Chain of Gold

by Cassandra Clare

  James dropped his hand, and with a last hard look at Alastair, strode from the room. Cordelia went immediately to the door, shut and locked it. She turned to face him.

  “What did you mean?” she said. “By ‘you have no idea what I’ve done for my sister’?”

  “Nothing,” Alastair said, picking up his gloves. “I meant nothing, Cordelia.”

  “Yes, you did,” she said. “I can tell that there is something you’re not telling me, something that has to do with Father. All this time you have acted like my attempts to save him, to save us, are childish and silly. You haven’t stood up for him at all. What are you not telling me?”

  Alastair squeezed his eyes shut. “Please stop asking.”

  “I won’t,” Cordelia said. “You think Father did something wrong. Don’t you?”

  The gloves Alastair had been holding fell to the floor. “It doesn’t matter what I think, Cordelia—”

  “It does matter!” Cordelia said. “It matters when you hide things from me, you and Mâmân. I got a letter from the Consul. It said that they couldn’t try Father with the Mortal Sword because he didn’t remember a thing about the expedition. How could that be? What did he do—”

  “He was drunk,” Alastair said. “The night of the expedition, he was drunk, so drunk he probably sent those poor bastards into a nest of vampires because he didn’t know enough not to. So drunk he doesn’t remember a thing. Because he’s always bloody drunk, Cordelia. The only one of us who didn’t know that is you.”

  Cordelia sank down on the couch. She no longer felt her legs could hold her up. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she whispered.

  “Because I never wanted you to know!” Alastair burst out. “Because I wanted you to have a childhood, a thing I never had. I wanted you to be able to love and respect your father as I never could. Every time he made a mess, who do you think had to clean it up? Who told you Father was ill or sleeping when he was drunk? Who went out and fetched him when he passed out in a gin palace and smuggled him in through the back door? Who learned at ten years old to refill the brandy bottles with water each morning so no one would notice the levels had sunk—?”

  He broke off, breathing hard.

  “Alastair,” Cordelia whispered. It was all true, she knew. She could not help but recall Father lying day after day in a darkened room, her mother saying he was “sick.” Elias’s hands shaking. Wine ceasing to appear at the dinner table. Elias never eating. Cordelia coming across bottles of brandy in odd places: a hall closet, a trunk of linens. Alastair never acknowledging any of it, laughing it off, turning her attention in some other direction, always, so she did not dwell. So she would not have to.

  “He will never win this trial,” said Alastair. He was trembling. “Even though the Mortal Sword is useless, he will indict himself with the way he looks, the way he speaks. The Clave knows a drunk when they see one. That is why Mother wants you married quickly. So you will be safe when the shame of it comes down.”

  “But what of you?” said Cordelia. “No shame should accrue to you, either—Father’s weakness is not your weakness.”

  The fire in the grate had nearly burned down. Alastair’s eyes were luminous in the dark. “I have my own weaknesses, as you well know.”

  “Love is not a weakness, Alastair dâdâsh,” she said, and for a moment she saw Alastair hesitate at the use of the Persian word.

  Then his mouth tightened. The shadows under his eyes looked like bruises; she wondered where he had been, to return so late at night.

  “Isn’t it?” he said, turning to leave the room. “Don’t give your heart to James Herondale, Cordelia. He is in love with Grace Blackthorn and he always will be.”

  * * *

  “You should brush your hair,” Jessamine said, pushing the silver-backed hairbrush along the nightstand toward Lucie. “It will get tangled.”

  “Why must you be such a fussy ghost?” said Lucie, scooting upright against the pillows. She had been firmly ordered to stay in bed, though she was itching to leap up, seize her pen, and write. What was the point of having exciting things happen to you if you couldn’t tell a story about them?

  “When I was a girl, I brushed my hair one hundred strokes a day,” said Jessamine—who, being a ghost, had hair that floated like fine gossamer and never needed brushing. “Why, I—”

  She shrieked and shot up into the air, hovering a foot above the nightstand. A wash of cold went over Lucie. She pulled the blankets up around her, looking about the room anxiously. “Jesse?”

