Every Exquisite Thing

by Cassandra Clare

  Anna stood up. “I think you are lying to yourself.”

  Ariadne raised her lovely face. Tears poured down her cheeks; she wiped them away with shaking hands. “Oh, Anna, won’t you kiss me?” she said. “Oh, please, Anna. Do not leave me. Please kiss me.”

  She looked at Anna pleadingly. Anna’s breaths were short, and her heart beat a wailing tattoo in her chest. The perfect world she had dreamed of was shattered into a million pieces, turned to dust, and blown away. What replaced it was something cruel and strange. There was not enough air to breathe. Hot tears stung her eyes.

  “Good-bye, Ariadne,” she managed, and staggered from the room.

  Anna sat on the edge of her bed and cried for a very long time. She cried until no tears came and her body heaved reflexively.

  There was a soft knock on her door, and her brother peeked his head in.

  “Anna?” he said, blinking his lavender eyes. “Are you all right? I thought I heard something.”

  Oh, Christopher. Sweet Christopher. Anna roughly wiped her face.

  “I’m fine, Christopher,” she said, clearing her throat.

  “Are you sure?” Christopher asked. “Is there nothing I can do to help you? I could perform a saving act of science.”

  “Christopher, get along with you.” It was Anna’s mother, appearing silently as a cat in the corridor behind her son. “Go and do something else. Something without explosives,” she added, shooing her second-born off down the hall.

  Anna hastily scrubbed the last traces of tears from her eyes as her mother came into her room, carrying a long, beribboned box. She sat down on the bed and looked at her daughter placidly.

  As always, Cecily was perfectly dressed and perfectly calm-looking, her dark hair in a smooth chignon at the back of her neck, her dress a becoming blue. Anna couldn’t help but think how ghastly she must look in her nightshirt with her face blotchy and red.

  “Do you know why I named you Anna?” Cecily said.

  Anna shook her head, puzzled.

  “I was awfully ill during my pregnancy,” said Cecily. Anna blinked—she hadn’t known that. “I was worried all the time that you wouldn’t live to be born, or you would be sickly and ill. And then you were born, and you were the most beautiful, healthy, perfect child.” She smiled. “Anna means favor, as in God has favored me. I thought the Angel had favored me with you, and I would make sure you were always happy, always content.” She reached out to gently touch Anna’s cheek. “She broke your heart, didn’t she? Ariadne?”

  Anna was speechless. So her mother did know. She had always thought her mother knew that she loved women, and that her father did as well . . . but they had never spoken of it until now.

  “I am so sorry.” Cecily kissed Anna’s forehead. “My darling lovely one. I know it does not help to be told it, but someone else will come, and she will treat your heart as the precious gift it is.”

  “Mama,” she said. “You do not mind—that I might not get married, or have children?”

  “There are many Shadowhunter children orphaned, as Ariadne was, seeking loving homes, and I see no reason why you might not provide one someday. As for marriage . . .” Cecily shrugged. “They said your Uncle Will could not be with your Aunt Tessa, that your Aunt Sophie and Uncle Gideon could not be together. And yet, I think you will find that they were wrong, and they would have been wrong even if marriage had been forbidden them. Even where laws are unjust, hearts can find a way to be together. If you love someone, I have no doubt you will find a way to spend your life with them, Anna. You are the most determined child I know.”

  “I am not a child,” Anna said, but she smiled, in some amazement. Ariadne might have disappointed her, but her mother was astonishing her in quite the opposite way.

  “Still,” her mother said. “You cannot keep wearing your brother’s clothes.”

  Anna’s heart fell. Here it was. Her mother’s understanding could only go so far.

  “I thought you didn’t know,” she said in a small voice.

  “Of course I knew. I am your mother,” Cecily said as if she were announcing that she were the Queen of England. She tapped the long, ribboned box. “Here is a new outfit for you. Hopefully you will find it suitable for accompanying your family in the park today.”

