Chain of Gold

by Cassandra Clare

  “We’d better go,” Lucie said. “James, will you be coming with us or going back the way you came?” She squinted. “What is the way you came?”

  “Never you mind,” said James, with his crooked smile. “Go take the carriage. I’ll follow along shortly and see you both at home.”

  * * *

  “I imagine James is staying because he wants to see Grace,” Lucie said in a low voice as she and Cordelia hurried back along the overgrown pathways of the Chiswick House gardens. They ducked through the gates and found the carriage exactly where it had been before, Xanthos seeming to stand guard. “Moon around under her window or whatever. I hope Tatiana doesn’t bite off his head.”

  “She certainly doesn’t seem to want visitors,” said Cordelia as they clambered into the carriage. “I felt rather bad for Grace.”

  “James used to feel pity for her,” said Lucie as the carriage started to move. “Then it seems that somehow he fell in love with her. Which is very odd, really. I’ve always thought of pity as the opposite of love—”

  She broke off, her face going white. Light was visible through the tangled branches of trees. Figures were hurrying across the road, toward the manor house.

  “It’s Papa,” Lucie said, in a grim tone, as if she’d just seen another Cerberus demon. “In fact, it’s everyone.”

  Cordelia stared. The road was suddenly full of witchlight. It shone upon the dark gates of the house, upon the rows of beech trees on either side of the road, upon the ragged outline of the manor itself. Lucie might have exaggerated slightly in saying everyone was there, but certainly a large group of Shadowhunters on foot was bearing down on the Blackthorns’ residence. Cordelia could see familiar faces—Gabriel and Cecily Lightwood, Charles Fairchild’s red hair—and of course, Will Herondale.

  “What are they doing here?” she wondered. “Should we go back—warn James to make himself scarce?”

  But the carriage had already begun speeding up, Xanthos trotting them quickly away while the last of the Enclave members poured through the gates.

  As the house receded in the distance, Lucie shook her head, looking grim. “He wouldn’t thank us for it,” she said. She sighed. “He’d just be angry we let ourselves get in trouble too—besides, James is a boy; he won’t be in the same sort of hot water if they do catch him wandering about the place. If they found us, you’d be in awful trouble with your mother. It isn’t in the least fair, but it’s the truth.”

  * * *

  Moonlight filtered into the greenhouse through shattered glass panes. The Nephilim were long gone, having made their examination of the place and their demands of the mistress of the house. It was finally quiet.

  The seedpods the Cerberus demon had dropped in its death throes began to shake and tremble, like eggs about to hatch. Their leathery casings split as thorn-sharp teeth tore them open from within. Covered with a sticky film and hissing like cockroaches, the newborn demons tumbled to the packed-earth floor of the greenhouse, each no bigger than a child’s hand.

  But they would not remain that size for long.

  DAYS PAST: IDRIS, 1900

  Deciding to sneak into Blackthorn Manor as a shadow was one thing, but actually going through with it was another. For days after Grace asked him, James made excuses to himself about why tonight could not be the night: his father up too late to not notice his leaving; weather too foul to roam around outside; moon too bright to give him sufficient cover of darkness.

  Then one night James awoke from agitated dreams and found himself flushed and breathless, as though he’d been fleeing something monstrous. The linens of his bed were thrown off. He stood and paced his bedchamber for a time, unable to think of sleep. Then he pulled on trousers and shirt and climbed out of his window.

  He had been thinking of Cordelia, not Grace, but he found himself at the wall around Blackthorn Manor nonetheless. Unable to turn back, having come this far, he willed himself into shadow. Quickly enough he found himself through the wall and across the grounds and into the entrance hall.

  He hadn’t been prepared for the state of Blackthorn Manor in the middle of the night, its deadly hush, its aura of menace like an opened tomb. Thick silver dust trailed along the edges of banisters and furniture and tangled into cobwebs in every corner. At the edge of his vision was a gray blur: he knew it was the border of the shadow realm. He knew he was courting that world by turning his flesh to shadow.

  But he had made a promise.

