Gabriel was white with rage, his green eyes standing out against his pale skin. “You don’t understand,” he said viciously. “You’re not a Shadowhunter. We have blood pride. Family pride. Granville Fairchild wanted the Institute to go to his daughter, and the Consul made it happen. But even though Fairchild is dead, we can still take that away from him. He was hated—so hated that no one would have married Charlotte if he hadn’t paid off the Branwells to hand Henry over. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows he doesn’t really love her. How could he—”
There was a crack, like the sound of a rifle shot, and Gabriel fell silent. Sophie had slapped him across the face. His pale skin was already beginning to redden. Sophie was staring at him, breathing hard, an incredulous look on her face, as if she could not believe what she had done.
Gabriel’s hands tightened at his sides, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t, Tessa knew. He could not strike a girl, a girl who was not even a Shadowhunter or a Downworlder but merely a mundane. He looked to his brother, but Gideon, expressionless, met his eyes and shook his head slowly; with a choked sound Gabriel spun on his heel and stalked from the room.
“Sophie!” Tessa exclaimed, reaching for her. “Are you all right?”
But Sophie was looking anxiously up at Gideon. “I’m so sorry, sir,” she said. “There’s no excuse—I lost my head, and I—”
“It was a well-placed blow,” Gideon said calmly. “I see you’ve been paying attention to my training.”
Will was sitting up on the bench, his blue eyes lively and curious. “Was it true?” he said. “That story Gabriel just told us.”
Gideon shrugged. “Gabriel worships our father,” he said. “Anything Benedict says is like a pronouncement from on high. I knew my uncle had killed himself, but not the circumstances, until the day after we first came back from training you. Father asked us how the Institute seemed to be run, and I told him it seemed in fine condition, no different from the Institute in Madrid. In fact, I told him I could see no evidence that Charlotte was doing a lax job. That was when he told us this story.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” said Tessa, “what was it that your uncle had done?”
“Silas? Fell in love with his parabatai. Not, actually, as Gabriel says, a minor infraction but a major one. Romantic relationships between parabatai are absolutely forbidden. Though even the best-trained Shadowhunter can fall prey to emotion. The Clave would have separated the two of them, though, and that Silas couldn’t face. That’s why he killed himself. My mother was consumed with rage and grief. I can well believe that her dying wish was that we would take the Institute from the Fairchilds. Gabriel was younger than I when our mother died—only five years old, clinging to her skirts still—and it seems to me his feelings are too overwhelming for him now to quite understand them. Whereas I—I feel that the sins of the fathers should not be visited on the sons.”
“Or the daughters,” said Will.
Gideon looked at him and gave him a crooked smile. There was no dislike in it; in fact, it was jarringly the look of someone who understood Will, and why he behaved as he did. Even Will looked a bit surprised. “There is the problem that Gabriel will never come back here, of course,” said Gideon. “Not after this.”
Sophie, whose color had started to return, paled again. “Mrs. Branwell will be furious—”
Tessa waved her back. “I’ll go after him and apologize, Sophie. It will be all right.”
She heard Gideon call after her, but she was already hurrying from the room. She hated to admit it, but she’d felt a spark of sympathy for Gabriel when Gideon had been telling his story. Losing a mother when you were so young you could barely remember her later was something she had familiarity with. If someone had told her that her mother had had a dying wish, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have done everything in her power to execute it . . . whether it made sense or not.
“Tessa!” She was partway down the corridor when she heard Will calling after her. She spun and saw him striding down the hall in her direction, a half smile on his face.
Her next words wiped his smile away. “Why are you following me? Will, you shouldn’t have left them alone! You must go back to the training room, right away.”
Will planted his feet. “Why?”
Tessa threw up her hands. “Don’t men notice anything? Gideon has designs on Sophie—”
“On Sophie?”
“She’s a very beautiful girl,” flared Tessa. “You’re an idiot if you haven’t noticed the way he looks at her, but I don’t want him taking advantage of her. She’s had enough such trouble in her life—and besides, if you’re with me, Gabriel won’t talk to me. You know he won’t.”
Will muttered something under his breath and seized her wrist. “Here. Come with me.”
The warmth of his skin against hers sent a jolt up her arm. He pulled her into the drawing room and across to the great windows that looked down over the courtyard. He released her wrist just in time for her to lean forward and see the Lightwoods’ carriage rattling furiously across the stone yard and under the iron gates.
“There,” Will said. “Gabriel’s gone anyway, unless you want to chase after the carriage. And Sophie’s perfectly sensible. She’s not going to let Gideon Lightwood have his way with her. Besides, he’s about as charming as a postbox.”
Tessa, surprising even herself, let out a gasp of laughter. She put her hand up to cover her mouth, but it was too late; she was already laughing, leaning a little against the window.
Will looked at her, his blue eyes quizzical, his mouth just beginning to quirk up in a grin. “I must be more amusing than I thought. Which would make me very amusing indeed.”
“I’m not laughing at you,” she told him in between giggles. “Just—Oh! The look on Gabriel’s face when Sophie slapped him. My goodness.” She pushed her hair out of her face and said, “I really shouldn’t be laughing. Half the reason he was so awful was your goading him. I should be angry with you.”
“Oh, should,” said Will, spinning away to drop into a chair near the fire, and stretching out his long legs toward the flames. Like every room in England, Tessa thought, it was chilly in here except just in front of the fire. One roasted in the front and froze in the back, like a badly cooked turkey. “No good sentences ever include the word ‘should.’ I should have paid the tavern bill; now they’re coming to break my legs. I should never have run off with my best friend’s wife; now she devils me constantly. I should—”
“You should,” Tessa said softly, “think about the way the things you do affect Jem.”
Will rolled his head back against the leather of the chair and regarded her. He looked drowsy and tired and beautiful. He could have been some Pre-Raphaelite Apollo. “Is this a serious conversation now, Tess?” His voice still held humor but was edged, like a gold blade edged in razored steel.
Tessa came and sat down in the armchair across from his. “Aren’t you worried that he’s cross with you? He’s your parabatai. And he’s Jem. He’s never cross.”