  Before Anna could protest, a loud and demanding cry sounded through the house. Exclaiming “Alexander!” Cecily swept out the door, instructing Anna to meet her downstairs in the sitting room when she was dressed.

  Glumly, Anna untied the ribbons holding the box closed. She had received many clothes from her mother in the past. Another pastel silk? Another cunningly constructed dress, meant to make the most of her slight curves?

  The ribbons and paper fell away, and Anna gasped.

  Inside the box was the most gorgeous suit she had ever seen. Charcoal tweed with a thin blue stripe, the jacket was crisply tailored. A gorgeous silk waistcoat in radiant shades of blue complemented a crisp white shirt. Shoes, braces—nothing had been forgotten.

  In a daze, Anna dressed herself and gazed into the mirror. The clothes fit perfectly—her mother must have given her measurements to the tailor. And yet there was still one thing not right.

  She tightened her jaw, then crossed the room to get the pair of scissors. Standing before the mirror, she grabbed a thick fistful of hair.

  She hesitated for only a moment, Ariadne’s soft voice in her ears.

  I thought you understood—that this would be a bit of happiness we could snatch for ourselves before the world forced us apart.

  The hair made a satisfying crisp sound as she cut through it. It rained down on the carpet. She took another fistful, then another, until her hair was to her chin. The cut brought her features into sharp relief. She trimmed more in the front, clipped away at the back, until there was just enough to sweep back into a gentlemanly wave.

  And now it was perfect. Her reflection gazed back at her, lips curved in an incredulous smile. The waistcoat brought out her eyes; the trousers, the slimness of her legs. She felt she could breathe, even with the ache of Ariadne’s loss in her chest: she might have lost the girl, but she had gained herself. A new Anna, confident, dapper, powerful.

  Hearts were broken across London every day. Perhaps Anna might break a heart or two herself. There would be others—lovely girls would come and go, and she would remain in control of her heart. She would never be torn like this again.

  She was a Shadowhunter. She would take the blow. She would harden herself and laugh in the face of pain.

  Anna descended the stairs soon after. It was late afternoon now, though the sun was still shining bright through the windows. This day would last forever.

  Her mother was in the sitting room with a tea tray, baby Alex in a basket by her side. Her father sat opposite, engaged in reading the newspaper.

  Anna stepped into the room.

  Both her parents looked up. She saw them take in her new clothes, as well as her short hair. She stood in the doorway, bracing herself for whatever response was coming.

  A long moment passed.

  “I told you the blue waistcoat was the one,” Gabriel said to Cecily. “It brings out her eyes.”

  “I did not disagree,” said Cecily, rocking the baby. “I just said she would also look very well in red.”

  Anna began to smile.

  “Much better than your brother’s clothes,” Gabriel said. “He does dreadful things to them with sulfur and acids.”

  Cecily examined Anna’s shorn locks.

  “Very sensible,” she said. “Hair can be cumbersome in battle. I like it very much.” She rose to her feet. “Come sit,” she added. “Stay with your brother and father a moment. There is something I meant to fetch for you.”

  As her mother left the room, Anna felt her limbs go tingly as she sat down on the settee. She reached down to Alex. He had j
ust woken up and was looking all around the room, taking in all the wonders anew in the way that babies do whenever they awake and find that the world is still there, to be understood in all of its myriad complexities.

  “I understand how you feel,” she said to her brother.

  He smiled a toothless smile at her and reached up a chubby hand. She extended her own, and he grabbed her finger.

  Her mother returned only a few minutes later with a small blue box.

  “You know,” Cecily said, sitting down and refilling her teacup, “my parents did not want me to be a Shadowhunter. They had fled the Clave. And your Uncle Will . . .”

  “I know,” Anna said. Gabriel gazed fondly at his wife.

  “But I was a Shadowhunter. I knew it then, when I was fifteen. I knew it was in my blood. Foolish people say so many things. But we know who we are, inside.”

  She set the blue box on the table and pushed it toward Anna.