  James could see ghosts, and there were no ghosts here. But this place felt haunted regardless. The shadows seemed to listen intently to his footfalls. Most strange of all, every clock in the house that he passed was stopped at exactly the same hour of twenty to nine.

  James went up the stairs. At the end of a long corridor before a turret wall stood a ghastly suit of armor, easily twice as tall as a human. Thankfully, it was only a decoration: fashioned from steel and copper, it resembled nothing so much as a massive human skeleton, with a chest piece in the shape of a rib cage and a helmet and mask that formed a leering skull. It stopped him short, and he stood staring at it until it came to him what it must be: one of Axel Mortmain’s famous clockwork creatures, an empty shell that had once housed a demon. The very monsters that his own parents had defeated when they were only barely older than he was now.

  Grace had told him that Tatiana had left the house untouched all these years, but that was not entirely true: she had installed this mechanical creature’s corpse in its gallery. Why? What did it mean to her? Was it admiration of Mortmain, who had nearly destroyed the Shadowhunters?

  James hated to turn his back on the thing, but he moved on, and quickly found the door to Tatiana’s study. The room was piled with boxes and crates, stacks of yellowed pages and decaying books. On the wall was a portrait of a boy, about the same age as James, shining green eyes dominating his gaunt face. James knew who it must be, though he had never seen him: Jesse Blackthorn.

  There was a metal box set on the low wrought-iron table below the portrait of the dead boy, carved all over with the winding vines that the Blackthorns used to decorate seemingly everything. The lock was built into the lid, presenting a simple keyhole in the smooth surface.

  Without looking directly at the box, he lowered his hand to its lid; he felt his body flash into and out of shadow in irregular jerks and for an awful moment saw that other land, the blighted place of twisted trees.

  James thrust his ethereal hand through the lid into the box, closed it around a cold serpent of metal, and withdrew it. It was Grace’s mother’s bracelet, just as she had described.

  He fled from the room, from the manor itself. The moonlight through the dusty windows of the hallways wavered and writhed like a mass of silver snakes.

  Out of the manor grounds and nearly home, James became aware that he remained a shadow. He stopped where he was, a nondescript stretch of road lined on both sides with dense trees and foliage, neither Blackthorn nor Herondale home visible. The sky was dark, the moon a bright sliver. Gray shimmered at the edge of his vision as he closed his eyes and willed himself to become solid again.

  Nothing happened.

  He was not, at the moment, a being who breathed, but he felt himself breathe anyway, hard and shaky. When he had become a shadow during his scalding fever, it had only been for moments. It had not been much longer at Shadowhunter Academy. But he had not made the change on purpose, either time.

  Oddly, his mind turned to Cordelia, to her voice reaching through the fever, through the shadows. He fell to his knees, his hands making no mark in the dirt of the road. He closed his eyes. Let me come back. Let me come back.

  Do not leave me alone in these shadows.

  He felt a jolt, as if he had fallen and hit the ground hard: his eyes flew open. He was no longer a shadow. He staggered to his feet, gasping in the cold, clear air. The gray had gone from the edge of his vision.

  “Well,” he said out loud to nobody, “never again. That’s easily done. Never again.”
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  * * *

  The next night Grace was waiting for him under the shade of a yew tree, just inside the entrance to Brocelind Forest. Without a word he placed the bracelet in her hand.

  She turned it thoughtfully over and over between her pale fingers, and he saw the moonlight strike across the engraving laid within the curve of metal.

  LOYAULTÉ ME LIE. James knew the meaning. It had been the maxim of a long-dead king of England. Loyalty Binds Me.

  “It was the motto of the Cartwrights,” Grace said, her voice very soft. “I was Grace Cartwright once.” A smile touched her lips, faint as winter moonlight. “As I waited for you, I realized how foolish I had been to ask for this. I can’t wear it without my mother seeing. I do not even dare keep it in my room lest she find it.” Grace turned to him. “Would you wear it?” she asked. “As my friend. As my only real friend, truly. Then when I see you, I will be reminded of who I am.”

