The House of Shattered Wings (36 page)

But on the stairs leading down to the river, the translucent shape of Morningstar stood guard, his wings sharply delineated against the night sky, his large sword held upward without apparent effort. And he could push past the Fallen—he was a ghost—no, worse than a ghost, a memory of a ghost that could no more stop him than a breath upon the wind—but, even in the depths of the dragon kingdom, Silverspires and its curse would still have him in an unbreakable hold. And, even as consort, even as Immortal, he would still remember Isabelle; and how he had failed her.

Come with us.

“Not yet,” he whispered to the encroaching night; and turned away from the stairs, to cross the bridge toward House Silverspires.

*   *   *

OUTSIDE,
in the gray light of late afternoon, Madeleine turned to Isabelle. “Thank you,” she said.

Isabelle shook her head, pulling her toward a black car. “Don't thank me. I need you, Madeleine—I gave Selene something, but it's not what she needs—you have to come—”

“You make no sense,” Madeleine said, but she let Isabelle pull her toward the car, where Javier waited, a frown on his face. “Good to see you again,” he said. “Let's go.”

She asked for explanations in the car; but Javier was distant, and Isabelle uncommunicative.

As they approached Silverspires, she held her breath. The cloud over it had now extended tendrils all the way into the cathedral; and there was something around the ruined towers, a canopy of . . . leaves?

“You have to explain,” she said, playing with the box of essence.

“I don't have all the explanations,” Isabelle said. “But the House is dying.”

Dying? She'd left it in bad shape, granted, and Asmodeus had seemed so sure it was about to fall, but . . .

“Trust me,” Isabelle said, and half dragged her, half pushed her into corridors overrun by huge roots and branches. There was an open door; and before she could realize it was Selene's office, now invaded beyond recognition, Isabelle had pushed her in.

It was empty; or almost so: Emmanuelle turned as they entered, surprised. “Madeleine? I thought—”

Madeleine felt the presence of Hawthorn in her mind, a weight dragging her down. “Emmanuelle? Where is Selene?”

“Overseeing the evacuation,” Emmanuelle said; and in the face of Madeleine's blank stare: “You came in through the North Wing? If you'd gone to the other side, you would have seen everyone else. Everyone still alive, that is.”

“I—” Madeleine took a deep breath, struggling to balance her sense of panic. “I thought—”

“This is a dying House,” Emmanuelle said. Her smile was bitter. “But she hasn't won yet, not if I can help it. Selene's first duty is to her dependents, but I—I have no such compunction.”

Isabelle was looking left and right, frantically. “Where are they?”

“The wings?” Emmanuelle took a deep, slow breath; let it out again. “Morningstar took them and went inside, to open the way. You just missed him.”

Morningstar? But Morningstar was dead. Surely . . .

“Then I'm too late.” Isabelle slumped. “It can't have worked, the power I infused them with. I brought Madeleine because she'd know how to do it properly. Emmanuelle—” She almost looked as though she was pleading, but without the tone that Madeleine would have associated with that. She looked and spoke as though she was head of the House.

Asmodeus had asked,
“So you set yourself up as his heir, do you?”

The heir of Morningstar; but there was only one heir, and she was head of the House.

“That's a dangerous position to occupy.”

Selene would be livid. Then again, Selene had no part in what they were now doing.

Emmanuelle said, “You got my message?”

“You know messages aren't that clear,” Isabelle said. “Merely an intimation to come back, and that there was something here for me.”

“Yes,” Emmanuelle said. “Selene had a mission for you.”

Madeleine merely stood, and listened; everything sliding past her. The box Asmodeus had given her was warm in her hands. “It can't be this easy—”

“Of course not. Morningstar . . . should provide you with time.”

“With a distraction, you mean,” Isabelle said. “Did Selene expect him to survive?”

Emmanuelle's voice was low, bitter. “She did what had to be done.”

Isabelle said nothing for a while. At last, she said, and her voice was cold, and wholly unlike what Madeleine remembered, “Blood and revenge and death. She is truly head of the House.”

“Of course.” Emmanuelle sounded exhausted. She opened her hand: in it was a small, blackened thing. “You didn't ask what Selene wanted of you. You will take this to the heart of the tree, and kill the curse. If it can still be done.”

Isabelle looked at it, intently. “Why are we not going through the parvis? That would be simpler, wouldn't it?”

“Because the door of the cathedral is where we're evacuating,” Emmanuelle said, “and we'd rather not have a fight conducted among our refugees.”

“I see.” Isabelle bit her lips. “It might work.”

“It might not,” Emmanuelle said.

“Of course it will. I will come back,” Isabelle said, carelessly. “But I have accounts to settle, first.”

