Clockwork Princess (35 page)

The scraping sound came again. A voice echoed in the back of Tessa’s mind, a querulous old woman’s voice demanding to know who was in her house. Tessa stumbled for the door, her breath coming short, her heart fluttering in her chest, and made for the main room of the house.

For a moment she saw nothing. Her eyes were rheumy, filmed over; shapes looked blurred and distant. Then something rose from beside the fire, and Tessa bit back a scream.

It was an automaton. This one was built to look nearly human. It had a thick body, clothed in a dark gray suit, but the arms that protruded from beyond the cuffs were stick-thin, ending in spatulate hands, and the head that rose above the collar was smooth and egglike. Two bulbous eyes were set into the head, but the machine had no other features.

“Who are you?” Tessa demanded in the old woman’s voice, brandishing the sharp pick she had taken earlier. “What are you doing in my house, creature?”

The thing made a whirring, clicking noise, obviously confused. A moment later the front door opened and Mrs. Black swept in. She was wrapped in her dark cloak, her white face blazing under the hood. “What’s going on here?” she demanded. “Did you find—” She broke off, staring at Tessa.

“What’s going on?” Tessa demanded, her voice coming out in the old woman’s high whine. “I ought to ask you that—breaking into perfectly decent folks’ homes—” She blinked, as if to make it clear she couldn’t see very well. “Get out of here, and take your friend”—she jabbed the object she held (
A
frog pick
, said the voice of the old woman in her mind;
you use it for cleaning horse’s hooves, silly girl
)—“with you. You’ll find nothing here worth stealing.”

For a moment she thought it had worked. Mrs. Black’s face was expressionless. She took a step forward. “You haven’t seen a young girl in these parts, have you?” she asked. “Very finely dressed, brown hair, gray eyes. She would have looked lost. Her people are looking for her and offering a handsome reward.”

“A likely story, looking for some lost girl.” Tessa sounded as surly as she could; it wasn’t difficult. She had a feeling the old woman whose face she was wearing had been a naturally surly sort. “Get out I said!”

The automaton whirred. Mrs. Black’s lips pressed suddenly together, as if she were holding back laughter. “I see,” she said. “Might I say that’s quite a fine necklace you’re wearing, old woman?”

Tessa’s hand flew to her chest, but it was already too late. The clockwork angel was there, clearly visible, ticking gently. “Take her,” said Mrs. Black in a bored voice, and the automaton lurched forward, reaching for Tessa. She dropped the blanket and backed away, brandishing her frog pick. She managed to rake quite a long gash down the automaton’s front as it reached for her and knocked her arm aside. The frog pick clattered to the floor, and Tessa cried out in pain just as the front door burst open and a flood of automatons filled the room, their arms reaching for her, their mechanical hands closing on her flesh. Knowing she was overpowered, knowing it would not do a bit of good, she finally allowed herself to scream.

Sun on his face woke Will. He blinked, opening his eyes slowly.

Blue sky.

He rolled over and stretched stiffly into a sitting position. He was on the rise of a green hill, just out of sight of the Shrewsbury-Welshpool road. He could see nothing all around him but scattered farmhouses in the distance; he had passed only a few tiny hamlets on his frantic midnight ride away from the Green Man, riding until he literally slid from Balios’s back in exhaustion and hit the dirt with bone-jarring force. Half-walking and half-crawling, he had let his exhausted horse nose him off the road and into a slight dip in the ground, where he had curled up and fallen asleep, heedless of the drizzle of cold rain that had still been falling.

Sometime between then and now the sun had come up, drying his clothes and hair, though he was still dirty, his shirt a mess of caked mud and blood. He rose to his feet, his whole body aching. He hadn’t bothered with any kind of healing runes the previous night. He’d gone into the inn—tracking rain and mud behind him—only to retrieve his things, before returning to the stables to free Balios and hurtle off into the night. The injuries he’d sustained in his battle against Woolsey’s pack still hurt, as did the bruises from falling off the horse. He limped stiffly to where Balios was cropping grass near the shade of a spreading oak tree. A rummage through the saddlebags yielded a stele and a handful of dried fruit. He used the one to trace himself with painkilling and healing runes in between taking bites of the other.

The events of the night before seemed a thousand miles away. He remembered fighting the wolves, the splinter of bones and the taste of his own blood, the mud and the rain. He remembered the pain of the severance from Jem, though he could no longer feel it. Instead of pain he felt hollowness. As if some great hand had reached down and cut everything that made him human out of his insides, leaving him a shell.

When he was done with his breakfast, he returned his stele to his saddlebag, stripped off his ruined shirt, and changed into a clean one. As he did so, he could not help but glance down at the
parabatai
rune on his chest.

It was not black, but silver-white, like a long-faded scar. Will could hear Jem’s voice in his head, steady and serious and familiar:
“And it came to pass … that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul…. Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.” They were two warriors, and their souls were knit together by Heaven, and out of that Jonathan Shadowhunter took the idea of
parabatai,
and encoded the ceremony into the Law
.

For years now this Mark and Jem’s presence had been all Will had had in his life to assure him that he was loved by anybody. All that he’d had to know that he was real and existed. He traced his fingers over the edges of the faded
parabatai
rune. He had thought he would hate it, hate the sight of it in sunlight, but he found to his surprise that he didn’t. He was glad the
parabatai
rune had not simply vanished off his skin. A Mark that spoke of loss was still a Mark, a remembrance. You could not lose something you had never had.

Out of the saddlebag he took the knife Jem had given him: a narrow blade with the intricate silver handle. In the shadow of the oak tree, he cut the palm of his hand and watched as the blood ran onto the ground, soaking the earth. Then he knelt and plunged the blade into the bloody ground. Kneeling, he hesitated, one hand on the hilt.

