He’d had lessons of diplomacy in the dragon kingdom. He should have paid more attention to them, instead of trying to come up with plans to impress his cousins. He… he’d always thought Kim Cuc would be there, and of course she was the one in need of rescue, and he couldn’t come up with a single idea that would make sense. He couldn’t fight off a House, or even a part of a House, all by himself—and especially not with both hands tied down, and no access to his magic lest he reveal himself.
No.
He was looking at it from the wrong way around. Because fighting or threatening wasn’t what he needed to do, if he wanted to use his magic. He needed… a distraction.
Which meant Sare.
He didn’t trust Sare. He couldn’t even be sure she was going to follow his lead: for all he knew, she’d be happy to leave Kim Cuc there forever, if it was for the good of the House.
But.
But she’d come back for both of them, and it was the only chance he’d get. “You don’t want Kim Cuc,” Thuan said, slowly. There wasn’t much khi water in the room, but he could gather it to him, slowly and methodically. He could fashion it into razor-thin blades, held within his palms. “You want Asmodeus.”
A silence. “You’re Houseless. You can’t possibly promise me anything that involves him.”
No, and neither would Thuan ever consider getting involved with the head of House Hawthorn. The last thing he needed was attention from that quarter. But it didn’t matter, because all he needed to do was lie smoothly enough.
“I’m not House. But she is.” He pointed to Sare but finished his gesture with a wide flourish, which enabled him to throw the blades of khi water in his hands towards Kim Cuc’s wrists. They connected with an audible crunch.
Water was stillness and decay and death. Thuan breathed in, slowly, moving his fingers as though he were playing the zither, weaving the pattern Kim Cuc had shown him earlier. The blades slowly moved in response, digging into the green stone, their edges turning it to dust, a thin, spreading line across its surface—so agonizingly slowly it was all he could do to breathe. “Ask her,” he said.
A silence, broken only by the slurping sound of the pumps. Then the being moving as gracefully as water flowing down, and the two children facing Sare vanished. She turned to Thuan, snarling, her face no longer in the semblance of anything human; and then saw the being of thorns, and sucked in a deep, audible breath.
Her mouth opened, closed. “It’s a bit of the House,” Thuan said, quickly. “Not…”
Sare’s face was unreadable again. “Is it?” She bowed, very low. “Tell me,” she said to Thuan.
Thuan gathered thoughts from where they’d fled, and put as many of them as he dared into words. “It wants Lord Asmodeus.”
Sare’s gaze moved to the basin, and then back to Thuan. “And, failing that, it will take the Houseless?” She showed no emotion. But then why would she have cared about Kim Cuc? Thuan waited for her to speak, to tell the being it was welcome to Kim Cuc and whatever else it saw fit to take. But Sare didn’t say anything.
“We need to be strong,” the being said. Thuan watched Kim Cuc’s bracelets; watched the thin line that was spreading across the stone, a widening crack. He would only get one chance to seize her and run, and he couldn’t even be sure that Sare would follow them. “Not distracted.”
“Distracted.” Sare’s face was hard again. “Grief is allowed.”
The being said nothing. Of course it wouldn’t understand.
Thuan shifted, moving closer to Kim Cuc, both arms outstretched to grab her.
“Lord Asmodeus isn’t available,” Sare said. “And we work on the principle that people are safe inside the House, regardless of whether they’re dependents or not.”
A hiss, from the being.
“Sare,” Thuan said.
She looked at him, startled, as if she’d forgotten he was there, or that he would speak.
“Be ready.”
The bracelets split with an audible crunch. Thuan reached out, lightning fast; grabbed Kim Cuc and pulled—she came light and unbearably fragile, a doll he could have snapped with a careless gesture—threw her over his shoulder, and ran.
He didn’t look back.
The spikes under his feet tensed, but didn’t surge—behind him, a blinding light, that filled the pump room until he could hardly see. He ran for the open doors, and the maze of corridors leading back to safety.
He’d expected to have to fight the children at the entrance, but they’d vanished in the wash of light. He could still see their silhouettes in the midst of the radiance, shock-still. Stunned, but recovering. He didn’t have much time.
Which way had he come? The corridors all looked alike, all with that same faded flower wallpaper, and the stains of blackened mold spreading from the carvings on the ceiling. The light behind him was dying down, the spikes at his feet quiescent. Waiting.
“You’re fast,” Sare commented, as she caught up to him.
“You—” Thuan was breathing hard. He’d slowed down to see where he was going. He expected, at any time, to see the spikes reforming, children of thorns waiting for them in the darkness.
“I hit him hard.” Sare sounded cheerful. “It was easier, knowing what I was dealing with.”
“You—” Thuan found a breath, finally. “You didn’t have to do this.” It was the House. It was the wards that kept all their dependents safe. She only had to look the other way.
Sare raised an eyebrow. “As I said, I’m responsible for the safety of the Houseless during those tests. And there are some choices that I won’t make. We’re not monsters, Thuan.”
Thuan clamped his mouth on the obvious response. “The Court of Birth,” he said, instead.
“This way,” Sare said, pointing to a corridor that seemed like the others, cracked parquet and faded wallpaper with an alignment of the same doors, all painted with stylized flowers. And, in the growing silence, “Children died, because Lord Uphir wouldn’t protect them. Before Lord Asmodeus took the House from him. It remembers.”
And Asmodeus protected children? Thuan didn’t voice this question, either, but Sare answered it regardless.
“The House keeps faith with its own. Lord Asmodeus understands this,” Sare said.
“Fine,” Thuan said. He wasn’t about to argue with her. “Any plans?”
“Yes.” For someone who’d been through Hell and back, Sare was still inordinately cheerful. “My turn. Be ready to run. It’s straight ahead, and left at the first intersection, the one with the two chairs and the pedestal table with the Chinese vase.”
“I don’t understand—” Thuan started, but she was looking past him, at what was coming up.
He turned, slightly—Kim Cuc a growing dead weight on his shoulder—and saw the maw of darkness, rising from the bottom of the wing—flowing like ink, like polluted oil, glittering with the shadows of thorns.
They couldn’t possibly outrun this.
By his side, Sare was leaning against a wall—the light coming out of her pale and weakened, the artefact around her neck open, with no hint of magic left within. The shadows flowed around her, not touching her—House, she was still House, and it didn’t care for her, didn’t want to hurt her, just in case she turned out to be useful one day. Under Thuan, the floor seemed to have become broken glass. And, as the shadows came forward and extinguished the light, they pooled—becoming the shape of children, the shape of a Fallen.
They didn’t speak, anymore: just a thin thread of sound that might have been the creaks of floorboards, the trickle of water. Stay. Stay.
Thuan backed away, until he stood in the center of the corridor, with threads of magic stretching, trying to bind him to the floor, to make him part of the House as they’d tried to do with Kim Cuc. He could barely hold on to his human shape. Any moment now, he was going to lose it, and Sare was going to see antlers sprouting from his temples, scales scattered across his cheeks.