She remembered him, remembered the lovely dying boy who had taken the time to comfort a frightened girl he did not know, and had not voiced a word of his own fear. Of course he had left his fingerprints on her heart. How could it be otherwise?
She remembered the time he had offered her his mother’s jade pendant, held out in his shaking hand. She remembered kisses in a carriage. She remembered walking into his room, spilled full with moonlight, and the silver boy standing in front of the window, wringing music more beautiful than desire out of the violin in his hands.
Will, he had said. Is it you, Will?
Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem’s violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.
Jem was mortal now. He would grow old like Will, and like Will he would die, and she did not know if she could bear it again.
And yet.
Most people are lucky to have even one great love in their life. You have found two.
Suddenly her feet were moving, almost without her volition. She was darting into the crowd, pushing past strangers, gasping out apologies as she nearly tripped over the feet of passersby or knocked into them with her elbows. She didn’t care. She was running flat out across the bridge, skidding to a halt at the very end of it, where a series of narrow stone steps led down to the water of the Thames.
She took them two at a time, almost slipping on the damp stone. At the bottom of the steps was a small cement dock, ringed around with a metal railing. The river was high and splashed up between the gaps in the metal, filling the small space with the smell of silt and river water.
Jem stood at the railing, looking out at the water. His hands were jammed tightly into his pockets, his shoulders hunched as if against a strong wind. He was staring ahead almost blindly, and with such fixed intent that he didn’t seem to hear her as she came up behind him. She caught at his sleeve, swinging him around to face her.
“What,” she said breathlessly. “What were you trying to ask me, Jem?”
His eyes widened. His cheeks were flushed, whether from running or the cold air, she wasn’t sure. He looked at her as if she were some bizarre plant that had sprung up on the spot, astonishing him. “Tessa—you followed me?”
“Of course I followed you. You ran off in the middle of a sentence!”
“It wasn’t a very good sentence.” He looked down at the ground, and then up at her again, a smile, as familiar as her own memories, tugging at the corner of his mouth. It came back to her then, a memory lost but not forgotten: Jem’s smile had always been like sunlight. “I never was the one who was good with words,” he said. “If I had my violin, I would be able to play you what I wanted to say.”
“Just try.”
“I don’t—I’m not sure I can. I had six or seven speeches prepared, and I was running through all of them, I think.”
His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans. Tessa reached out and took him gently by the wrists. “Well, I am good with words,” she said. “So let me ask you, then.”
He drew his hands from his pockets and let her wrap her fingers around his wrists. They stood, Jem looking at her from under his dark hair—it had blown across his face in the wind off the river. There was still a single streak of silver in it, startling against the black.
“You asked me if I have loved anyone but Will,” she said. “And the answer is yes. I have loved you. I always have, and I always will.”
She heard his sharp intake of breath. There was a pulse pounding in his throat, visible under the pale skin still laced with the fading white lines of the Brotherhood’s runes.
“They say you cannot love two people equally at once,” she said. “And perhaps for others that is so. But you and Will—you are not like two ordinary people, two people who might have been jealous of each other, or who would have imagined my love for one of them diminished by my love of the other. You merged your souls when you were both children. I could not have loved Will so much if I had not loved you as well. And I could not love you as I do if I had not loved Will as I did.”
Her fingers ringed his wrists lightly, just below the cuffs of his jumper. To touch him like this—it was so strange, and yet it made her want to touch him more. She had almost forgotten how much she missed the touch of someone she loved.
She forced herself to release her hold on him, though, and reached her hand into the collar of her shirt. Carefully she took hold of the chain around her throat and lifted it so that he could see, dangling from it, the jade pendant he had given her so long ago. The inscription on the back still gleamed as if new:
When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze.
“You remember, that you left it with me?” she said. “I’ve never taken it off.”
He closed his eyes. His lashes lay against his cheeks, long and fine. “All these years,” he said, and his voice was a low whisper, and it was not the voice of the boy he had been once, but it was still a voice she loved. “All these years, you wore it? I never knew.”
“It seemed that it would only have been a burden on you, when you were a Silent Brother. I feared you might think that my wearing it meant I had some sort of expectation of you. An expectation you could not fulfill.”
He was silent for a long time. Tessa could hear the lap of the river, the traffic in the distance. It seemed to her she could hear the clouds move across the sky. Every nerve in her body screamed for him to speak, but she waited: waited as the expressions chased themselves across his face, and finally he spoke.
“To be a Silent Brother,” he said, “it is to see everything and nothing all at once. I could see the great map of life, spread out before me. I could see the currents of the world. And human life began to seem a sort of passion play, acted at a distance. When they took the runes from me, when the mantle of the Brotherhood was removed, it was as if I had awoken from a long dream, or as if a shield of glass around me had shattered. I felt everything, all at once, rushing in upon me. All the humanity the Brotherhood’s spells had taken from me. That I had so much humanity to return to me . . . That is because of you. If I had not had you, Tessa, if I had not had these yearly meetings as my anchor and my guide, I do not know if I could have come back.”
There was light in his dark eyes now, and her heart soared in her chest. She had only ever loved two men in her life, and she had never thought to see either of their faces again. “But you have,” she whispered. “And it is a miracle. And you remember what I once told you about miracles.”
He smiled again at that. “ ‘One does not question miracles, or complain that they are not constructed perfectly to one’s liking.’ I suppose that is true. I wish that I could have come back to you earlier. I wish I were the same boy I was when you loved me, once. I fear that the years have changed me into someone else.”