The blanket was patchwork, the kind that would have been sewed by a woman, a woman who had lived in this house. Tessa drew in her breath and reached—reached into the blanket, searching for a flicker of ownership, the signature of whatever spirit had created and owned it. It was like plunging her hand into dark water and feeling around for an object. After what felt like an age of searching, she lit upon it—a flicker in the darkness, the solidity of a soul.
She concentrated on it, wrapping it around her like the blanket she clung to. The Change was easier now, less painful. She saw her fingers warp and change, becoming the clubbed, arthritic hands of an old woman. Liver spots rose on her skin, her back hunched, and her dress began to hang off her withered form. When her hair fell in front of her eyes, it was white.
The scraping sound came again. A voice echoed in the back of Tessa’s mind, a querulous old woman’s voice demanding to know who was in her house. Tessa stumbled for the door, her breath coming short, her heart fluttering in her chest, and made for the main room of the house.
For a moment she saw nothing. Her eyes were rheumy, filmed over; shapes looked blurred and distant. Then something rose from beside the fire, and Tessa bit back a scream.
It was an automaton. This one was built to look nearly human. It had a thick body, clothed in a dark gray suit, but the arms that protruded from beyond the cuffs were stick-thin, ending in spatulate hands, and the head that rose above the collar was smooth and egglike. Two bulbous eyes were set into the head, but the machine had no other features.
“Who are you?” Tessa demanded in the old woman’s voice, brandishing the sharp pick she had taken earlier. “What are you doing in my house, creature?”
The thing made a whirring, clicking noise, obviously confused. A moment later the front door opened and Mrs. Black swept in. She was wrapped in her dark cloak, her white face blazing under the hood. “What’s going on here?” she demanded. “Did you find—” She broke off, staring at Tessa.
“What’s going on?” Tessa demanded, her voice coming out in the old woman’s high whine. “I ought to ask you that—breaking into perfectly decent folks’ homes—” She blinked, as if to make it clear she couldn’t see very well. “Get out of here, and take your friend”—she jabbed the object she held (A frog pick, said the voice of the old woman in her mind; you use it for cleaning horse’s hooves, silly girl)—“with you. You’ll find nothing here worth stealing.”
For a moment she thought it had worked. Mrs. Black’s face was expressionless. She took a step forward. “You haven’t seen a young girl in these parts, have you?” she asked. “Very finely dressed, brown hair, gray eyes. She would have looked lost. Her people are looking for her and offering a handsome reward.”
“A likely story, looking for some lost girl.” Tessa sounded as surly as she could; it wasn’t difficult. She had a feeling the old woman whose face she was wearing had been a naturally surly sort. “Get out I said!”
The automaton whirred. Mrs. Black’s lips pressed suddenly together, as if she were holding back laughter. “I see,” she said. “Might I say that’s quite a fine necklace you’re wearing, old woman?”
Tessa’s hand flew to her chest, but it was already too late. The clockwork angel was there, clearly visible, ticking gently.
“Take her,” said Mrs. Black in a bored voice, and the automaton lurched forward, reaching for Tessa. She dropped the blanket and backed away, brandishing her frog pick. She managed to rake quite a long gash down the automaton’s front as it reached for her and knocked her arm aside. The frog pick clattered to the floor, and Tessa cried out in pain just as the front door burst open and a flood of automatons filled the room, their arms reaching for her, their mechanical hands closing on her flesh. Knowing she was overpowered, knowing it would not do a bit of good, she finally allowed herself to scream.
Sun on his face woke Will. He blinked, opening his eyes slowly.
Blue sky.
He rolled over and stretched stiffly into a sitting position. He was on the rise of a green hill, just out of sight of the Shrewsbury-Welshpool road. He could see nothing all around him but scattered farmhouses in the distance; he had passed only a few tiny hamlets on his frantic midnight ride away from the Green Man, riding until he literally slid from Balios’s back in exhaustion and hit the dirt with bone-jarring force. Half-walking and half-crawling, he had let his exhausted horse nose him off the road and into a slight dip in the ground, where he had curled up and fallen asleep, heedless of the drizzle of cold rain that had still been falling.
Sometime between then and now the sun had come up, drying his clothes and hair, though he was still dirty, his shirt a mess of caked mud and blood. He rose to his feet, his whole body aching. He hadn’t bothered with any kind of healing runes the previous night. He’d gone into the inn—tracking rain and mud behind him—only to retrieve his things, before returning to the stables to free Balios and hurtle off into the night. The injuries he’d sustained in his battle against Woolsey’s pack still hurt, as did the bruises from falling off the horse. He limped stiffly to where Balios was cropping grass near the shade of a spreading oak tree. A rummage through the saddlebags yielded a stele and a handful of dried fruit. He used the one to trace himself with painkilling and healing runes in between taking bites of the other.
The events of the night before seemed a thousand miles away. He remembered fighting the wolves, the splinter of bones and the taste of his own blood, the mud and the rain. He remembered the pain of the severance from Jem, though he could no longer feel it. Instead of pain he felt hollowness. As if some great hand had reached down and cut everything that made him human out of his insides, leaving him a shell.
When he was done with his breakfast, he returned his stele to his saddlebag, stripped off his ruined shirt, and changed into a clean one. As he did so, he could not help but glance down at the parabatai rune on his chest.
It was not black, but silver-white, like a long-faded scar. Will could hear Jem’s voice in his head, steady and serious and familiar: “And it came to pass . . . that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. . . . Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.” They were two warriors, and their souls were knit together by Heaven, and out of that Jonathan Shadowhunter took the idea of parabatai, and encoded the ceremony into the Law.
For years now this Mark and Jem’s presence had been all Will had had in his life to assure him that he was loved by anybody. All that he’d had to know that he was real and existed. He traced his fingers over the edges of the faded parabatai rune. He had thought he would hate it, hate the sight of it in sunlight, but he found to his surprise that he didn’t. He was glad the parabatai rune had not simply vanished off his skin. A Mark that spoke of loss was still a Mark, a remembrance. You could not lose something you had never had.
Out of the saddlebag he took the knife Jem had given him: a narrow blade with the intricate silver handle. In the shadow of the oak tree, he cut the palm of his hand and watched as the blood ran onto the ground, soaking the earth. Then he knelt and plunged the blade into the bloody ground. Kneeling, he hesitated, one hand on the hilt.