Clockwork Princess
Page 7

"I believe you," she said. "I don't know if Consul Wayland will, but that is your lookout. If you will give me an address-"
"I haven't got one," Gabriel said, in desperation. "Where do you think I could go?"
She just looked at him, one eyebrow raised.
"I want to stay with my brother," he said finally, aware that he sounded petulant and angry, but not quite sure what to do about it.
"But your brother lives here," she said. "And you have made your feelings about the Institute and about my claim to it very clear. Jem told me what you believe. That my father drove your uncle to suicide. It isn't true, you know, but I don't expect you to believe me. It does leave me wondering, however, why you would wish to remain here."
"The Institute is a refuge."
"Was your father planning on running it as a refuge?"
"I don't know! I don't know what his plans are-what they were!"
"Then why did you go along with them?" Her voice was soft but merciless.
"Because he was my father!" Gabriel shouted. He spun away from Charlotte, his breath becoming ragged in his throat. Only barely aware of what he was doing, he wrapped his arms around himself, hugging his own body tight, as if he could keep himself from coming undone.
Memories of the past few weeks, memories that Gabriel had been doing his best to press back into the very recesses of his mind, threatened to burst out into the light: weeks in the house after the servants had been sent away, hearing the noises coming from the upstairs rooms, screams in the night, blood on the stairs in the morning, Father shouting gibberish from behind the locked library door, as if he could no longer form words in English ...
"If you are going to throw me out on the street," Gabriel said, with a sort of terrible desperation, "then do it now. I do not want to think I have got a home when I have not. I do not want to think I am going to see my brother again if I am not going to."
"You think he would not go after you? Find you wherever you were?"
"I think he has proved who he cares for most," said Gabriel, "and it is not me." He slowly straightened, loosing his grip on himself. "Send me away or let me stay. I will not beg you."
Charlotte sighed. "You will not have to," she said. "Never before have I sent away anyone who told me they had nowhere else to go, and I will not start now. I will ask of you only one thing. To allow someone to live in the Institute, in the very heart of the Enclave, is to place my trust in their good intentions. Do not make me regret that I have trusted you, Gabriel Lightwood."
The shadows had lengthened in the library. Tessa sat in a pool of light by one of the windows, beside a shaded blue lamp. A book had been open on her lap for several hours, but she had not been able to concentrate on it. Her eyes skidded over the words on the pages without absorbing them, and she would often find that she was pausing to try to remember who a character was, or why they were doing what they were doing.
She was in the middle of beginning chapter five yet again when the creak of a floorboard alerted her, and she looked up to find Will standing before her, damp-haired, his gloves in his hands.
"Will." Tessa set the book down on the windowsill beside her. "You startled me."
"I didn't mean to interrupt," he said in a low voice. "If you are reading ..." He began to turn away.
"I am not," she said, and he stopped, looking back at her over his shoulder. "I cannot lose myself in words now. I cannot calm the distraction of my mind."
"Nor I," he said, turning fully now. He was no longer spattered in blood. His clothes were clean, and his skin mostly unmarked, though she could see the pinkish-white lines of grazes on his neck, disappearing down into the collar of his shirt, healing as the iratzes did their work.
"Is there news of my-is there news of Jem?"
"There is no change," he said, though she had guessed as much. If there had been a change, Will would not have been here. "The Brothers will still not let anyone into the room, not even Charlotte.
"And why are you here?" he went on. "Sitting in the dark?"
"Benedict wrote on the wall of his study," she said in a low voice. "Before he turned into that creature, I imagine, or while it was happening. I don't know. 'The Infernal Devices are without pity. The Infernal Devices are without regret. The Infernal Devices are without number. The Infernal Devices will never stop coming.'"
"The infernal devices? I assume he means Mortmain's clockwork creatures. Not that we have seen any of them for months."
"That does not mean they will not come back," Tessa said. She looked down at the library table, its scratched veneer. How often Will and Jem must have sat here together, studying, carving their initials, as bored schoolboys did, into the table's surface. "I am a danger to you here."
"Tessa, we have talked about this before. You are not the danger. You are the thing Mortmain wants, yes, but if you were not here and protected, he could get you easily, and to what destruction would he turn your powers? We don't know-only that he wants you for something, and that it is to our advantage to keep you from him. It is not selflessness. We Shadowhunters are not selfless."
She looked up at that. "I think you are very selfless." At his noise of disagreement she said: "Surely you must know that what you do is exemplary. There is a coldness to the Clave, it is true. We are dust and shadows. But you are like the heroes of ancient times, like Achilles and Jason."
"Achilles was murdered with a poisoned arrow, and Jason died alone, killed by his own rotting ship. Such is the fate of heroes; the Angel knows why anyone would want to be one."
Tessa looked at him. There were shadows under his blue eyes, she saw, and his fingers were worrying at the material of his cuffs, thoughtlessly, as if he were not aware he was doing it. Months, she thought. Months since they had been alone together for more than a moment. They'd had only accidental encounters in hallways, in the courtyard, awkwardly exchanged pleasantries. She had missed his jokes, the books he had lent her, the flashes of laughter in his gaze. Caught in the memory of the easier Will of an earlier time, she spoke without thinking:
"I cannot stop recollecting something you told me once," she said.
He looked at her in surprise. "Yes? And what is that?"
"That sometimes when you cannot decide what to do, you pretend you are a character in a book, because it is easier to decide what they would do."
"I am," Will said, "perhaps, not someone to take advice from if you are seeking happiness."
