TWENTY. LIKE SEEDS, SCATTERED BY THE WINDS
EMMANUELLE came in with Javier: the priest looked much older, much more brittle than Selene remembered. “We found the place,” Emmanuelle said. She looked grim; her sleeves slashed in multiple places. “A cellar with a circle — like the one under the cathedral.”
A circle of power, like the one he had originally traced. Had he always intended to come back, then? Had he… engineered his own death and resurrection? “I see,” Selene said. She didn’t look at the curtain that separated her living quarters from her office; afraid that she’d see Morningstar in repose once more, with that serene, otherworldly expression: innocence personified, jarring from someone who had never been innocent, or even young.
“No, you don’t.” Emmanuelle’s face was hard. “It was full of roots, Selene. I think… I think the circle was a crack between life and death; and a crack in the wards, too — an opening big enough for the curse to exploit. The roots must have descended from the first floor and gone into the foundations through the circle.”
“Morningstar would never do that,” Selene said, startled.
“No,” Emmanuelle said. “If I understand correctly, he was dead at that point.” She bit her lip. “He had a plan, I’m sure, Selene. I just don’t think it played out as he wished it.”
No; or he would be back as he had been. But the dead didn’t trace circles, or cast spells. Someone else had done this for him.
Asmodeus. Her hands clenched, in spite of herself. “Has Hawthorn left?”
“They’re gone,” Javier said. “With apologies for taking their leave so… abruptly.”
And no wonder, if what she suspected was true. Except, of course, that she had no way to prove it — and what would she do, even if it were proved? Accuse Asmodeus — who would no doubt laugh at her, and tell her that spells of resurrection were a fantasy? In any case — she had bigger problems on her hands.
“Did you—” Choérine swallowed. “Did you learn any more?”
Selene shook her head. “He says he doesn’t remember anything. As if he were a newborn Fallen.” And she was inclined to believe him. If it was an act, some game put on for their benefit, it was an impossibly good one.
Choérine shook her head, once, twice; her dark eyes burning against the porcelain-white tones of her skin. “What’s going to happen, Selene?”
I don’t know, she wanted to say; she wanted to surrender to the pressure, to bow down and admit that she wasn’t worthy of this mantle, that she never had been. But she stopped herself, with an effort of will. Ignorance or indecisiveness was not what Choérine needed to hear. “We will talk,” she said. “See where the future of the House lies. It’s a good thing he’s back; we could badly use his insights.”
“Yes, of course.” Choérine smiled, some of the fatigue lifting from her eyes. “I’ll go see to the children.”
After she was gone, Emmanuelle pulled away from the wall she’d been leaning on, and came to rest her head against Selene’s shoulder. “A good lie,” she said.
Selene breathed in Emmanuelle’s perfume: musk and amber, heady and strong, a reminder of more careless days. If she closed her eyes, could she believe they would go to bed now; would kiss and make love with the fury and passion of the desperate?
But, of course, there had never been any careless days. There was war, and internecine fights; Emmanuelle’s addiction, and Selene’s hours of crippling self-doubt. “What else could I have told her?” Selene asked.
Emmanuelle didn’t move. “It wasn’t a reproach. But if you think you can fool me…”
“I would never dare.” Selene gently disengaged herself from her lover’s embrace, leaving only one hand trailing in Emmanuelle’s hair, running braids between her fingers like pearl necklaces. “But you can’t fool me, either. What didn’t you tell me?”
Emmanuelle grimaced. “I underplayed it, Selene. It wasn’t easy to search the cellars. Everything was… covered in roots. And they weren’t exactly friendly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Try fighting your way through a thornbush. One that hits back. And it’s big now. Entire corridors are starting to look like the underside of a particularly nasty kind of tree, yes.” Emmanuelle picked at her torn sleeves, her face grim and distant. “At this rhythm—”
“I know,” Selene said. “The entire wing will become unusable.” She didn’t need Emmanuelle to tell her that: the magic of the House was flickering, being squeezed and choked into nothingness in so many places. In too many places.
All that you hold dear — vanished.
“That’s assuming it stops at the wing,” Emmanuelle said.
Which was, on the face of it, rather unlikely. “It said, in the crypt, that it would destroy us all.” Selene stared at her hands. What could she do? She should wake Morningstar, ask him what they should do. Surely, even amnesiac, he would know….
Pathetic. He had said it himself. She was head of the House now, and it was her responsibility. “Get me Isabelle,” she said to Emmanuelle. “We need to destroy this before it destroys us.”
* * *
LATER, much later — or perhaps it wasn’t, but time seemed to have blurred between a series of unbearably sharp tableaux, like teeth, biting over and over into her flesh — walking over the Pont Saint-Michel, watching the omnibus she’d hoped to catch move away from her, the sound of the hooves like thunder in her ears — a brief conversation before a line of black cars, Asmodeus gesturing to her, Elphon prodding and pushing her into the same one as his master — the car pulling away, and the spire of the ruined cathedral dwindling farther and farther away in the distance.
“You’re much better off with us,” Asmodeus said. He was polishing his glasses with a yellow cloth; his eyes on the window, on the House that was his rival and enemy. “See? Over Notre-Dame?”
There were… clouds, but clouds didn’t gather so dense and dark, didn’t form that almost perfect circle that ringed the two ruined towers like a crown. And clouds didn’t reach down: those were extending tendrils, wrapping themselves around the ruined stone, until the entire cathedral seemed tethered to the Heavens.
“It’s survived such a long time, hasn’t it? Fire and floods and war. But this, I think, will finally break it.” He sounded thoughtful, not gloating or satisfied, as she would have imagined. His eyes rested on her; in earnest for once, with none of the mockery she was used to. “So silent? Have you nothing to say?”
Madeleine, too weary for words, rested her head against the polished, darkened glass of the car window, and watched her safe haven of the past twenty years vanish into the distance, leaving her alone with the master of Hawthorn.
* * *
ISABELLE, when she came, didn’t seem entirely happy, or entirely at ease with her new charge as alchemist. “Madeleine knew better than I,” she said.
Selene shook her head. The last thing she needed was people questioning her decisions. “Madeleine is no longer with us. There are only a few laws in Silverspires; and she broke one.”
“So you don’t forgive,” Isabelle said, slowly. She was more sharply defined, somehow, the light from her body radiating more strongly than it should have. Was she on essence, too? But there were no signs of any external sources: merely Isabelle as she’d always been, impossibly young and impossibly old at the same time. “That’s good to know.”
“Do you have objections?” Selene said. She hesitated, for a fraction of a second only, and decided to make this her show of strength. “You can leave if you disagree. I’m sure there are other Houses that are far less vigilant about enforcing their laws.”