He closed his eyes. She was used to dark shadows on his lids, but they were gone now. “I had no choice. You were gone, and in my stead Will had gone after you. I did not fear death, but I feared deserting you both. This, then, was my only recourse. To live, to stand and fight.”
A little color had come into his voice: There was passion there, under the cold detachment of the Silent Brothers.
“But I knew what I would lose,” he said. “Once you understood my music. Now you look at me as though you do not know me at all. As though you never loved me.”
Tessa slid out from beneath the coverlet and stood. It was a mistake. Her head swam suddenly, her knees buckling. She threw out a hand to catch at one of the posts of the bed, and found herself with a handful of Jem’s parchment robes instead. He had darted toward her with the graceful quiet tread of the Brothers that was like smoke unfurling, and his arms were around her now, holding her up.
She went still in his arms. He was close, close enough that she should have been able to feel warmth coming off his body, but she did not. His usual scent of smoke and burned sugar was gone. There was only the faint scent of something dry and as cold as old stone, or paper. She could feel the muffled beat of his heart, see the pulse in his throat. She stared up at him in wonder, memorizing the lines and angles of his face, the scars on his cheekbones, the rough silk of his eyelashes, the bow of his mouth.
“Tessa.” The word came out on a groan, as if she had hit him. There was the faintest trace of color in his cheeks, blood under snow. “Oh, God,” he said, and buried his face in the crook of her neck, where the curve of her shoulder began, his cheek against her hair. His palms were flat against her back, pressing her harder against him. She could feel him trembling.
For a moment she was unmoored by the heady relief of it, the feeling of Jem under her hands. Perhaps you did not really believe in a thing until you could touch it. And here was Jem, who she had thought was dead, holding her, and breathing, and alive.
“You feel the same,” she said. “And yet you look so different. You are different.”
He broke away from her at that, with an effort that made him bite his lip and corded the muscles in his throat. Holding her gently by the shoulders, he guided her to sit down again upon the edge of the bed. When he released her, his hands curled into fists. He took a step back. She could see him breathing, see the pulse going in his throat.
“I am different,” he said in a low voice. “I am changed. And not in a way that can be undone.”
“But you are not entirely one of them yet,” she said. “You can speak—and see—”
He exhaled slowly. He was still staring at the post of the bed as if it held the universe’s secrets. “There is a process. A series of rituals and procedures. No, I am not quite a Silent Brother yet. But I will be soon.”
“So the yin fen did not prevent it.”
“Almost. There was—pain when I made the transition. Great pain, that nearly killed me. They did what they could. But I shall never be like other Silent Brothers.” He looked down, his lashes veiling his eyes. “I shall not be—quite as they are. I will be less powerful, for there are some runes, still, that I cannot withstand.”
“Surely they can just wait now for the yin fen to leave your body completely?”
“It will not. My body has been arrested in the state it was in when they put these first runes on me here.” He indicated the scars on his face. “Because of it, there will be skills I cannot achieve. It will take me much longer to master their vision and speech of the mind.”
“Does that mean they will not take your eyes—sew your lips shut?”
“I don’t know.” His voice was soft now, almost entirely the voice of the Jem she knew. There was a flush across his cheekbones, and she thought of a pale column of hollow marble slowly filling with human blood. “They will have me for a long time. Perhaps forever. I cannot say what will happen. I have given myself over to them. My fate is in their hands now.”
“If we could free you from them—”
“Then the yin fen that remains in me would burn again, and I would be as I was. An addict, dying. This is my choice, Tessa, because it is death otherwise. You know that it is. I do not want to leave you. Even knowing that becoming a Silent Brother could ensure my survival, I fought it as if it were a prison sentence. Silent Brothers cannot marry. They cannot have parabatai. They can live only in the Silent City. They do not laugh. They cannot play music.”
“Oh, Jem,” Tessa said. “Perhaps the Silent Brothers cannot play music, but neither can the dead. If this is the only way you can live, then I rejoice in my soul for you, even as my heart sorrows.”
“I know you too well to think that you would feel another way.”
“And I know you well enough to know that you feel bowed by guilt. But why? You have done nothing wrong.”
He bent his head so that his forehead rested on the bedpost. He closed his eyes. “This is why I did not want to come.”
“But I am not angry—”
“I did not think you would be angry,” Jem burst out, and it was like ice cracking across a frozen waterfall, freeing a torrent. “We were engaged, Tessa. A proposal—an offer of marriage—is a promise. A promise to love and care for someone always. I did not mean to break mine to you. But it was that or die. I wanted to wait, to be married to you and live with you for years, but that wasn’t possible. I was dying too fast. I would have given it up—all of it up—to be married to you for a day. A day that would never have come. You are a reminder—a reminder of everything I am losing. The life I will not have.”
“To give up your life for one day of marriage—it would not have been worth it,” Tessa said. Her heart was pounding out a message that spoke to her of Will’s arms around her, his lips on hers in the cave under Cadair Idris. She didn’t deserve Jem’s gentle confessions, his penitence, or his longing. “Jem, I must tell you something.”
He looked at her. She could see the black in his eyes, threads of black alongside the silver, beautiful and strange.
“It’s about Will. About Will, and me.”
“He loves you,” Jem said. “I know he loves you. We spoke of it before he left here.” Though the coldness had not returned to his voice, he sounded suddenly almost unnaturally calm.
Tessa was shocked. “I didn’t know you had ever talked of it with each other. Will did not say.”
“Nor did you ever tell me of his feelings, though you knew for months. We all have our secrets that we keep because we do not want to hurt the people who love us.” There was a sort of warning in his voice, or was she imagining it?
“I do not want to keep secrets from you any longer,” Tessa said. “I thought you were dead. Will and I both did. In Cadair Idris—”
“Did you love me?” he interrupted. It seemed an odd question, and yet he asked it without implication or hostility, and waited quietly for her answer.
She looked at him, and Woolsey’s words came back to her, like the whisper of a prayer. Most people never find one great love in their life. You are lucky enough to have found two. For a moment she put aside her confession. “Yes. I loved you. I love you still. I love Will, too. I cannot explain it. I didn’t know it when I agreed to marry you. I loved you, I still love you, I never loved you less for all that I love him. It sounds mad, but if anyone might ever understand—”