“James?” Will said.
There was a world of questions in that one word.
“She’s gone,” Jem said in a flat, uninflected voice. “I ran after the carriage—but it was gaining speed and I could not run fast enough. I lost them near Temple Bar.” His eyes flicked toward Jessamine, but he did not even seem to see her body, or Will holding her, or anything at all. “If I could have run faster—,” he said, and then he doubled up as if he had been struck, a cough ripping through him. He hit the ground on his knees and elbows, blood spattering the ground at his feet. His fingers clawed at the stone. Then he rolled onto his back and was still.
10
LIKE WATER UPON SAND
For I wondered that others, subject to death, did live, since he whom I loved, as if he should never die, was dead; and I wondered yet more that myself, who was to him a second self, could live, he being dead. Well said one of his friends, “Thou half of my soul”; for I felt that my soul and his soul were “one soul in two bodies”: and therefore was my life a horror to me, because I would not live halved. And therefore perchance I feared to die, lest he whom I had much loved should die wholly.
—Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book IV
Cecily pushed open the door of Jem’s bedroom with the tips of her fingers, and stared inside.
The room was quiet but aflutter with movement. Two Silent Brothers stood by the side of Jem’s bed, with Charlotte between them. Her face was grave and tearstained. Will knelt by the side of the bed, still in his bloodstained clothes from the courtyard fight. His head was down on his crossed arms, and he looked as if he was praying. He seemed young and vulnerable and despairing, and despite her conflicted feelings, some part of Cecily longed to go into the room and comfort him.
The rest of her saw the still, white figure lying in the bed, and quailed. She had been here such a short time; she could feel nothing but that she was intruding on the inhabitants of the Institute—their grief, their sorrow.
But she must talk to Will. She had to. She moved forward—
And felt a hand on her shoulder, pulling her away. Her back hit the wall of the corridor, and Gabriel Lightwood immediately released her.
She looked up at him in surprise. He looked exhausted, his green eyes shadowed, flecks of blood in his hair and on the cuffs of his shirt. His collar was damp. He had clearly come from his brother’s room. Gideon had been wounded badly in the leg by an automaton’s blade, and though the iratzes had helped, it seemed there was a limit to what they could cure. Both Sophie and Gabriel had assisted him to his room, though he had protested the whole way that all available attention should go to Jem.
“Do not go in there,” Gabriel said in a low voice. “They are trying to save Jem. Your brother needs to be there for him.”
“Be there for him? What can he do? Will is not a doctor.”
“Even unconscious, James will draw strength from his parabatai.”
“I need to talk to Will for only a moment.”
Gabriel ran his hands through his mop of tousled hair. “You have not been with the Shadowhunters very long,” he said. “You may not understand. To lose your parabatai—it is no small thing. We take it as seriously as losing a husband or wife, or a brother or sister. It is as if it were you lying in that bed.”
“Will would not care so much if I were lying in that bed.”
Gabriel snorted. “Your brother would not have taken so much trouble to warn me off you if he did not care about you, Miss Herondale.”
“No, he does not like you much. Why is that? And why are you giving me advice about him now? You do not like him, either.”
“No,” Gabriel said. “It is not quite like that. I do not like Will Herondale. We have disliked each other for years. In fact, he broke my arm once.”
“Did he?” Cecily’s eyebrows shot up despite herself.
“And yet I am beginning to come to see that many things that I had always thought were certain, are not certain. And Will is one of those things. I was certain he was a scoundrel, but Gideon has told me more about him, and I begin to understand he has a very peculiar sense of honor.”
“And you respect that.”
“I wish to respect it. I wish to understand it. And James Carstairs is one of the best of us; even if I hated Will, I would want him spared now, for Jem’s sake.”
“The thing I must tell my brother,” Cecily said. “Jem would want me to tell him. It is important enough. And it will take but a moment.”
Gabriel rubbed the skin at his temples. He was so very tall—he seemed to tower above Cecily, for all that he was very slender. He had a sharply planed face, not quite pretty, but elegant, his lower lip shaped nearly exactly like a bow. “All right,” he said. “I will go in and send him out.”
“Why you? And not me?”
“If he is angry, if he is grief-stricken, it is better I see it, and that he be furious with me than with you,” Gabriel said matter-of-factly. “I am trusting you, Miss Herondale, that this is important. I hope you won’t disappoint me.”
Cecily said nothing, just watched as Gabriel pushed the door of the sickroom open and went in. She leaned against a wall, her heart pounding, as a murmur of voices came from within. She could hear Charlotte say something about blood replacement runes, which were apparently dangerous—and then the door opened and Gabriel came out.
She stood up straight. “Is Will—”
Gabriel’s eyes flashed at her, and a moment later Will appeared, on Gabriel’s heels, reaching around to shut the door firmly behind him. Gabriel nodded at Cecily and set off down the hall, leaving her alone with her brother.
She had always wondered how you could be alone with someone else, really. If you were with them, weren’t you by definition not alone? But she felt entirely alone now, for Will seemed to be somewhere else completely. He did not even seem to be angry. He leaned against the wall by the door, beside her, and yet he seemed as insubstantial as a ghost.
“Will,” she said.
He did not seem to hear her. He was trembling, his hands shaking with strain and tension.
“Gwilym Owain,” she said again, more softly.
He turned his head to look at her at least, though his eyes were as blue and cold as the water of Llyn Mwyngil in the lee of the mountains. “I first came here when I was twelve,” he said.
“I know,” Cecily said, bewildered. Did he think she could have forgotten? Losing Ella, and then her Will, her beloved older brother, in only a matter of days? But Will did not even seem to hear her.
“It was, to be precise, the tenth of November of that year. And every year after, on the anniversary of that day, I would fall into a black mood of despair. That was the day—that and my birthday—when I was most strongly reminded of Mam and Dad, and of you. I knew you were alive, that you were out there, that you wanted me back, and I could not go, could not even send you a letter. I wrote dozens, of course, and burned them. You had to hate me and blame me for Ella’s death.”
“We never blamed you—”
“After the first year, even though I still dreaded the day’s approach, I began to find that there was something Jem simply had to do every November tenth, some training exercise or some search that would take us to the far end of the city in the cold, wet winter weather. And I would abuse him bitterly for it, of course. Sometimes the damp chill made him ill, or he would forget his drugs and become ill on the day, coughing blood and confined to bed, and that would be a distraction too. And only after it had happened three times—for I am very stupid, Cecy, and think only of myself—did I realize that of course he was doing it for me. He had noticed the date and was doing all he could to draw me from my melancholy.”