Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 169

“The Silent Brothers have conferred and agree with you,” said Jem. “They will make a recommendation to the Consul and the new Inquisitor when he or she is appointed.”
“But Jia—Jia is still the Consul?” said Emma.
“Yes, though she is very ill. She has been for some time. I hope she will now have the time and space to rest and get well.”
“Oh.” Emma was surprised—Jia had seemed invulnerable to her.
“The Cohort members who survived are being held in the Gard prison. You did win the battle for us, after all. Though I would not recommend trying that tactic again.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” Julian said. “Will we be punished?”
“For what happened on the field? I do not think so,” said Jem. “It was a war. You slew the Riders of Mannan, for which everyone is grateful, and you slew several Cohort members, which you might have done anyway. I think you will be curiosities now—true Nephilim have not been seen in centuries. Also, you may have to do community service.”
“Really?” said Emma.
“Not really,” said Jem, and winked at her.
“I meant about the parabatai thing,” said Julian. “We’re still breaking the Law by feeling like we do about each other. Even if they make the Laws gentler, we’ll still have to be separated, exiled even, so this never happens again.”
“Ah,” said Jem, and he leaned back against the wall, his arms folded. “When your clothes were cut from you so you could be healed, here in the Basilias, it was noticed that your parabatai runes had disappeared.”
Emma and Julian both stared at him.
“Now, a parabatai rune can be cut from your skin, and you will not lose your bond,” said Jem. “The rune is the symbol, not the bond itself. But it was curious, because there were no marks or scars where your parabatai runes had been; it was as if they had never been drawn. The Silent Brothers looked into your minds and saw the bond had been severed.” He paused. “In most cases, I would feel I was giving you bad news, but in this case, perhaps not. You are no longer parabatai.”
Neither of them moved or even breathed. Inside Emma’s chest, her heart seemed to be ringing like a bell in a vast space, the deep echo of a cavern whose roof was so high all sound vanished into silence and dreams. Julian’s face was as white as the demon towers.
“Not parabatai?” he said at last, his voice like a stranger’s.
“I’ll give you two a moment to digest the news,” Jem said, a smile curling the edge of his mouth. “I will go to speak with your family. They have been worried about you.” He left the room, and even though he wore jeans and a sweater, the shadow of robes seemed to move about him as he went.
The door closed behind Jem, and still Emma couldn’t move. The terror of letting herself believe that the horror was over, that it would be all right, kept her frozen in place. For so long she had lived with a weight on her shoulders. For so long it had been the first thing she’d thought of when she woke up and the last of her thoughts before she slept; the food of nightmares and the close of every secret fear: I will lose Julian. I will lose my family. I will lose myself.
Even in the brightest moments, she had thought she would lose one of those things. She had never dreamed she would keep them all.
“Emma,” Julian said. He had gotten to his feet, limping slightly, and Emma’s heart broke: She knew this could be no easier for him than it was for her. She rose to her feet, her legs shaking. They faced each other across the space between their two cots.
She didn’t know who broke and moved first. It could have been her, or him; they could have moved in unison as they had done for so long, still connected even though the parabatai bond was gone. They collided in the middle of the room; she flung her arms around Julian, her bandaged fingers digging into the back of his shirt.
He was here, really here, solid in her arms. He kissed her face feverishly and ran his hands through her hair. She knew tears were running down her face; she held on to him as tightly as she could, feeling him shaking in her arms. “Emma,” he was saying, over and over, his voice breaking, shattering on the word. “Emma, Emma, my Emma.”
She couldn’t speak. Instead, she traced her fingers clumsily across his back, writing out what she couldn’t say aloud, as they had for so long. A-T L-A-S-T, she wrote. A-T L-A-S-T.
The door flew open. And for the first time ever, they didn’t leap apart: They kept hold of each other’s hands, even as their family and friends poured into the room, tearful and bright with happiness and relief.
* * *
“They are quite afraid of you in Faerie now, Cristina,” said Kieran. “They call you a slayer of kings and princes. A terrifying Shadowhunter.”
The three of them—Mark, Cristina, and Kieran—were sitting by a dry fountain in Angel Square, outside the Basilias. Cristina sat between Mark’s legs, his arms around her. Kieran leaned against his side.
“I am not terrifying,” Cristina protested.
“You terrify me,” Mark said, and Cristina turned and made a face at him. Kieran smiled but did not laugh: there seemed too much tension in him. Perhaps because it was difficult for him to be in Alicante. It had been heavily faerie-proofed during the Dark War, iron and salt and rowan strategically deployed in nearly every street. The Basilias was covered in hammered iron nails, so Mark and Cristina waited for news of Jules and Emma in the square with Kieran, letting the bright sun warm them as they rested.
After the Dark War, Mark knew, this square had been full of bodies. Corpses laid out in rows, their eyes bound with white silk, ready for burning and burial. Now it was peacefully quiet. There had been deaths in the battle three days before, and the next day a great funeral at the Fields. Jia had spoken: of the sorrow endured, of the necessity of building again and the importance of not acting in revenge against the Cohort, fifty of whom were now in the Gard jail.
“My mother is the one who is terrifying,” said Cristina, shaking her head. She was warm in Mark’s arms, and Kieran was a comforting weight against his side. If it had not been for worry over Emma and Jules, he would have been perfectly happy. “I told her about us last night.”
“You did?” Mark was agog. Cristina’s mother was terrifying—he’d heard that after the gates of the City had been opened by the Silent Brothers, she’d climbed up on one of the walls and thrown dozens of spears at the Unseelie faeries with a deadly precision that had sent redcaps scurrying away from the city. There was also a rumor that she’d punched Lazlo Balogh in the nose, but he decided not to confirm it.
“What did she say?” Kieran’s black and silver eyes were worried.
“She said that it was perhaps not the choice she would have made for me,” said Cristina, “but that what mattered was that I was happy. She also said she wasn’t surprised it took two men to fill Diego’s shoes.” She grinned.
“Because Diego saved my life, I will absorb that slight without retort,” said Kieran.
“And I’ll tie his shoelaces together the next time I see him,” said Mark. “Can you believe they found Manuel hiding under Horace’s dead body?”
“I am only surprised he did not cut Horace’s body open and hide inside it,” said Kieran dourly.
Mark punched him lightly in the shoulder.
“Why do you strike me?” Kieran protested. “It has been done before in Faerie. Once a cowardly warrior hid inside a kelpie for a week.”
Something white fluttered down from the sky. A moth, who deposited an acorn in Kieran’s lap and winged away.
“A message?” Mark said.
Kieran unscrewed the acorn’s top. He looked darkly serious, probably because he was now clad in the raiment of an Unseelie King. It still gave Mark a jolt to see him, all in black—black boots, black breeches, and a black waistcoat sewed with embroidered waves of gold and green to symbolize Kieran’s nixie heritage. “From Winter,” Kieran said. “All the Shadowhunters and Downworlders are now returned from the Unseelie Lands to their homes.”
Kieran had opened the hospitality of the Unseelie Court to those who had fled the battle on the Fields. Alec had said he thought the gesture would go a long way toward rolling back the laws of the Cold Peace. A meeting to discuss how the Clave would go forward was scheduled for the next day, and Mark was anxious for it.