Clockwork Prince
Page 16

"You should have told him," said Magnus. "He would have chosen to be your parabatai anyway, even knowing the risks."
"I cannot burden him with that knowledge! He would keep it secret if I asked him to, but it would pain him to know it-and the pain I cause others would only hurt him more. Yet if I were to tell Charlotte, to tell Henry and the rest, that my behavior is a sham-that every cruel thing I have said to them is a lie, that I wander the streets only to give the impression that I have been out drinking and whoring when in reality I have no desire to do either-then I have ceased to push them away."
"And thus you have never told anyone of this curse? No one but myself, since you were twelve years old?"
"I could not," Will said. "How could I be sure they would form no attachment to me, once they knew the truth? A story like that might engender pity, pity could become attachment, and then . . ."
Magnus raised his eyebrows. "Are you not concerned about me?"
"That you might love me?" Will sounded genuinely startled. "No, for you hate Nephilim, do you not? And besides, I imagine you warlocks have ways to guard against unwanted emotions. But for those like Charlotte, like Henry, if they knew the persona I presented to them was false, if they knew of my true heart . . . they might come to care for me."
"And then they would die," said Magnus.
* * * Charlotte raised her face slowly from her hands. "And you've absolutely no idea where he is?" she asked for the third time. "Wil is simply-gone?"
"Charlotte." Jem's voice was soothing. They were in the drawing room, with its wal paper of flowers and vines. Sophie was by the fire, using the poker to coax more flames from the coal. Henry sat behind the desk, fiddling with a set of copper instruments; Jessamine was on the chaise, and Charlotte was in an armchair by the fire. Tessa and Jem sat somewhat primly side by side on the sofa, which made Tessa feel peculiarly like a guest. She was full of sandwiches that Bridget had brought in on a tray, and tea, its warmth slowly thawing her insides. "It isn't as if this is unusual. When do we ever know where Will is at nighttime?"
"But this is different. He saw his family, or his sister at least. Oh, poor Will."
Charlotte's voice shook with anxiety. "I had thought perhaps he was final y beginning to forget about them . . ."
"No one forgets about their family," said Jessamine sharply. She sat on the chaise longue with a watercolor easel and papers propped before her; she had recently made the decision that she had fal en behind in pursuing the maidenly arts, and had begun painting, cutting silhouettes, pressing flowers, and playing on the spinet in the music room, though Will said her singing voice made him think of Church when he was in a particularly complaining mood.
"Well, no, of course not," said Charlotte hastily, "but perhaps not to live with the memory constantly, as a sort of dreadful weight on you."
"As if we'd know what to do with Will if he didn't have the morbs every day," said Jessamine. "Anyway, he can't have cared about his family that much in the first place or he wouldn't have left them."
Tessa gave a little gasp. "How can you say that? You don't know why he left. You didn't see his face at Ravenscar Manor-"
"Ravenscar Manor." Charlotte was staring blindly at the fireplace. "Of all the places I thought they'd go . . ."
"Pish and tosh," said Jessamine, looking angrily at Tessa. "At least his family's alive. Besides, I'll wager he wasn't sad at all ; I'll wager you he was shamming. He always is."
Tessa glanced toward Jem for support, but he was looking at Charlotte, and his look was as hard as a silver coin. "What do you mean," he said, "of all the places you thought they'd go? Did you know that Will 's family had moved?"
Charlotte started, and sighed. "Jem . . ."
"It's important, Charlotte."
Charlotte glanced over at the tin on her desk that held her favorite lemon drops. "After Will 's parents came here to see him, when he was twelve, and he sent them away . . . I begged him to speak to them, just for a moment, but he wouldn't. I tried to make him understand that if they left, then he could never see them again, and I could never tell him news of them. He took my hand, and he said, 'Please just promise me you'l tell me if they die, Charlotte. Promise me.'" She looked down, her fingers knotting in the material of her dress. "It was such an odd request for a little boy to make. I-I had to say yes."
"So you've been looking into the welfare of Will 's family?" Jem asked.
"I hired Ragnor fell to do it," Charlotte said. "For the first three years. The fourth year he came back to me and told me that the Herondales had moved.
