Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)(134)

“Tessa,” said a familiar voice. “This will keep you lucid for a time, but you must not let yourself fall back into darkness and dreams.”

She froze, not daring to look.

“Jem?” she whispered.

The sound of the vial being set down on the bedside table. A sigh. “Yes,” he said. “Tessa. Will you look at me?”

She turned, and looked. And drew in her breath.

It was Jem, and not Jem.

He wore the parchment robes of a Silent Brother, open at the throat to show the collar of an ordinary shirt. His hood was thrown back, revealing his face. She could see the changes in him, where she had only barely seen them in the noise and confusion of the battle at Cadair Idris. His delicate cheekbones were scarred with the runes she had noticed before, one on each, long slashes of scars that did not look like ordinary Shadowhunter runes. His hair was no longer pure silver—streaks of it had darkened to black-brown, no doubt the color he had been born with. His eyelashes, too, had darkened to black. They looked like fine strands of silk against his pale skin—though he was no longer as pale as he had been.

“How is it possible?” she whispered. “That you are here?”

“I was called from the Silent City by the Council.” His voice was not the same either. There was an undertone of something cool to it, something that had not been there before. “Charlotte’s influence, I was given to understand. I am allowed an hour with you, no more.”

“An hour,” Tessa echoed, stunned. She put a hand up to push her hair from her face. What a fright she must look, in her crumpled nightgown, her hair hanging in tangled plaits, her lips dry and cracked. She reached for the clockwork angel at her neck—a familiar, habitual gesture, meant to comfort, but the angel was no longer there. “Jem. I thought you were dead.”

“Yes,” he said, and there was that remoteness in his voice still, a distance that reminded her of the icebergs she had seen off the side of the Main, floes drifting far out in icy water. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t somehow—that I couldn’t tell you.”

“I thought you were dead,” Tessa said again. “I can’t believe you’re real, now. I dreamed of you, over and over. There was a dark corridor and you were walking away from me, and however I called out, you could not, would not, turn to see me. Perhaps this is only another dream.”

“This is no dream.” He rose to his feet and stood in front of her, his pale hands interlaced in front of him, and she could not forget that this was how he had proposed to her—standing, as she sat upon the bed, looking up at him, incredulous, as she was now.

He opened his hands slowly, and on the palms, as on his cheeks, she saw great black runes scored. She was not familiar enough with the Codex to recognize them, but she knew instinctively that they were not the runes of an ordinary Shadowhunter. They spoke of a power beyond that.

“You told me it was impossible,” she whispered. “That you could not become a Silent Brother.”

He turned away from her. There was something to his motions now that was different, something of the gliding softness of the Silent Brothers. It was both lovely and chilling. What was he doing? Could he not bear to look at her?

“I told you what I believed,” he said, his face turned toward the window. In profile, she could see that some of the painful thinness of his face had faded. His cheekbones were no longer so pronounced, the hollows at his temples no longer so dark. “And what was true. That the yin fen in my blood prevented the runes of the Brotherhood from being placed upon me.” She saw his chest rise and fall beneath the parchment robes, and it almost startled her: It seemed so human, the need to draw breath. “Every effort that had ever been made to wean me slowly from the yin fen had nearly killed me. When I ceased to take it because there was no more, I felt my body begin to break, from the inside out. And I thought that I had nothing more to lose.” The intensity in Jem’s voice warmed it—was that a tone of humanity there, a crack in the armor of the Brotherhood? “I begged Charlotte to call the Silent Brothers and asked them to place the runes of the Brotherhood on me at the very last possible moment, the moment when the life was leaving my body. I knew that the runes might mean I died in agony. But it was the only chance.”

“You said that you did not wish to become a Silent Brother. Did not wish to live forever …”

He had taken a few steps across the room and was beside her vanity table. He reached down and lifted something metallic and glittering from a shallow jewelry dish. She realized with a shock of surprise that it was her clockwork angel.

“It no longer ticks,” he said. She could not read his voice; it was distant, as smooth and cool as stone.

“Its heart is gone. When I changed into the angel, I freed it from its clockwork prison. It no longer lives within. It no longer protects me.”

His hand closed around the angel, the wings digging hard into the flesh of his palm. “I must tell you,” he said. “When I received Charlotte’s demand that I come here, it was against my wishes.”

“You did not wish to see me?”

“No. I did not want you to look at me as you are looking at me now.”

“Jem—” She swallowed, tasting on her tongue the bitterness of the tisane he had given her. A whirl of memories, the darkness under Cadair Idris, the town on fire, Will’s arms around her—Will. But she had thought Jem was dead. “Jem,” she said again. “When I saw you alive, there below Cadair Idris, I thought it was a dream or a lie. I had thought you dead. It was the darkest moment of my life. Believe me, please believe me, that my soul rejoices to see you again when I thought that I never would. It’s just that …”