Clockwork Princess
Page 56

She glanced down at the watch on her wrist. Five minutes to noon. She was a little early, but then she always was for this, their yearly meeting. It gave her a chance to think-to think and to remember, and there was no place better for doing either than here, on Blackfriars Bridge, the first place they had ever really talked.
Beside the watch was the pearl bracelet she always wore. She never took it off. Will had given it to her when they had been married thirty years, smiling as he'd fastened it on. He had had gray in his hair then, she knew, though she had never really seen it. As if her love had given him his own shape-shifting ability, no matter how much time had passed, when she looked at him, she saw always the wild, black-haired boy she had fallen in love with.
It still seemed incredible to her sometimes that they had managed to grow old together, herself and Will Herondale, whom Gabriel Lightwood had once said would not live to be older than nineteen. They had been good friends with the Lightwoods too, through all those years. Of course Will could hardly not be friends with the man who was married to his sister. Both Cecily and Gabriel had seen Will on the day he died, as had Sophie, though Gideon had himself passed away several years before.
Tessa remembered that day clearly, the day the Silent Brothers had said there was nothing more they could do to keep Will alive. He had been unable to leave their bed by then. Tessa had squared her shoulders and gone to give the news to their family and friends, trying to be as calm for them as she could, though her heart had felt as if it were being ripped out of her body.
It had been June, the bright hot summer of 1937, and with the curtains thrown back the bedroom had been full of sunlight, sunlight and her and Will's children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews-Cecy's blue-eyed boys, tall and handsome, and Gideon and Sophie's two girls-and those who were as close as family: Charlotte, white-haired and upright, and the Fairchild sons and daughters with their curling red hair like Henry's had once been.
All day Tessa had sat on the bed with Will beside her, leaning on her shoulder. The sight might have been strange to others, a young woman lovingly cradling a man who looked old enough to be her grandfather, her hands looped through his, but to their family it was only familiar-it was only Tessa and Will. And because it was Tessa and Will, the others came and went all day, as Shadowhunters did at a deathbed, telling stories of Will's life and all the things he and Tessa had done through their long years together.
The children had spoken fondly of the way he had always loved their mother, fiercely and devotedly, the way he had never had eyes for anyone else, and how their parents had set the model for the sort of love they hoped to find in their own lives. They spoke of his regard for books, and how he had taught them all to love them too, to respect the printed page and cherish the stories that those pages held. They spoke of the way he still cursed in Welsh when he dropped something, though he rarely used the language otherwise, and of the fact that though his prose was excellent-he had written several histories of the Shadowhunters when he'd retired that had been very well respected-his poetry had always been awful, though that had never stopped him from reciting it.
Their oldest child, James, had spoken laughingly about Will's unrelenting fear of ducks and his continual battle to keep them out of the pond at the family home in Yorkshire.
Their grandchildren had reminded him of the song about demon pox he had taught them-when they were much too young, Tessa had always thought-and that they had all memorized. They sang it all together and out of tune, scandalizing Sophie.
With tears running down her face, Cecily had reminded him of the moment at her wedding to Gabriel when he had delivered a beautiful speech praising the groom, at the end of which he had announced, "Dear God, I thought she was marrying Gideon. I take it all back," thus vexing not only Cecily and Gabriel but Sophie as well-and Will, though too tired to laugh, had smiled at his sister and squeezed her hand.
They had all laughed about his habit of taking Tessa on romantic "holidays" to places from Gothic novels, including the hideous moor where someone had died, a drafty castle with a ghost in it, and of course the square in Paris in which he had decided Sydney Carton had been guillotined, where Will had horrified passersby by shouting "I can see the blood on the cobblestones!" in French.
At the end of the day, as the sky had darkened, the family had come around Will's bed and kissed him each in turn and left one by one, until Will and Tessa were alone together. Tessa had lain down beside him and slid her arm beneath his head, and put her head on his chest, listening to the ever-weakening beat of his heart. And in the shadows they'd whispered, reminding each other of the stories only they knew. Of the girl who had hit over the head with a water jug the boy who had come to rescue her, and how he had fallen in love with her in that instant. Of a ballroom and a balcony and the moon sailing like a ship untethered through the sky. Of the flutter of the wings of a clockwork angel. Of holy water and blood.