  “Of course,” he said, his heart breaking for her. “Of course I will.”

  “Hold out your arm,” she whispered, barely loud enough to be heard, and he did.

  He told himself later that he would never forget her fingers on his skin, the way the whole of Brocelind Forest, perhaps all of Idris, gave a great sigh, as Grace gently closed the bracelet on his wrist.

  He looked down at Grace. How had he never noticed before that her eyes were almost the precise color of silver, like the bracelet itself?

  He wore it through the summer, into the next year and the year after. He had, even now, still not taken it off.

  7 FALL OF SONGS

  Bright is the ring of words

  When the right man rings them,

  Fair the fall of songs

  When the singer sings them.

  —Robert Louis Stevenson, “Bright Is the Ring of Words”

  “You have to understand,” said Charles, his eyes glittering earnestly. “The Enclave is extremely annoyed with you, James. Some of them I would even say are angry.”

  It was the morning after his odd visit to Chiswick; James was sitting in the chair in front of his father’s desk. Tessa had never redecorated the Institute’s office and it still had a dark Victorian feel to it, with pine-colored wallpaper and Aubusson rugs on the floors. The chair his father sat in was heavy mahogany, the armrests chipped and scratched. Charles Fairchild leaned against the wall near the door, which he had shut and locked after the three of them. His red hair gleamed like a dull old penny in the witchlight.

  Lucie had been swept away by Tessa after breakfast to help in the infirmary. The Silent Brothers had put Barbara, Piers, and Ariadne into deep, unwavering enchanted sleep: they had hopes that their bodies would resist the poison while they rested. One could sense the shadow in the house, the sickroom atmosphere, along with the thick tension in this room.

  “That seems like it must be very upsetting for the Enclave, then,” said James. “Bad for their dyspepsia.”

  He was trying not to glare at Charles but was losing the battle. He’d slept badly the night before after returning to the Institute with his father. It would have been one thing if his father had been angry, but it was clear Will had been more worried than anything else, and James’s insistence that he’d merely gone for a walk and ended up in Chiswick didn’t help matters.

  “You need to take this seriously, James,” said Charles. “It was necessary to use a Tracking rune to find you—”

  “I wouldn’t say it was necessary,” said James. “I was not in need of help, nor was I lost.”

  “James,” his father said calmly. “You disappeared.”

  “I should have told you I was going out,” said James. “But—demons attacked us in daylight yesterday. We still have three Shadowhunters in the infirmary, and no cure for their condition. Why is the Enclave focused on me?”

  Red flared in Charles’s face. “The Enclave is meeting to discuss the situation with the demons today. But we’re Shadowhunters—life doesn’t simply stop because of a demon attack. According to Tatiana, you went to her house last night and demanded to see Grace, and when she said no, you smashed her greenhouse to pieces—”

  Will threw up his hands. “Why would James vandalize a random outbuilding because he couldn’t see a girl? It’s ridiculous, Charles, and you know it.”

  James half closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look directly at his father and see Will’s distress: his tie askew and his jacket rumpled and his face showing the evidence of a sleepless night. “I told you, Charles. I never spoke to Mrs. Blackthorn or Grace, either. And there was a Cerberus demon in that greenhouse.”

  “Maybe so,” said Charles. He was beginning to remind James of a dog that refused to give up a shoe it was gnawing on. “But you would never have been in a position to see it had you not already been on the grounds of Chiswick House and broken into the greenhouse.”

  “I didn’t break into the greenhouse,” said James, which was technically true.

  “Then tell me what you did do!” Charles pounded his right fist into the palm of his other hand. “If what Tatiana is saying isn’t true, then why don’t you tell me what did happen?”

  I went into the shadow realm to see if I could find a connection to the demon attacks. I followed a light I believe was Cortana and discovered myself in the greenhouse, where Cordelia Carstairs was already being attacked by a tentacle.

  No. No one would believe him. And they would think he was mad, and he would be getting Cordelia and Matthew and Lucie and Thomas and Christopher into trouble as well.

