“Ah.” Cecily felt a slight pang of disappointment. “I am quite all right.”
Tessa moved forward slightly. “Is that Great Expectations?”
“Yes.” Cecily did not say that she had seen Will reading it, and had picked it up to try to gain insight into what he was thinking. So far she was woefully lost. Pip was morbid, and Estella so awful that Cecily wanted to shake her.
“‘Estella,’” Tessa said softly. “‘To the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil.’”
“So you memorize passages of books, just like Will? Or is this a favorite?”
“I don’t have Will’s memory,” said Tessa, coming forward slightly. “Or his mnemosyne rune. But I do love that book.” Her gray eyes searched Cecily’s face. “Why are you still in your gear?”
“I was thinking of going up to the training room,” Cecily said. “I find I can think well there, and it isn’t as if anyone minds one way or the other what I do.”
“More training? Cecily, you’ve just been in a battle!” Tessa protested. “I know it can sometimes take more than one application of runes to entirely heal— Before you start training again, I should call someone to you: Charlotte, or—”
“Or Will?” Cecily snapped. “If either of them cared, they would have come already.”
Tessa paused by the bedside. “You cannot think Will doesn’t care about you.”
“He isn’t here, is he?”
“He sent me,” Tessa said, “because he is with Jem,” as if that explained everything. Cecily supposed that in a way it did. She knew that Will and Jem were close friends, but also that it was more than that. She had read of parabatai in the Codex, and knew that the bond was one that did not exist among mundanes, something closer than brothers and better than blood. “Jem is his parabatai. He has made a vow to be there in times like this.”
“He would be there, vow or not. He would be there for any of you. But he has not so much as come by to see if I needed another iratze.”
“Cecy …,” Tessa began. “Will’s curse—”
“It wasn’t a real curse!”
“You know,” Tessa said thoughtfully, “in its way, it was. He believed no one could love him, and that if he allowed them to, it would result in their death. That is why he left you all. He left you to keep you safe, and here you are now—the very definition, to him, of not safe. He cannot bear to come and look at your injuries, because to him it is as if he had put them there himself.”
“I chose this. Shadowhunting. And not only because I wanted to be with Will.”
“I know that,” Tessa said. “But I also sat with Will while he was delirious from exposure to vampire blood, choking on holy water, and I know the name he called out. It was yours.”
Cecily looked up in surprise. “Will called out for me?”
“Oh, yes.” A small smile touched the edge of Tessa’s mouth. “He wouldn’t tell me who you were, of course, when I asked him, and it drove me half-mad—” She broke off, and looked away.
“Why?”
“Curiosity,” said Tessa with a shrug, though there was a flush on her cheekbones. “It’s my besetting sin. In any event, he loves you. I know that with Will everything is backward and upside down, but the fact that he isn’t here is only further proof to me of how precious you are to him. He is used to pushing away everyone he loves, and the more he loves you, the more he will violently try not to show it.”
“But there is no curse—”
“The habits of years are not unlearned so quickly,” Tessa said, and her eyes were sad. “Do not make the mistake of believing that he does not love you because he plays at not caring, Cecily. Confront him if you must and demand the truth, but do not make the mistake of turning away because you believe that he is a lost cause. Do not cast him from your heart. For if you do, you will regret it.”
To: Members of the Council
From: Consul Josiah Wayland
Forgive the delay in my reply, gentlemen. I wished to be sure that I was not giving you my opinions in any spirit of precipitate haste, but rather that my words were the sound and well-reasoned results of patient thought.
I am afraid I cannot second your recommendation of Charlotte Branwell as my successor. Though possessed of a good heart, she is altogether too flighty, emotional, passionate, and disobedient to have the making of a Consul. As we know, the fair sex has its weaknesses that men are not heir to, and sadly she is prey to all of them. No, I cannot recommend her. I urge you to consider another—my own nephew, George Penhallow, who will be twenty-five this November and is a fine Shadowhunter and an upstanding young man. I believe he has the moral certainty and strength of character to lead the Shadowhunters into a new decade.
In Raziel’s name,
Consul Josiah Wayland
4
TO BE WISE AND LOVE
For to be wise and love
Exceeds man’s might.
—Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
“I thought you’d at least make a song out of it,” said Jem.
Will looked at his parabatai curiously. Jem, though he had asked for Will, did not seem in a forthcoming mood. He was sitting quietly on the edge of his bed in a clean shirt and trousers, though the shirt was loose and made him look thinner than ever. There were still flecks of dried blood around his collarbones, a sort of brutal necklace. “Make a song out of what?”
Jem’s mouth quirked. “Our defeat of the worm?” he said. “After all those jokes you made …”
“I have not been in a joking mood, these past few hours,” Will said, his eyes flicking to the bloody rags that covered the nightstand by the bed, the bowl half-full of pinkish fluid.
“Don’t fuss, Will,” Jem said. “Everyone’s been fussing over me and I can’t abide it; I wanted you because—because you wouldn’t. You make me laugh.”
Will threw his arms up. “Oh, all right,” he said. “How’s this?
“Forsooth, I no longer toil in vain,
To prove that demon pox warps the brain.
So though ‘tis pity, it’s not in vain
That the pox-ridden worm was slain:
For to believe in me, you all must deign.”
Jem burst out laughing. “Well, that was awful.”
“It was impromptu!”
“Will, there is such a thing as scansion—” Between one moment and the next Jem’s laughter turned into a fit of coughing. Will darted forward as Jem doubled up, his thin shoulders heaving. Blood splattered the bed’s white coverlet.
“Jem —”
With a hand, Jem gestured toward the box on his nightstand. Will reached for it; the delicately drawn woman on the lid, pouring water from a jug, was intimately familiar to him. He hated the sight of her.
He snapped the box open—and froze. What looked like a light dusting of silvery powdered sugar barely covered the wooden bottom. Perhaps there had been a greater quantity before the Silent Brothers had treated Jem; Will did not know. What he did know was that there should have remained much, much more. “Jem,” he said in a strangled voice, “how is this all there is?”