As they turned into the servants’ part of the wing—narrower rooms with shabbier sloped ceilings, all with that air of decayed grandeur—Thuan spoke up. “What’s this wing?” he asked.
Sare’s eyes narrowed. “You mean why here?”
“Yes.”
Her gaze held him, for a while. Beneath him, he could feel the spikes, quiescent. Waiting. Like the children, in the shadows, the ones he couldn’t see.
“I don’t know,” Sare said. “It’s the water wing—the one with the spring and the pump room—but it’s not the only one.”
The spring. He could feel it, distantly—khi water, far, far underground, all reserved for the House’s use, a trove of power that would never be his. But Sare was right: there were other springs, too, that he could feel on the edges of his thoughts, other currents of khi water being funneled into the House.
“Then that can’t be it.”
Sare’s gaze was hard. “You want everything to make sense, don’t you.”
Thuan fingered dust on a marble table, followed it down the curve of verdigried legs. “I want to understand.”
“Then this is what I want to understand,” Sare said, closing the door behind her. “How come only your friend vanished, Thuan? What made her so special?”
She was clever. But then, he’d expected nothing less of her. She hadn’t gotten where she was—head of the alchemy laboratory, in charge of Hawthorn’s vast troves of stored magic—by being a fool.
“I don’t know,” he said, thoughtfully. It couldn’t be that she was a dragon, or Thuan would have vanished, too. He wasn’t stronger than she was. “They tried to hold us all.”
“Yes,” Sare said. “But they gave up when we proved no easy prey. Except they did snatch your friend, who presumably fought back, same as everyone. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the only Annamites.”
“Yes,” Thuan said, startled. This wasn’t where he’d wanted the conversation to go. The immediate threat of the thorn children had receded, but Sare’s grilling almost made him regret the creepy escort. “But not the only colonials. And I didn’t vanish.”
“No,” Sare said. “But perhaps you’re stronger than her.”
Thuan snorted. “No. If anything, I’m weaker than she is.” He hesitated, then said, “She’s been the one always looking out for me.”
“Like a mother?” Sare’s gaze was sharp.
Children of thorns. No. Thuan shook his head. “She wasn’t the only motherly figure in that crowd, was she? That’s a rather facile explanation.”
“That children want mothers? It seems to me rather natural,” Sare said, with the ease of someone who’d never actually have any children. All Fallen were sterile.
Mothers, perhaps not. He thought, again, of the bracelets on Kim Cuc’s arms, of the wealth of Fallen magic stored there, something most Houseless would never see. In Paris, the Houses had hoarded nearly all the magic, and the rare artefacts went on the black market for a fortune. But no, that couldn’t be it. Otherwise Sare and the other dependents would have been the first to vanish. “Why children? They can’t possibly be the only dependents the House has failed.”
He thought Sare was going to berate him, but instead she walked a little further down the corridor, and stared at the darkness in front of her. “You’re here, aren’t you?” she called, magic streaming out of her like light. “I can feel you.”
Again, that odd feeling in his feet, as if the floor itself were twisting and disgorging something; and two children, stepping out of the darkness to gaze levelly back at her. Their arms were branches woven together, their hands three-fingered, and their bodies merely frames on which hung flowers the color of rot. And, in the gauntness of their faces, they had no eyes, just pinpoints of light.
“Stay,” the one on the left said.
“Where is she?” Sare asked. The light that came out of her was subdued, but Thuan could still feel the power; could still feel it pushing against the children, compelling them to answer.
She might as well have been pushing on thin air.
“Where we all go,” the rightmost one said. “Into darkness, into earth.”
Thuan opened his mouth to ask why they’d taken her, and then closed it, because it wasn’t what mattered.
“Show me,” Sare said.
A slow ponderous nod from both of them, perfectly synchronized, and two hands extending towards her.
“Sare, wait—”
But she was already moving—before Thuan could grab her away, or even finish his warning—extending both arms to clasp them.
There was a sound like cloth ripping, and then only shadows, extending to cover the corridor where Sare had been.
Thuan gave up, and used all the colorful curses Second Aunt forbade him to utter in her presence. It seemed more than appropriate.
He didn’t know how long he remained there, staring at the darkness, which stubbornly refused to coalesce again into anything meaningful. But, gradually, some order swam out of the morass of his thoughts, a sense that he had to do something rather than succumb to despair. He was—no matter how utterly laughably inappropriate this might seem—their best chance at a rescue.
Where we all go.
Into darkness, into earth.
Sare was right: there were other wings with a spring, and a water room. But this was also the wing where the House received the Houseless. Which meant the expendable one. And—if he was to hazard a guess—the one least protected by the wards.
And Asmodeus, the head of the House and its major protector, was shut in his rooms, grieving and not paying attention to what was going on within the House. An opening, for something that had lain in wait for years? An attempt to seize a weak and unprotected part of the House, or to weaken Hawthorn?
Demons take them all. He didn’t want to help the House, didn’t want to involve himself in its politics. But, if he didn’t, Kim Cuc wouldn’t come back.
Thuan closed his eyes, and sought out the spring again. It was muzzled, bound by layer after layer of Fallen magic—wards that would singe him, if he so much as thought of touching them. It flowed, steadily, into the House, giving it everything it had, the diseased, polluted waters of the Parisian underground, sewage no one would have thought of drinking before the war and its devastation.
The House will fail you as it failed its children.
The only thing Thuan wanted the House to do for him was to forget he existed, and not look too closely. He hardly expected any protection, or wanted to pledge it any allegiance. Not that Second Aunt would let him, mind you. She’d carve out chunks of his hide before she allowed this to happen.
A comforting thought: there were things scarier than unknown children of thorns with shadowy agendas.
Thuan walked downwards, towards the spring.
There were two children waiting for him outside the corrugated doors of the water room. They didn’t appear, or fade: they were just there, like guards standing at attention. By their size, the human children they were mimicking couldn’t have been more than five or six.
“What are you?” he asked, again.
He hadn’t expected an answer, but they both bowed to him, perfectly synchronized. “The Court,” they said.
“The Court.” Thuan’s voice was flat.
“The Court of Birth.”
Thuan was abysmal at a number of things, but his memory for details was excellent, and he’d been briefed on the history of the House before being sent there. Before he became head of the House, Asmodeus had been leader of the Court of Birth.
Children. The Court of Birth was in charge of the education of children and young Fallen. In charge of their protection. “There is a Court of Birth,” he said, slowly. “In the House.” Not here, in this deserted wing filled with thorns and shadows.