Tho some call it the road to Heaven.”
“She’s singing,” said Cecily, starting up the steps. “Again.”
Gabriel, balancing the parcels nimbly, made an equable noise. “I’m famished. I wonder if she’ll scare me up some cold chicken and bread in the kitchen if I tell her I don’t mind the songs?”
“Everyone minds the songs.” Cecily looked at him sideways; he had an awfully fine profile. Gideon was good-looking as well, but Gabriel was all sharp angles, chin, and cheekbones, which she thought altogether more elegant. “It isn’t your fault, you know,” she said abruptly.
“What is not my fault?” They turned from the steps onto the corridor of the second floor. It seemed dark to Cecily, the witchlights turned down low. She could hear Bridget, still singing:
“It was dark, dark night, there was no starlight,
And they waded through red blood to the knee;
For all the blood that’s shed on earth
Runs through the springs of that country.”
“Your father,” Cecily said.
Gabriel’s face tightened. For a moment Cecily thought he was going to make an angry retort, but instead he said only: “It may or may not be my fault, but I chose to be blind to his crimes. I believed in him when it was wrong to do so, and he has disgraced the name of Lightwood.”
Cecily was silent for a moment. “I came here because I believed Shadowhunters were monsters who had taken my brother. I believed it because my parents believed it. But they were wrong. We are not our parents, Gabriel. We do not have to carry the burden of their choices or their sins. You can make the Lightwood name shine again.”
“That is the difference between you and me,” he said, with not a little bitterness. “You chose to come here. I was driven out of my home—chased here by the monster that was once my father.”
“Well,” Cecily said kindly, “not chased all the way here. Only as far as Chiswick, I thought.”
“What—”
She smiled at him. “I am Will Herondale’s sister. You can’t expect me to be serious all the time.”
His expression at that was so comical that she giggled; she was still giggling when they pushed the library door open and entered—and both stopped dead in their tracks.
Charlotte, Henry, and Gideon were sitting around one of the long tables. Magnus stood a distance away, by the window, his hands clasped behind him. His back was rigid and straight. Henry looked wan and tired, Charlotte tearstained. Gideon’s face was a mask.
The laughter died on Cecily’s lips. “What is it? Has there been word? Is Will—”
“It is not Will,” said Charlotte. “It is Jem.” Cecily bit her lip, even as her heartbeat slowed with guilty relief. She had thought first of her brother, but of course it was his parabatai who was in more imminent peril.
“Jem?” she breathed.
“He is still alive,” Henry said, in answer to her unspoken question.
“Well, then. We got everything,” Gabriel said, putting the parcels down on the table. “Everything Magnus asked for—the damiana, the bat’s head root—”
“Thank you.” Magnus spoke from the window, without turning.
“Yes, thank you,” Charlotte said. “You did all I asked, and I am grateful. But I am afraid your errand was in vain.” She looked down at the parcel, and then back up again. It was clear that it was taking her a great effort to speak. “Jem has made a decision,” she said. “He wishes us to cease searching for a cure. He has had the last of the yin fen; there is no more, and it is a matter of hours now. I have summoned the Silent Brothers. It is time to say good-bye.”
It was dark in the training room. The shadows lay long upon the floor, and moonlight came in through the high arched windows. Cecily sat on one of the worn benches and stared down at the patterns the moonlight made on the splintered wooden floor.
Her right hand idly worried at the red pendant around her throat. She could not help but think of her brother. Part of her mind was there in the Institute, but the rest was with Will: on the back of a horse, leaning into the wind, riding hell-for-leather over the roads that separated London from Dolgellau. She wondered if he was frightened. She wondered if she would see him again.
So deep in thought was she that she started at the creak of the door as it opened. A long shadow was cast across the floor, and she looked up to see Gabriel Lightwood blinking at her in surprise.
“Hiding here, are you?” he said. “That’s—awkward.”
“Why?” She was surprised at how ordinary her voice sounded, even calm.
“Because I had intended to hide here myself.”
Cecily was silent for a moment. Gabriel actually looked a little uncertain—it hung strangely on him; he was usually so confident. Though it was a more fragile confidence than his brother’s. It was too dark for her to see the color of his eyes or hair, and for the first time she could actually see the resemblance between him and Gideon. They had the same determined set to their chins, the same wide-spaced eyes and careful stance. “You may hide here with me,” she said, “if you wish.”
He nodded, and crossed the room to where she sat, but instead of joining her he moved to the window and glanced outside. “The Silent Brothers’ carriage is here,” he said.
“Yes,” said Cecily. She knew from her reading of the Codex that the Silent Brothers were both the doctors and the priests of the Shadowhunter world; one might expect to find them at deathbeds and sickbeds and childbed alike. “I thought I should see Jem. For Will. But I could—I could not bring myself. I am a coward,” she added as an afterthought. It was not something she had ever thought about herself before.
“Then I am too,” he replied. The moonlight fell across one side of his face, making him look as if he were wearing a half mask. “I had come up here to be alone and, frankly, to be away from the Brothers, for they give me the chills. I thought I might play solitaire. We could, if you’d like, have a game of Beggar My Neighbor.”
“Like Pip and Estella in Great Expectations,” said Cecily, with a flash of amusement. “But, no—I do not know how to play cards. My mother tried to keep cards out of the house, as my father . . . had a weakness for them.” She looked up at Gabriel. “You know, in some ways we are the same. Our brothers left and we were alone without brother or sister, with a father who was deteriorating. Mine went a bit mad for a while after Will left and Ella died. It took him years to recover himself, and in the meantime we lost our home. Just as you lost Chiswick.”
“Chiswick was taken from us,” said Gabriel with an acidic flash of bitterness. “And to be quite honest, I am both sorry and not. My memories of the place—” He shuddered. “My father locked himself in his study a fortnight before I came here for help. I should have come earlier, but I was too proud. I did not want to admit that I had been wrong about Father. For that two weeks I barely slept. I banged on the door of the study and begged my father to come out, to speak to me, but I heard only inhuman noises. I turned the lock on my door at night and in the morning there would be blood on the stairs. I told myself the servants had fled. I knew better. So no, we are not the same, Cecily, because you left. You were brave. I stayed until there was no choice but to leave. I stayed even though I knew it was wrong.”