Queen of Air and Darkness
Page 74

“It was to find the Black Volume of the Dead. The Inquisitor sent us.”
Jace looked incredulous. “Robert sent you here?”
Emma and Julian glanced at each other. There was an awful silence.
Jace moved closer to the thorned bars of the cage that held him and Clary. “Whatever you’re not telling us, don’t hold it back,” he said. “If something happened, you need to let us know.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, it was Julian who spoke. “Robert Lightwood is dead.”
The witchlight blinked out.
In the darkness, with her Night Vision rune useless, Emma could see nothing. She heard Jace make a muffled noise, and Clary whispering. Words of comfort, words of soothing—Emma was sure of it. She recognized herself, murmuring to Julian in the quiet of night.
The whispering stopped, and the witchlight flickered back on. Jace was holding it in one hand, his other wrapped tightly around one of the vines. Blood ran from between his fingers, down his arm. Emma imagined the thorns stabbing into his palm and winced.
“What about everyone else?” he said in a voice so tight it was barely human. “What about Alec?”
Emma moved closer to the front of the cell. “He’s fine,” she said, and filled them in as quickly as she could on what had happened, from Annabel’s murder of Robert and Livvy to Horace’s ascension as Inquisitor.
There was a silence when she was done, but at least Jace had let go of the vine.
“I’m so sorry about your sister,” Clary said softly. “I’m sorry we weren’t there.”
Julian said nothing.
“There isn’t anything you could have done,” said Emma.
“The King is close to getting the Black Volume,” said Jace. He opened and closed his bloody hand. “This is really bad news.”
“But you didn’t come here for that,” said Julian. “You came here to find Ash. He’s the weapon you’re looking for, right?”
Clary nodded. “We got a tip-off from the Spiral Labyrinth that there was a weapon in Faerie that the Unseelie King had access to, something that could nullify Shadowhunter powers.”
“We were sent here because of our angelic blood. Rumors of the ineffectiveness of Shadowhunter magic in the Courts were swirling; the Silent Brothers said we would be more resistant to the effects,” said Jace. “We don’t suffer from time slippage here, and we can use runes—or at least we could, before they took our steles away. At least we still have these.” He held up the glowing witchlight, pulsing in his hand.
“So we knew we were looking for something,” said Clary. “But not that it was my—that it was Ash.”
“How did you figure it out?” said Emma.
“We found out pretty early on that the King had kidnapped the Seelie Queen’s son,” said Jace. “It’s something of an open secret in the Courts. And then the first time Clary saw him—from a distance, we were captured before we ever got close—”
Clary moved restlessly inside the cell. “I knew who he was right away. He looks exactly like my brother.”
Emma had heard Julian and Livvy and Mark and Dru say the words “my brother” more times than she could count. It had never sounded the way it did when Clary said it: imbued with bitterness and regret.
“And now the King has the Black Volume, which means we have hardly any time,” said Jace, brushing his hand lightly across the back of Clary’s neck.
“Okay,” said Julian. “What exactly does the King plan to do with the Black Volume to make Ash a weapon?”
Jace lowered his voice, though Emma doubted anyone could hear them. “There are spells in the Black Volume that would imbue Ash with certain powers. The King did something like this once before—”
“Have you heard of the First Heir?” said Clary.
“Yes,” Emma said. “Kieran mentioned him—or at least mentioned the story.”
“It was something his brother Adaon told him.” Julian was frowning. “Kieran said his father had wanted the book since the First Heir was stolen. Maybe to raise the child from the dead? But what does that have to do with Ash?”
“It’s an old story,” said Jace. “But as you know—all the stories are true.”
“Or at least true in part.” Clary smiled up at him. Emma felt a spark of longing—even in the darkness and cold of this prison, their love was undamaged. Clary turned back to Julian and Emma. “We learned that long ago the Unseelie King and the Seelie Queen decided to unite the Courts. Part of their plan involved having a child together, a child who would be heir to both Courts. But that wasn’t enough for them—they wanted to create a faerie child so powerful that he could destroy the Nephilim.”
“Before the child was born, they used rites and spells to give the child ‘gifts,’” said Jace. “Think Sleeping Beauty but the parents are the wicked faeries.”
“The child would be perfectly beautiful, a perfect leader, inspiring of perfect loyalty,” said Clary. “But when the child was born, she was a girl. It had never even occurred to the King that the child wouldn’t be male—being who he is, he thought the perfect leader had to be a man. The King was furious and thought that the Queen had betrayed him. The Queen, in turn, was furious that he wanted to abandon their whole plan just because the child was a girl. Then the child was kidnapped, and possibly murdered.”
“No wonder—all that stuff about the King hating daughters,” Emma mused.
“What do you mean ‘possibly’?” said Julian.
Jace said, “We weren’t able to find out what happened to that child. No one knows—the claim of the King was that she was kidnapped and murdered, but it seems likely she escaped Faerie and lived on.” He shrugged. “What’s clear is that Ash has mixed in him the blood of royal faeries, the blood of the Nephilim, and the blood of demons. The King believes he’s the perfect candidate to finish what they began with the First Heir.”
“The end of all Shadowhunters,” Julian said slowly.
“The blight the King has already brought here has been taking hold slowly,” Clary said. “But if the King is allowed to perform the spells he wants to on Ash, Ash will become a weapon even more powerful than the blight. We don’t even know everything he’ll be able to do, but he’ll have the same mixture of seraphic and infernal blood that Sebastian did.”
“He’d be demonic, but impervious to runes or angelic magic,” said Jace. “He could bear runes, but nothing demonic could hurt him. The touch of his hands could make the blight spread like wildfire.”
“The blight is already in Idris,” said Emma. “Parts of Brocelind Forest have been destroyed.”
“We need to get back,” Clary said. She looked even paler than she had before, and younger. Emma remembered Clary on the roof at the L.A. Institute. Knowing something awful is coming. Like a wall of darkness and blood. A shadow that spreads out over the world and blots out everything.
“We can’t wait any longer,” Jace said. “We have to get out of here.”
“I’m guessing that wishing to get out of here hasn’t worked so far, since you’re still imprisoned,” said Julian.
Jace narrowed his eyes.
“Julian,” Emma said. She wanted to add sorry, he has no feelings of empathy, but she didn’t because at that moment she heard a shout, followed by a loud thump. Jace closed his hand over his witchlight, and in the near-total darkness, Emma backed away from the walls of the cage. She didn’t want to accidentally walk face-first into the stabbing thorns.
There was a grinding sound as the door of the prison swung open.
“Probably guards,” said Clary in a low voice.
Emma stared into the shadowy dimness. There were two figures coming toward them; she could see the gold glint of the braid on guard uniforms.
“One’s carrying a sword,” Emma whispered.
“They’re probably coming for us,” Clary said. “We’ve been down here longer.”
“No,” Julian said. Emma knew what he was thinking. Jace and Clary were valuable hostages, in their way. Emma and Julian were Shadowhunter thieves who had killed a Rider. They would not be left in the dungeons to languish. They would be beheaded quickly for the enjoyment of the Court.