  He materialized at the foot of the bed, in the same black trousers and shirtsleeves he always wore. His eyes were green and very serious. “I am here.”

  Lucie looked up at Jessamine. “Could I have a moment to speak with Jesse alone?”

  “Alone?” Jessamine looked horrified. “But he’s a gentleman. In your bedroom.”

  “I am a ghost,” said Jesse dryly. “What is it exactly you imagine I might do?”

  “Please, Jessamine,” said Lucie.

  Jessamine sniffed. “Never in my day!” she announced, and vanished in a swirl of petticoats.

  “Why are you here?” Lucie said, hugging the blankets to her chest. It was true that Jesse was a ghost, but she still felt awkward about the idea of him seeing her in her nightgown. “I don’t remember you leaving. At the bridge.”

  “Your brother and friends seemed to have the situation well in hand,” Jesse said. His gold locket glimmered at his throat. “And your brother can see ghosts. He’s never seen me before, but—”

  “Humph,” Lucie said. “You do realize I just had to be dishonest with my family and pretend as if I didn’t know you existed or that you raised the dead to bring Cordelia out of the river.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I’m grateful that you did it. Brought Cordelia out of the river, I mean. Don’t think I’m not. It’s just—”

  “You think I called the dead out of the river?” Jesse demanded. “I answered the call.”

  Despite the blanket, Lucie suddenly felt cold all over. “What do you mean?”

  “You called the dead,” said Jesse. “You called the dead, and the dead came. I heard you, across the whole city, calling for someone to help you.”

  “What do you mean? Why would I have any ability to call the dead up? I can see them, but I certainly can’t command—”

  She broke off. She was suddenly back in Emmanuel Gast’s bedroom in that small, terrible flat. You will, she had said when the ghost proclaimed he would never tell, and he had given up his secrets. Leave us, she had said, and he had winked out of existence.

  “You were the only one who could see me in the ballroom,” said Jesse. “You have always been the only one who can see me besides my family. There’s something unusual about you.”

  She stared at him. What if she ordered Jesse to do something? Would he have to do it? Would he have to come to her if she called, as he had on the riverbank?

  She swallowed. “When we were beside the river, when you were with me, you were holding that locket at your throat. Clutching it.”

  “And you want me to tell you why?” he said, and she knew he’d had the same thought she had. She didn’t like the thought. She didn’t want to order him around, or Jessamine. Perhaps she had to be panicked, though, she told herself. She’d been frightened in Gast’s flat, and again at the river.

  “If you want to,” she said.

  “This locket was placed around my throat by my mother,” he said. “It contains my last breath.”

  “Your last breath?”

  “I ought to tell you how I died, I suppose,” he said, perching himself on the windowsill. He seemed to like it there, Lucie thought, just on the threshold. “I was a sickly child. My mother told the Silent Brothers that I wasn’t well enough to withstand being given runes, but I begged and begged. She managed to fight me off until I was seventeen. You might understand that by then, I was desperate to be a Shadowhunter like other Shadowhunters. I told her that
if she did not let me get the Marks, I would run away to Alicante and get them myself.”

  “And did you? Run away?”

  He shook his head. “My mother relented, and the Silent Brothers came to the manor house. The rune ceremony went off without a hitch, and I thought I had triumphed.” He held up his right hand, and she realized what she had thought was a scar was the faint outline of the Voyance rune. “My first rune and my last.”

  “What happened?”

  “When I returned to my room, I collapsed on my bed. Then I woke in the night burning with fever. I remember screaming, and Grace running into my room. She was half-hysterical. Blood was welling from my skin, turning the sheets to scarlet. I writhed and screamed and tore at the bedspread, but I was weakening, nor could they use healing runes on me. I remember realizing I was dying. I had become so weak. Grace held me as I shivered. She was barefoot, and her nightgown and wrapper were soaked with my blood. I remember my mother coming in. She held the locket to my lips, as if she meant me to kiss it.…”

  “Did you?” Lucie whispered.

