Queen of Air and Darkness

by Cassandra Clare

  “And you were incoherent,” said Jace. “Julian was out cold at first, but you kept shouting about demons and black skies and a dead sun. Like you’d been to Edom.” Jace’s eyes were narrowed. He wasn’t far off, Emma thought; Jace could be silly when he felt like it, but he was smart.

  Aline stomped back into the room. She had quite a stomp for a woman who was built along delicate lines. “Also, what is this?” she demanded, holding up the Mortal Sword.

  Tavvy made a delighted noise. “I know that one! It’s the Mortal Sword!”

  “No, the Mortal Sword is broken,” Dru said. “That’s got to be something else.” She frowned. “What is it, Jules?”

  “It’s the Mortal Sword,” Julian said. “But we have to keep its existence here an absolute secret.”

  Another hubbub broke out. Someone pounded on the door; it turned out Kit and Ty were in the corridor. They’d been downstairs with Kieran, Alec, and Magnus and had just found out Emma was awake. Cristina scolded everyone in Spanish for making noise, and Jace wanted to hold the Mortal Sword, and Julian indicated to Mark that he could stand on his own, and Aline stuck her head into the hallway to say something to Ty and Kit, and Emma looked at Julian, who was looking directly back at her.

  “All right, stop,” Emma said, throwing her hands up. “Give me and Julian a second alone to talk. Then we’ll tell you everything.” She frowned. “But not in my bedroom. It’s crowded and giving me privacy issues.”

  “The library,” Clary said. “I’ll help set it up, and get you some food. You must be starving, even though we gave you a few of these.” She tapped the Nourishment rune on Emma’s arm. “Okay, come on, clear the room. . . .”

  “Give Ty a hug for me,” Emma said to Tavvy as he hopped down. He looked dubious about the transference of hugs, but filed out with everyone else.

  And then the room was quiet and empty except for Emma and Julian. She slid out of bed, and this time she managed to stand without dizziness. She felt the slight twinge of her rune and thought: It’s because Julian’s here, I’m drawing strength from him.

  “Do you feel it?” she said, touching her left bicep. “The parabatai rune?”

  “I don’t feel much,” he said, and Emma’s heart sank. She’d known it, really, from the moment he’d walked in, but she hadn’t realized how much hope she still had hanging on the idea that somehow, the spell might have been broken.

  “Turn around,” she said dully. “I have to get dressed.”

  Julian raised his eyebrows. “I have seen it all before, you know.”

  “Which does not entitle you to further viewing privileges,” said Emma. “Turn. Around.”

  Julian turned around. Emma fished into her closet for the least Thule-esque clothes she had and eventually fished out a flowered dress and vintage sandals. She changed, watching Julian as he watched the wall.

  “So just to be clear, the spell is back,” she said once the dress was on. Quietly, she picked up the vest she’d worn in Thule, took Livvy’s letter, and transferred it to the pocket of her dress.

  “Yes,” he said, and she felt the word like a needle in her heart. “I had some dreams, dreams with emotions in them, but by the time I woke up . . . they faded. I know that I felt, even how I felt, but I can’t feel it. It’s like knowing I had a wound, but I can’t remember what the pain was like.”

  Emma kicked her feet into her sandals and twisted her hair up into a knot. She suspected she probably looked pallid and horrible, but did it matter? Julian was the only person she wanted to impress, and he didn’t care.

  “Turn around,” she said, and he turned. He looked grimmer than she would have thought, as if the spell being unbroken was bitter to him, too. “So what are you going to do?”

  “Come here,” he said, and she came close to him with a little reluctance as he began to unwind the bandages on his arm. It was hard not to remember the way he’d spoken to her in Thule, the way he’d placed each bit of himself, his hope and yearning and desire and fear, in her hands.

  I’m not myself without you, Emma. Once you dissolve dye in water, you can’t take it back out. It’s like that. I can’t take you out of me. It means cutting out my heart, and I don’t like myself without my heart.

  The bandages came free and he extended his forearm to her. She sucked in her breath. “Who did this?” she demanded.

  “I did,” he said. “Before we left Thule.”

