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.”
And still no mention of whatever was causing the evacuation—no one who’d dared ask, either. Thuan fell in line behind two gaunt men in white bourgeons and blue aprons, Leila and Kim Cuc following a little behind. His neighbor was one of the House’s dependents, a middle-aged woman with a lean, harsh face who didn’t seem inclined to make conversation. She held a magical artefact in her clenched hand, but by the faint translucency of her skin she’d already inhaled its contents. Bad enough for everyone to be prepared for magic, then.
He still felt, under him, the spikes. They were moving, slowly weaving a pattern like snakes as he stepped over them, pushing upwards to trap his ankles. Their hold easily snapped as he stepped away, but it kept getting stronger and stronger. How far away were the gardens, how much time did they have? And what would happen, if he faltered and stopped? Something was trying to invade this part of the House, was trying to find a weakness, but he couldn’t see anything or anyone.
He glanced behind him. A small, skeleton-thin girl in a torn hempen dress had stumbled, and one of the dependents, cursing under her breath, was trying to help the girl up. Magic surged through her chest and arms, a light that threw the girl’s cheekbones into sharp relief. “Get up,” the dependent said, and the girl stumbled on.
So he wasn’t the only one, then. And it wasn’t only people with magic, Fallen or dragon who were feeling this.
Something moved, at the back. For a moment Thuan thought it was a child who’d gotten left behind, but it was too small and agile, and its joints didn’t seem to flex in the right way. Its eyes glittered in the growing shadows. And then, as swiftly as it had appeared, it vanished.
A child. The shape of a child. And—Thuan’s memory was unfortunately excellent on details like this—not something made of flesh and muscles and bones, but a construct of parquet wood, prickling with the thorns of brambles.
Of hawthorns, he thought, suddenly chilled.
When he turned to look again, the shadows had lengthened, and there were more of them, trailing the group, here one moment and gone the next, flickering in and out of existence like lights wavering in the wind. He scanned the crowd. Most Houseless appeared oblivious; but, here and there, people stared with growing fear. The House dependents didn’t appear to see the children of thorns at all.
That wasn’t good.
But, as they moved forward—always driven, always following the elusive light of Sare’s magic, following a corridor that twisted and turned and seemed to have no end—Thuan couldn’t help looking back again. Every time he looked, the children of thorns were more solid, more sharply defined. And not flickering in and out of existence, but more and more there.
The shadows at their back lengthened, until the light of the dependents’ magic seemed the only safety in the entire world. And the spikes—the branches, weren’t they?—grabbed his ankles and slowed him down, and more and more people stumbled, and they weren’t making good enough time, they were going to slow down and fall…
Someone grabbed Thuan’s hand. And it was definitely not human, or Fallen, or dragon—a dry, prickling touch like kindling wood. Thuan fought the urge to grab his hand away. “What are you?” he asked, and—where its breath should have been coming from—there was only the loud creak of floorboards.
It whispered something that might have been a name, that might have been a curse, but didn’t let go. “Stay,” it whispered. “Or the House will fail you as it failed its children.”