With a ghost. With someone she had never known, except that this same someone had doomed Philippe; and turned the House she had always thought of as a refuge into—this.

Emmanuelle held Isabelle's gaze for a while; at length, she nodded. “For the good of the House,” she said. She reached out into one of the drawers, and picked up a small knife. “Here. You'll need this as well.” And as she handed the knife and the mirror to Isabelle, she added, “You've changed.”

“I've had to,” Isabelle said. She bit her lip. “Like wildfire—if I let go for even a moment . . . ,” she whispered; and for a moment she sounded bewildered and lost, once more the Fallen Madeleine had taken under her wing. “I'm sorry, Madeleine. But you should go.”

Emmanuelle was already halfway to the door. “Madeleine?”

Madeleine remained standing where she was. She couldn't have told what moved her now: the melody of Hawthorn within her mind, the memories of Isabelle; the pain in her hip and in her ribs that would never truly go away?
“Try not to get yourself killed,”
Asmodeus had said, knowing that she would be safe. She was not one for rash decisions. She—“I'll go with you,” she said.

Isabelle smiled. “Are you sure?”

Madeleine shook her head. “No. But it's as good as anything. But I wasn't sure about the dragon kingdom, either, was I?”

Isabelle forced a smile. Charge in, and then see later. As if that had worked out well: the root of all their problems, Selene would have said, her voice acid.

But Selene wasn't there, anymore; forced out of her own House and her own office by the magic of revenge. “Let's go,” she said; and walked out of the room, refusing to look back.

THE PLACE OF REBIRTH

THE
corridors were empty, overrun by the huge, fibrous roots Madeleine had already seen—though in places, huge chunks of them had been removed, leaving easy passage.

“Morningstar,” Isabelle said, curtly.

“You're going to have to explain this.”

Isabelle shook her head. “I can't really explain. He was dead, and then he was not.”

Like Elphon, Madeleine thought; and shied away from the implications. Asmodeus could resurrect his own Fallen from within Hawthorn, but surely he couldn't . . .

She touched one of the cut places; sap dribbled down, wet and sticky: it pulsed with a slow heartbeat, like some huge being; and the warmth of her hand was magic. The magic of the tree; or that of the House? Behind the roots, she could see cracks in the wallpaper; no, cracks in the wall itself. “It's choking the House,” she said.

“I know.” Isabelle's face crumpled, became harsher, as if she were thinking of something unpleasant. “Destroying everything that is Silverspires. I—I will not stand for that. Come, Madeleine.”

They ran, in the flickering light provided by Isabelle's skin; though, as they went deeper and deeper into the House, the light grew and grew, until it seemed to Madeleine they were moving within Heaven itself—until, between the roots, she caught glimpses of graceful tiered arches; of the golden glimmer of icons on painted domes; and the hint of music, harp and violin and voices that squeezed her heart into bloody tatters.

The City.

Bright and terrible, and wholly out of this world; the warmth around her reminding her of Asmodeus's touch on her skin, as his passionless voice explained why he had saved her life; why he had not cared, and would never care.

Bright and terrible; like Isabelle, like Morningstar. Were all Fallen like this, with the harshness of their Fall at the core of their being? No wonder they were merciless, and cruel, if that was all they saw and remembered. . . .

Isabelle had stopped in the middle of an intersection of corridors. The light around her was tinged with the green of the East Wing. Morningstar, or whoever he really was, was taller than her, and the humanoid-shaped hole he had left on his swath of destruction to the heart of the cathedral surrounded her like the sarcophagus of a mummy—slightly larger than her, perfectly shaped—even taking into account the shadows of wings at her back.

Morningstar's heir.

Madeleine was already running out of breath; not that she'd had much to start with. They hadn't seen anything so far; merely the silence of the grave; and even the tree itself seemed to have been shocked into stillness. Whatever Morningstar had done . . .

Selene had sent him ahead as a distraction. There was no other interpretation possible—she had known, sending him, that there was only one possible outcome to his charging in alone—even with all the magic the House could spare at his back.

“Are you all right?” Isabelle asked.

“I don't know,” Madeleine said. She leaned on one of the descending roots to catch her breath, felt the warmth leeched from the House; and withdrew her hand.

She was Hawthorn's now. It was no longer her business.

There was a sound around them; a huge tightening of something, so hard that the walls audibly cracked. “What was that?” Madeleine asked.

“Something that has no right to happen,” Isabelle said coldly. “Come on, it's this way.”

