Clockwork Princess (26 page)

“Atque in pepetuum, frater, ave atque vale,”
he whispered. The words of the poem had never seemed so fitting:
Forever and ever, my brother, hail and farewell
.

Will began to straighten up, to turn away from the bed. And as he did, he felt something wrap tightly around his wrist. He glanced down and saw Jem’s hand braceleting his own. For a moment he was too shocked to do anything but stare.

“I am not dead yet, Will,” Jem said in a soft voice, thin but as strong as wire. “What did Magnus mean by asking you if I knew you were in love with Tessa?”

“Will?”

After so much time of silence, of only Jem’s breaths, raggedly in and out, Will thought for a moment he was imagining it, his best friend’s voice speaking to him out of the dimness. As Jem released his grip on Will’s wrist, Will sank into the armchair beside the bed. His heart was pounding, half with relief and half with a sickly dread.

Jem turned his head toward him, against the pillow. His eyes were dark, their silver swallowed up by black. For a moment the two young men just stared at each other. It was like the calm just as one engaged in a battle, Will thought, when thought fled and inevitability took over.

“Will,” Jem said again, and coughed, pressing his hand to his mouth. When he took it away, there was blood on his fingers. “Did I—have I been dreaming?”

Will started upright. Jem had sounded so clear, so sure—
What did Magnus mean by asking you if I knew you were in love with Tessa?
—but it was as if that burst of strength had fled from him, and now he sounded dizzy and bewildered.

Had Jem really heard what Magnus had said to him? And if he had, was there any chance it could be passed off as a dream, a feverish hallucination? The thought filled Will with a mixture of relief and disappointment. “Dream what?”

Jem looked down at his bloody hand, and slowly closed it into a fist. “The fight in the courtyard. Jessamine’s death. And they took her, didn’t they? Tessa?”

“Yes,” Will whispered, and he repeated the words Charlotte had said to him earlier. They had brought him no comfort, but perhaps they would to Jem. “Yes, but I don’t think they’ll hurt her. Remember, Mortmain desired her unhurt.”

“We must find her. You know that, Will. We must—” Jem struggled into a sitting position, and immediately began to cough again. Blood spattered the white coverlet. Will held Jem’s frail and shaking shoulders until the coughing ceased to rack his frame, then took one of the damp cloths from the bedside table and began to clean Jem’s hands. When he reached to wipe the blood from his
parabatai
’s face, Jem took the cloth gently from his grasp and looked at him gravely. “I am not a child, Will.”

“I know.” Will drew his hands back. He had not cleaned them since the fight in the courtyard, and Jessamine’s dried blood mixed with Jem’s fresh blood on his fingers.

Jem took a deep breath. Both he and Will waited to see if it would produce another spasm of coughing, and when it did not, Jem spoke. “Magnus said you were in love with Tessa. Is it true?”

“Yes,” Will said, with the feeling that he was falling off a cliff. “Yes, it’s true.”

Jem’s eyes were wide and luminous in the darkness.
“Does she love you?”

“No.” Will’s voice cracked. “I told her I loved her, and she never wavered from you. It is you she loves.”

Jem’s death grip on the cloth in his hands relaxed slightly. “You told her,” he said. “That you were in love with her.”

“Jem—”

“When was this, and what excess of desperation could have driven you?”

“It was before I knew you were engaged. It was the day I discovered there was no curse on me.” Will spoke haltingly. “I went to Tessa and told her that I loved her. She was as kind as she could be in telling me that she loved you and not me, and that you two were engaged.” Will dropped his gaze. “I do not know if this will make any difference to you, James. But I truly had no idea that you cared for her. I was entirely obsessed with my own emotions.”

Jem bit his lower lip, bringing color to the white skin. “And—forgive me for asking this—it is not a passing fancy, a transient regard …?” He broke off, looking at Will’s face. “No,” he murmured. “I can see that it is not.”