  “No,” said Jesse matter-of-factly. “I died.”

  For the first time in her life, Lucie felt a pang of pity for Grace. To have her brother die in her arms like that. She could not imagine the agony.

  “I came slowly to understand I was a ghost after that,” said Jesse. “And it took me months of trying before my mother and sister could hear me and speak to me. Even then, I disappeared every morning when the sun came up, and only came back to consciousness with evening. I spent many nights walking alone in Brocelind Forest, with only the dead to see me. And you. A little girl who’d fallen into a faerie trap.”

  Lucie blushed.

  “I was surprised when you saw me,” he said. “And even more when I was able to touch your hand and lift you out of that pit. I thought perhaps it was because you were so young, but no. There is something unusual about you, Lucie. You have a power that is tied to the dead.”

  Lucie sighed. “If only I could have had a power that was tied to bread-and-butter pudding.”

  “That would not have helped Cordelia last night,” Jesse said. He let his head fall back against the windowpane, and Lucie saw that of course he was not reflected in the dark glass. “My mother believes that once everything is in order, and she has all the ingredients a warlock will need, the last breath in this locket can be used to resurrect me. But on the riverbank, I was holding it because…”

  Lucie raised her eyebrows.

  “I thought at first you might have been in the water. Drowning. The life force in the locket could have emptied your lungs and let you breathe.” He hesitated. “I thought, if you were dying, I would use it to bring you back.”

  Lucie inhaled sharply. “You would do that? For me?”

  His eyes were fathomless deep green, the way Lucie imagined the depth of the ocean. His lips parted as if he meant to answer, just as a shaft of dawn light pierced the window glass. He stiffened, his eyes still locked on hers, as if he had been shot through with an arrow.

  “Jesse,” she whispered, but he had already vanished.

  DAYS PAST: LONDON, GROSVENOR SQUARE, 1901

  On the night of the death of Queen Victoria, the bells of London erupted into clamorous alarm.

  Matthew Fairchild also grieved, but not for a dead queen. He grieved for the loss of someone he had never known, for a life that had ended. For a future whose happiness would always be tainted with the shadow of what he had done.

  He knelt before the statue of Jonathan Shadowhunter in his family’s parlor, his hands covered in ash. “Bless me,” he said haltingly, “for I have sinned. I have…” He stopped, unable to say the words. “Tonight someone died because of me. Because of my actions. Someone I loved. Someone I didn’t know. But I loved them just the same.”

  He had thought the prayer might help. It did not. He had shared his secret with Jonathan Shadowhunter, but he would never share it with anyone else: not his parabatai, not his parents, not a single friend or stranger. From that night on, an impassable chasm opened between Matthew and the whole world. None of them knew it, but he was cut off from them forever in all the ways that mattered.

  But that was as it should be, Matthew thought. After all, he had committed murder.

  18 DARKNESS STIRS

  The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:

  And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,

  Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,

  Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,

  And, mingling with the still night and mute sky,

  Its awful hush is felt inaudibly

  —Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire”

  It was late afternoon by the time James was able to pry himself away from the Institute—it seemed every Enclave member who passed through the gates wanted to interrogate him about Mandikhor demons—and head to Grosvenor Square to meet the rest of the Merry Thieves.

  After letting himself into Matthew’s house with his key, James paused for a moment on the steps that led to the cellar. He knew his friends were in the laboratory: he could hear their voices rising up toward him like smoke, could hear Christopher chattering, Matthew’s low and musical tones. He could feel Matthew’s presence, this close to his parabatai, like one magnet coming within range of another.

