Clockwork Princess (31 page)

Maybe I am dying
, Tessa thought. And,
This cannot be
. But as the angel held her, and they drifted together toward earth, the ground came clearer and clearer into focus. She could see the individual rocks by the side of the stream now, the currents as they ran downstream, the reflection of the sun in the water. The shadow of wings appeared against the earth and grew wider and wider until she was falling into it, falling into the shadow, and she and the angel plunged together to the ground and landed in the soft dirt and scattered rocks at the side of the stream.

Tessa gasped as she landed, more from shock than impact, and reached up, as if she could cushion the angel’s fall with her body—but it was shrinking already, growing smaller and smaller, its wings folding in on themselves, until it struck the ground by her side, the size of a toy once more. She reached out a shaking hand and seized it. She was lying on uneven rocks, half-in, half-out of the chilly water; it was already soaking through her skirts. She seized the pendant and crawled up the side of the stream with the remainder of her strength, and collapsed at last on dry ground with the angel pressed against her chest, ticking its familiar beat against her heart.

Sophie sat in the armchair by the side of Jem’s bed that had always been Will’s place, and watched Jem sleep.

There had been a time, she thought, when she would have been almost grateful for this opportunity, a chance to be so close to him, to place cold cloths against his forehead when he stirred and murmured and burned with fever. And though she no longer loved him as she once had—the way, she realized now, one loved someone one did not know at all, with admiration and distance—it still wrung her heart to see him like this.

One of the girls in the town where Sophie had grown up had died of consumption, and Sophie recalled how they had all talked of the way the disease had made her more beautiful before it killed her—made her pale and slender, and flushed her face with a hectic rosy glow. Jem had that fever in his cheeks now as he tossed against his pillows; his silvery-white hair was like frost, and his restless fingers twitched against the blanket. Every once in a while he spoke, but the words were in Mandarin, and she did not know them. He called out for Tessa.
Wo ai ni, Tessa. Bu lu run, he qing kuang fa sheng, wo men dou hui zai yi qi
. And he called out for Will as well,
sheng si zhi jiao
, in a way that made Sophie want to take his hand and hold it, though when she did reach to touch him, he was burning up with fever and snatched his hand away with a cry.

Sophie shrank back against the chair, wondering if she should call for Charlotte. Charlotte would want to know if Jem’s condition worsened. She was about to rise to her feet, when Jem suddenly gasped and his eyes flew open. She sank back into the chair, staring. His irises were such a pale silver that they were nearly white. “Will?” he said. “Will, is that you?”

“No,” she said, almost afraid to move. “It is Sophie.”

He exhaled softly and turned his head toward her on the pillow. She saw him focus on her face with an effort—and then, incredibly, he smiled, that smile of great sweetness that had first won her heart. “Of course,” he said. “Sophie. Will is not— I sent Will away.”

“He has gone after Tessa,” Sophie said.

“Good.” Jem’s long hands plucked at the blanket, contracted once into fists—and then relaxed. “I—am glad.”

“You miss him,” Sophie said.

Jem nodded slowly. “I can feel it—his distance, like a cord inside me pulled very, very tightly. I did not expect that. We have not been apart since we became
parabatai
.”

“Cecily said you sent him away.”

“Yes,” said Jem. “He was difficult to persuade. I think if he were not in love with Tessa himself, I would not have been able to make him go.”

Sophie’s mouth fell open. “You
knew
?”

“Not for long,” Jem said. “No, I would not be that cruel. If I had known, I would never have proposed. I would have stood back. I did not know. And yet, now, as everything is going away from me, all things appear in such a clear light that I think I would have come to know it, even if he had not told me. At the end of things, I would have known.” He smiled a little at Sophie’s stricken expression. “I am glad I did not have to wait until the end.”

“You’re not angry?”

“I am glad,” he said. “They will be able to take care of each other when I am gone, or at least I can hope for it. He says she does not love him, but—surely she will come to love him in time. Will is easy to love, and he has given her his whole heart. I can see it. I hope she will not break it.”