“I love her enough that when she assured me that she would be happy with you, I swore to myself I would never speak of my desires again, never indicate my regard by word or by gesture, never by action or speech violate her happiness. My feelings have not changed, and yet I care enough for her and for you that I would not say a word to threaten what you have found.” The words spilled from Will’s lips; there seemed no reason to keep them back. If Jem was going to hate him, he would hate him for the truth and not a lie.

Jem looked stricken. “I am so sorry, Will. So very, very sorry. I wish that I had known—”

Will slumped down in the chair. “What could you have done?”

“I could have called off the engagement—”

“And broken both your hearts? How would that have benefited me? You are as dear to me as another half of my soul, Jem. I could not be happy while you were unhappy. And Tessa—she loves
you
. What sort of awful monster would I be, delighting in causing the two people I love the most in the world agony simply that I might have the satisfaction of knowing that if Tessa could not be mine, she could not be anybody’s?”

“But you are my
parabatai
. If you are in pain, I wish to lessen it—”

“This,” Will said, “is the one thing you cannot give me comfort for.”

Jem shook his head. “But how could I not have noticed? I told you, I saw that the walls about your heart were coming down. I thought—I thought I knew why; I told you I always knew you carried a burden, and I knew you had gone to see Magnus. I had thought that perhaps you had made some use of his magic, to free yourself from some imaginary guilt. If I had ever known it was because of Tessa, you must know, Will, I would never have made my feelings known to her.”

“How could you have guessed?” Miserable though Will was, he felt free, as if a heavy burden had been displaced from him. “I did all I could to hide and deny it. You—you never hid your feelings. Looking back, it was clear and plain, and yet I never saw it. I was astonished when Tessa told me that you were engaged. You’ve always been the source in my life of such good things, James. I never thought you would be the source of pain, and so, wrongly, I never thought of your feelings at all. And that is why I was so blind.”

Jem closed his eyes. The lids were blue-shadowed, parchmentlike. “I am grieved for your pain,” he said. “But I am glad that you love her.”

“You are
glad
?”

“It makes it easier,” Jem said. “To ask you to do what I wish you to do: leave me, and go after Tessa.”

“Now? Like this?”

Jem, incredibly, smiled. “Is that not what you were doing when I caught at your hand?”

“But—I did not believe you would regain consciousness. This is different. I cannot leave you like this, not to face alone whatever you must face—”

Jem’s hand came up, and for a moment Will thought he was going to reach for Will’s hand, but he knotted his fingers in the material of his friend’s sleeve instead. “You are my
parabatai
,” he said. “You have said I could ask anything of you.”

“But I
swore
to stay with you. ‘If aught but death part thee and me—’”

“Death
will
part us.”

“You know the words of the oath come from a longer passage,” Will said. “‘Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest,
I will go
.’”

Jem cried out with all his remaining strength. “You cannot go where I am going! Nor would I want that for you!”

“Neither can I walk away and leave you to die!”

There. Will had said it, said the word, admitted the possibility.
Die
.

“No one else can be trusted with this.” Jem’s eyes were bright, feverish, almost wild. “Do you think I don’t know that if you do not go after her, no one will? Do you think it doesn’t kill me that I cannot go, or at least go with you?” He leaned toward Will. His skin was as pale as the frosted glass of a lamp shade, and like such a lamp, light seemed to shine through him from some inner source. He slid his hands across the coverlet. “Take my hands, Will.”

Numbly Will closed his hands around Jem’s. He imagined he could feel a flicker of pain in the
parabatai
rune on his chest, as if it knew what he did not and was warning him of coming pain, a pain so great he did not imagine he could bear it and live.
Jem is my great sin
, he had told Magnus, and this, now, was the punishment for it. He had thought losing Tessa was his penance; he had not thought of how it would be when he had lost both of them.

“Will,” Jem said. “For all these years I have tried to give you what you could not give yourself.”

Will’s hands tightened on Jem’s, which were as thin as a bundle of twigs. “And what is that?”

“Faith,” said Jem. “That you were better than you thought you were. Forgiveness, that you need not always punish yourself. I always loved you, Will, whatever you did. And now I need you to do for me what I cannot do for myself. For you to be my eyes when I do not have them. For you to be my hands when I cannot use my own. For you to be my heart when mine is done with beating.”