“James Carstairs,” he said, and swallowed. It was always this way; when he needed words the most, he could not find them. The words of the biblical
parabatai
oath came into his head:
Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee—for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Angel do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me
.

But no. That was what was said when you were joined, not when you were cut apart. David and Jonathan had been separated, too, by death. Separated but not divided.

“I told you before, Jem, that you would not leave me,” Will said, his bloody hand on the hilt of the dagger. “And you are still with me. When I breathe, I will think of you, for without you I would have been dead years ago. When I wake up and when I sleep, when I lift up my hands to defend myself or when I lie down to die, you will be with me. You say we are born and born again. I say there is a river that divides the dead and the living. What I do know is that if we are born again, I will meet you in another life, and if there is a river, you will wait on the shores for me to come to you, so that we can cross together.” Will took a deep breath and let go of the knife. He drew his hand back. The cut on his palm was already healing—the result of the half dozen
iratzes
on his skin. “You hear that, James Carstairs? We are bound, you and I, over the divide of death, down through whatever generations may come.
Forever
.”

He rose to his feet and looked down at the knife. The knife was Jem’s, the blood was his. This spot of ground, whether he could ever find it again, whether he lived to try, would be theirs.

He turned to walk toward Balios, toward Wales and Tessa. He did not look back.

“There’s a man here to see you, Mrs. Branwell.”

Charlotte glanced up wearily to see Sophie standing in the doorway. She looked tired, as they all did; the unmistakable traces of weeping were beneath her eyes. Charlotte knew the signs—she had seen them in her own mirror that morning.

She sat behind the desk in the drawing room, staring down at the letter in her hand. She had not expected Consul Wayland to be pleased by her news, but neither had she expected this blank contempt and refusal.
I command the armies of the Shadowhunters, madam, not yourself. Fix your mind instead on an attempt to better keep your Shadowhunters in check
.

Keep them in check
. She fumed. As if they were all children and she no better than their governess or nursemaid, parading them in front of the Consul when they were washed and dressed, and hiding them in the playroom the rest of the time that he not be disturbed. They were
Shadowhunters
, and so was she. And if he did not think that Will was reliable, he was a fool. He knew of the curse; she had told him herself. Will’s madness had always been like Hamlet’s, half play and half wildness, and all driving toward a certain end.

The fire crackled in the grate; outside, the rain sheeted down, painting the windowpanes in silver lines. That morning she had passed Jem’s bedroom, the door open, the bed divested of its linens, the possessions cleared away. It could have been anyone’s room. All the evidence of his years with them, gone with the wave of a hand. She had leaned against the wall of the corridor, sweat beading on her brow, her eyes burning.
Raziel, did I do the right thing?

She passed her hand over her eyes now. “Now, of all times? It isn’t Consul Wayland, is it?”

“No, ma’am.” Sophie shook her dark head. “It’s Aloysius Starkweather. He says it is a matter of the greatest urgency.”

“Aloysius Starkweather?”
Charlotte sighed. Some days simply piled horror on horror. “Well, let him in, then.”

She folded the letter she had written as a response to the Consul, and had just sealed it when Sophie returned and ushered Aloysius Starkweather into the room, before excusing herself. Charlotte did not rise from her desk. Starkweather looked much as he had the last time she had seen him. He seemed to have calcified, as if while he was getting no younger, he could get no older either. His face was a map of wrinkled lines, framed with a white beard and white hair. His clothes were dry; Sophie must have hung his overcoat downstairs. The suit he wore was at least ten years out of fashion, and he smelled faintly of old mothballs.

“Please be seated, Mr. Starkweather,” said Charlotte as courteously as she could to someone who she knew disliked her, and had hated her father.

But he did not sit down. His hands were locked behind his back, and as he turned, surveying the room around him, Charlotte saw with a flash of alarm that one of the cuffs of his jacket was splattered with blood.

“Mr. Starkweather,” she said, and now she did rise. “Are you hurt? Should I summon the Brothers?”

“Hurt?” he barked out. “Why would I be hurt?”

“Your sleeve.” She pointed.

He drew his arm away and gazed at it before huffing out a laugh. “Not my blood,” he said. “I was in a fight, earlier. He took objection …”

“Took objection to what?”

“To my cutting off all his fingers and then slitting his throat,” said Starkweather, meeting her eyes. His own were gray-black, the color of stone.

“Aloysius.” Charlotte forgot to be polite. “The Accords forbid unproved attacks on Downworlders.”

“Unprovoked? I’d say this was provoked. His folk murdered my granddaughter. My daughter nearly died of grief. The house of Starkweather destroyed—”

“Aloysius!” Charlotte was seriously alarmed now. “Your house is not destroyed. There are still Starkweathers in Idris. I do not say that to minimize your sorrow, for some losses are with us always.”
Jem
, she thought, unbidden, and the pain of the thought pushed her back into the chair. She rested her elbows on the table, her face in her hands. “I do not know why you came to tell me this now,” she murmured. “Did you not see the runes upon the door of the Institute? This is a time of great sorrow for us—”

“I came to tell you because it’s important!” Aloysius flared up. “It regards Mortmain, and Tessa Gray.”

Charlotte lowered her hands. “What do you know of Tessa Gray?”

Aloysius had turned away. He stood facing the fire, his long shadow cast across the Persian rug on the floor. “I am not a man who thinks much of the Accords,” he said. “You know it; you have been in Councils with me. I was brought up to believe that everything touched by demons was foul and corrupt. That it was the blood right of a Shadowhunter to kill these creatures and to take what they had as spoils and treasure. The spoils room of the Institute in York was left in my charge, and I kept it filled until the day the new Laws were passed.” He scowled.