Sophie could not think of a word to say. She did not know what anyone could say in the face of love like this—so much forbearance, so much endurance, so much hope. There had been many times in these past months when she’d regretted that she had ever had a bad thought about Will Herondale, when she saw how he had stood back and allowed Tessa and Jem to be happy together, and she knew the agony that had come to Tessa along with the happiness, in the knowledge that she was hurting Will. Sophie alone, she thought, knew that Tessa called out for Will sometimes when she slept; she alone knew that the scar on Tessa’s palm was not from an accidental encounter with a fireplace poker but a deliberate wound, inflicted on herself that she might, somehow, physically match the emotional pain she’d felt in denying Will. Sophie had held Tessa while she’d wept and torn the flowers out of her hair that were the color of Will’s eyes, and Sophie had covered up with powder the evidence of tears and sleepless nights.

Should she tell him? Sophie wondered. Would it really be a kindness to say,
Yes, Tessa loves him too; she has tried not to, but she does
? Could any man honestly want to hear that about the girl he was going to marry? “Miss Gray has great regard for Mr. Herondale, and she would not break any heart lightly, I think,” Sophie said. “But I wish you would not speak as if your death were inevitable, Mr. Carstairs. Even now Mrs. Branwell and the others are hopeful of finding a cure. I think you will live to old age with Miss Gray, and the both of you very happy.”

He smiled as if he knew something she did not. “That is kind of you to say, Sophie. I know I am a Shadowhunter, and we do not pass easily from this life. We fight to the last. We come from the realm of angels, and yet we fear it. I think, though, that one can face the end and not be afraid without having bowed under to death. Death shall never rule me.”

Sophie looked at him, a little worried; he sounded part delirious to her. “Mr. Carstairs? Shall I fetch Charlotte?”

“In a moment, but, Sophie—in your expression, just there, when I spoke—” He leaned forward. “Is it true, then?”

“Is what true?” she asked him in a small voice, but she knew what the question would be, and she could not lie to Jem.

Will was in a foul mood. The day had dawned foggy, wet, and dreadful. He had woken feeling sick to his stomach, and had only barely been able to choke down the rubbery eggs and cold bacon the landlord’s wife had served him in the stuffy parlor; every part of his body had hummed to get back to the road and continue on his journey.

Bouts of rain had left him shivering in his clothes despite a liberal use of warming runes, and Balios disliked the mud that sucked at his hooves as they tried to make speed along the road, Will grumpily contemplating how it was possible that fog might actually condense upon the
inside
of one’s clothes. He had at least made it to Northamptonshire, which was something, but he had covered barely twenty miles and flatly refused to stop, though Balios looked at him entreatingly as they passed through Towcester, as if begging for a warm room in a stable and some oats, and Will was almost inclined to give it to him. A sense of hopelessness had invaded his bones, as chill and inescapable as the rain. What did he think he was doing? Did he really think he would find Tessa this way? Was he a fool?

They were passing through disagreeable country now too, where the mud made the rocky pathway treacherous. A great cliff wall rose on one side of the road, blocking out the sky. On the other side of the path, the road fell away dramatically into a ravine full of sharp rocks. The distant water of a muddy stream glinted faintly at the ravine’s bottom. Will kept Balios’s head well pulled in, far from the drop-off, but the horse still seemed skittish and shy of the fall. Will’s own head was down, tucked into his collar to avoid the cold rain; it was only by chance that, glancing for a moment to the side, he caught a glimpse of bright green and gold amid the rocks at the edge of the road.

He had pulled up Balios in an instant and was down and off the horse so quickly that he almost slipped in the mud. The rain was coming down more heavily now as he approached and knelt to examine the golden chain that had become caught around the sharp outcrop of a rock. He picked it up carefully. It was a jade pendant, circular, with characters stamped upon the back. He knew well enough what they meant.

When two people are as one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze
.

Jem’s bridal gift to Tessa. Will’s hand tightened about it as he stood. He remembered facing her in the stairwell—the chain of the jade pendant at her throat winking at him like a cruel reminder of Jem as she’d said,
They say you cannot divide your heart, and yet—

“Tessa!” he cried out suddenly, his voice echoing off the rocks.
“Tessa!”