  He found his friends seated around a high, marble-topped laboratory table. Everywhere were instruments of curious design: a galvanometer for measuring electrical currents, a torsion balance machine, and a clockwork orrery of gold, bronze, and silver—a gift from Charlotte to Henry some years ago. A dozen different microscopes, astrolabes, retorts, and measuring devices were scattered across the table and cabinet tops. On a plinth rested the Colt Single Action army revolver Christopher and Henry had been working on for months before all this had happened. Its river-gray nickel plating was deeply engraved with runes and a curving inscription: LUKE 12:49.

  Christopher’s brass goggles were pushed up into his hair; he wore a shirt and trousers that had been burned and stained so many times he had been forbidden to wear them outside. Matthew could have been his mirror opposite: in blue-and-gold waistcoat and matching spats, he stood well away from the flames of the Bunsen burners, which had been turned up so high that the room was the temperature of a tropical island. Oscar napped gently at his feet.

  “What’s going on, Kit?” said James. “Testing to see the temperature at which Shadowhunters melt?”

  “My hair is certainly ruined,” said Matthew, pushing his hands through the sweat-darkened strands. “I believe Christopher is hard at work on the antidote. I am assisting by providing witty observations and trenchant commentary.”

  “I’d rather you handed me that beaker,” said Christopher, pointing. Matthew shook his head. James grabbed the beaker and passed it to Christopher, who added a few drops of its contents to the liquid simmering in a retort by his elbow. He frowned. “It’s not going well, I’m afraid. Without this one ingredient, it doesn’t seem likely to work.”

  “What ingredient?” James asked.

  “Malos root, a rare plant. Shadowhunters aren’t supposed to cultivate it because doing so violates the Accords. I have been searching, and I asked Anna to try to get me some in Downworld, but we’ve had no luck.”

  “Why would anyone be forbidden from growing some silly plant?” said Matthew.

  “This plant only grows in soil that has been soaked by the blood of murdered mundanes,” said Christopher.

  “I stand corrected,” Matthew admitted. “Ugh.”

  “Dark magic plants, is it?” James’s eyes narrowed. “Christopher—can you draw me a sketch of the root?”

  “Certainly,” said Christopher, as if this were not at all an odd request. He took a notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket and began to scribble on the back. The liquid in the retort had begun to turn black. James eyed it warily.

  “There were so
me forbidden plants growing in Tatiana’s greenhouse,” James explained. “I told Charles about it at the time, and he didn’t seem to feel they were of great concern, but—”

  Christopher held up the sketch, of an almost tulip-like plant with sharp-edged white leaves and a black root.

  “Yes,” James said, his excitement rising. “I remember those—they were in the greenhouse at Chiswick. They struck me because those leaves looked like knives. We could go there now—is there a carriage free?”

  “Yes.” Matthew’s excitement matched James’s own. “Charles had some sort of meeting, but he left the second carriage in the mews. Put your goggles down, Christopher—time for some fieldwork.”

  Christopher grumbled slightly. “All right, all right—but I have to go change. I’m not allowed out in these clothes.”

  “Just switch off anything that might burn down the house first,” said Matthew, catching hold of James’s arm. “We’ll meet you in the front garden.”

  James and Matthew fled through the house (pursued by Oscar, barking in excitement), then paused a moment on the front steps, breathing in the cool air. The sky was heavy with clouds; a bit of weak sunlight peeked through, illuminating the path from the Fairchilds’ front steps to the wall of the front garden, and the gate that led to the street. It had been raining earlier, and the stone was still wet.

  “Where’s Thomas?” James asked, as Matthew tipped his face back to look up at the clouds: though they did not look rain-heavy, they had an energy to them as of an oncoming electrical storm. As did Matthew, James thought.

  “Patrolling with Anna,” said Matthew. “Remember, Thomas is the most elderly of our group. He is required for day patrol.”

  “I am not sure just eighteen is precisely elderly,” said James. “He should have some years before senility sets in.”

  “I get the sense sometimes that he rather likes Alastair Carstairs. Which would indicate senility has already set in.”