Clockwork Prince (8 page)

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Gideon muttered, meeting neither of their eyes with his. Bad moods seemed to run in the family, Tessa thought, remembering that Will had said that next to his brother, Gabriel seemed a sweetheart.

“Don’t worry. Will’s not here,” Jem said to Gabriel, who was glancing around the room. Gabriel frowned at him, but Jem had already turned to Gideon. “When did you get back from Madrid?” he asked politely.

“Father called me back home a short while ago.” Gideon’s tone was neutral. “Family business.”

“I do hope everything’s all right—”

“Everything is quite all right, thank you, James,” said Gabriel, his tone clipped. “Now, before we move to the training portion of this visit, there are two people you should probably meet.” He turned his head and called out, “Mr. Tanner, Miss Daly! Please come up.”

There were footfalls on the steps, and two strangers entered, neither in gear. Both wore servants’ clothes. One was a young woman who was the very definition of “rawboned”—her bones seemed too big for her skinny, awkward frame. Her hair was a bright scarlet, drawn back into a chignon under a modest hat. Her bare hands were red and scrubbed-looking. Tessa guessed she was about twenty. Beside her stood a young man with dark brown curling hair, tall and muscular—

Sophie took a sharp indrawn breath. She had gone pale. “Thomas . . .”

The young man looked terribly awkward. “I’m Thomas’s brother, miss. Cyril. Cyril Tanner.”

“These are the replacements the Council promised you for your lost servants,” said Gabriel. “Cyril Tanner and Bridget Daly. The Consul asked us if we would bring them from Kings Cross here, and naturally we obliged. Cyril will replace Thomas, and Bridget will replace your lost cook, Agatha. They were both trained in fine Shadowhunter households and come soundly recommended.”

Red spots had begun to burn on Sophie’s cheeks. Before she could say anything, Jem said quickly, “No one could replace Agatha or Thomas for us, Gabriel. They were friends as well as servants.” He nodded toward Bridget and Cyril. “No offense intended.”

Bridget only blinked her brown eyes, but, “None taken,” said Cyril. Even his voice was like Thomas’s, almost eerily so. “Thomas was my brother. No one can replace him for me, either.”

An awkward silence descended on the room. Gideon leaned back against one of the walls, his arms crossed, a slight scowl on his face. He was quite good-looking, like his brother, Tessa thought, but the scowl rather spoiled it.

“Very well,” Gabriel said finally into the silence. “Charlotte had asked us to bring them up so you could meet them. Jem, if you’d like to escort them back to the drawing room, Charlotte’s waiting with instructions—”

“So neither of them needs any extra training?” Jem said. “Since you’ll be training Tessa and Sophie regardless, if Bridget or Cyril—”

“As the Consul said, they have been quite effectively trained in their previous households,” said Gideon. “Would you like a demonstration?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Jem said.

Gabriel grinned. “Come along, Carstairs. The girls might as well see that a mundane can fight almost like a Shadow-hunter, with the
right
kind of instruction. Cyril?” He stalked over to the wall, selected two longswords, and threw one toward Cyril, who caught it out of the air handily and advanced toward the center of the room, where a circle was painted on the floorboards.

“We already know that,” muttered Sophie, in a voice low enough that only Tessa could hear. “Thomas and Agatha were both trained.”

“Gabriel is only trying to annoy you,” said Tessa, also in a whisper. “Do not let him see that he bothers you.”

Sophie set her jaw as Gabriel and Cyril met in the center of the room, swords flashing.

Tessa had to admit there was something rather beautiful about it, the way they circled each other, blades singing through the air, a blur of black and silver. The ringing sound of metal on metal, the way they moved, so fast her vision could barely follow. And yet, Gabriel was better; that was clear even to the untrained eye. His reflexes were faster, his movements more graceful. It was not a fair fight; Cyril, his hair pasted to his forehead with sweat, was clearly giving everything he had, while Gabriel was simply marking time. In the end, when Gabriel swiftly disarmed Cyril with a neat flicking motion of his wrist, sending the other boy’s sword rattling to the floor, Tessa couldn’t help but feel almost indignant on Cyril’s behalf. No human could best a Shadowhunter. Wasn’t that the point?

