The House of Shattered Wings

Casually, in one practiced movement, Madeleine removed one of the bones from the tray and slipped it in the small box. There was enough there to last her a few months, if she was careful, if the need didn’t come on her too often . . .

She said aloud, keeping her voice even, “I’ll go and burn the bones in the incinerators.”

Oris nodded. He trusted her. He shouldn’t have, but he always did.

All the way to the incinerator and back, Madeleine kept expecting something to happen: some orderly jumping from one of the other deserted rooms, some nurse taking a break in the ruined cloisters, inquiring what she was doing. But nothing happened. There was only the silence of the night; and her own conscience.

Ah well. She’d never had much of one in the first place. Silverspires wasn’t her refuge; it was the place where she would die, and she’d known as much since the night Morningstar carried her into the House.

If she was caught, though . . . Selene wasn’t merciful. It’d be back on the streets of a city that had grown alien to her, with no easy means of sustenance—another kind of death by inches, far more unpleasant and painful than the one she’d chosen for herself.

But she wouldn’t be caught. Not if she was careful, and she always was. Selene need never know what she did; Aragon would likely figure it out at some point, but she would deal with that then.

Good.

In the admissions room, Oris was fussing around the young man. He raised his gaze when she arrived. “Madeleine? May I use your mirrors?”

Madeleine nodded. She wished she could muster some anger at his lack of initiative, but she had none, too relieved he hadn’t questioned her further. She turned back to her patient, and to the last thing that needed to be done.

She reached for the scalpels; and, carefully picking one out from the row of blades, made a small nick in the palm of the Fallen’s left hand, where the heart line would have been. Blood leaked out, red and lazy, sinking into the beaten earth of Silverspires. She braced herself for saying the binding words; but before her mouth could curve around them, the young man sat bolt upright in bed, clutching at his own left hand. “No,” he said. “Don’t—I may not be bound to the earth of this land, of any land—”

Oris, in shock, had taken a step backward, leaving Madeleine to say aloud, “What do you mean?”

The young man’s narrow eyes turned toward her, though it was clear he wasn’t seeing anything in this world. “I know what you want to do, alchemist,” he said, and there was a touch of malice in his voice. “Bound to the earth, bound to the House. Do you truly think you can have this one?”

“This one?” Madeleine said. “The young man, or the girl?” Either term, of course, was relative, since Fallen didn’t really have gender; or much that was human about them.

But the young man had fallen back on the bed, unconscious. “Don’t move,” Madeleine said to Oris. Someone had to keep a level head, and it would definitely not be her assistant.

She spoke the words of binding over the girl first, finishing what she had started. Blood and magic and earth, the oldest things, as the young man had said: a spell-oath to bind her to the House, to its welfare, though how had he known, and who was speaking through him? “By this, I bid you welcome into Silverspires; I give the House leave—”

She never got to the end. As she spoke each word, the resistance in the air grew, an expanding weight that pressed against her throat; and when she reached “leave” it was all she could do to force syllables between clenched teeth. There was . . . something vast, something infinitely larger than either of them—larger than the House, larger than the City—and it was somehow tied to those two, to either or both of them. She broke off then. “Oris, can you do the binding for me?”

She’d hoped that, since Oris was Fallen, he would have more power to draw on; but as he stumbled his way through the binding, he, too, met the same obstacle. She rose, and touched the young man’s hands; they were wet and clammy to the touch, and his complexion was paler than it should have been, for all that he was Annamite. “You’re doing this,” she said aloud. “Aren’t you?”

“Doing what?”

Madeleine whirled around, her heart hammering against her chest. Selene stood behind her.