“Tessa!” The voice echoed in her ear, a ragged shout. She sat bolt upright on the riverbank, her body trembling.
“Will?” She scrambled to her feet and looked around. The moon had passed behind a cloud. The sky above was like dark gray marble, shot through with veins of black. The river ran before her, dark gray in the poor light, and glancing around, she saw only gnarled trees, the steep cliff down which she had fallen, a broad swatch of countryside stretching away in the other direction—fields and stone fences, the occasionally distant dotting of a farmhouse or habitation. She could see nothing like a city or a town, not even a cluster of lights that might have indicated a tiny hamlet.
“Will,” she whispered again, drawing her arms about herself. She was sure it had been his voice she had heard calling her name. No one else’s voice sounded like his. But it was ridiculous. He was not here. He could not be. Perhaps, like Jane Eyre, who had heard Rochester’s voice calling for her on the moors, she was half-dreaming.
At least it was a dream that had driven her out of her unconsciousness. The wind was like a knife of cold, cutting through her clothes—she wore only a thin dress, meant for indoors, and no coat or hat—and into her skin. Her skirts were still wet with river water, her dress and stocking ripped and stained with blood. The angel had saved her life, it seemed, but it had not protected her from injury.
She touched it now, hoping for guidance, but it was as still and mute as ever. As she took her hand away from her throat, though, she heard Will’s voice in her head: Sometimes, when I have to do something I don’t want to do, I pretend I’m a character from a book. It’s easier to know what they would do.
A character from a book, Tessa thought, a good, sensible one, would follow the stream. A character from a book would know that human habitations and towns are often built by water, and would seek out help, rather than blundering into the woods. Resolutely she wrapped her arms about herself and began to trudge downstream.
By the time Will—well-bathed, shaved, and wearing a clean shirt and collar—returned to the common room for supper, the room was half-full of people.
Well, not exactly people. As he was shown to a table, he passed tables where trolls sat hunched together over pints of beer, looking like gnarled old men save for the tusks that protruded from their lower jaws. A thin warlock with a mop of brown hair and a third eye in the center of his forehead was sawing into a veal cutlet. A group sat huddled at a table by the fire—werewolves, Will sensed, from their packlike demeanor. The room smelled of damp and embers and cooking, and Will’s stomach rumbled; he hadn’t realized how hungry he was.
Will studied a map of Wales as he drank his wine (sour, vinegary) and ate the food he was brought (a tough cut of venison with potatoes) and did his best to try to ignore the stares of the other customers. He supposed the stable-boy had been right; they didn’t get many Nephilim here. He felt as if his Marks were glowing like brands. When the plates were cleared away, he took out paper and composed a letter:
Charlotte:
I am sorry for leaving the Institute without your permission. I ask for your forgiveness; I felt I had no other choice.
That, however, is not why I am sending this letter. By the side of the road I have found evidence of Tessa’s passage. Somehow she had managed to cast her jade necklace from the carriage window, I believe so that we might trace her by it. I have it with me now. It is proof undeniable that we were correct in our supposition about Mortmain’s whereabouts. He must be in Cadair Idris. You must write to the Consul and demand that he send a full force to the mountain.
Will Herondale
Having sealed the letter, Will called over the landlord and confirmed that for half a crown, the boy would bring it to the night coach for delivery. Having made his payment, Will sat back, considering whether he should force down another glass of wine to ensure that he could sleep—when a sharp, stabbing pain shot through his chest. It felt like being shot with an arrow, and Will jerked back. His wineglass crashed to the floor and shattered. He lurched to his feet, leaning both hands on the table. He was vaguely aware of stares, and the landlord’s anxious voice in his ear, but the pain was too great to think through, almost too great to breathe through.
The tightness in his chest, the one that he had thought of as one end of a cord tying him to Jem, had pulled so taut that it was strangling his heart. He stumbled away from his table, pushing through a knot of customers near the bar, and passed to the front door of the inn. All he could think of was air, getting air into his lungs to breathe.
He pushed the doors open and half-tumbled out into the night. For a moment the pain in his chest eased, and he fell back against the wall of the inn. Rain was sheeting down, soaking his hair and clothes. He gasped, his heart stuttering with a mixture of terror and desperation. Was this just the distance from Jem affecting him? He had never felt anything like this, even when Jem had been at his worst, even when he’d been injured and Will had ached with sympathetic pain.
The cord snapped.
For a moment everything went white, the courtyard bleaching through as if with acid. Will jackknifed to his knees, vomiting up his supper into the mud. When the spasms had passed, he staggered to his feet and blindly away from the inn, as if trying to outrace his own pain. He fetched up against the wall of the stables, beside the horse trough. He dropped to his knees to plunge his hands into the icy water—and saw his own reflection. There was his face, as white as death, and his shirt, and a spreading stain of red across the front.
With wet hands he seized at his lapels and jerked the shirt open. In the dim light that spilled from the inn, he could see that his parabatai rune, just over his heart, was bleeding.
His hands were covered in blood, blood mixed with rain, the same rain that was washing the blood away from his chest, showing the rune as it began to fade from black to silver, changing all that had been sense in Will’s life into nonsense.
Jem was dead.
Tessa had been walking for hours, and her thin shoes were cut through from the jagged rocks by the riverbed. She had started out almost running, but exhaustion and cold had overtaken her, and now she was limping slowly, if determinedly, downstream. The soaked material of her skirts dragged her down, feeling like an anchor that would pull her to the bottom of some terrible sea.
She had seen no sign of human habitation for miles, and was beginning to despair of her plan, when a clearing came into view. It had begun to rain lightly, but even through the drizzle she could see the outline of a low stone building. As she drew closer, she saw that it seemed to be a small house, with a thatched roof and overgrown path leading to the front door.
She picked up her pace, hurrying now, thinking of a kindly farmer and his wife, the kind in books who would take in a young girl and help contact her family, as the Rivers had done for Jane in Jane Eyre. As she drew closer, though, she noticed the dirty and broken windows and the grass growing on the thatched roof. Her heart sank. The house was deserted.
The door was already part open, the wood swelled with rain. There was something frightening about the house’s emptiness, but Tessa was desperate for shelter from both the rain and any pursuers that Mortmain might have sent after her. She clung to the hope that Mrs. Black would think she had died in the fall, but she doubted that Mortmain would be so easily put off her trail. After all, if anyone knew what her clockwork angel could do, it would be him.