She was not sure what she had expected Will to say, but this was not it. “A Pyxis? But why would your father keep a Pyxis?”
“A memento from his Shadowhunting days? Who can guess? But do you recall the Codex discussing curses and how they can be cast? Well, when I opened the box, I released a demon—Marbas—who cursed me. He swore that anyone who loved me was doomed to die. I might not have believed it—I was not well schooled in magic—but my elder sister died that night, horribly. I thought it was the beginning of the curse. I fled my family and came here. It seemed to me the only way to keep them safe, not to bring them death on death. I did not realize at first that I was walking into a second family. Henry, Charlotte, even bloody Jessamine—I had to make sure that no one here could ever love me. To do so, I thought, would be to put them into deadly danger. For years I have held everyone at arm’s length—everyone I could not push away entirely.”
Tessa stared at him. The words echoed in her head. Held everyone at arm’s length—pushed everyone away—She thought of his lies, his hiding, the unpleasantness to Charlotte and Henry, the cruelties that seemed forced, even the story of Tatiana, who had only loved him the way little girls did, and whose affections he had crushed. And then there was . . . “Jem,” she whispered.
He looked at her miserably. “Jem is different,” he whispered.
“Jem is dying. You let Jem in because he was already near death? You thought the curse wouldn’t affect him?”
“And with every year that passed, and he survived, that seemed more likely. I thought I could learn to live like this. I thought when Jem was gone, after I turned eighteen, I’d go live by myself, not inflict myself or my curse on anyone—and then everything changed. Because of you.”
“Me?” said Tessa in a quiet, stunned voice.
The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. “When I first met you, I thought you were unlike anyone else I had ever known. You made me laugh. No one but Jem has made me laugh in, good God, five years. And you did it like it was nothing, like breathing.”
“You did not even know me. Will—”
“Ask Magnus. He’ll tell you. After that night on the roof, I went to him. I had pushed you away because I thought you had begun to realize how I felt about you. In the Sanctuary that day, when I thought you were dead, I realized you must have been able to read it on my face. I was terrified. I had to make you hate me, Tessa. So I tried. And then I wanted to die. I had thought I could bear it if you hated me, but I could not. I realized you would be staying in the Institute, and that every time I saw you it would be like standing on that roof all over again, making you despise me and feeling as if I were choking down poison. I went to Magnus and demanded that he help me find the demon who had cursed me in the first place, that the curse might be lifted. If it was, I thought, I could try again. It might be slow and painful and nearly impossible, but I thought I could make you care for me again, if only I could tell you the truth. That I could gain your trust back—build something with you, slowly.”
“Are—are you saying the curse is lifted? That it’s gone?”
“There is no curse on me, Tessa. The demon tricked me. There never was a curse. All these years, I’ve been a fool. But not so much a fool that I didn’t know that the first thing I needed to do once I had learned the truth was tell you how I really felt.” He took another step forward, and this time she did not move back. She was staring at him, at the pale, almost translucent skin under his eyes, at the dark hair curling at his temples, the nape of his neck, at the blue of his eyes and the curve of his mouth. Staring at him the way she might stare at a beloved place she was not sure she would ever see again, trying to commit the details to memory, to paint them on the backs of her eyelids that she might see it when she shut her eyes to sleep.
She heard her own voice as if from very far away. “Why me?” she whispered. “Why me, Will?”
He hesitated. “After we brought you back here, after Charlotte found your letters to your brother, I—I read them.”
Tessa heard herself say, very calmly, “I know you did. I found them in your room when I was there with Jem.”
He looked startled. “You said nothing to me about it.”
“At first I was angry,” she admitted. “But that was the night we found you in the ifrit den. I felt for you, I suppose. I told myself you had only been curious, or Charlotte had asked you to read them.”
“She didn’t,” he said. “I pulled them out of the fire myself. I read them all. Every word you wrote. You and I, Tess, we’re alike. We live and breathe words. It was books that kept me from taking my own life after I thought I could never love anyone, never be loved by anyone again. It was books that made me feel that perhaps I was not completely alone. They could be honest with me, and I with them. Reading your words, what you wrote, how you were lonely sometimes and afraid, but always brave; the way you saw the world, its colors and textures and sounds, I felt—I felt the way you thought, hoped, felt, dreamed. I felt I was dreaming and thinking and feeling with you. I dreamed what you dreamed, wanted what you wanted—and then I realized that truly I just wanted you. The girl behind the scrawled letters. I loved you from the moment I read them. I love you still.”
Tessa had begun to tremble. This was what she had always wanted someone to say. What she had always, in the darkest corner of her heart, wanted Will to say. Will, the boy who loved the same books she did, the same poetry she did, who made her laugh even when she was furious. And here he was standing in front of her, telling her he loved the words of her heart, the shape of her soul. Telling her something she had never imagined anyone would ever tell her. Telling her something she would never be told again, not in this way. And not by him.
And it did not matter.
“It’s too late,” she said.
“Don’t say that.” His voice was half a whisper. “I love you, Tessa. I love you.”
She shook her head. “Will . . . stop.”