  “If you will accept it,” her mother said.

  Inside the box was a necklace with a glimmering red gem. Latin words were etched onto the back.

  “For your protection,” she said. “You know what it does.”

  “It senses demons,” Anna said, astonished. Her mother wore it nearly every time she went out to fight, though that was rarer now that Alexander had come along.

  “It cannot protect your heart, but it can protect the rest of you,” Cecily said. “It is an heirloom. It should be yours.”

  Anna fought back the tears that sought to fill her eyes.

  She took up the necklace and clasped it about her throat. She stood up and gazed at herself in the mirror over the fireplace. A handsome reflection gazed back at her. The necklace felt right, just as her short hair did. I do not have to be only one thing, Anna thought. I can choose what suits me when it suits me. The trousers and jacket do not make me a man, and the necklace does not make me a woman. They are only what makes me feel beautiful and powerful in this moment. I am exactly as I choose to be. I am a Shadowhunter who wears gorgeous suits and a legendary pendant.

  She looked at her mother’s reflection in the glass. “You were right,” she said. “The red does suit me.”

  Gabriel chuckled softly, but Cecily only smiled.

  “I have always known you, my love,” Cecily said. “You are the gem of my heart. My firstborn. My Anna.”

  Anna thought of all the pain of the day again—the wound that had ripped her chest open and exposed her heart. But now it was as if her mother had drawn a rune over it and closed it. The scar was there, but she was whole.

  It was like being Marked all over again, defining who she was. This was Anna Lightwood.

  Acknowledgments: Thanks to Melissa Scott for reading and advising!

  Read on for a snippet from the fourth Ghosts of the Shadow Market story, “Learn About Loss,” by Cassandra Clare and Kelly Link:

  Learn About Loss excerpt

  On the morning of October 23, 1936, the inhabitants of Chattanooga, Tennessee, woke up to discover posters tacked up on the sides of buildings on every street. FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY, the posters declared, MAGIC & MUSIC & MOST MYSTERIOUS MERCHANTS’ BAZAAR. PAY ONLY WHAT YOU CAN AFFORD & ENTER FAIRYLAND. SEE WHAT YOU MOST DESIRE. ALL WELCOME.

  Some men and women passed these posters, shaking their heads. It was the height of the Great Depression, and even if the President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was promising more work on projects like the tunnel and trails and campgrounds underway in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, jobs were scarce and times were hard and most people didn’t have money to spare on fripperies or fun. And who wanted to travel all the way up Lookout Mountain only to be turned away because what you could afford was nothing? Besides, no one ever gave you something for nothing.

  But plenty of other Chattanoogans saw the posters and thought that maybe better times really were just around the corner. There was a New Deal, and maybe there would be new fun too. And there was not a single child who caught sight of the posters and didn’t yearn with their entire heart for what the posters promised. The sixth of October was a Friday. On Saturday, at least half the city of Chattanooga lit out for the carnival. Some of them packed bedrolls or tarps to sleep under. If there was music and festivity, maybe they would stay longer than a day. The churches of Chattanooga were poorly attended on Sunday morning. But the carnival in the Fairyland neighborhood of Lookout Mountain was busier than a beehive.

  Up on top of Lookout Mountain, a local boy named Garnet Carter had quite recently established the community of Fairyland, which included Tom Thumb Golf, the first miniature golf course in the United States. There was the eerie natural landscape of Rock City, where his wife, Freida Carter, had laid out paths between towering, mossy rock formations, planting wildflowers and importing German statuary so that the trails were watched over by gnomes and characters from fairytale stories like Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs.