Near midnight the door had opened and Jem had come in. Tessa supposed she should have thought of him as Brother Zachariah by then, but neither Will nor Tessa had ever called him that. He had come in like a shadow in his white robes, and Tessa had taken a deep breath when she had seen him, for she had known that this was what Will had been waiting for, and that the hour was now.
He did not come to Will at once, but crossed the room to a rosewood box that sat upon the top of the dresser. They had always kept Jem's violin for him, as Will had promised. It was kept clean and in order, and the hinges of the box did not creak as Jem opened it and lifted the instrument out. They watched as he rosined the bow with his familiar slim fingers, his pale wrists disappearing down into the paler material of the Brothers' parchment robes.
He lifted the violin to his shoulder then, and raised the bow. And he played.
Zhi yin. Jem had told her once that it meant understanding music, and also a bond that went deeper than friendship. Jem played, and he played the years of Will's life as he had seen them. He played two little boys in a training room, one showing the other how to throw knives, and he played the ritual of parabatai: the fire and the vows and the burning runes. He played two young men running through the streets of London in the dark, stopping to lean up against a wall and laugh together. He played the day in the library when he and Will had jested with Tessa about ducks, and he played the train to Yorkshire on which Jem had said that parabatai were meant to love each other as they loved their own souls. He played that love, and he played their love for Tessa, and hers for them, and he played Will saying, In your eyes I have always found grace. He played the too few times he had seen them since he had joined the Brotherhood-the brief meetings at the Institute; the time when Will had been bitten by a Shax demon and nearly died, and Jem had come from the Silent City and sat with him all night, risking discovery and punishment. And he played the birth of their first son, and the protection ceremony that had been carried out on the child in the Silent City. Will would have no other Silent Brother but Jem perform it. And Jem played the way he had covered his scarred face with his hands and turned away when he'd found out the child's name was James.
He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears. Jem set down his bow, and came toward the bed, drawing back his hood, so she could see his closed eyes and his scarred face. And he had sat down beside them on the bed, and taken Will's hand, the one that Tessa was not holding, and both Will and Tessa had heard Jem's voice in their minds.
I take your hand, brother, so that you may go in peace.
Will had opened the blue eyes that had never lost their color over all the passing years, and looked at Jem and then Tessa, and smiled, and died, with Tessa's head on his shoulder and his hand in Jem's.
It never had stopped hurting, remembering when Will had died. After he was gone, Tessa had fled. Her children were grown, had children of their own; she told herself they did not need her and hid in the back of her mind the thought that haunted her: She could not bear to remain and watch them grow older than she was. It had been one thing to survive the death of her husband. To survive the death of her children-she could not sit by and watch it. It would happen, must happen, but she would not be there.
And besides, there was something Will had asked her to do.
The road that led from Shrewsbury to Welshpool was no longer as it had been when Will had ridden across it in a mad, heedless dash to save her from Mortmain. Will had left instructions, details, descriptions of towns, of a certain spreading oak tree. She had puttered up and down the road several times in her Morris Minor before she'd found it: the tree, just as he had drawn it in the journal he had given her, his hand shaking a little but his memory clear.
The dagger was there among the roots of the trees, which had grown around the hilt. She had had to cut some of them away, and dig at the dirt and rocks with a trowel, before she could free it. Jem's blade, stained dark now with weather and the passage of time.
She had brought it to Jem that year on the bridge. It was 1937 and the Blitz had not yet come to level the buildings around Saint Paul's, to strafe the sky with fire and burn the walls of the city Tessa loved. Still, there was a shadow over the world, the hint of a coming darkness.
"They kill each other and kill each other, and we can do nothing," Tessa had said, her hands on the worn stone of the bridge parapet. She was thinking of the Great War, of the spendthrift waste of life. Not a Shadowhunter war, but out of blood and war were demons born, and it was the responsibility of the Nephilim to keep demons from wreaking even greater destruction.
We cannot save them from themselves, Jem had replied. He wore his hood up, but the wind blew it back, showing her the edge of his scarred cheek.