He took a ragged breath. “I knew you would be reluctant to trust me,” he said. “Tessa, please, is it that you do not believe me, or is it that you cannot imagine ever loving me back? Because if it is the second—”
“Will. It doesn’t matter—”
“Nothing matters more!” His voice grew in strength. “I know that if you hate me it is because I forced you to. I know that you have no reason to give me a second chance to be regarded by you in a different light. But I am begging you for that chance. I will do anything. Anything.”
His voice cracked, and she heard the echo of another voice inside it. She saw Jem, looking down at her, all the love and light and hope and expectancy in the world caught up in his eyes.
“No,” she whispered. “It isn’t possible.”
“It is,” he said desperately. “It must be. You cannot hate me as much as all that—”
“I don’t hate you at all,” she said, with great sadness. “I tried to hate you, Will. But I could never manage it.”
“Then, there’s a chance.” Hope flared in his eyes. She should not have spoken so gently—oh, God, was there nothing that would make this less awful? She had to tell him. Now. Quickly. Cleanly. “Tessa, if you don’t hate me, then there’s a chance that you might—”
“Jem has proposed to me,” she blurted out. “And I have said yes.”
“What?”
“I said that Jem proposed to me,” she whispered. “He asked if I would marry him. And I said I would.”
Will had gone shockingly white. He said, “Jem. My Jem?”
She nodded, without words to say.
Will staggered and put his hand on the back of a chair for balance. He looked like someone who had been suddenly, viciously kicked in the stomach. “When?”
“This morning. But we have been growing closer, much closer, for a long time.”
“You—and Jem?” Will looked as if he were being asked to believe in something impossible—snow in summertime, a London winter without rain.
In answer, Tessa touched
with her fingertips the jade pendant Jem had given her. “He gave me this,” she said. Her voice was very quiet. “It was his mother’s bridal gift.”
Will stared at it, at the Chinese characters on it, as if it were a serpent curled about her throat. “He never told me anything. He never said a word about you to me. Not that way.” He pushed his hair back from his face, that characteristic gesture she had seen him make a thousand times, only now his hand was visibly shaking. “Do you love him?”
“Yes, I love him,” she said, and she saw Will flinch. “Don’t you?”
“But he would understand,” he said dazedly. “If we explained it to him. If we told him . . . he would understand.”
For just a moment Tessa imagined herself drawing the pendant off, going down the hallway, knocking on Jem’s door. Giving it back to him. Telling him she had made a mistake, that she could not marry him. She could tell him, tell him everything about herself and about Will—how she was not sure, how she needed time, how she could not promise him all of her heart, how some part of her belonged to Will and always would.
And then she thought of the first words she had ever heard Jem speak, his eyes closed, his back to her, his face to the moonlight. Will? Will, is that you? The way Will’s voice, his face, softened for Jem as it did for no one else; the way Jem had gripped Will’s hands in the infirmary while he’d bled, the way Will had called out James! when the warehouse automaton had knocked Jem down.
I cannot sever them, one from the other, she thought. I cannot be responsible for such a thing.
I cannot tell either of them the truth.
She imagined Jem’s face if she called off the engagement. He would be kind. Jem was always kind. But she would be breaking something precious inside him, something essential. He would not be the same afterward, and there would be no Will to comfort him. And he had so little time.
And Will? What would he do then? Whatever he might think now, she knew that if she broke things off with Jem, even then, he would not touch her, would not be with her, no matter how much he loved her. How could he parade his love for her in front of Jem, knowing his happiness came at the cost of his best friend’s pain? Even if Will told himself he could manage it, to him she would always be the girl Jem loved, until the day Jem died. Until the day she died. He would not betray Jem, even after death. If it had been anyone else, anyone else in the world—but she did not love anyone else in the world. These were the boys she loved. For better. And for worse.
She made her voice as cold as she could. As calm. “Told him what?”
Will only looked at her. There had been light in his eyes on the stairs, as he’d locked the door, when he’d kissed her—a brilliant, joyous light. And it was going now, fading like the last breath of someone dying. She thought of Nate, bleeding to death in her arms. She had been powerless then, to help him. As she was now. She felt as if she were watching the life bleed out of Will Herondale, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“Jem would forgive me,” Will said, but there was hopelessness in his face, his voice, already. He had given up, Tessa thought; Will, who never gave up on any fight before it had started. “He . . .”
“He would,” she said. “He could never stay angry at you, Will; he loves you too well for that. I do not even think he would hold anger toward me. But this morning he told me he thought he would die without ever loving anyone as his father loved his mother, without ever being loved like that in return. Do you want me to go down the hallway and knock on his door and take that away from him? And would you love me still, if I did?”
Will looked at her for a long moment. Then he seemed to crumple inside, like paper; he sat down in the armchair, and put his face into his hands. “You promise me,” he said. “That you love him. Enough to marry him and make him happy.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Then, if you love him,” he said quietly, “please, Tessa, don’t tell him what I just told you. Don’t tell him that I love you.”
“And the curse? He doesn’t know—”
“Please don’t tell him about that either. Nor Henry, nor Charlotte—no one. I must tell them in my own time, in my own way. Pretend I said nothing to you. If you care about me at all, Tessa . . .”