  Rich people came on holidays and rode the funicular, which also happened to be the world’s steepest passenger railway, the mile up from Chattanooga to the Lookout Mountain Hotel. The hotel was also known as the Castle Above the Clouds, and if all the rooms were taken, well, there was also the Fairyland Inn. For the wealthy, there was golf and ballroom dancing and hunting. For the civic minded, there was the site of the Battle Among the Clouds, where the Union Army had, in living memory, driven off at great cost the Confederates. You could still find minié bullets and other traces of the dead all down the slopes of the mountain, along with flint arrowheads used by Cherokee. But the Cherokee had all been driven off, and the Civil War was over too. There had been a greater war in recent memory, and many a family in Chattanooga had lost sons or fathers to it. Human beings did terrible things to each other, and the traces of those terrible things were everywhere if you looked.

  If your taste ran more to corn whiskey than history, well, there were plenty of moonshine stills up on Lookout Mountain too. And who knew what other illegal or immoral delights might be found at a Mysterious Merchants’ Bazaar?

  There were men and women of money and taste at the carnival on that first Saturday, rubbing alongside the thin-faced children and wives of farmers. The rides were free to all. There were games with prizes, and a petting zoo with a three-headed dog and a winged snake so large that it was able to swallow a full-grown steer each day at noon. There were strolling fiddle players who drew such melancholy and lovely songs out on their instruments that tears came to the eyes of all who heard them. There was a woman who said that she could speak with the dead, and asked no coin. There was a magician, too, Roland the Astonishing, who grew a dogwood tree from a seed on his stage and then caused it to flower, drop its leaves, and grow bare again as if all the seasons were passing in the blink of an eye. He was a handsome man in his sixties, with bright blue eyes, a luxuriant white moustache, and snowy white hair with a black streak running through it as if some devil had touched it with a sooty hand.

  There were delicious things to eat at such a negligible cost, or freely given as samples, that every child ate himself or herself sick. As promised, the Bazaar was full of remarkable objects on display, tended by even more remarkable people. Some of the customers, too, drew curious glances. Were there people in faraway lands who had curly tails or flames in their pupils? One of the most popular stalls had on offer a local product: a clear, potent liquor rumored to give dreams of a moonlit forest full of running wolves to those who drank it. The men at that booth were taciturn and did not smile often. But when they did, their teeth were unsettlingly white. They lived up in the mountains and mostly kept to themselves, but here at the Bazaar they seemed quite at home.

  One tent was staffed by nurses so very lovely it wasn’t a chore at all to let them draw your blood. They took a cup or two, “for research purposes,” they said. And to those who donated, they gave away tokens that could be used elsewhere in the bazaar, just like money.
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  Just beyond the tents of the Bazaar was a sign that led to the Maze of Mirrors. It said SEE FOR YOURSELF. THE TRUE WORLD AND THE FALSE LIE NEXT DOOR TO ONE ANOTHER. Those who went through the Maze of Mirrors came out looking a little dazed. Some of them had found their way to the very center, in which they had been made an offer by an entity that each described differently. To some, the person in the room had appeared as a small child, or an old woman in an elegant gown, or even in the shape of a loved one long dead. The person in the room had a mask, and if you confessed a thing that you desired, the mask was put upon you and, well, you should really go and see for yourself. If, that is, you could find your way through the maze and to the place where that person and the mask were waiting.

  By the end of the first weekend, most of Chattanooga had come up to see for themselves the strange charms of the carnival. And many came back to the carnival on the second weekend, although by then rumors were beginning to spread of troubling behavior exhibited by some who had returned. A woman claimed that the man she was married to was an impostor who had killed her real husband: this claim would have been easier to dismiss if a body had not been discovered in the river, in all ways a double of the man she was married to. A young man stood up in church and said that he saw and knew the secrets of all the congregation by looking at them. When he began to say these secrets out loud, the pastor tried to shout him down until the man began to declaim the things he knew about the pastor. At this, the pastor fell silent, then left his church and went home and slit his throat.

  Another man won again and again at a weekly game of poker, until, drunk, he confessed, sounding astonished, that he could see the cards every man there held as if they were his very own hand. He proved this by calling out each card in order, and after that was beaten soundly and left unconscious and bloody in the street by men who had been his friends since childhood.