The cathedral had changed. Instead of pillars, a host of fluted trunks; and an impassable canopy of branches and leaves masking the view of the Heavens. Here there were few or no cuts from Morningstar's wings; but also enough space for them to wend their way through the maze of roots and trunks and green leaves. The smell of a tropical jungle became overpowering: loamy earth and the peculiar sharpness that comes after the rain. Madeleine's hands tightened around the box; should she inhale its contents? No, she wasn't going to give Asmodeus that satisfaction.

Over the altar was the largest trunk of them all, covering seemingly everything from the throne to the entrance to the crypt. But Madeleine had no time to take it in, because the trunk was halfway open; and someone stood there, bending over a body.

The body was Morningstar's. Even though she hadn't seen him since he came back to life, there was no mistaking the fair hair, or the serrated wings that the other person was busy removing from him.

In front of her, Isabelle's light grew harsh. “Stop!”

The other rose, taking the wings with her; dropped them, as if they were fundamentally distasteful. “You fool,” she whispered, and her voice carried under the vault. “Did you really think they would serve you, in the end?”

Then she turned, and looked at Isabelle.

She was small, and thin; her hair a dull, mousy brown; her eyes wide in the delicate oval of her face, with the same familiar harshness to her features that Madeleine had seen in Isabelle and Selene. She wore a simple white shift, reminiscent of the robe of altar boys; leaves were still caught around the collar, and scattered twigs clung to the hem above her bare feet.

“That is unexpected,” she said. She walked downstairs, leaving Morningstar behind her. Her gaze raked Isabelle and her from top to bottom, leaving Madeleine with the distinct impression they'd been found wanting. “Is this what the House sends to defend itself? You're too late.”

“Nightingale,” Madeleine whispered, and the woman smiled.

“I'd thought it would be someone I would remember.”

I don't,
Madeleine thought.
I wasn't even there when you died. I—damn it, can't the dead remain where they are, safely away from us?

“You have no right.” Isabelle walked toward her; stopped, in a perfect triangle with her, Morningstar's body and Nightingale.

Nightingale's gaze swung toward her. “Right? You do know what he did, don't you? I would hate to think his House produced someone so naive.”

Isabelle drew herself to her full height. “It's not his House any longer.”

“It's Selene's.” Nightingale's gaze moved, rested on Madeleine. “Don't look so surprised. I don't come into this world like a blameless fool. I'm no Fallen.”

No, that she patently was not. How much did she know? Was it through the Furies, through Philippe, or something else entirely? She had been born of the House's magic: their own sword, turned against them; Morningstar's own sins, brought back full circle; and she would not be stopped.

Except . . . Behind her, to the right, lay the discarded wings; and Isabelle had claimed her right to inherit Morningstar's mantle. If anyone could stop her . . .

Madeleine took a step forward, her heart hammering against her chest. Before she could think on what she was doing, she raised the box to her face; and, opening it in one swift movement, inhaled its entire contents.

It was like inhaling liquid fire: an irrepressible feeling of suffocation that rose in her, sending her to her knees, struggling to breathe—even as warmth exploded in her chest, spread to her arms and legs—and climbed upward, a stab like a spike driven into her brain, whiting out her vision for a bare moment.

When she opened her eyes again, Nightingale had moved; was standing almost over her. Madeleine pushed herself upward, stood. Nightingale watched her, unmoving. “So you set yourself to fight me, then?”

No, no, no.
She wasn't that much of a fool. Isabelle had to understand, had to get the message. “Someone has to stand against you. I wish it wasn't me, but there is no one else.” Each word she spoke hurt, lodged against her tongue and palate like serrated blades, like flame butterflies. If she moved too fast, or spoke too soon, she was going to burst; so much power within her, so much raw potential. Once, she would have felt safe, away from Asmodeus, but now she had Hawthorn at the back of her thoughts; and she stood in the destroyed heart of Silverspires, facing a dead woman come back to life. There was no safety left to her.

There had been no safety for such, such a long time.

“I see,” Nightingale said, and reached out, power blossoming within her. Madeleine stepped aside, instinctively raising wards that the power tore to shreds. She wasn't made for this: she wasn't Isabelle; she wasn't Selene or any other Fallen. She was an
alchemist
, not a fighter!

She tried to see Isabelle, but Nightingale blocked her field of vision, smiling. “You're not much of a challenge.”

She had to—Madeleine reached within her, felt something shift; and magic flowed through the floor, raising little bumps like a hundred fingertips poking through the stones. Nightingale stepped aside, but not in time: she stumbled, mouthing a curse, and leaves scattered from her shift.

Her response was a cold wind, flowing through the trees. Madeleine dived behind one of the fluted trunks, but the wind tore through it: her fingers were locked into place, and everything was frozen within her.

