“Tessa. Wake up. Please, wake up.”
Sophie’s voice now, cutting through the darkness. Tessa struggled, forcing her eyes open for a split second. She saw her bedroom at the Institute, the familiar furniture, the drapes pulled back, weak sunlight casting squares of light on the floor. She fought to hold on to it. It was like this, brief periods of lucidity in between fever and nightmares—never enough, never enough time to reach out, to speak. Sophie, she fought to whisper, but her dry lips would not pass the words. Lightning shivered down through her vision, splitting the world apart. She cried out soundlessly as the Institute broke into pieces and rushed away from her into the dark.
It was Cyril who finally told Gabriel that Cecily was in the stables, after the younger Lightwood brother had spent much of the day searching fruitlessly—though, he hoped not obviously—through the Institute for her.
Twilight had come, and the stable was full of warm yellow lantern light and the smell of horses. Cecily was standing by Balios’s stall, her head against the neck of the great black horse. Her hair, nearly the same inky color, was loose over her shoulders. When she turned to look at him, Gabriel saw the wink of the red ruby around her throat.
A look of concern passed across her face. “Has something happened to Will?”
“Will?” Gabriel was startled.
“I just thought—the way you looked—” She sighed. “He has been so distraught these past few days. If it were not enough that Tessa is ill and injured, to know what he does about Jem—” She shook her head. “I have tried to speak to him about it, but he will say nothing.”
“I think he is speaking to Jem now,” Gabriel said. “I confess I do not know his state of mind. If you wish, I could—”
“No.” Cecily’s voice was quiet. Her blue eyes were fixed on something far away. “Let him be.”
Gabriel took a few steps forward. The soft yellow glow of the lantern at Cecily’s feet laid a faint golden sheen over her skin. Her hands were bare of gloves, very white against the horse’s black hide. “I . . .,” he began. “You seem to like that horse very much.”
Silently he cursed himself. He remembered his father once saying that women, the gentler sex, liked to be wooed with charming words and pithy phrases. He wasn’t sure exactly what a pithy phrase was, but he was sure that “You seem to like that horse very much” was not one.
Cecily seemed not to mind, though. She gave the horse’s hide an absent pat before turning to face him. “Balios saved my brother’s life.”
“Are you going to leave?” Gabriel said abruptly.
Her eyes widened. “What was that, Mr. Lightwood?”
“No.” He held his hand up. “Don’t call me Mr. Lightwood, please. We are Shadowhunters. I am Gabriel to you.”
Her cheeks pinked. “Gabriel, then. Why did you ask me if I am leaving?”
“You came here to bring your brother home,” said Gabriel. “But it is clear he is not going to go, isn’t it? He is in love with Tessa. He is going to stay wherever she is.”
“She might not stay here,” Cecily said, her eyes unreadable.
“I think she will. But even if she does not, he will go where she is. And Jem—Jem has become a Silent Brother. He is still Nephilim. If Will hopes to see him again, and I think we know he does, he will remain. The years have changed him, Cecily. His family is here now.”
“Do you think you are telling me anything I have not observed for myself? Will’s heart is here, not in Yorkshire, in a house he has never lived in, with parents he has not seen for years.”
“Then, if he cannot go home—I thought perhaps that you would.”
“So that my parents are not alone. Yes. I can see why you would think that.” She hesitated. “You know, of course, that in a few years I would be expected to be married, and to leave my parents regardless.”
“But not to never speak to them again. They are exiled, Cecily. If you remain here, you will be cut off from them.”
“You say it as if you wish to convince me to return home.”
“I say it because I am afraid you will.” The words were out of his mouth before he could recapture them; he could only look at her as a flush of embarrassment heated his face.
She took a step toward him. Her blue eyes, upturned to his, were wide. He wondered when they had stopped reminding him of Will’s eyes; they were just Cecily’s eyes, a shade of blue he associated with her alone. “When I came here,” she said, “I thought the Shadowhunters were monsters. I thought I had to rescue my brother. I thought that we would return home together, and my parents would be proud of us both. That we would be a family again. Then I realized—you helped me realize—”
“I helped you? How?”