He stood for a moment, shuddering, at the side of the road. He did not know what he had expected—an answer? It was hardly as if she could be here, hiding among the sparse rocks. There was only silence and the sound of the wind and rain. Still, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was Tessa’s necklace. Perhaps she had torn it from her throat and dropped it out the carriage window to mark the path for him, like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of bread crumbs. It was what a storybook heroine would do, and therefore what his Tessa would do. Maybe there would be other markers too, if he kept on his way. For the first time hope flowed back into his veins.

With new resolve he strode toward Balios and swung himself up into the saddle. There would be no slowing down; they would make Staffordshire by evening. As he turned the horse’s head back toward the road, he slipped the pendant into his pocket, where its engraved words of love and commitment seemed to burn like a brand.

Charlotte had never felt so tired. The coming child had exhausted her more than she had thought it would at first, and she had been awake all night and racing about all day. There were stains on her dress from Henry’s crypt, and her ankles ached from going up and down the stairs and the ladders in the library. Nevertheless, when she opened the door of Jem’s bedroom and saw him not only awake but sitting up and talking to Sophie, she forgot her tiredness and felt her face break into a helpless smile of relief. “James!” she exclaimed. “I had wondered—that is, I am glad you are awake.”

Sophie, who was looking oddly flushed, rose to her feet. “Should I go, Mrs. Branwell?”

“Oh, yes, please, Sophie. Bridget’s in one of her moods; she says she can’t find the Bang Mary, and I haven’t even the slightest what she’s talking about.”

Sophie almost smiled—she would have, if her heart hadn’t been pounding with the knowledge that she might just have done something very dreadful. “The
bain-marie
,” she said. “I will locate it for her.” She moved toward the door, paused, and threw a peculiar look over her shoulder at Jem, who was resting back against his pillows, looking very pale but composed. Before Charlotte could say anything, Sophie was gone, and Jem was beckoning Charlotte forward with a tired smile.

“Charlotte, if you would not mind very much—could you bring me my violin?”

“Of course.” Charlotte went over to the table by the window where the violin was stored in its square rosewood case, with its bow and small round box of rosin. She lifted the violin and brought it over to the bed, where Jem took it carefully from her arms, and she sank down gratefully in the chair beside him. “Oh—,” she said a moment later. “I’m sorry. I forgot the bow. Did you want to play?”

“That’s all right.” He plucked gently at the strings with his fingertips, which produced a soft, vibrant noise. “This is pizzicato—the first thing my father taught me how to do when he showed me the violin. It reminds me of being a child.”

You are still a child
, Charlotte wanted to say, but she did not. He was only a few weeks short of his eighteenth birthday, after all, when Shadowhunters became adults, and if when she looked at him she still saw the dark-haired little boy who had arrived from Shanghai clutching his violin, his eyes huge in his pale face, that did not mean he had not grown up.

She reached for the box of
yin fen
on his bedside table. There was only a pale scatter left at the bottom, barely a teaspoonful. She swallowed against her tight throat, and tapped the powder into the bottom of a glass, then poured water from the carafe into it, letting the
yin fen
dissolve like sugar. When she handed it to Jem, he put the violin aside and took the glass from her. He stared down into it, his pale eyes thoughtful.

“Is this the last of it?” he asked.

“Magnus is working on a cure,” Charlotte said. “We all are. Gabriel and Cecily are out purchasing ingredients for medicine to keep you strong, and Sophie and Gideon and I have been researching. Everything is being done. Everything.”

Jem looked a little surprised. “I did not realize.”

“But of course it is,” Charlotte said. “We are your family; we would do anything for you. Please do not lose hope, Jem. I need you to keep your strength.”

“What strength I have is yours,” he said cryptically. He downed the
yin fen
solution, handing her back the empty glass. “Charlotte?”

“Yes?”

“Have you won the fight about what to call the child yet?”

Charlotte gave a startled laugh. It seemed odd to think about her child now, but then why not?
In death, we are in life
. It was something to think about that was not illness, or Tessa’s disappearance, or Will’s dangerous mission. “Not yet,” she said. “Henry is still insisting on Buford.”