“No,” said Will wildly. “No, no, no. I will not be those things. Your eyes will see, your hands will feel, your heart will continue to beat.”

“But if not, Will—”

“If I could tear myself in half, I would—that half of me might remain with you and half follow Tessa—”

“Half of you would be no good to either of us,” said Jem. “There is no other I could trust to go after her, no other who would give of his own life, as I would, to save hers. I would have asked you to undertake this mission even if I had not known your feelings, but being certain that you love her as I do— Will, I trust you above all, and believe in you above all, knowing that as always your heart is twinned with mine in this matter.
Wo men shi jie bai xiong di
—we are more than brothers, Will. Undertake this journey, and you undertake it not for yourself alone but for both of us.”

“I cannot leave you to face death alone,” Will whispered, but he knew he was beaten; the sands of his will had run out.

Jem touched the
parabatai
rune on his shoulder, through the thin material of his nightshirt. “I am not alone,” he said. “Wherever we are, we are as one.”

Will rose slowly to his feet. He could not believe he was doing what he was doing, but it was clear that he was, as clear as the silver rim around the black of Jem’s eyes. “If there is a life after this one,” he said, “let me meet you in it, James Carstairs.”

“There
will
be other lives.” Jem held his hand out, and for a moment they clasped hands, as they had done during their
parabatai
ritual, reaching across twin rings of fire to interlace their fingers with each other. “The world is a wheel,” he said. “When we rise or fall, we do it together.”

Will tightened his grip on Jem’s hand. “Well, then,” he said, through a tight throat, “since you say there will be another life for me, let us both pray I do not make as colossal a mess of it as I have this one.”

Jem smiled at him, that smile that had always, even on Will’s blackest days, eased his mind. “I think there is hope for you yet, Will Herondale.”

“I will try to learn how to have it, without you to show me.”

“Tessa,” Jem said. “She knows despair, and hope as well. You can teach each other. Find her, Will, and tell her that I loved her always. My blessing, for all that it is worth, is on you both.”

Their eyes met and held. Will could not bring himself to say good-bye, or to say anything at all. He only gripped Jem’s hand one last time and released it, and then turned and walked out the door.

The horses were stabled out behind the Institute—Cyril’s territory during the daytime, where the rest of them rarely ventured. The stable had once been an old parish house, and the floor was of uneven stone, swept scrupulously clean. Stalls lined the walls, though only two were occupied: one by Balios and the other by Xanthos, both fast asleep with their tails switching slightly, in the manner of dreaming equines. Their mangers were packed with fresh hay, and shining tack lined the walls, polished to bright perfection. Will determined that if he should return from his mission alive, he would make sure to tell Charlotte that Cyril was doing an excellent job.

Will woke Balios with gentle murmurings and drew him from his stall. He had been taught to saddle and bridle a horse as a boy, before he had ever come to the Institute, and so he let his mind wander as he did it now, running the stirrups up the leathers, checking both sides of the saddle, reaching carefully beneath Balios to capture the cinch.

He had left no notes behind him, no messages for anyone in the Institute. Jem would tell them where he had gone, and Will had found that now, in this time when he most needed the words he usually found so easily, he could not reach them. He could not quite conceive that he might be saying good-bye, and so he ran over and over in his mind what he had packed in the saddlebags: gear, a clean shirt and collar (who knew when he might need to look like a gentleman?), two steles, all the weapons that would fit, bread, cheese, dried fruit, and mundane money.

As Will fastened the cinch, Balios lifted his head and whickered. Will’s head whipped around. A slight feminine figure stood in the doorway of the stable. As Will stared, she raised her right hand, and the witchlight in it flared up, illuminating her face.

It was Cecily, a blue velvet cloak wrapped around her, her dark hair loose and free around her face. Her feet were bare, peeking out beneath the hem of the cloak. He straightened up. “Cecy, what are you doing here?”