, anymore, if the thoughts were his or Morningstar’s. He teetered on the edge of the abyss where he would lose himself in a way utterly alien to him, subsumed in the unpalatable memories of a Fallen. . . .

“Give me time,” he said through clenched lips. “Please, Isabelle. You know—”

“That you don’t mean harm?” She was silent for a while.

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t wish the House harm.” And it was a lie, and they both knew it. “But you have to see I’m a prisoner here.” As she was not. She was Fallen, with all the privileges this afforded her; and Silverspires was her home. It could never be his, even if it had been as welcoming as his own mother’s hearth. He was . . . Annamite. Other. “Please.”

Her eyes shone in the paleness of her face. “I can guess what you feel. I can—” She took in a deep, shaking breath. “I feel some of it.”

Philippe looked away, trying to avoid her gaze, or her three-fingered hand. What was it for her, the same as for him: an odd twisting in his belly; a nagging sense of always knowing where she was, a faint echo of what she felt? Affection, embarrassment? It was too weak an emotion, whatever was in her mind; and he wouldn’t understand her so easily. They moved in wholly different worlds.

“Then—” He hardly dared to breathe.

She didn’t move for a while. “Three days. That’s all I can give you, Philippe.”

After she’d left, he sat in his chair, staring at the book in front of him—the past that should have had no bearing on him—breathing hard.

Three days. He had three days before Selene was informed of what he was up to, and his life got a lot more difficult, and possibly a lot shorter. Three days to find something; that was if the memories didn’t kill him first.

He had to find out what was going on in the House, and not entirely so he could get rid of his chains.

No, he had to know, because it looked as though the curse wasn’t going to be content with the occasional vision from the past. If he didn’t understand it, he was going to find himself swept along in whatever twisted revenge the unknown Fallen had dreamed of, and utterly lose himself in the process.