Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)(153)

“The cure—you found it?”

“I did not find it myself,” he said slowly. “But—it was found.”

“I saw Magnus in Alicante only a few months ago. We spoke of you. He never said …”

“He didn’t know,” Jem said. “It has been a hard year, a dark year, for Shadowhunters. But out of the blood and the fire, the loss and the sorrow, there have been born some great new changes.” He held out his arms, self-deprecatingly, and with a little amazement in his voice, as he said: “I myself am changed.”

“How—”

“I will tell you the story of it. Another story of Lightwoods and Herondales and Fairchilds. But it will take more than an hour in the telling, and you must be cold.” He moved forward as if to touch her shoulder, then seemed to remember himself, and let his hand fall.

“I—” Words had deserted her. She was still feeling the shock of seeing him like this, bone-deep. Yes, she had seen him every year, here in this place, on this bridge. But it was not until this moment that she realized how much she had been seeing a Jem transmuted. But this—this was like falling into her own past, all the last century erased, and she felt dizzy and elated and terrified with it. “But—after today? Where will you go? To Idris?”

He looked, for a moment, honestly bewildered—and despite how old she knew him to be, so young. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never had a lifetime to plan for before.”

“Then … to another Institute?” Don’t go, Tessa wanted to say. Stay. Please.

“I do not think I will go to Idris, or to an Institute anywhere,” he said, after a pause so long that she felt as if her knees might give way under her if he did not speak. “I don’t know how to live in the world as a Shadowhunter without Will. I don’t think I even want to. I am still a parabatai, but my other half is gone. If I were to go to some Institute and ask them to take me in, I would never forget that. I would never feel whole.”

“Then what—”

“That depends on you.”

“On me?” A sort of terror gripped her. She knew what she wanted him to say, but it seemed impossible. In all the time she had seen him, since he had become a Silent Brother, he had seemed remote. Not unkind or unfeeling, but as if there were a layer of glass between him and the world. She remembered the boy she had known, who’d given his love as freely as breathing, but that was not the man she had met only once each year for more than a century. She knew how much the time between then and now had changed her. How much more must it have changed him? She did not know what he wanted from his new life or, more immediately, from her. She wanted to tell him whatever he wanted to hear, wanted to catch at him and hold him, to seize his hands and reassure herself of their shape—but she did not dare. Not without knowing what he wanted from her. It had been so many years. How could she presume he still felt as he once had?

“I—” He looked down at his slender hands, gripping the concrete of the bridge. “For a hundred and thirty years every hour of my life has been scheduled. I thought often of what I would do if I were free, if there were ever a cure found. I thought I would bolt immediately, like a bird released from a cage. I had not imagined I would emerge and find the world so changed, so desperate. Subsumed in fire and blood. I wished to survive it, but for only one reason. I wished …”

“What did you wish for?”

He did not reply. Instead he reached over to touch her pearl bracelet with light fingers. “This is your thirtieth-anniversary bracelet,” he said. “You still wear it.”

Tessa swallowed. Her skin was prickling, her pulse racing. She realized she hadn’t felt this, this particular brand of excited nervousness, in so many years that she had nearly forgotten it. “Yes.”

“Since Will, have you never loved anyone else?”

“Don’t you know the answer to that?”

“I don’t mean the way you love your children, or the way you love your friends. Tessa, you know what I’m asking.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I think I need you to tell me.”

“We were once going to be married,” he said. “And I have loved you all this time—a century and a half. And I know that you loved Will. I saw you together over the years. And I know that that love was so great that it must have made other loves, even the one we had when we were both so young, seem small and unimportant. You had a whole lifetime of love with him, Tessa. So many years. Children. Memories I cannot hope to—”

He broke off with a violent start.

“No,” he said, and let her wrist fall. “I can’t do it. I was a fool to think— Tessa, forgive me,” he said, and drew away from her, plunging into the throng of people surging across the bridge.

Tessa stood for a moment in shock; it was just a moment, but it was enough time for him to vanish into the crowd. She put out a hand to steady herself. The stone of the bridge was cold under her fingers—cold, just as it had been that night when they had first come to this place, where they had first talked. He had been the first person she had ever voiced her deepest fear to: that her power made her something other, something that was not human. You are human, he had said. In all the ways that matter.

She remembered him, remembered the lovely dying boy who had taken the time to comfort a frightened girl he did not know, and had not voiced a word of his own fear. Of course he had left his fingerprints on her heart. How could it be otherwise?