He put his arms about himself as if he were cold. “I do not know who to be without him,” he said. “Tessa is gone, and every moment she is gone is a knife ripping me apart from the inside. She is gone, and they cannot track her, and I have no idea where to go or what to do next, and the only person I can imagine speaking my agony to is the one person who cannot know. Even if he were not dying.”
“Will. Will.” She put her hand on his arm. “Please listen to me. This is about finding Tessa. I believe I know where Mortmain is.”
His eyes snapped wide at that. “How could you know?”
“I was close enough to you to hear what Jessamine said when she was dying,” Cecily said, feeling the blood pounding in him under his skin. His heart was hammering. “She said you were a terrible Welshman.”
“Jessamine?” He sounded bewildered, but she saw the slight narrowing of his eyes. Perhaps, unconsciously, he was beginning to follow the same line of thought that she had.
“She kept saying Mortmain was in Idris. But the Clave knows he is not,” said Cecily rapidly. “You did not know Mortmain when he lived in Wales, but I did. He knows it well. And once you did too. We grew up in the shadow of the mountain, Will. Think.”
He stared at her. “You don’t imagine—Cadair Idris?”
“He knows those mountains, Will,” she said. “And he would find it all funny, a great joke on you and all the Nephilim. He has taken her exactly where you fled from. He has taken her to our home.”
“A posset?” said Gideon, taking the steaming mug from Sophie. “I feel like a child again.”
“It has spice and wine in it. It will do you good. Build up your blood.” Sophie fussed about, not looking at Gideon directly as she set the tray she had been carrying down on the nightstand beside his bed. He was sitting up, one of the legs of his trousers cut away below the knee and the leg itself wrapped in bandages. His hair was still disarrayed from the fight, and though he had been given clean clothes to wear, he still smelled slightly of blood and sweat.
“These build up my blood,” he said, holding out an arm on which two blood-replacement runes, sangliers, had been inked.
“Is that supposed to mean that you don’t like possets, either?” she demanded, her hands on her hips. She could still recall how annoyed she’d been with him about the scones, but she had forgiven him completely the night before, while reading his letter to the Consul (which she had not had a chance to post yet—it was still in the pocket of her bloodstained apron). And today, when the automaton had sliced at his leg on the Institute steps and he’d fallen, blood pouring from the open wound, her heart had seized up with a terror that had surprised her.
“No one likes possets,” he said with a faint but charming smile.
“Do I have to stay and make sure you drink it, or are you going to throw it under the bed? Because then we’ll have mice.”
He had the grace to look sheepish; Sophie rather wished she had been there when Bridget had swept into his room and announced that she was there to clean the scones out from under the bed. “Sophie,” he said, and when she gave him a stern look, he took a hasty swig of the posset. “Miss Collins. I have not yet had a chance to properly apologize to you, so let me take it now. Please forgive me for the trick I played on you with the scones. I did not mean to show you disrespect. I hope you do not imagine I think any less of you for your position in the household, for you are one of the finest and bravest ladies I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.”
Sophie took her hands off her hips. “Well,” she said. It was not many gentlemen who would apologize to a servant. “That is a very pretty apology.”
“And I am sure the scones are very good,” he added hastily. “I just don’t like scones. I never have liked scones. It’s not your scones.”
“Do please stop saying the word ‘scone,’ Mr. Lightwood.”
“All right.”
“And they are not my scones; Bridget made them.”
“All right.”
“And you are not drinking your posset.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it hastily and lifted the mug. When he was looking at her over the rim, she relented, and smiled. His eyes lit up.
“Very well,” she said. “You do not like scones. How do you feel about sponge cake?”
It was midafternoon and the sun was high and weak in the sky. A dozen or so of the Enclave Shadowhunters, and several Silent Brothers, were spread out across the property of the Institute. They had taken away Jessamine earlier, and the body of the dead Silent Brother, whose name Cecily had not known. She could hear voices from the courtyard, and the clank of metal, as the Enclave sifted through remnants of the automaton attack.
In the drawing room, however, the loudest noise was the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner. The curtains were drawn back, and in the pale sunlight the Consul stood scowling, his thick arms crossed over his chest. “This is madness, Charlotte,” he said. “Utter madness, and based on the fancy of a child.”
“I am not a child,” Cecily snapped. She was seated in a chair by the fireplace, the same one Will had fallen asleep in the night before—had it been such a short time ago? Will stood beside her, glowering. He had not changed his clothes. Henry was in Jem’s room with the Silent Brothers; Jem had still not regained consciousness, and only the arrival of the Consul had dragged Charlotte and Will from his side. “And my parents knew Mortmain, as you well know. He befriended my family, my father. He gave us Ravenscar Manor when my father had—when we lost our house near Dolgellau.”
“It is true,” said Charlotte, who stood behind her desk, papers spread out before her on the surface. “I spoke to you of it this summer, of what Ragnor Fell had reported to me about the Herondales.”
Will pulled his fists from his trouser pockets and faced the Consul angrily. “It was a joke to Mortmain, giving my family that house! He toyed with us. Why would he not extend the joke in this manner?”
“Here, Josiah,” said Charlotte, indicating one of the papers on the desk in front of her. A map of Wales. “There is a Lake Lyn in Idris—and here, Tal-y-Llyn lake, at the foot of Cadair Idris—”
“‘Llyn’ means ‘lake,’” said Cecily in an exasperated tone. “And we call it Llyn Mwyngil, though some call it Tal-y-Llyn—”
“And there are probably other locations in the world with the name of Idris,” snapped the Consul, before he seemed to realize that he was arguing with a fifteen-year-old girl, and subsided.
“But this one means something,” Will said. “They say the lakes around the mountain are bottomless—that the mountain itself is hollow, and inside it sleep the Cwn Annwn, the Hounds of the Underworld.”
“The Wild Hunt,” said Charlotte.
“Yes.” Will raked his dark hair back. “We are Nephilim. We believe in legends, in myths. All the stories are true. Where better than a hollow mountain already associated with dark magic and portents of death to hide himself and his contraptions? No one would find it odd if strange noises came from the mountain, and no locals would investigate. Why else would he even be in the area? I always wondered why he took a particular interest in my family. Maybe it was simple proximity—the opportunity to devil a Nephilim family. He would have been unable to resist it.”