  Across the skin of his inner arm, he had cut words: words that had healed now, into red-black scars.

  YOU ARE IN THE CAGE.

  “Do you know what this means?” he said. “Why I did this?”

  Her heart felt like it was breaking into a thousand pieces. “I do,” she said. “Do you?”

  Someone knocked on the door; Julian jumped back and began hurriedly rewrapping his arm.

  “What’s up?” Emma called. “We’re almost ready.”

  “I just wanted to tell you to come down,” Mark said. “We are all eager to hear your story, and I’ve made my famous doughnut sandwiches.”

  “I’m not sure ‘Tavvy likes them’ is exactly what most people mean when they say ‘famous,’ ” Emma said.

  Julian, her Julian, would have laughed. This Julian just said, “We’d better go,” and walked past her to the door.

  * * *

  At first Cristina thought Kieran’s hair had turned white from shock or annoyance. It took a few minutes for her to realize it was powdered sugar.

  They were in the kitchen, helping Mark as he put together plates of apples and cheese and “doughnut sandwiches”—truly horrible concoctions involving doughnuts cut in half and filled with peanut butter, honey, and jelly.

  Kieran liked the honey, though. He licked some off his fingers and started to peel an apple with a small, sharp knife.

  “Guácala.” Cristina laughed. “Gross! Wash your hands after you lick them.”

  “We never washed our hands in the Hunt,” said Kieran, sucking honey from his finger in a way that made Cristina’s stomach feel fluttery.

  “That’s true. We didn’t,” Mark agreed, slicing a doughnut in half and sending up another cloud of powdered sugar.

  “That is because you lived like savages,” said Cristina. “Go wash your hands!” She steered Kieran to the sink, whose taps still confused him, and went over to dust sugar off the back of Mark’s shirt.

  He turned to smile at her, and her stomach flipped again. Feeling very odd, she left Mark and went back to cutting cheese into small cubes as Kieran and Mark squabbled fondly about whether or not it was disgusting to eat sugar directly out of the box.

  There was something about being with both of them that was sweetly, calmly domestic in a way she hadn’t felt since she’d left home. Which was odd, because there was nothing ordinary at all about either Mark or Kieran and nothing normal about how she felt about the two of them.

  She had, in fact, hardly seen either of them since they’d returned from Faerie. She’d spent her time in Emma’s room, worried that Emma would wake up and she wouldn’t be there. She’d slept on a mattress next to the bed, though she hadn’t slept all that much; Emma had tossed restlessly night and day and called out over and over: for Livvy, for Dru and Ty and Mark, for her parents, and most often, for Julian.

  That was another reason Cristina wanted to be in the room with Emma, one she had not admitted to anyone. In her incoherent state, Emma was calling out to Julian that she loved him, for him to come and hold her. Any of those statements might be written off as the love felt between parabatai—but then again, they might not be. As a keeper of Emma and Julian’s secret, Cristina felt she owed it to them both to protect Emma’s unconscious confidences.

  She knew Mark felt the same: He’d been with Julian, though he reported that Julian cried out much less. It was one of the few things Mark had said to her since they’d gotten back from Faerie. She’d been avoiding both Mark and Kieran deliberately—Diego and Jaime were in prison, the Consul was under house arrest, the Dea
rborns were still in power, and Emma and Julian were unconscious; she was far too frayed to deal with her mess of a love life at the moment.

  She hadn’t realized till this moment quite how much she’d missed them.

  “Hello!” It was Tavvy, bouncing into the kitchen. He’d been subdued the last few days while Julian had been sick, but he’d recovered with the admirable elasticity of children. “I’m supposed to carry sandwiches,” he added with the air of someone who has been given a task of great importance.

  Mark gave him a plate of the doughnuts, and another to Kieran, who shepherded Tavvy out of the room in the manner of one growing used to being surrounded by a large family.

  “I wish I’d had a camera,” Cristina said after they left. “A photograph of a haughty prince of Faerie carrying a plate of terrible doughnut sandwiches would be quite a memento.”