Edmund Herondale-that's Will 's father-had lost their house gambling. That was all Ragnor was able to glean. The Herondales had been forced to move.
He could find no further trace of them."
"Did you ever tell Will ?" Tessa said.
"No." Charlotte shook her head. "He had made me promise to tell him if they died, that was all. Why add to his unhappiness with the knowledge that they had lost their home? He never mentioned them. I had grown to hope he might have forgotten-"
"He has never forgotten." There was a force in Jem's words that stopped the nervous movement of Charlotte's fingers.
"I should not have done it," Charlotte said. "I should never have made that promise. It was a contravention of the Law-"
"When Will truly wants something," said Jem quietly, "when he feels something, he can break your heart."
There was a silence. Charlotte's lips were tight, her eyes suspiciously bright. "Did he say anything about where he was going when he left Kings Cross?"
"No," said Tessa. "We arrived, and he just up and dusted-sorry, got up and ran," she corrected herself, their blank looks alerting her to the fact that she was using American slang.
"'Up and dusted,'" said Jem. "I like that. Makes it sound like he left a cloud of dust spinning in his wake. He didn't say anything, no-just elbowed his way through the crowd and was gone. Nearly knocked down Cyril coming to get us."
"None of it makes any sense," Charlotte moaned. "Why on earth would Will 's family be living in a house that used to belong to Mortmain? In Yorkshire of all places? This is not where I thought this road would lead. We sought Mortmain and we found the Shades; we sought him again and found Will 's family. He encircles us, like that cursed ouroboros that is his symbol."
"You had Ragnor fell look into Will 's family's welfare before," said Jem.
"Can you do it again? If Mortmain is somehow entangled with them . . . for whatever reason . . ."
"Yes, yes, of course," said Charlotte. "I Will write to him immediately."
"There is a part of this I do not understand," Tessa said. "The reparations demand was filed in 1825, and the complain-ant's age was listed as twenty- two. If he was twenty-two then, he'd be seventy-five now, and he doesn't look that old. Maybe forty . . ."
"There are ways," Charlotte said slowly, "for mundanes who dabble in dark magic to prolong their lives. Just the sort of spell, by the way, that one might find in the Book of the White. Which is why possession of the Book by anyone other than the Clave is considered a crime."
"All that newspaper business about Mortmain inheriting a shipping company from his father," Jem said. "Do you think he pulled the vampire trick?"
"The vampire trick?" echoed Tessa, trying in vain to remember such a thing from the Codex.
"It's a way vampires have of keeping their money over time," said Charlotte. "When they have been too long in one place, long enough that people have started to notice that they never age, they fake their own death and leave their inheritance to a long-lost son or nephew. Voila-the nephew shows up, bears an uncanny resemblance to his father or uncle, but there he is and he gets the money. And they go on like that for generations sometimes. Mortmain could easily have left the company to himself to disguise the fact that he wasn't aging."
"So he pretended to be his own son," said Tessa. "Which would also have given him a reason to be seen changing the direction of the company-to return to Britain and begin interesting himself in mechanisms, that sort of thing."
"And is probably also why he left the house in Yorkshire," said Henry.
"Though that does not explain why it is being inhabited by Will 's family,"
mused Jem.
"Or where Will is," added Tessa.
"Or where Mortmain is," put in Jessamine, with a sort of dark glee. "Only nine more days, Charlotte."
Charlotte put her head back into her hands. "Tessa," she said, "I hate to ask this of you, but it is, after all, why we sent you to Yorkshire, and we must leave no stone unturned. You still have the button from Starkweather's coat?"
Wordlessly Tessa took the button from her pocket. It was round, pearl and silver, strangely cold in her hand. "You want me to Change into him?"
"Tessa," Jem said quickly. "If you do not want to do this, Charlotte- we- would never require it."
"I know," Tessa said. "But I offered, and I would not go back on my word."
"Thank you, Tessa." Charlotte looked relieved. "We must know if there is anything he is hiding from us-if he was lying to you about any part of this business. His involvement in what happened to the Shades . . ."
Henry frowned. "It Will be a dark day when you cannot trust your fell ow Shadowhunters, Lottie."