The point of Gabriel’s blade rested an inch from Cyril’s throat. Cyril raised his hands in surrender, a smile, much like his brother’s easy grin, spreading across his face. “I yield—”

There was a blur of movement. Gabriel yelped and went down, his sword skittering from his hand. His body hit the ground, Bridget kneeling atop his chest, her teeth bared. She had slipped up behind him and tripped him while no one was looking. Now she whipped a small dagger from the inside of her bodice and held it against his throat. Gabriel looked up at her for a moment, dazed, blinking his green eyes. Then he began to laugh.

Tessa liked him more in that moment than she ever had before. Not that that was saying much.

“Very impressive,” drawled a familiar voice from the doorway. Tessa turned. It was Will, looking, as her aunt would have said, as if he’d been dragged through a hedge backward. His shirt was torn, his hair was mussed, and his blue eyes were rimmed with red. He bent down, picked up Gabriel’s fallen sword, and leveled it in Bridget’s direction with an amused expression. “But can she
cook
?”

Bridget scrambled to her feet, her cheeks flushing dark red. She was looking at Will the way girls always did—a little openmouthed, as if she couldn’t quite believe the vision that had materialized in front of her. Tessa wanted to tell her that Will looked better when less bedraggled, and that being fascinated by his beauty was like being fascinated by a razor-sharp piece of steel—dangerous and unwise. But what was the point? She’d learn it herself soon enough. “I am a fine cook, sir,” she said in a lilting Irish accent. “My previous employers had no complaints.”

“Lord, you’re Irish,” said Will. “Can you make things that don’t have potatoes in them? We had an Irish cook once when I was a boy. Potato pie, potato custard, potatoes with potato sauce . . .”

Bridget looked baffled. Meanwhile, somehow Jem had crossed the room and seized Will’s arm. “Charlotte wants to see Cyril and Bridget in the drawing room. Shall we show them where it is?”

Will wavered. He was looking at Tessa now. She swallowed against her dry throat. He looked as if there were something he wanted to say to her. Gabriel, glancing between them, smirked. Will’s eyes darkened, and he turned, Jem’s hand guiding him toward the stairway, and stalked out. After a startled moment Bridget and Cyril followed.

When Tessa turned back to the center of the room, she saw that Gabriel had taken one of the blades and handed it to his brother. “Now,” he said. “It’s about time to start training, wouldn’t you say, ladies?”

Gideon took the blade.
“Esta es la idea más estúpida que nuestro padre ha tenido,”
he said.
“Nunca.”

Sophie and Tessa exchanged a look. Tessa wasn’t sure
exactly
what Gideon had said, but “
estúpida
” sounded familiar enough. It was going to be a long remainder of the day.

They spent the next few hours performing balancing and blocking exercises. Gabriel took it upon himself to oversee Tessa’s instruction, while Gideon was assigned to Sophie. Tessa couldn’t help but feel that Gabriel had chosen her to annoy Will in some obscure way, whether Will knew about it or not. He wasn’t a bad teacher, actually—fairly patient, willing to pick up weapons again and again as she dropped them, until he could show her how to get the grip correct, even praising when she did something right. She was concentrating too fiercely to notice whether Gideon was as adept at training Sophie, though Tessa heard him muttering in Spanish from time to time.

By the time the training was over and Tessa had bathed and dressed for dinner, she was starving in a most unladylike manner. Fortunately, despite Will’s fears, Bridget
could
cook, and very well. She served a hot roast with vegetables, and a jam tart with custard, to Henry, Will, Tessa, and Jem for dinner. Jessamine was still in her room with a headache, and Charlotte had gone to the Bone City to look directly through the Reparations archives herself.

It was odd, having Sophie and Cyril coming in and out of the dining room with platters of food, Cyril carving the roast just as Thomas would have, Sophie helping him silently. Tessa could hardly help but think how difficult it had to be for Sophie, whose closest companions in the Institute had been Agatha and Thomas, but every time Tessa tried to catch the other girl’s eye, Sophie looked away.

Tessa remembered the look on Sophie’s face the last time Jem had been ill, the way she’d twisted her cap in her hands, begging for news of him. Tessa had ached to talk to Sophie about it afterward, but knew she never could. Romances between mundanes and Shadowhunters were forbidden; Will’s mother was a mundane, and his father had been forced to leave the Shadowhunters to be with her. He must have been terribly in love to be willing to do it—and Tessa had never had the sense that Jem was fond of Sophie in that way at all. And then there was the matter of his illness. . . .