  “My sandwiches are not terrible.” Mark leaned back against the counter with an easy grace. In blue jeans and a T-shirt, he looked entirely human—if you didn’t note his sharply pointed ears. “You really care about him, don’t you?”

  “About Kieran?” Cristina felt her pulse speed up: with nerves and with closeness to Mark. They had spoken only of surface things for days. The intimacy of discussing their actual feelings was making her heart race. “Yes. I—I mean, you know that, don’t you?” She felt herself blush. “You saw us kiss.”

  “I did,” Mark said. “I did not know what it meant to you, nor to Kieran, either.” He looked thoughtful. “It is easy to be carried away in Faerie. I wanted to reassure you I was not angry or jealous. I am truly not, Cristina.”

  “All right,” she said awkwardly. “Thank you.”

  But what did it mean that he wasn’t angry or jealous? If what had happened with her and Kieran in Faerie had happened among Shadowhunters, she would have considered it a declaration of interest. And would have worried that Mark was upset. But it hadn’t been, had it? It might have meant nothing more to Kieran than a handshake.

  She trailed a hand along the smooth top of the counter. She could not help but remember a conversation she had had with Mark once, here in the Institute. It felt so long ago. It came back to her like a lucid dream:

  There was nothing rehearsed about the look Mark gave her then. “I meant it when I said you were beautiful. I want you, and Kieran would not mind—”

  “You want me?”

  “Yes,” Mark said simply, and Cristina looked away, suddenly very aware of how close his body was to hers. Of the shape of his shoulders under his jacket. He was lovely as faeries were lovely, with a sort of unearthliness, as quicksilver as moonlight on water. He didn’t seem quite touchable, but she had seen him kiss Kieran and knew better. “You do not want to be wanted?”

  In another time, the time before, Cristina would have blushed. “It is not the sort of compliment mortal women enjoy.”

  “But why not?” said Mark.

  “Because it makes it sound like I am a thing you want to use. And when you say Kieran would not mind, you make it sound as if he would not mind because I do not matter.”

  “That is very human,” he said. “To be jealous of a body but not a heart.”

  “You see, I do not want a body without a heart,” she said.

  A body without a heart.

  She could have both Mark and Kieran now, in the way that Mark had suggested so long ago—she could kiss them, and be with them, and bid them good-bye when they left her, because they would.

  “Cristina,” Mark said. “Are you all right? You seem—sad. I would have hoped to reassure you.” He touched the side of her face lightly, his fingers tracing the shape of her cheekbone.

  I don’t want to talk about this, Cristina thought. They had spent three days speaking of nothing important save Emma and Julian. Those three days and the peace of them felt delicate, as if too much discussion of reality and its harshness might shatter everything.

  “We don’t have time to talk now,” she said. “Perhaps later—”

  “Then let me say one thing.” Mark spoke quietly. “I have been long torn between two worlds. I thought I was a Shadowhunter, told myself I was only that. But I have realized my ties to Faerie are stronger than I thought. I cannot leave half my blood, half my heart, in either world. I dream it might be possible to have both, but I know it cannot be.”

  Cristina turned away so as not to see the look on his face. Mark would choose Faerie, she knew. Mark would choose Kieran. They had their history together, a great love in the past. They were both faeries, and though she had studied Faerie and yearned toward it with all her heart, it was not the same. They would be together because they belonged together, because they were beautiful together, and there would be pain for her when she lost them both.

  But that was the way for mortals who loved the folk of Faerie. They always paid a heavy price.

  * * *

  It was, Emma discovered, not actually possible to hate a doughnut sandwich. Even if her arteries might pay for it someday down the line. She ate three.

  Mark had placed them with care on platters, which sat in the middle of one of the big library tables—something about the desire to please in the gesture touched Emma’s heart.

  Everyone else was crowded around the long table, including Kieran, who sat quietly, his face blank, beside Mark. He wore a simple black shirt and linen pants; he looked nothing like he had the last time Emma had seen him, in the Unseelie Court, covered in blood and dirt, his face twisted with rage.

