Through the light of the flame, he saw Emmanuelle’s shocked face — the dilated pupils, the dark features frozen in shock, the gaze trained on him, frantically trying to see a trace of magic and finding none.
Good. Not everything in the world was subject to the Fallen.
Gently, slowly, he closed his hand around the flame; let the magic dissolve in the midst of the khi currents and of his body until no trace of it was left. As he did so, for a bare moment, something else connected to the khi currents: water, but not the stale water within the House — something bubbling and simmering, almost youthful in its enthusiasm. Something he’d felt once before in Annam; but no, this was impossible. There were no dragon kingdoms here — no spirits of the rain and rivers, not under the polluted clouds that rained acid; not in the blackened waters of the Seine; not in the wells that had long since run dry.
But he’d felt this, once before — in the ruined cathedral — much fainter, almost spent, but still…
Impossible. Nostalgia and the fancies of a prisoner, that was all it was.
“Satisfied?” he asked, shaking his head to dismiss the odd feeling.
Emmanuelle grimaced, but she nodded. “As much as one can be, I guess.”
Aragon returned to his desk, put down his stethoscope with an audible thump. “I trust that is the end of the examination.” His face was severe; his opinion of the entire affair all too clear — a waste of time.
Philippe said nothing. At length, Emmanuelle got up, closing the file she held in her hands. “I will report this to Selene,” she said; and left the room.
Aragon waited until her footsteps vanished from hearing; and they were well and truly alone. “You surprise me.”
Philippe raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
Aragon’s smile was terrible to behold. “You are still here.”
“Not by choice,” Philippe said, stiffly. He tried, every night, to untangle Selene’s spell on him; stood on the border of the House, feeling the resistance in the air and wondering if he dared test himself against it. But that spell was a vast maw; something larger than anything he had seen. “Believe me, if I could undo Selene’s spell—”
“Yes? Do tell me.” Aragon put down the paper he was holding. “What would you do? Go back to your games with the gangs and the misery of the streets?”
“Careful, old man,” Philippe said.
But Aragon went on, relentless. “Or will you go home instead? Surely you have to realize it’s a dream you can’t go back to?”
The rest of Europe was ashes as welclass="underline" the Great War had spilled outward from Paris, engulfing every region and every department — and reaching across borders through the alliances struck between Houses, a network of mutual support that had turned into tinder for a continent-wide conflagration — English Houses against French Houses; and then, as governments collapsed and the circle of conflicts tightened, each House for itself. Outside Paris, ruins dotted the landscape — the minor, provincial Houses in other cities shattered, their Fallen and human dependents dead in their hundreds, and the manors of the countryside fastnesses in the midst of wastelands. The travelers from Madrid or London arrived with delegations as large and as armed as a battalion, after a grueling journey that had taken them months to complete. And the boats for Annam and the colonies were few, the exclusive province of the favored of Houses: an impossibility for such as him. He’d tried, numerous times, to sneak into convoys bound for Marseilles and Saigon; but the security was too tight, the spells too powerful. He’d have to be a dependent to get on board; and he wasn’t ever going to sell himself into servitude to a House — his return wasn’t worth the degradation.
Aragon was right: he would never see Annam again — he would never smell the green papayas, freshly cut open; or the garlic and the fish sauce; never climb into the mountains of the west and see them shrouded in bluish clouds; never hear the chants of worshippers at the ancestral altars… “I know,” Philippe said, in a whisper.
Aragon’s gaze was piercing. “If you’ll forgive me for meddling where I shouldn’t — it’s long past the time where you should make a life for yourself here.”
“As a pampered captive on reprieve from a death sentence? No.” Philippe clenched his fists. “And you are meddling, aren’t you?”
Aragon smiled; this time more gently. “Because I believe in helping my own kin. All Fallen, not just those of the House you belong to.”
“I’m not Fallen,” Philippe pointed out — he wasn’t sure he’d ever understand Aragon. Bodhisattva ethics, perhaps; saving everyone whether they’d asked for it or not; sacrificing himself and his good reputation by helping wounded and sick Fallen, whatever their House. Or his Hippocratic oath, perhaps, though Philippe laid no claim to understanding that peculiarity.
“You’re not Fallen,” Aragon said, at last. “But you still should be free to choose. It’s not right, what Selene did to you. I already asked her, but she won’t lift the spell; and she holds it together with the entire strength of the House. It’s not right.”
Neither was what he had done to Isabelle, but Philippe clamped his mouth shut on that response before it could doom him.
Aragon drummed his fingers on his desk. “I don’t meddle,” he said, more to himself than to Philippe. “I don’t take sides — that was the bargain I struck. But they have to keep their side of it; and they’re not.” He looked up; as if genuinely surprised to still see Philippe there. “There is someone who could help you, but it will not come cheap.”
“Do I look like I have money?” Philippe said.
“No,” Aragon said. “It’s what they’ll ask for that preoccupies me, in fact.” He drummed his fingers on the desk again, staring at Philippe as if he could dissect him. “You’re a decent being, underneath. Can you promise you’ll follow your own heart in this?”
“I can promise,” Philippe said, “but—”
“Then do so.”
“Fine, fine,” Philippe said. It didn’t seem to be much, in any case. “I promise.”
Aragon sighed. “The next Great Market is in two days. Wait in the courtyard near the Préfecture’s former entrance — you know where that is? I’ll show you on a map. Midday, I suspect, is the time he’ll prefer, but I’ll confirm with you. Oh, and naturally do keep my name out of this.”
“I don’t understand—” Philippe started, but he did understand — that somewhere, somehow, there was a person who could effortlessly shatter Selene’s spell; who could make him free.
And wasn’t that all that mattered, ultimately? That, and not the bleak maw of the future that Aragon had described so well; the closed doors to an Annam he couldn’t return to, to a pale, bloodless life with Ninon and Baptiste and the rest of the Red Mambas; or to the cessation of life itself, the supreme attainment of the Buddhists, the thought of which scared him sick in his belly?
* * *
PHILIPPE went to see Isabelle, afterward — to check up on her, ensure that she was still around. He wasn’t sure why, but the interview — and Aragon’s promise — had left him shaken, no longer sure of what he ought to do.
He found her in the kitchens, stubbornly trying to handle a wet, sticky dough under the amused gaze of Laure. “She’s getting better at this,” Laure said to Philippe when he arrived. Her husband, Gauthier, was nearby, showing two junior cooks how to prepare flaky pastry for bouchées à la reine. “Though still a bit of a disaster, if you ask me.”
Philippe forced a smile he didn’t feel. Laure was kind, and he couldn’t fault her; but right now he couldn’t handle another House dependent — except for Isabelle.