“Tessa,” Jem said in a low voice, “are you all right? You look a million miles away.”

She smiled at him. “Just tired. The training—I’m not used to it.” It was the truth. Her arms were sore from holding the heavy practice sword, and though she and Sophie had done little beyond balancing and blocking exercises, her legs ached too.

“There’s a salve the Silent Brothers make, for sore muscles. Knock on the door of my room before you go to sleep, and I’ll give you some.”

Tessa flushed slightly, then wondered why she had flushed. The Shadowhunters had their odd ways. She had been in Jem’s room before, even alone with him, even alone with him in her night attire, and no fuss had been made over it. All he was doing now was offering her a bit of medicine, and yet she could feel the heat rise in her face—and he seemed to see it, and flushed himself, the color very visible against his pale skin. Tessa looked away hastily and caught Will watching them both, his blue eyes level and dark. Only Henry, chasing mushy peas around his plate with a fork, seemed oblivious.

“Much obliged,” she said. “I will—”

Charlotte burst into the room, her dark hair escaping from its pins in a whirl of curls, a long scroll of paper clutched in her hand. “I’ve found it!” she cried. She collapsed breathlessly into the seat beside Henry, her normally pale face rosy with exertion. She smiled at Jem. “You were quite right—the Reparations archives—I found it after only a few hours of looking.”

“Let me see,” said Will, setting down his fork. He had eaten only a very little of his food, Tessa couldn’t help noticing. The bird design ring flashed on his fingers as he reached for the scroll in Charlotte’s hand.

She swatted his hand away good-naturedly. “No. We shall all look at them at the same time. It was Jem’s idea, anyway, wasn’t it?”

Will frowned, but said nothing; Charlotte spread the scroll out over the table, pushing aside teacups and empty plates to make room, and the others rose and crowded around her, gazing down at the document. The paper was really more like thick parchment, with dark red ink, like the color of the runes on the Silent Brothers’ robes. The handwriting was in English, but cramped and full of abbreviations; Tessa could make neither head nor tail of what she was looking at.

Jem leaned in close to her, his arm brushing hers, reading over her shoulder. His expression was thoughtful.

She turned her head toward him; a lock of his pale hair tickled her face. “What does it say?” she whispered.

“It’s a request for recompense,” said Will, ignoring the fact that she had addressed her question to Jem. “Sent to the York Institute in 1825 in the name of Axel Hollingworth Mortmain, seeking reparations for the unjustified death of his parents, John Thaddeus and Anne Evelyn Shade, almost a decade before.”

“John Thaddeus Shade,” said Tessa. “
JTS
, the initials on Mortmain’s watch. But if he was their son, why doesn’t he have the same surname?”

“The Shades were warlocks,” said Jem, reading farther down the page. “Both of them. He couldn’t have been their blood son; they must have adopted him, and let him keep his mundane name. It does happen, from time to time.” His eyes flicked toward Tessa, and then away; she wondered if he was remembering, as she was, their conversation in the music room about the fact that warlocks could not have children.

“He said he began to learn about the dark arts during his travels,” said Charlotte. “But if his parents were warlocks—”

“Adoptive parents,” said Will. “Yes, I’m sure he knew just who in Downworld to contact to learn the darker arts.”

“Unjustifiable death,” Tessa said in a small voice. “What does that mean, exactly?”

“It
means
he believes that Shadowhunters killed his parents despite the fact that they had broken no Laws,” said Charlotte.

“What Law were they meant to have broken?”

Charlotte frowned. “It says something here about unnatural and illegal dealings with demons—that could be nearly anything—and that they stood accused of creating a weapon that could destroy Shadowhunters. The sentence for that would have been death. This was before the Accords, though, you must remember. Shadowhunters could kill Downworlders on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing. That’s probably why there’s nothing more substantive or detailed in the paperwork here. Mortmain filed for recompense through the York Institute, under the aegis of Aloysius Starkweather. He was asking not for money but for the guilty parties—Shadowhunters—to be tried and punished. But the trial was refused here in London on the grounds that the Shades were ‘beyond a doubt’ guilty. And that’s really all there is. This is simply a short record of the event, not the full papers. Those would still be in the York Institute.” Charlotte pushed her damp hair back from her forehead. “And yet. It
would
explain Mortmain’s hatred of Shadowhunters. You were correct, Tessa. It was—it
is—
personal.”