"There is something coming. A horror Mortmain could only have imagined. I feel it in my bones."
No one can rid the world of all evil, Tessa.
And when she drew his dagger, wrapped in silk, though still dirty and stained with earth and Will's blood, from the pocket of her coat and gave it to him, he bent his head and held it to him, hunching his shoulders over it, as if protecting a wound to his heart.
"Will wanted you to see it," she said. "I know you cannot take it with you."
Keep it for me. There may come a day.
She did not ask him what he meant, but she kept it. Kept it when she left England, the white cliffs of Dover retreating like clouds in the distance as she crossed the Channel. In Paris she found Magnus, who was living in a garret apartment and painting, an occupation for which he had no aptitude whatsoever. He let her sleep on a mattress by the window, and in the night, when she woke up screaming for Will, he came and put his arms around her, smelling of turpentine.
"The first one is always the hardest," he said.
"The first?"
"The first one you love who dies," he said. "It gets easier, after."
When the war came to Paris, they went to New York together, and Magnus reintroduced her to the city she had been born in-a busy, bright, buzzing metropolis she barely recognized, where motorcars crowded the streets like ants, and trains whizzed by on elevated platforms. She did not see Jem that year, because the Luftwaffe was strafing London with fire and he had deemed it too dangerous to meet, but in the years after-
"Tessa?"
Her heart stopped.
A great wave of lurching dizziness passed over her, and for a moment she wondered if she were going mad, if after so many years the past and present had blended within her memories until she could no longer tell the difference. For the voice she heard was not the soft, silent voice-within-her-mind of Brother Zachariah. The voice that had echoed in her head once a year for the past one hundred and thirty years.
This was a voice that drew out memories stretched thin by years of recollection, like paper unfolded and refolded too many times. A voice that brought back, like a wave, the memory of another time on this bridge, a night so long ago, everything black and silver and the river rushing away under her feet ...
Her heart was pounding so hard, she felt as if it might break through her rib cage. Slowly she turned, away from the balustrade. And stared.
He stood on the pavement in front of her, smiling shyly, hands in the pockets of a pair of very modern jeans. He wore a blue cotton jumper pushed up to the elbows. Faint white scars decorated his forearms like lacework. She could see the shape of the rune of Quietude, which had been so black and strong against his skin, faded now to a faint imprint of silver.
"Jem?" she whispered, realizing why she had not seen him when she'd been searching the crowd for him. She had been looking for Brother Zachariah, wrapped in his parchment-white robe, moving, unseen, through the throng of Londoners. But this was not Brother Zachariah.
This was Jem.
She couldn't tear her gaze away from him. She had always thought Jem was beautiful. He was no less beautiful to her now. Once he had had silver-white hair and eyes like gray skies. This Jem had raven-black hair, curling slightly in the humid air, and dark brown eyes with glints of gold in the irises. Once his skin had been pale; now it had a flush of color to it. Where his face had been unmarked before he'd become a Silent Brother, there were two dark scars, the first runes of the Brotherhood, standing out starkly and blackly at the arch of each cheekbone.
Where the collar of his jumper dipped slightly, she could see the delicate shape of the parabatai rune that had once tied him to Will. That might tie them still, if one imagined souls could be tied even over the divide of death.
"Jem," she breathed again. At first glance he looked perhaps nineteen years old, or twenty, a bit older than he had been when he had become a Silent Brother. When she looked more deeply, she saw a man-the long years of pain and wisdom at the backs of his eyes; even the way he moved spoke of the care of quiet sacrifice. "You are"-her voice rose with wild hope-"this is permanent? You are not bound to the Silent Brothers anymore?"
"No," he said. There was a rapid hitch in his breath; he was looking at her as if he had no idea how she would react to his sudden appearance. "I am not."
"The cure-you found it?"
"I did not find it myself," he said slowly. "But-it was found."
"I saw Magnus in Alicante only a few months ago. We spoke of you. He never said ..."
"He didn't know," Jem said. "It has been a hard year, a dark year, for Shadowhunters. But out of the blood and the fire, the loss and the sorrow, there have been born some great new changes." He held out his arms, self-deprecatingly, and with a little amazement in his voice, as he said: "I myself am changed."