Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 127

“That is—brutal.” Magnus was clearly shaken. His hair had gotten quite shaggy, Emma thought. It was rare to see Magnus less than perfectly coiffed. “But I suppose you’ve always been determined. I talked to Helen while you were missing—she confirmed for me that you’d been running the Institute for quite a while on your own. Covering up for Arthur, who never recovered from his experience in Faerie.”
“What does that have to do with the spell?” said Julian.
“It sounds as if you’ve always had to make hard choices,” said Magnus. “For yourself, and for the people you care about. This seems like another hard choice. I still know less than I wish I did about the outcome of the parabatai curse. A friend of mine has been looking into it, though, and from what he’s told me, the threat is very real.” He looked pained. “You may be better off as you are.”
“I’m not,” Julian said. “And you know this isn’t emotionality talking.” Despite the bitterness of the words, his tone was flat. “Without my emotions, without my feelings, I’m a worse Shadowhunter. I make poorer decisions. I wouldn’t trust someone who felt nothing for anyone. I wouldn’t want them to make decisions that affected other people. Would you?”
Magnus looked thoughtful. “Hard to say. You’re very clever.”
Julian didn’t look as if the compliment affected him one way or the other. “I wasn’t always clever in the way you mean. From the time I turned twelve, when my father died and the kids became my responsibility, I had to learn how to lie. To manipulate. So if that’s cleverness, I had it. But I knew where to stop.”
Magnus raised his eyebrows.
“Julian without feelings,” said Emma, “doesn’t know where to stop.”
“I liked your idea earlier,” Magnus said, looking at Julian curiously. “Raising a resistance. Why didn’t you push it more?”
“Because Jace wasn’t wrong,” Julian said. “We could be betrayed. Normally I’d be able to think past that. Imagine a solution. But not like this.” He touched his temple, frowning. “I thought I’d be able to think more clearly, without feelings. But the opposite is true. I can’t think at all. Not properly.”
Magnus hesitated.
“Please,” Emma said.
“You’ll need a plan,” Magnus said. “I know your plan before was exile, but that was when Robert could help you. Horace Dearborn won’t.”
“Dearborn won’t, but another Inquisitor might. We must overthrow the Cohort in any case. There’s a chance the next Inquisitor might be reasonable,” said Julian.
“They don’t have a history of being reasonable,” said Magnus. “And we don’t really know the time frame here.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “I have an idea,” he said finally. “You won’t like it.”
“What about one we would like?” Emma suggested.
Magnus gave her a dark look. “There are a few things that will, in an emergent situation, break your bond. Death, which I don’t recommend. Being bitten by a vampire—hard to arrange, and can also end in death. Having your Marks stripped off and being turned into a mundane. Probably the best option.”
“But only the Silent Brothers can do that,” said Emma. “And we can’t get near them right now.”
“There’s Jem,” Magnus said. “He and I have both seen Marks stripped. And he was a Silent Brother himself. Together, we could make it happen.” He looked slightly ill. “It would be painful and unpleasant. But if there was no other choice—”
“I’ll do it,” Emma said quickly. “If the curse starts to happen, then strip my Marks. I can take it.”
“I don’t . . . ,” Julian began. Emma held her breath; the real Julian would never let her offer this. She had to get him to agree before Magnus took off the spell. “I don’t like the idea,” Julian said at last, looking almost puzzled, as if his own thoughts surprised him. “But if there’s no other choice, all right.”
Magnus gave Emma a long look. “I’ll take this as a binding promise,” he said after a pause. He stretched out a ringed hand. “Julian. Come here.”
Emma watched in an agony of anticipation—what if something went wrong? What if Magnus couldn’t remove the spell?—as Julian went over to the warlock and sat down on a chair facing him.
“Brace yourself,” said Magnus. “It’ll be a shock.”
He reached out and touched Julian’s temple. Julian started as a spark of light flew from Magnus’s fingers to brush against his skin; it vanished like a firefly winking out, and Julian flinched back, suddenly breathing hard.
“I know.” Julian’s hands were shaking. “I already went through it in Thule. I can—do it again.”
“It made you sick in Thule,” Emma said. “On the beach.”
Julian looked at her. And Emma’s heart leaped: In that look was everything, all of her Julian, her parabatai and best friend and first love. In it was the shining connection that had always bound them.
He smiled. A careful smile, thoughtful. In it she saw a thousand memories: of childhood and sunshine, playing in the water as it rushed up and down the beach, of Julian always saving the best and biggest seashells for her. Carefully holding her hand in his when she’d cut it on a piece of glass and was too young for an iratze. He’d cried when they stitched it up, because he knew she didn’t want to even though the pain was awful. He’d asked her for a lock of her hair when they both turned twelve, because he wanted to learn to paint the color. She remembered sitting on the beach with him when they were sixteen; the strap of her swimsuit had fallen down and she recalled the sharp hitch of his breath, the way he’d looked away quickly.
How had she not known? she thought. How he felt. How she felt herself. The way they looked at each other wasn’t the way Alec looked at Jace, or Clary at Simon.
“Emma,” Julian whispered. “Your Marks . . .”
She shook her head, tears bitter in the back of her throat. It’s done.
The look on his face broke her heart. He knew there was no point arguing that he should be the one to have his Marks stripped instead, Emma thought. He could read her again, just like she could read him.
“Julian,” Magnus said. “Give me your arm. The left one.”
Julian tore his gaze away from Emma’s and offered his scarred arm to Magnus.
Magnus ran his blue-sparking fingers with surprising gentleness along Julian’s forearm, and the incised letters, one by one, faded and disappeared. When he was done, he released Julian and looked between him and Emma. “I’ll give you a small piece of good news,” he said. “You weren’t parabatai when you were in Thule. That was an injury to your bond that’s healing. So you have a small cushion of time during which the bond will be weaker.”
Thank the Angel. “How long?” Emma said.
“That depends on you. Love is powerful, and the more you’re together, and let yourself feel what you do, the stronger it’ll be. You need to stay away from each other. To not touch each other. Not speak to each other. Try not to even think about each other.” He waved his arms like an octopus. “If you find yourselves thinking fondly of each other, for God’s sake stop yourselves right away.”
They both stared at him.
“We can’t do that forever,” Emma said.
“I know. But hopefully, when the Cohort is gone, we’ll have a new Inquisitor who can gift you with exile. And hopefully it’ll happen soon.”
“Exile is a pretty bitter gift,” Julian said.
Magnus’s smile was full of sorrow. “Many gifts are.”
* * *
It wasn’t hard to find Kieran. He hadn’t gone very far; he was standing in the hallway near one of the windows that looked out over the hills. He had his palm pressed flat against the glass, as if he could touch the sand and desert flowers through the barrier.
“Kieran,” Mark said, stopping before he reached him. Cristina stopped too; there was something remote in Kieran’s expression, something distant. The awkwardness that had been between all of them since the night before was still there too, forbidding simple gestures of comfort.