City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3)(57)

“Fine.” She stood up, wincing a little. Her elbow ached. “Aside from the fact that Amatis will probably kill me when we get back. Considering that I smashed all her plates and opened up a Portal in her kitchen.”

He reached his hand down to her. “For whatever it’s worth,” he said, helping her to her feet, “I was very impressed.”

“Thanks.” Clary glanced around. “So this is where you grew up? It’s like something out of a fairy tale.”

“I was thinking a horror movie,” Jace said. “God, it’s been years since I’ve seen this place. It didn’t use to be so—”

“So cold?” Clary shivered a little. She buttoned her coat, but the cold in the manor was more than physical cold: The place felt cold, as if there had never been warmth or light or laughter inside it.

“No,” said Jace. “It was always cold. I was going to say dusty.” He took a witchlight stone out of his pocket, and it flared to life between his fingers. Its white glow lit his face from beneath, picking out the shadows under his cheekbones, the hollows at his temples. “This is the study, and we need the library. Come on.”

He led her from the room and down a long corridor lined with dozens of mirrors that gave back their own reflections. Clary hadn’t realized quite how disheveled she looked: her coat streaked with dust, her hair snarled from the wind. She tried to smooth it down discreetly and caught Jace’s grin in the next mirror. For some reason, due doubtless to a mysterious Shadowhunter magic she didn’t have a hope of understanding, his hair looked perfect.

The corridor was lined with doors, some open; through them Clary could glimpse other rooms, as dusty and unused-looking as the study had been. Michael Wayland had had no relatives, Valentine had said, so she supposed no one had inherited this place after his “death”—she had assumed Valentine had carried on living here, but that seemed clearly not to be the case. Everything breathed sorrow and disuse. At Renwick’s, Valentine had called this place home, had showed it to Jace in the Portal mirror, a gilt-edged memory of green fields and mellow stone, but that, Clary thought, had been a lie too. It was clear Valentine hadn’t really lived here in years—perhaps he had just left it here to rot, or he had come here only occasionally, to walk the dim corridors like a ghost.

They reached a door at the end of the hallway and Jace shouldered it open, standing back to let Clary pass into the room before him. She had been picturing the library at the Institute, and this room was not entirely unlike it: the same walls filled with row upon row of books, the same ladders on rolling casters so the high shelves could be reached. The ceiling was flat and beamed, though, not conical, and there was no desk. Green velvet curtains, their folds iced with white dust, hung over windows that alternated panes of green and blue glass. In the moonlight they sparkled like colored frost. Beyond the glass, all was black.

“This is the library?” she said to Jace in a whisper, though she wasn’t sure why she was whispering. There was something so profoundly still about the big, empty house.

He was looking past her, his eyes dark with memory. “I used to sit in that window seat and read whatever my father had assigned me that day. Different languages on different days—French on Saturday, English on Sunday—but I can’t remember now what day Latin was, if it was Monday or Tuesday….”

Clary had a sudden flashing image of Jace as a little boy, book balanced on his knees as he sat in the window embrasure, looking out over—over what? Were there gardens? A view? A high wall of thorns like the wall around Sleeping Beauty’s castle? She saw him as he read, the light that came in through the window casting squares of blue and green over his fair hair and the small face more serious than any ten-year-old’s should be.

“I can’t remember,” he said again, staring into the dark.

She touched his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter, Jace.”

“I suppose not.” He shook himself, as if waking out of a dream, and moved across the room, the witchlight lighting his way. He knelt down to inspect a row of books and straightened up with one of them in his hand. “Simple Recipes for Housewives,” he said. “Here it is.”

She hurried across the room and took it from him. It was a plain-looking book with a blue binding, and dusty, like everything in the house. When she opened it, dust swarmed up from its pages like a gathering of moths.

A large, square hole had been cut out of the center of the book. Fitted into the hole like a jewel in a bezel was a smaller volume, about the size of a small chapbook, bound in white leather with the title printed in gilded Latin letters. Clary recognized the words for “white” and “book,” but when she lifted it out and opened it, to her surprise the pages were covered with thin, spidery handwriting in a language she couldn’t understand.

“Greek,” Jace said, looking over her shoulder. “Of the ancient variety.”

“Can you read it?”

“Not easily,” he admitted. “It’s been years. But Magnus will be able to, I imagine.” He closed the book and slipped it into the pocket of her green coat before turning back to the bookshelves, skimming his fingers along the rows of books, his fingertips tracing their spines.

“Are there any of these you want to take with you?” she asked gently. “If you’d like—”