  Magnus looked different than he had the last time she’d seen him, too. And not in a good way. He had come down to the library leaning heavily on Alec, his face gray and tight, sharply drawn with pain. He lay on a long couch by the table, a blanket around his shoulders. Despite the blanket and the warm weather, he shivered often. Every time he did, Alec would bend down over him and smooth his hair back or draw the blankets up more tightly over his shoulders.

  And every time Alec did, Jace—sitting across the table, beside Clary—would tense, his hands curling into useless fists. Because that was what being parabatai meant, Emma knew. Feeling someone else’s pain as if it was your own.

  Magnus kept his eyes closed while Emma told the story of Thule, Julian interjecting quietly when she forgot a detail or glossed over something he thought was necessary. He didn’t push her, though, at the harder parts—when she had to talk about how Alec and Magnus had died or about Isabelle’s last stand with the Mortal Sword. About Clary’s death at Lilith’s hands.

  And about Jace. His eyes widened incredulously when Emma spoke of the Jace who lived in Thule, who had been bound to Sebastian for so long he would never be free. Emma saw Clary reach over to grip his hand tightly, her eyes shining with tears the way they hadn’t when her own death had been described.

  But the worst, of course, was describing Livvy. Because while the other stories were horrors, knowing about Livvy in Thule reminded them that there was a horror story in this world that they could neither change nor reverse.

  Dru, who had insisted on sitting at the table with everyone else, said nothing when they described Livvy, but tears streaked silently down her cheeks. Mark went ashen. And Ty—who looked thinner than Emma remembered him, bitten down like a ragged fingernail—made no sound either. Kit, who was sitting beside him, tentatively put his hand over Ty’s where it lay on the table; Ty didn’t react, though he didn’t draw away from Kit either.

  Emma went on, because she had no choice but to go on. Her throat was aching badly by the time she finished; gray-faced, Cristina pushed a glass of water toward her and she took it gratefully.

  A silence had fallen. No one seemed to know what to say. The only sound was the faint tinny chime of the music coming from Tavvy’s headphones as he played with a train set in the corner—they were Ty’s headphones, really, but he’d put them gently on Tavvy’s head before Emma had started talking.

  “Poor Ash,” Clary said. She was very pale. “He was—my nephew. I mean, my brother was a monster, but . . .�
�

  “Ash saved me,” said Emma. “He saved my life. And he said it was because he liked something I said about you. But he stayed because he wanted to stay in Thule. We offered to bring him back. He didn’t want to come.”

  Clary smiled tightly, her eyes sparkling with tears. “Thank you.”

  “Okay, let’s talk about the important part.” Magnus turned to Alec with a furious look on his face. “You killed yourself? Why would you do that?”

  Alec looked startled. “That wasn’t me,” he pointed out. “It’s an alternate universe, Magnus!”

  Magnus grabbed Alec by the front of his shirt. “If I die, you are not allowed to do anything like that! Who would take care of our kids? How could you do that to them?”

  “We never had kids in that world!” Alec protested.

  “Where are Rafe and Max?” Emma whispered to Cristina.

  “Simon and Isabelle are looking after them in New York. Alec checks in every day to see if Max is getting sick, but he seems fine so far,” Cristina whispered back.

  “You are not allowed to hurt yourself, under any circumstances,” Magnus said, his voice gruff. “Do you understand that, Alexander?”

  “I would never,” Alec said softly, stroking Magnus’s cheek. Magnus clasped Alec’s hand against his face. “Never.”

  They all looked away, letting Magnus and Alec have their moment in privacy.

  “I see why you clawed at me when I tried to lift you up,” Jace said to Emma. His golden eyes were dark with a regret she could only begin to understand. “When you first came through the Portal. You were lying on the ground, and I—you were bleeding, and I thought I should carry you to the infirmary, but you clawed at me and screamed like I was a monster.”

  “I don’t remember it,” Emma said honestly. “Jace, I know you’re a completely different person than him, even if he did look like you. You can’t feel bad or responsible for what someone who wasn’t you did.” She turned to look at the rest of the table. “The Thule versions of us aren’t really us,” she added. “If you think of them as copies of you, it’ll drive you crazy.”