Where was Isabelle—she couldn't keep this up for long; she'd never been trained . . .

Nothing. Silence.

She bent around the trunk; and saw, like a response to her prayers, that Nightingale's attention had shifted to Isabelle; who was straightening from her crouch, with Morningstar's wings spreading wide behind her.

She was bright, and terrible: light streaming from her skin, her presence so palpable, so vivid, a pressure in the air that made Madeleine want to prostrate herself; for what else could she do, before Morningstar's heir? Behind her, the wings fanned out, as sharp as sword blades, and she had picked up a knife from the wreckage: Morningstar's knife, or perhaps the one Emmanuelle had given her in Selene's office?

Nightingale was watching her, a mocking smile on her face. “Commendable,” she said. “But not, I think, enough, in the end.”

She flung her arms outward; Isabelle moved faster than Madeleine had thought possible and was almost upon her, the wings scraping against the trunks, leaving deep gouges as they did so. Nightingale dodged, and sent a trail of fire streaking through the air, which Isabelle caught in her hands and flung away. . . .

Madeleine, watching them, was reminded of nothing quite so much as dancers, moving with inhuman fluidity, as if to a rhythm only they could hear, some slow and ponderous music played on a now defunct organ.

She crawled, instead, to Morningstar; fearing, with each jolt, that the magic within her would tear her apart. It would fade, eventually, the sense of coiled fire within her sinking down to dull embers; leaving her once more craving its touch, once more staring at the aimlessness of her life. It would go away. All she had to do was wait.

Neither Isabelle nor Nightingale paid her any attention, too engrossed in their fight. Nightingale's fingers were moving fast, as if playing on piano keys, and Isabelle was leaning on a tree trunk, breathing hard, eyes closed, while frost coalesced around her fingers. . . .

Madeleine had seen Morningstar in life, a long time ago. In death he looked almost ordinary, his hair the color of freshly cut corn, his hands long-fingered, with nails that curved almost like claws; his skin with a faint glow, not like Oris, whose corpse had lost its luster . . .

No. Wait.
Fumbling, Madeleine looked for the heartbeat in the wrist and in the chest—then gave up and called on the magic within her. It rose, wringing her lungs out like a cast-off floor cloth: a jolt that traveled from her heart to her fingers; and, as she touched Morningstar's wrist, she felt the magic earth itself; felt the slow, regular heartbeat under her fingers. Alive, then. Barely so, if it took magic to hear it.

There were healing spells; and ways to keep him farther away from death's door. She knew none of them; only Aragon's gloomy warnings that one did not meddle with human or Fallen biology. Anything she did risked making matters worse. But—she raised her eyes. Nightingale and Isabelle were fighting a little farther away from her, throwing magic at each other with abandon. Isabelle's face was flecked with sweat; Nightingale's hadn't changed as she flung trails of fire at Isabelle.

Isabelle, obviously weary of the spells exchanged, lunged at Nightingale: once, twice, the wings following her every movement. Nightingale dodged two moves that should have slashed her from shoulder to hip, smiling. “Is this all you have?” she asked.

“You have no idea.” Isabelle shook her head. “This is my House. The place that took me in, that gave me space to grow and learn and be safe. I—will—not—lose—it.” Her knife sliced; Nightingale leaped away again, and the knife scraped against the edge of a ward she'd put up. She was smiling, not even out of breath.

“You forget. It was my House, too.” She extended both hands; looked at Isabelle, her gaze intent, her eyes two huge black holes in the oval of her face. “Just as it was yours.” Her hands shot forward; the air seemed to crumple in front of her; and she drove them, effortlessly, into Isabelle's chest.

Isabelle froze. She stared at Nightingale, her eyes widening, slowly glazing over. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.

No, no, no.

Slowly, gracefully, Isabelle fell back; and a spray of blood fell forward, onto the stones of the cathedral.

No.

Madeleine rose, and ran, screaming, the magic streaming out of her, uncontrollable—fully expecting to have to fight Nightingale, too; and to fail as Isabelle had failed, to fall as Isabelle had fallen. . . .

But when she reached the body, Nightingale was already gone, walking away without a backward glance toward the entrance of the cathedral; the roots opening in front of her in an obscene parody of the sea parting before Moses's staff. Madeleine knelt, shaking, pouring all the magic she had left into Isabelle's body, trying to find a way, any way, to heal her.

Nothing happened. A glance should have told her—as she looked up, weak, trembling—that it was useless, that no one recovered from two bloody holes of that size in the chest. Isabelle's eyes were wide-open, vitreous; her breath inaudible; her skin already losing its luster, becoming gray and fragile and mortal.