"It is a dark day already, Henry dear," Charlotte replied without looking at him.
"You won't help me, then," Will said in a flat voice. Using magic, Magnus had built the fire up in the grate. In the glow of the leaping flames, the warlock could see more of the details of Will -the dark hair curling close at the nape of his neck, the delicate cheekbones and strong jaw, the shadow cast by his lashes. He reminded Magnus of someone; the memory tickled at the back of his mind, refusing to come clear. After so many years, it was hard sometimes to pick out individual memories, even of those you had loved. He could no longer remember his mother's face, though he knew she had looked like him, a mixture of his Dutch grandfather and his Indonesian grandmother.
"If your definition of 'help' involves dropping you into the demon realms like a rat into a pit full of terriers, then no, I won't help you," said Magnus. "This is madness, you know. Go home. Sleep it off."
"I'm not drunk."
"You might as well be." Magnus ran both hands through his thick hair and thought, suddenly and irrational y, of Camil e. And was pleased. Here in this room, with Will, he had gone nearly two hours without thinking of her at all.
Progress. "You think you're the only person who's ever lost anyone?"
Will 's face twisted. "Don't make it sound like that. Like some ordinary sort of grief. It's not like that. They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite. Over. This is a fresh wound every day."
"Yes," said Magnus, leaning back against the cushions. "That is the genius of curses, isn't it."
"It would be one thing if I had been cursed so that everyone I loved would die," said Will. "I could keep myself from loving. To keep others from caring for me-it is an odd, exhausting procedure." He sounded exhausted, Magnus thought, and dramatic in that way that only seventeen-year-olds could be. He also doubted the truth of Will 's statement that he could have kept himself from loving, but understood why the boy would want to tel himself such a story. "I must play the part of another person all day, each day -bitter and vicious and cruel-"
"I rather liked you that way. And don't tell me you don't enjoy yourself at least a little, playing the devil, Will Heron-dale."
"They say it runs in our blood, that sort of bitter humor," said Will, looking at the flames. "El a had it. So did Cecily. I never thought I did until I found I needed it. I have learned good lessons in how to be hateful over all these years. But I feel myself losing myself-" He groped for words. "I feel myself diminished, parts of me spiraling away into the darkness, that which is good and honest and true-If you hold it away from yourself long enough, do you lose it entirely? If no one cares for you at all, do you even really exist?"
He said this last so softly that Magnus had to strain to hear him. "What was that?"
"Nothing. Something I read somewhere once." Will turned to him. "You would be doing me a mercy, sending me to the demon realms. I might find what I am looking for. It is my only chance-and without that chance my life is worthless to me anyway."
"Easy enough to say at seventeen," said Magnus, with no smal amount of coldness. "You are in love and you think that is all there is in the world. But the world is bigger than you, Will, and may have need of you. You are a Shadowhunter. You serve a greater cause. Your life is not yours to throw away."
"Then nothing is mine," said Will, and pushed himself away from the mantel, staggering a little as if he really were drunk. "If I don't even own my own life-"
"Who ever said we were owed happiness?" Magnus said softly, and in his mind he saw the house of his childhood, and his mother flinching away from him with frightened eyes, and her husband, who was not his father, burning.
"What about what we owe to others?"
"I've given them everything I have already," said Will, seizing his coat off the back of the chair. "They've had enough out of me, and if this is what you have to say to me, then so have you-warlock."
He spat the last word like a curse. Regretting his harshness, Magnus began to rise to his feet, but Will pushed past him toward the door. It slammed behind him. Moments later Magnus saw him pass by the front window, struggling into his coat as he walked, his head bent down against the wind.
Tessa sat before her vanity table, wrapped in her dressing gown and rol ing the smal button back and forth in her palm. She had asked to be left alone to do what Charlotte had requested of her. It was not the first time she had transformed into a man; the Dark Sisters had forced her to do it, more than once, and while it was a peculiar feeling, it was not what fueled her reluctance. It was the darkness she had seen in Starkweather's eyes, the slight sheen of madness to his tone when he spoke of the spoils he had taken. It was not a mind she wanted to acquaint herself with further.