"Not happiness. Not exactly. I want to help-to do good-" She broke off and sighed. "And I have turned to many books, but if there is guidance in them, I have not found it. You said you were Sydney Carton-"
Will made a sound, and sank down onto a chair on the opposite side of the table from her. His lashes were lowered, veiling his eyes.
"And I suppose I know what that makes the rest of us," she said. "But I do not want to be Lucie Manette, for she did nothing to save Charles; she let Sydney do it all. And she was cruel to him."
"To Charles?" Will said.
"To Sydney," Tessa said. "He wanted to be a better man, but she would not help him."
"She could not. She was engaged to Charles Darney."
"Still, it was not kind," Tessa said.
Will threw himself out of his chair as quickly as he had thrown himself into it. He leaned forward, his hands on the table. His eyes were very blue in the blue light of the lamp. "Sometimes one must choose whether to be kind or honorable," he said. "Sometimes one cannot be both."
"Which is better?" Tessa whispered.
Will's mouth twisted with bitter humor. "I suppose it depends on the book."
Tessa craned her head back to look at him. "You know that feeling," she said, "when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing close around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage, and you cannot let go or turn the course aside." His blue eyes were dark with understanding-of course Will would understand-and she hurried on. "I feel now as if the same is happening, only not to characters on a page but to my own beloved friends and companions. I do not want to sit by while tragedy comes for us. I would turn it aside, only I struggle to discover how that might be done."
"You fear for Jem," Will said.
"Yes," she said. "And I fear for you, too."
"No," Will said hoarsely. "Don't waste that on me, Tess."
Before she could reply, the library door opened. It was Charlotte, looking drained and exhausted. Will turned toward her quickly.
"How is Jem?" he said.
"He is awake and talking," said Charlotte. "He has had some of the yin fen, and the Silent Brothers have been able to make his condition stable, and to stop the internal bleeding."
At the mention of internal bleeding, Will looked as if he were going to throw up; Tessa imagined she looked much the same.
"He can have a visitor," Charlotte went on. "In fact, he has requested it."
Will and Tessa exchanged a quick glance. Tessa knew what both were thinking: Which of them should the visitor be? Tessa was Jem's fiancee, but Will was his parabatai, which was sacred in and of itself. Will had begun to step back, when Charlotte spoke again, sounding tired down to her bones:
"He has asked for you, Will."
Will looked startled. He darted a glance at Tessa. "I-"
Tessa could not deny the little burst of surprise and almost-jealousy she had felt behind her rib cage at Charlotte's words, but she pushed it down ruthlessly. She loved Jem enough to want whatever he wanted for himself, and he always had his reasons. "You go," she said gently. "Of course he would want to see you."
Will began to move toward the door to join Charlotte. Halfway there he turned back and crossed the room to Tessa. "Tessa," he said, "while I am with Jem, would you do something for me?"
Tessa looked up and swallowed. He was too close, too close: All the lines, shapes, angles of Will filled her field of vision as the sound of his voice filled her ears. "Yes, certainly," she said. "What is it?"
To: Edmund and Linette Herondale
Ravenscar Manor
West Riding, Yorkshire
Dear Dad and Mam,
I know it was cowardly of me to have left as I did, in the early morning before you woke, with only a note to explain my absence. I could not bear to face you, knowing what I had decided to do, and that I was the worst of disobedient daughters.
How can I explain the decision I made, how I arrived at it? It seems, even now, like madness. Each day in fact is madder than the one before it. You did not lie, Dad, when you said the life of a Shadowhunter was like a feverish dream-
Cecily drew the nib of the pen viciously through the lines she had written, then crumpled up the paper in one hand and rested her head on the desk.
She had started this letter so many times, and had yet to arrive at any satisfactory version. Perhaps she should not be attempting it now, she thought, not when she had been trying to calm her nerves since they had returned to the Institute. Everyone had been swarming about Jem, and Will, after roughly checking her for injuries in the garden, had barely spoken to her again. Henry had gone running for Charlotte, Gideon had drawn Gabriel aside, and Cecily had found herself climbing the Institute stairs alone.
She had slipped into her bedroom, not bothering to divest herself of her gear, and curled up on the soft four-poster bed. As she'd lain among the shadows, hearing the faint sounds of London passing by outside, her heart had clenched with sudden, painful homesickness. She'd thought of the green hills of Wales, and of her mother and father, and had bolted out of the bed as if she had been pushed, stumbling to the desk and taking up pen and paper, the ink staining her fingers in her haste. And yet the right words would not come. She felt as if she bled her regret and her loneliness from her very pores, and yet she could not shape those feelings into any sentiment she could imagine her parents could bear reading.
At that moment there was a knock on the door. Cecily reached for a book she had left resting on the desk, propped it up as if she had been reading, and called: "Come in."
The door swung open; it was Tessa, standing hesitantly in the doorway. She was no longer wearing her destroyed wedding dress but a simple gown of blue muslin with her two necklaces glittering at her throat: the clockwork angel and the jade pendant that had been her bridal gift from Jem. Cecily looked at Tessa curiously. Though the two girls were friendly, they were not close. Tessa had a certain wariness around her that Cecily suspected the source of without ever being able to prove it; on top of that there was something fey and strange about her. Cecily knew she could shape-shift, could transform herself into the likeness of any person, and Cecily could not rid herself of the sense that it was unnatural. How could you know someone's true face if they could change it as easily as someone else might change a gown?
"Yes?" Cecily said. "Miss Gray?"
"Please call me Tessa," said the other girl, shutting the door behind her. It was not the first time she had asked Cecily to call her by her given name, but habit and perversity kept Cecily from doing it. "I came to see if you were all right and if you needed anything."
"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."