“Perhaps it’s better that he’s cross with me,” said Will. “So much saintlike patience cannot be good for anyone.”
“Do not mock him.” Tessa’s tone was sharp.
“Nothing is beyond mockery, Tess.”
“Jem is. He has always been good to you. He is nothing but goodness. That he hit you last night, that only shows how capable you are of driving even saints to madness.”
“Jem hit me?” Will, fingering his cheek, looked amazed. “I must confess, I remember very little of last night. Only that the two of you woke me, though I very much wanted to stay asleep. I remember Jem shouting at me, and you holding me. I knew it was you. You always smell of lavender.”
Tessa ignored this. “Well, Jem hit you. And you deserved it.”
“You do look scornful—rather like Raziel in all those paintings, as if he were looking down on us. So tell me, scornful angel, what did I do to deserve being hit in the face by James?”
Tessa reached for the words, but they eluded her; she turned to the language she and Will shared—poetry. “You know, in that essay of Donne’s, what he says—”
“‘License my roving hands, and let them go’?” quoted Will, eyeing her.
“I meant the essay about how no man is an island. Everything you do touches others. Yet you never think about it. You behave as if you live on some sort of—of Will island, and none of your actions can have any consequences. Yet they do.”
“How does my going to a warlock den affect Jem?” Will inquired. “I suppose he had to come and haul me out, but he’s done more dangerous things in the past for me. We protect each other—”
“No, you don’t,” Tessa cried in frustration. “Do you think he cares about the danger? Do you? His whole life has been destroyed by this drug, this yin fen, and there you go off to a warlock den and drug yourself up as if it doesn’t even matter, as if it’s just a game to you. He has to take this foul stuff every day just so he can live, but in the meantime it’s killing him. He hates to be dependent on it. He can’t even bring himself to buy it; he has you do that.” Will made a sound of protest, but Tessa held up a hand. “And then you swan down to Whitechapel and throw your money at the people who make these drugs and addict other people to them, as if it were some sort of holiday on the Continent for you. What were you thinking?”
“But it had nothing to do with Jem at all—”
“You didn’t think about him,” said Tessa. “But perhaps you should have. Don’t you understand he thinks you made a mockery out of what’s killing him? And you’re supposed to be his brother.”
Will had whitened. “He can’t think that.”
“He does,” she said. “He understands you don’t care what other people think about you. But I believe he always expected you’d care what he thought. What he felt.”
Will leaned forward. The firelight made odd patterns against his skin, darkening the bruise on his cheek to black. “I do care what other people think,” he said with a surprising intensity, staring into the flames. “It’s all I think about—what others think, what they feel about me, and I about them; it drives me mad. I wanted escape—”
“You can’t mean that. Will Herondale, minding what others think of him?” Tessa tried to make her voice as light as possible. The look on his face startled her. It was not closed but open, as if he were caught half-entangled in a thought he desperately wanted to share, but could not bear to. This is the boy who took my private letters and hid them in his room, she thought, but she could work up no anger about it. She had thought she would be furious when she saw him again, but she was not, only puzzled and wondering. Surely it showed a curiosity about other people that was quite un-Will-like, to want to read them in the first place?
There was something raw in his face, his voice. “Tess,” he said. “That is all I think about. I never look at you without thinking about what you feel about me and fearing—”
He broke off as the drawing room door opened and Charlotte came in, followed by a tall man whose bright blond hair shone like a sunflower in the dim light. Will turned away quickly, his face working. Tessa stared at him. What had he been going to say?
“Oh!” Charlotte was clearly startled to see them both. “Tessa, Will—I didn’t realize you were in here.”
Will’s hands were in fists at his sides, his face in shadow, but his voice was level when he replied: “We saw the fire going. It’s as chill as ice in the rest of the house.”
Tessa stood up. “We’ll just be on our way—”
“Will Herondale, excellent to see you looking well. And Tessa Gray!” The blond man broke away from Charlotte and came toward Tessa, beaming as if he knew her. “The shape-changer, correct? Enchanted to meet you. What a curiosity.”
Charlotte sighed. “Mr. Woolsey Scott, this is Miss Tessa Gray. Tessa, this is Mr. Woolsey Scott, head of the London werewolf pack, and an old friend of the Clave.”
“Very well, then,” said Gideon as the door shut behind Tessa and Will. He turned toward Sophie, who was suddenly acutely aware of the largeness of the room, and how small she felt inside it. “Shall we continue with the training?”
He held out a knife to her, shining like a silver wand in the room’s dimness. His green eyes were steady. Everything about Gideon was steady—his gaze, his voice, the way he held himself. She remembered what it felt like to have those steady arms around her, and shivered involuntarily. She had never been alone with him before, and it frightened her. “I don’t think my heart would be in it, Mr. Lightwood,” she said. “I appreciate the offer all the same, but . . .”
He lowered his arm slowly. “You think that I don’t take training you seriously?”
“I think you’re being very generous. But I ought to face facts, oughtn’t I? This training was never about me or Tessa. It was about your father and the Institute. And now that I’ve slapped your brother—” She felt her throat tighten. “Mrs. Branwell would be so disappointed in me if she knew.”
“Nonsense. He deserved it. And the little matter of the blood feud between our families does come to mind.” Gideon spun the silver knife carelessly about his finger and thrust it through his belt. “Charlotte would probably give you a rise in salary if she knew.”
Sophie shook her head. They were only a few steps from a bench; she sank down onto it, feeling exhausted. “You don’t know Charlotte. She’d feel honor-bound to discipline me.”
Gideon settled himself on the bench—not beside her, but against the far side of it, as distant from her as he could get. Sophie couldn’t decide whether she was pleased about that or not. “Miss Collins,” he said. “There is something you ought to know.”
She laced her fingers together. “What is that?”
He leaned forward a little, his broad shoulders hunched. She could see the flecks of gray in his green eyes. “When my father called me back from Madrid,” he said, “I did not want to come. I had never been happy in London. Our house has been a miserable place since my mother died.”