“Your father did not give you choices,” she said. “He demanded that you be what he wanted. And that demand broke your family apart. But my father, he chose to leave the Nephilim and marry my mother. That was his choice, just as staying with the Shadowhunters is Will’s. Choosing love or war: both are brave choices, in their own ways. And I do not think my parents would grudge Will his choice. Above all, what matters to them is that he be happy.”
“But what of you?” Gabriel said, and they were very close now, almost touching. “It is your choice to make now, to stay or return.”
“I will stay,” Cecily said. “I choose the war.”
Gabriel let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “You will give up your home?”
“A drafty old house in Yorkshire?” Cecily said. “This is London.”
“And give up what is familiar?”
“Familiar is dull.”
“And give up seeing your parents? It is against the Law . . .”
She smiled, the glimmer of a smile. “Everyone breaks the Law.”
“Cecy,” he said, and closed the distance between them, though it was not much, and then he was kissing her—his hands awkward around her shoulders at first, slipping on the stiff taffeta of her gown before his fingers slid behind her head, tangling in her soft, warm hair. She stiffened in surprise before softening against him, the seam of her lips parting as he tasted the sweetness of her mouth. When she drew away at last, he felt light-headed. “Cecy?” he said again, his voice hoarse.
“Five,” she said. Her lips and cheeks were flushed, but her gaze was steady.
“Five?” he echoed blankly.
“My rating,” she said, and smiled at him. “Your skill and technique may, perhaps, require work, but the native talent is certainly there. What you require is practice.”
“And you are willing to be my tutor?”
“I should be very insulted if you chose another,” she said, and leaned up to kiss him again.
When Will came into Tessa’s room, Sophie was sitting by her bed, murmuring in a soft voice. She swung around as the door closed behind Will. The corners of her mouth looked pinched and worried.
“How is she?” Will asked, pushing his hands deep into his trouser pockets. It hurt to see Tessa like this, hurt as if a sliver of ice had lodged itself under his ribs and was digging into his heart. Sophie had plaited Tessa’s long brown hair neatly so that it would not tangle when she tossed her head fitfully against the pillows. She breathed quickly, her chest rising and falling fast, her eyes visibly moving beneath her pale eyelids. He wondered what she was dreaming.
“The same,” Sophie said, rising gracefully to her feet and ceding him the chair beside the bed. “She has been calling out again.”
“For anyone particular?” Will asked, and then was immediately sorry he had asked. Surely his motives would be ridiculously transparent.
Sophie’s dark hazel eyes darted away from his. “For her brother,” she said. “If you wish a few moments alone with Miss Tessa . . .”
“Yes, please, Sophie.”
She paused at the door. “Master William,” she said.
Having just settled himself in the armchair beside the bed, Will glanced over at her.
“I am sorry I have thought
and spoken so ill of you for all these years,” Sophie said. “I understand now that you were only doing what we all try to do. Our best.”
Will reached out and placed his hand over Tessa’s left one, where it plucked feverishly at the coverlet. “Thank you,” he said, unable to look at Sophie directly; a moment later he heard the door softly close behind her.
He looked at Tessa. She was momentarily quiet, her lashes fluttering as she breathed. The circles beneath her eyes were dark blue, her veins a delicate filigree at her temples and the insides of her wrists. When he remembered her blazing up in glory, it was impossible to believe her fragile, yet here she was. Her hand felt hot in his, and when he brushed his knuckles against her cheek, her skin was burning.
“Tess,” he whispered. “Hell is cold. Do you remember when you told me that? We were in the cellars of the Dark House. Anyone else would have been panicking, but you were as calm as a governess, telling me Hell was covered in ice. If it is the fire of Heaven that takes you from me, what a cruel irony that would be.”
She breathed in sharply, and for a moment his heart leaped—had she heard him? But her eyes remained firmly shut.