“I will tell no one,” she said. “I swear it. I promise it, on my angel. My mother’s angel. And, Will . . .”
He had lowered his hands, but he still could not seem to look at her. He was gripping the sides of the armchair, his knuckles white. “I think you had better go, Tessa.”
But she could not bear to. Not when he was looking like that, like he was dying on the inside. More than anything else, she wanted to go and put her arms around him, to kiss his eyes closed, to make him smile again. “What you have endured,” she said, “since you were twelve years old—it would have killed most people. You have always believed that no one loved you, that no one could love you, as their continued survival was proof to you that they did not. But Charlotte loves you. And Henry. And Jem. And your family. They all have always loved you, Will Herondale, for you cannot hide what is good about yourself, however hard you try.”
He lifted his head and looked at her. She saw the flame of the fire reflected in his blue eyes. “And you? Do you love me?”
Her nails dug into her palms. “Will,” she said.
He looked at her, almost through her, blindly. “Do you love me?”
“I . . .” She took a deep breath. It hurt. “Jem has been right about you all this time. You were better than I gave you credit for being, and for that I am sorry. Because if this is you, what you are truly like, and I think that it is—then you will have no difficulty finding someone to love you, Will, someone for whom you come first in their heart. But I . . .”
He made a sound halfway between a choking laugh and a gasp. “‘First in your heart,’” he said. “Would you believe that is not the only time you have said that to me?”
She shook her head, bewildered. “Will, I have not—”
“You can never love me,” he said flatly, and when she did not respond, when she said nothing, he shuddered—a shudder that ran through his whole body—and pushed away from the armchair without looking at her. He stood up stiffly and crossed the room, groping for the bolt on the door; she watched with her hand across her mouth as, after what seemed like an age, he found it, fumbled it open, and went out into the corridor, slamming the door behind him.
Will, she thought. Will, is that you? The backs of her eyes ached. Somehow she found that she was sitting on the floor in front of the grate of the fire. She stared at the flames, waiting for the tears to come. Nothing happened. After such a long time of forcing them back, it seemed, she had lost the ability to cry.
She took the poker from the fireplace iron holder and drove the tip of it into the heart of the burning coals, feeling the heat on her face. The jade pendant around her throat warmed, almost burning her skin.
She drew the poker out of the fire. It glowed as red as a heart. She closed her hand around the tip.
For a moment she felt absolutely nothing. And then, as if from a very great distance, she heard herself cry out, and it was like a key turned inside her heart, freeing the tears at last. The poker clattered to the ground.
When Sophie came dashing in, having heard her scream, she found Tessa on her knees by the fire, her burned hand pressed to her chest, sobbing as if her heart would break.
It was Sophie who took Tessa to her room, and Sophie who put her in her nightgown and then in bed, and Sophie who washed her burned hand with a cool flannel and bound it up with a salve that smelled like herbs and spices, the same salve, she told Tessa, that Charlotte had used on Sophie’s cheek when she had first come to the Institute.
“Do you think I’ll have a scar?” Tessa asked, more out of curiosity than because she cared one way or the other. The burn, and the weeping that had followed it, seemed to have seared and flooded all the emotion out of her. She felt as light and hollow as a shell.
&n
bsp; “Probably a bit of a one, not like I’ve got,” said Sophie frankly, securing the bandage around Tessa’s hand. “Burns hurt worse than they are, if you catch my meaning, and I got to you quickly with the salve. You’ll be all right.”
“No, I won’t be,” said Tessa, looking at her hand, and then over at Sophie. Sophie, lovely as always, calm and patient in her black dress and white cap, her curls clustering around her face. “I’m sorry again, Sophie,” she said. “You were right about Gideon, and I was wrong. I should have listened to you. You’re the last person on earth inclined to be foolish over men. The next time you say someone is worth trusting, I will believe you.”
Sophie’s smile flashed out, the smile that made even strangers forget her scar. “I understand why you said it.”
“I should have trusted you—”
“I shouldn’t have got so angry,” Sophie said. “The truth is, I wasn’t sure myself what he was going to do. I wasn’t sure till he came back in the carriage with you all that he would side with us in the end.”
“It must be nice, though,” Tessa said, playing with the bedclothes, “that he’s going to live here. He’ll be so close to you—”
“It will be the worst thing in the world,” Sophie said, and suddenly her eyes were full of tears. Tessa froze in horror, wondering what she could have said so wrong. The tears stood in Sophie’s eyes, without falling, making their green shimmer. “If he lives here, he’ll see me as I really am. A servant.” Her voice cracked. “I knew I should never have gone to see him when he asked me. Mrs. Branwell’s not the type to punish her servants for having followers and the like, but I knew it was wrong anyway, because he’s himself and I’m me, and we don’t belong together.” She reached up a hand and wiped at her eyes, and then the tears did fall, spilling down both her cheeks, the whole and the scarred one. “I could lose everything if I let myself—and what’s he stand to lose? Nothing.”
The Infernal Devices Series Page 82