  Silent, James gritted his teeth.

  Charles sighed. “You leave us to assume the worst, James.”

  “That he’s a senseless vandal? Honestly, Charles,” said Will. “You know how Tatiana feels about our family.”

  “I killed a demon in that greenhouse,” James said evenly. “I did what I was supposed to do. Yet I am the one the Enclave is blaming, rather than the Shadowhunter keeping a demon on the grounds of her house.”

  It was Will’s turn to sigh. “Jamie, we know that Benedict kept Cerberus demons.”

  “The one that was there—and I do believe you when you say it was there—cannot be blamed on Tatiana,” said Charles. “The rest of the property has been searched, and there were no more. It was your bad luck to stumble across this one.”

  “That greenhouse is full of dark magic plants,” said James. “Surely someone noticed that.”

  “It is,” Charles admitted, “but given the severity of her complaints, James, no one is going to note the presence of a few belladonna bushes in her shrubbery. You still wouldn’t have run across the demon if you hadn’t been trespassing already.”

  “Tell Tatiana we’ll pay for the repairs to the greenhouse,” said Will wearily. “I must say all this seems a vast overreaction, Charles. James happened to be there, he ran into a demon, and things took their natural course. Would you rather he’d let it loose to devour the neighborhood?”

  Charles cleared his throat. “Let us stick to practicalities.” Sometimes James had a hard time remembering that Charles was a Shadowhunter, and not one of the thousands of bowler-hatted, sack-suited bankers who flooded down Fleet Street every morning on their way to offices in the City. “I have had a long conversation with Bridgestock this morning—”

  Will said something rude in Welsh.

  “However you may feel about him, he remains the Inquisitor,” said Charles. “And at the moment, with my mother in Idris dealing with the Elias Carstairs situation, I represent her interests here in London. When the Inquisitor speaks, I must hear him out.”

  James started. He had not connected Charlotte’s trip to Idris with the situation affecting Cordelia’s father. He supposed he should have: he recalled overhearing his sister and Cordelia in Kensington Gardens, Cordelia saying her father had made a mistake. The tremble in her voice.

  “No punishment is being recommended for James at this point,” Charles went on. “But James—I suggest you avoid Chiswick House, and avoid Tatiana Blackth
orn and her daughter entirely.”

  James went still. The hands of the grandfather clock were blades, sweeping slowly around the face, cutting time.

  “Let me apologize to her,” James said; the silver bracelet felt as if it were burning on his wrist. He didn’t know if he meant Tatiana or Grace.

  “Now, James,” Charles said. “You should not try to make a young woman choose between you and her family. It is not kind. Grace told me herself that if she were to marry a man not of her mother’s choosing, she would be disowned—”

  “You barely know her,” James snapped. “One carriage ride—”

  “I know her better than you think,” said Charles, with a flash of schoolboy superiority.

  “Are you two talking about the same girl?” said Will, his eyebrows rising. “Grace Blackthorn? I don’t see—”

  “It’s nothing. Nothing.” James could stand it no longer. He rose, buttoning his jacket. “I must be off,” he said. “There’s an orangery in Kensington Gardens that needs smashing. Ladies, lock up your outbuildings. James Herondale is in town and he has been slighted in love!”

  Charles looked pained. “James,” he said, but James had already swept past him and out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

  * * *

  Cordelia plucked nervously at the fabric of her visiting gown. Quite surprisingly, an official invitation to tea from Anna Lightwood—on monogrammed stationery, no less—had arrived by penny post that morning. Cordelia was shocked that after everything that had happened, Anna had remembered her desultory offer. Still, she had seized at the opportunity to get out of the house like a drowning man seizing a rope.

  She’d barely been able to sleep after getting home the night before. Curled under her coverlet, she couldn’t help thinking of Cousin Jem and her father, and helplessly of James, the way he’d been gentle with her ankle, the look on his face when he’d talked about the shadow realm that only he could see. She couldn’t think of a way to help him, any more than she could help her father. She wondered if not being able to help the people you loved was the worst feeling in the world.