His hand tightened on hers.
“Come back,” he said. “Come back to me, Tessa. Henry said that perhaps, since you had touched the soul of an angel, that you dream of Heaven now, of fields of angels and flowers of fire. Perhaps you are happy in those dreams. But I ask this out of pure selfishness. Come back to me. For I cannot bear to lose all my heart.”
Her head turned slowly toward him, her lips parting as if she were about to speak. He leaned forward, heart leaping.
“Jem?” she said.
He froze, unmoving, his hand still wrapped about hers. Her eyes fluttered open—as gray as the sky before rain, as gray as the slate hills of Wales. The color of tears. She looked at him, through him, not seeing him at all.
“Jem,” she said again. “Jem, I am so sorry. It is all my fault.”
Will leaned forward again. He could not help himself. She was speaking, and comprehensibly, for the first time in days. Even if not to him.
“It’s not your fault,” he said.
She returned the pressure of his hand hotly; each of her individual fingers seemed to burn through his skin. “But it is,” she said. “It is because of me that Mortmain deprived you of your yin fen. It is because of me that all of you were in danger. I was meant to love you, and all I did was shorten your life.”
Will took a ragged breath. The splinter of ice was back in his heart, and he felt as if he were breathing around it. And yet it was not jealousy, but a sorrow more profound and deeper than any he thought he had known before. He thought of Sydney Carton. Think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you. Yes, he would have done that for Tessa—died to keep the ones she needed beside her—and so would Jem have done that for him or for Tessa, and so would Tessa, he thought, do that for both of them. It was a near incomprehensible tangle, the three of them, but there was one certainty, and that was that there was no lack of love between them.
I am strong enough for this, he told himself, lifting her hand gently. “Life is not just surviving,” he said. “There is also happiness. You know your James, Tessa. You know he would choose love over the span of his years.”
But Tessa’s head only tossed fretfully on the pillow. “Where are you, James? I search for you in the darkness, but I cannot find you. You are my intended; we should be bound by ties that cannot sever. And yet when you were dying, I was not there. I have never said good-bye.”
“What darkness? Tessa, where are you?” Will gripped her hand. “Give me a way to find you.”
Tessa arched back on the bed suddenly, her hand clamping down on his. “I’m sorry!” she gasped. “Jem—I am so sorry—I have wronged you, wronged you horribly—”
“Tessa!” Will bolted to his feet, but Tessa had already collapsed bonelessly onto the mattress, breathing hard.
He could not help it. He cried out for Charlotte like a child who had woken from a nightmare, as he had never permitted himself to cry out when he truly was a child, waking in the then unfamiliar Institute and longing for comfort but knowing he must not take it.
Charlotte came running through the Institute, as he had always known she would come running for him if he called. She arrived, breathless and frightened; she took one look at Tessa on the bed, and Will clasping her hand, and he saw the terror leave her face, replaced by a look of wordless sorrow. “Will . . .”
Will gently detached his hand from Tessa’s, turning toward the door. “Charlotte,” he said. “I have never asked you to use your position as head of the Institute to help me before—”
“My position cannot heal Tessa.”
“It can. You must bring Jem here.”
“I cannot demand that,” Charlotte said. “Jem has only just begun his term of service in the Silent City. New Initiates are not meant to leave at all for the first year—”
“He came to the battle.”
Charlotte pushed a stray curl from her face. Sometimes she looked very young, as she did now, though earlier, facing the Inquisitor in the drawing room, she had not. “That was Brother Enoch’s choice.”
Certainty straightened Will’s spine. For so many years he had doubted the contents of his own heart. He did not doubt them now. “Tessa needs Jem,” he said. “I know the Law, I know he cannot come home, but—the Silent Brothers are meant to sever every bond that ties them to the mortal world before they join the Brotherhood. That is also the Law. The bond between Tessa and Jem was not severed. How is she to rejoin the mortal world, then, if she cannot even see Jem one last time?”
