“Who else?” Jem’s voice. As he stepped forward into the light of the room, Will could see that the hood of his parchment robes was down, his gaze level with Will’s. His face, eyes, all familiar. But Will had always been able to sense Jem before, sense his approach and his presence. The fact that Jem had startled him this time was a sharp reminder of the change in his parabatai.
Not your parabatai any longer, said a small voice in the back of his mind.
Jem came into the room with the soundless tread of the Silent Brothers, closing the door behind him. Will did not move from where he stood. He did not feel that he could. The sight of Jem in Cadair Idris had been a shock that had gone through his system like a terrible and wonderful incandescence—Jem was alive, but he was changed; he lived, but was lost.
“But,” he said. “You are here to see Tessa.”
Jem looked at him levelly. His eyes were gray-black, like slate shot through with streaks of obsidian. “And you did not think I would take the chance, whatever chance I could, to see you, too?”
“I did not know. You left, after the battle, without a farewell.”
Jem took a few steps forward, into the room. Will felt his spine tighten. There was something strange, something bone-deep and different about the way Jem moved now; this was not the Shadowhunter’s grace Will had trained himself over so many years to mimic, but something strange and alien and new.
Jem must have seen something in Will’s expression, for he paused. “How could I say farewell,” he said, “to you?”
Will let the knife fall from his hand. It stuck, point-down, in the wood of the floor. “As Shadowhunters do? Ave atque vale. And forever, brother, hail and farewell.”
“But those are the words of death. Catullus spoke them over his brother’s grave, did he not? Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias—”
Will knew the words. Through many waters borne, brother, I am come to thy sad grave, that I may give these last gifts to the dead. Forever and ever, brother, hail. Forever and ever, farewell. He stared. “You—memorized the poem in Latin? But you were always the one who would memorize music, not words—” He broke off with a short laugh. “Never mind. The rituals of the Brotherhood would have changed that.” He turned and paced a few steps away, then spun abruptly to face Jem. “Your violin is in the music room. I thought you might have taken it with you—you cared for it so.”
“We can take nothing with us to the Silent City but our own bodies and minds,” said Jem. “I left the violin here for some future Shadowhunter who might wish to play it.”
“Not for me, then.”
“I would be honored if you would take it and care for it. But I left something else for you. In your room is my yin fen box. I thought that you might want it.”
“That seems a cruel sort of gift,” Will said. “That I might be reminded . . .” What took you away from me. What made you suffer. What I searched for and could not find. How I failed you.
“Will, no,” said Jem, who, as always, understood without Will having to explain. “It was not always a box that held my drugs. It was my mother’s. Kwan Yin is the goddess depicted on the front. It is said that when she died and reached the gates of paradise, she paused and heard the cries of anguish from the human world below and could not leave it. She remained to give aid to mortals, when they cannot aid themselves. She is the comfort of all suffering hearts.”
“A box will not comfort me.”
“Change is not loss, Will. Not always.”
Will pushed his hands through his damp hair. “Oh, yes,” he said bitterly. “Perhaps in some other life, beyond this one, when we have passed beyond the river, or turned upon the Wheel, or whatever kind words you want to use to describe leaving this world, I shall find my friend again, my parabatai. But I have lost you now—now, when I need you more than I ever did!”
Jem had moved across the room—like a flicker of shadow, the Silent Brother’s grace light upon him—and now stood beside the fire. The firelight illuminated his face, and Will could see that something seemed to shine through him: a sort of light that had not been there before. Jem had always shone, with fierce life and fiercer goodness, but this was something different. The light in Jem seemed to burn now; it was a distant light and a lonely one, like the light of a star. “You don’t need me, Will.”
Will looked down at himself, at the knife at his feet, and remembered the knife he had buried at the base of the tree on the Shrewsbury-Welshpool road, stained with his blood and Jem’s. “All my life, since I came to the Institute, you were the mirror of my soul. I saw the good in me in you. In your eyes alone I found grace. When you are gone from me, who will see me like that?”
There was a silence then. Jem stood as still as a statue. With his gaze Will searched for, and found, the parabatai rune on Jem’s shoulder; like his own, it had faded to a pale white.
At last Jem spoke. The cool remoteness had left his voice. Will breathed in hard, remembering how much that voice had shaped the years of his growing up, its steady kindness a lighthouse beacon in the dark. “Have faith in yourself. You can be your own mirror.”
“What if I can’t?” Will whispered. “I don’t even know how to be a Shadowhunter without you. I have only ever fought with you by my side.”
Jem stepped forward, and this time Will did not move to discourage him. He came close enough to touch—Will thought distractedly that he had never stood so close to a Silent Brother before, that the fabric of the parchment robes was woven of a strange, tough, pale fabric like the bark of a tree, and that cold seemed to emanate from Jem’s skin the way stone held a chill even on a hot day.
Jem put his fingers under Will’s chin, forcing Will to look directly at him. His touch was cold.
Will bit at his lip. This was the last time Jem, as Jem, might ever touch him. The sharp memory went through him like a knife—of years of Jem’s light tap on his shoulder, his hand reaching to help Will up when he fell, Jem holding him back when he was furious, Will’s own hands on Jem’s thin shoulders as Jem coughed blood into his shirt. “Listen to me. I am leaving, but I am living. I will not be gone from you entirely, Will. When you fight now, I will be still by you. When you walk in the world, I will be the light at your side, the ground steady under your feet, the force that drives the sword in your hand. We are bound, beyond the oath. The Marks did not change that. The oath did not change that. It merely gave words to something that existed already.”
“But what of you?” said Will. “Tell me what I can do, for you are my parabatai, and I do not wish you to go into the shadows of the Silent City alone.”
“I have no choice. But if there is one thing I could ask of you, it is that you be happy. I want you to have a family and grow old with those who love you. And if you wish to marry Tessa, then do not let the memory of me keep you apart.”
“She may not want me, you know,” Will said.
Jem smiled, fleetingly. “Well, that part is up to you, I think.”
Will smiled back, and for just that moment they were Jem-and-Will again. Will could see Jem, but also through him, to the past. Will remembered the two of them, running through the dark streets of London, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, seraph blades gleaming in their hands; hours in the training room, shoving each other into mud puddles, throwing snowballs at Jessamine from behind an ice fort in the courtyard, asleep like puppies on the rug in front of the fire.