And he was gone, leaving both girls looking after him in mingled confusion and surprise.
With the training session mercifully over, Tessa found herself hurrying to change back into her ordinary clothes, and then to lunch, eager to see if Will had returned. He hadn’t. His chair, between Jessamine and Henry, still sat empty—but there was someone new in the room, someone who made Tessa stop short at the doorway, trying not to stare. A tall man, he sat near the head of the table beside Charlotte, and was green. Not a very dark green—his skin had a faint greenish sheen to it, like light reflecting off the ocean, and his hair was snowy white. From his forehead curled two small elegant horns.
“Miss Tessa Gray,” said Charlotte, making the introductions, “this is the High Warlock of London, Ragnor Fell. Mr. Fell, Miss Gray.”
After murmuring that she was delighted to meet him, Tessa sat down at the table beside Jem, diagonally from Fell, and tried not to stare at him out of the corner of her eye. As Magnus’s cat’s eyes were his warlock’s mark, Fell’s would be his horns and tinted skin. She couldn’t help being fascinated by Downworlders still, warlocks in particular. Why were they marked and she wasn’t?
“What’s on the carpet, then, Charlotte?” Ragnor was saying. “Did you really call me out here to discuss dark doings on the Yorkshire moors? I was under the impression that nothing of great interest ever happened in Yorkshire. In fact, I was under the impression that there was nothing in Yorkshire except sheep and mining.”
“So you never knew the Shades?” Charlotte inquired. “The warlock population of Britain is not so large . . .”
“I knew them.” As Fell sawed into the ham on his plate, Tessa saw that he had an extra joint to each finger. She thought of Mrs. Black, with her elongated taloned hands, and repressed a shudder. “Shade was a little mad, with his obsession with clockwork and mechanisms. Their death was a shock to Downworld. The ripples of it went through the community, and there was even some discussion of vengeance, though none, I believe, was ever taken.”
Charlotte leaned forward. “Do you remember their son? Their adopted child?”
“I knew of him. A married warlock couple is rare. One who adopts a human child from an orphanage is rarer still. But I never saw the boy. Warlocks—we live forever. A gap of thirty, even fifty, years between meetings is not unusual. Of course now that I know what the boy grew up to be, I wish I had met him. Do you think there is value in attempting to discover who his true parents were?”
“Certainly, if it can be discovered. Whatever information we can glean about Mortmain could be useful.”
“I can tell you he gave himself that name,” said Fell. “It sounds like a Shadowhunter name. It is the sort of name someone with a grudge against Nephilim, and a dark sense of humor, would take. Mort main—”
“Hand of death,” supplied Jessamine, who was proud of her French.
“It does make one wonder,” said Tessa. “If the Clave had simply given Mortmain what he wanted—reparations—would he still have become what he did? Would there ever have been a Pandemonium Club at all?”
“Tessa—,” Charlotte began, but Ragnor Fell waved her silent. He gazed amusedly down the table at Tessa. “You’re the shape-changer, aren’t you?” he said. “Magnus Bane told me about you. No mark on you at all, they say.”
Tessa swallowed and looked him straight in the eye. They were discordantly human eyes, ordinary in his extraordinary face. “No. No mark.”
He grinned around his fork. “I do suppose they’ve looked everywhere?”
“I’m sure Will’s tried,” said Jessamine in a bored tone. Tessa’s silverware clattered to her plate. Jessamine, who had been mashing her peas flat with the side of her knife, looked up when Charlotte let out an aghast, “Jessamine!”
Jessamine shrugged. “Well, he’s like that.”
Fell turned back to his plate with a faint smile on his face. “I remember Will’s father. Quite the ladies’ man, he was. They couldn’t resist him. Until he met Will’s mother, of course. Then he threw it all in and went to live in Wales just to be with her. What a case he was.”
“He fell in love,” said Jem. “It isn’t that peculiar.”
“‘Fell’ into it,” said the warlock, still with the same faint smile. “Hurtled into it is more like. Headlong-crashed into it. Still, there are always some men like that—just one woman for them, and only she will do, or nothing.”
Charlotte looked over at Henry, but he appeared completely lost in thought, counting something—though who knew what—off on his fingers. He was wearing a pink and violet waistcoat today, and had gravy on his sleeve. Charlotte’s shoulders slumped visibly, and she sighed. “Well,” she said. “By all accounts they were very happy together—”
“Until they lost two of their three children and Edmund Herondale gambled away everything they had,” said Fell. “But I imagine you never told young Will about that.”
Tessa exchanged a glance with Jem. My sister is dead, Will had said. “They had three children, then?” she said. “Will had two sisters?”
“Tessa. Please.” Charlotte looked uneasy. “Ragnor . . . I never hired you to invade the privacy of the Herondales, or Will. I did it because I had promised Will I would tell him if harm came to his family.”
Tessa thought of Will—a twelve-year-old Will, clinging to Charlotte’s hand, begging to be told if his family died. Why run? she thought for the hundredth time. Why put them behind you? She had thought perhaps he did not care, but clearly he had cared. Cared still. She could not stop the tightening at her heart as she thought of him calling out for his sister. If he loved Cecily as she had once loved Nate . . .
Mortmain had done something to his family, she thought. As he had to hers. That bound them to each other in a peculiar way, she and Will. Whether he knew it or not.
“Whatever it is that Mortmain has been planning,” she heard herself say, “he has been planning it a long time. Since before I was born, when he tricked or coerced my parents into ‘making’ me. And now we know that years ago he involved himself with Will’s family and moved them to Ravenscar Manor. I fear we are like chess pieces he slides about a board, and the outcome of the game is already known to him.”
“That is what he desires us to think, Tessa,” said Jem. “But he is only a man. And each discovery we make about him makes him more vulnerable. If we were no threat, he would not have sent that automaton to warn us off.”
“He knew exactly where we would be—”
“There is nothing more dangerous than a man bent on revenge,” said Ragnor. “A man who has been bent on it for nearly three score years, who has nurtured it from a tiny, poisonous seed to a living, choking flower. He will see it through, unless you end him first.”
“Then, we will end him,” said Jem shortly. It was as close to a threat as Tessa had ever heard him make.
Tessa looked down at her hands. They were a paler white than they had been when she lived in New York, but they were her hands, familiar, the index finger slightly longer than the middle one, the half-moons of her nails pronounced. I could Change them, she thought. I could become anything, anyone. She had never felt more mutable, more fluid, or more lost.