Charlotte was silent for a space of time. There was a shadow over her face, one he could not define. Surely she would want this, for Jem, for Tessa, for both of them? “Very well,” she said at last. “I shall see what I can do.”
“They lighted down to take a drink
Of the spring that ran so clear,
And there she spied his bonny heart’s blood,
A-running down the stream.
‘Hold up, hold up, Lord William,’ she said,
‘For I fear that you are slain;’
‘’Tis nought but the dye of my scarlet clothes,
That is sparkling down the stream.’ ”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Sophie muttered as she passed the kitchen. Did Bridget really have to be so morbid in all her songs, and did she have to use Will’s name? As if the poor boy hadn’t suffered enough—
A shadow materialized out of the darkness. “Sophie?”
Sophie screamed and nearly dropped her carpet brush. Witchlight flared up in the dim corridor, and she saw familiar gray-green eyes.
“Gideon!” she exclaimed. “Heavens above, you nearly frightened me to death.”
He looked penitent. “I apologize. I only wished to wish you good night—and you were smiling as you walked along. I thought . . .”
“I was thinking about Master Will,” she said, and then smiled again at his dismayed expression. “Only that a year ago, if you had told me that someone was tormenting him, I would have been delighted, but now I find myself in sympathy with him. That is all.”
He looked sober. “I am in sympathy with him as well. Every day that Tessa does not wake, you can see a bit of the life drain out of him.”
“If only Master Jem were here . . .” Sophie sighed. “But he is not.”
“There is much that we must learn to live without, these days.” Gideon touched her cheek lightly with his fingers. They were rough, the fingers callused. Not the smooth fingers of a gentleman. Sophie smiled at him.
“You didn’t look at me at dinner,” he said, dropping his voice. It was true—dinner had been a quick affair of cold roast chicken and potatoes. No one had seemed to have much appetite, save Gabriel and Cecily, who’d eaten as if they had spent the day training. Perhaps they had.
“I have been concerned about Mrs. B
ranwell,” Sophie confessed. “She has been so worried, about Mr. Branwell, and about Miss Tessa, she is wasting away, and the baby—” She bit her lip. “I am concerned,” she said again. She could not bring herself to say more. It was hard to lose the reticence of a lifetime of service, even if she was engaged to a Shadowhunter now.
“Yours is a gentle heart,” Gideon said, sliding his fingers down her cheek to touch her lips, like the lightest of kisses. Then he drew back. “I saw Charlotte go alone into the drawing room, only a few moments ago. Perhaps you could have a word with her about your concern?”
“I couldn’t—”
“Sophie,” Gideon said. “You are not just Charlotte’s maid; you are her friend. If she will talk to anyone, it will be to you.”
The drawing room was cold and dark. There was no fire in the grate, and none of the lamps were lit against the cloak of night, which cast the chamber into gloom and shadow. It took Sophie a moment to even realize that one of the shadows was Charlotte, a small silent figure in the chair behind the desk.
“Mrs. Branwell,” she said, feeling a great awkwardness come upon her, despite Gideon’s encouraging words. Two days ago she and Charlotte had fought side by side at Cadair Idris. Now she was a servant again, here to clean the grate and dust the room for the next day’s use. A bucket of coals in one hand, tinderbox in her apron pocket. “I am sorry—I did not mean to interrupt.”
“You are not interrupting, Sophie. Not anything important.” Charlotte’s voice—Sophie had never heard her sound like that before. So small, or so defeated.
Sophie set the coals down by the fire and approached her mistress hesitantly. Charlotte was seated with her elbows on the desk, her face resting in her hands. A letter was on the desk, with the seal of the Council broken open. Sophie’s heart sped suddenly, remembering how the Consul had ordered them all out of the Institute before the battle at Cadair Idris. But surely it had been proved that they were correct? Surely their defeat of Mortmain would have canceled out the Consul’s edict, especially now that he was dead? “Is—is everything all right, ma’am?”
The Infernal Devices Series Page 124