Will smiled, despite everything; he couldn’t help it. It had been the one thing in the past few years that had made him feel fortunate: that he had someone in his life who knew him, knew what he was thinking before he said it out loud. “I would have knocked his teeth out in return,” he said, “but when I went to find him again, he had emigrated to America. To avoid my wrath, no doubt.”
“Hmph,” said Charlotte, the way she always did when she thought Will was getting above himself. “He had many enemies in London, to my understanding.”
“Dydw I ddim yn gwybod pwy yw unrhyw un o’r bobl yr ydych yn siarad amdano,” said Cecily plaintively.
“You may not know who we are talking about, but no one else knows what you are saying,” said Will, though his tone held no real reproof. He could hear the exhaustion in his own voice. The lack of sleep of the night before was taking its toll. “Speak English, Cecy.”
Charlotte rose, returned to her desk, and set the jar of salve down. Cecily tugged on a lock of Will’s hair. “Let me see your hands.”
He held them up. He remembered the fire, the white-hot agony of it, and more than anything else Tessa’s shocked face. He knew she would understand why he had done what he had done, why he had not thought twice about it, but the look in her eyes—as if her heart had broken for him.
He only wished that she were still here. It was good to be here with Jem and Cecily and Charlotte, to be surrounded by their affection, but without her there would always be something missing, a Tessa-shaped part chiseled out of his heart that he would never get back.
Cecily touched his fingers, which looked quite normal now, aside from the soot under his fingernails. “It is quite astonishing,” she said, then patted his hands lightly, careful not to smear the salve. “Will has always been prone to damaging himself,” she added, with fondness in her tone. “I cannot count the broken limbs he sustained when we were children—the scratches, the scars.”
Jem leaned closer against the chair, staring into the fire. “Better it were my hands,” he said.
Will shook his head. Exhaustion was muting the edges of everything in the room, blurring the flocked wallpaper into a single mass of dark color. “No. Not your hands. You need your hands for the violin. What do I need mine for?”
“I should have known what you would do,” Jem said in a low voice. “I always know what you will do. I should have known you would put your hands into the fire.”
“And I should have known you would throw that packet away,” said Will, without rancor. “It was—it was a madly noble thing to do. I understand why you did it.”
“I was thinking of Tessa.” Jem drew his knees up and rested his chin on them, then laughed softly. “Madly noble. Isn’t that meant to be your area of expertise? Suddenly I am the one who does ridiculous things and you tell me to stop?”
“God,” said Will. “When did we change places?”
The firelight played over Jem’s face and hair as he shook his head. “It is a very strange thing, to be in love,” he said. “It changes you.”
Will looked down at Jem, and what he felt, more than jealousy, more than anything else, was a wistful desire to commiserate with his best friend, to speak of the feelings he held in his heart. For were they not the same feelings? Did they not love the same way, the same person? But, “I wish you wouldn’t risk yourself,” was all he said.
Jem stood up. “I have always wished that about you.”
Will raised his eyes, so drowsy with sleep and the tiredness that came with healing runes that he could see Jem only as a haloed figure of light. “Are you going?”
“Yes, to sleep.” Jem touched his fingers lightly to Will’s healing hands. “Let yourself rest, Will.”
Will’s eyes were already drifting closed, even as Jem turned to go. He did not hear the door close behind Jem. Somewhere down the corridor Bridget was singing, her voice rising above the crackle of the fire. Will did not find it as annoying as he usually did, but rather more like a lullaby that his mother would once have sung him, to guide him to sleep.
“Oh, what is brighter than the light?
What is darker than the night?
What is keener than an axe?
What is softer than melting wax?
Truth is brighter than the light,
Falsehood darker than the night.
Revenge is keener than an axe,
And love is softer than melting wax.”
“A riddle song,” Cecily said, her voice drowsy and half-awake. “I’ve always liked those. Do you remember when Mam used to sing to us?”
“A little,” Will admitted. If he were not so tired, he might not have admitted it at all. His mother had always been singing, music filling the corners of the manor house, singing while she walked beside the waters in the Mawddach estuary, or among the daffodils in the gardens. Llawn yw’r coed o ddail a blode, llawn o goriad merch wyf inne.
“Do you remember the sea?” he said, exhaustion making his voice heavy. “The lake at Tal-y-Llyn? There is nothing so blue here in London as either of those things.”
He heard Cecily take a sharp breath. “Of course I remember. I thought you did not.”
Images from dreams painted themselves on the inside of Will’s eyelids, sleep reaching for him like a current, pulling him away from the lighted shore. “I don’t think I can get up out of this chair, Cecy,” he murmured. “I shall rest here tonight.”
Her hand came up, felt for his, and circled it in a loose clasp. “Then I will stay with you,” she said, and her voice became part of the current of dreams and sleep that caught him finally and drew him down and over and under.
To: Gabriel and Gideon Lightwood
From: Consul Josiah Wayland
I was most surprised to receive your missive. I fail to perceive how I could possibly have made myself more clear. I wish for you to relay the details of Mrs. Branwell’s correspondence with her relatives and well-wishers in Idris. I did not request any persiflage about the woman’s milliner. I care neither about her manner of dress nor about your daily menu.
Pray write back to me a letter containing relevant information. I devoutly hope such a letter will also be one more befitting Shadowhunters and less Bedlamites.
In Raziel’s name,
Consul Wayland
8
THAT FIRE OF FIRE
You call it hope—that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “Tamerlane”
Tessa sat at her vanity table methodically brushing out her hair. The air outside was cool but humid, seeming to trap the water of the Thames, scented with iron and city dirt. It was the sort of weather that made her normally thick, wavy hair tangle at the ends. Not that her mind was on her hair; it was simply a repetitive motion, the brushing, that allowed her to keep a sort of forcible calm.
Over and over in her mind she saw Jem’s shock as Charlotte read out Mortmain’s letter, and Will’s burned hands, and the tiny bit of yin fen she had managed to gather up off the floor. She saw Cecily’s arms about Will, and Jem’s anguish as he apologized to Will, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.
She hadn’t been able to bear it. They had been in agony, both of them, and she loved them both. Their pain had been because of her—she was what Mortmain wanted. She was the cause of Jem’s yin fen being gone, and Will’s misery. When she had whirled and run out of the room, it had been because she could not stand it any longer. How could three people who cared for one another so much cause one another so much pain?