Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)(19)

“You fear for Jem,” Will said.

“Yes,” she said. “And I fear for you, too.”

“No,” Will said hoarsely. “Don’t waste that on me, Tess.”

Before she could reply, the library door opened. It was Charlotte, looking drained and exhausted. Will turned toward her quickly.

“How is Jem?” he said.

“He is awake and talking,” said Charlotte. “He has had some of the yin fen, and the Silent Brothers have been able to make his condition stable, and to stop the internal bleeding.”

At the mention of internal bleeding, Will looked as if he were going to throw up; Tessa imagined she looked much the same.

“He can have a visitor,” Charlotte went on. “In fact, he has requested it.”

Will and Tessa exchanged a quick glance. Tessa knew what both were thinking: Which of them should the visitor be? Tessa was Jem’s fiancée, but Will was his parabatai, which was sacred in and of itself. Will had begun to step back, when Charlotte spoke again, sounding tired down to her bones:

“He has asked for you, Will.”

Will looked startled. He darted a glance at Tessa. “I—”

Tessa could not deny the little burst of surprise and almost-jealousy she had felt behind her rib cage at Charlotte’s words, but she pushed it down ruthlessly. She loved Jem enough to want whatever he wanted for himself, and he always had his reasons. “You go,” she said gently. “Of course he would want to see you.”

Will began to move toward the door to join Charlotte. Halfway there he turned back and crossed the room to Tessa. “Tessa,” he said, “while I am with Jem, would you do something for me?”

Tessa looked up and swallowed. He was too close, too close: All the lines, shapes, angles of Will filled her field of vision as the sound of his voice filled her ears. “Yes, certainly,” she said. “What is it?”

To: Edmund and Linette Herondale

Ravenscar Manor

West Riding, Yorkshire

Dear Dad and Mam,

I know it was cowardly of me to have left as I did, in the early morning before you woke, with only a note to explain my absence. I could not bear to face you, knowing what I had decided to do, and that I was the worst of disobedient daughters.

How can I explain the decision I made, how I arrived at it? It seems, even now, like madness. Each day in fact is madder than the one before it. You did not lie, Dad, when you said the life of a Shadowhunter was like a feverish dream—



Cecily drew the nib of the pen viciously through the lines she had written, then crumpled up the paper in one hand and rested her head on the desk.

She had started this letter so many times, and had yet to arrive at any satisfactory version. Perhaps she should not be attempting it now, she thought, not when she had been trying to calm her nerves since they had returned to the Institute. Everyone had been swarming about Jem, and Will, after roughly checking her for injuries in the garden, had barely spoken to her again. Henry had gone running for Charlotte, Gideon had drawn Gabriel aside, and Cecily had found herself climbing the Institute stairs alone.

She had slipped into her bedroom, not bothering to divest herself of her gear, and curled up on the soft four-poster bed. As she’d lain among the shadows, hearing the faint sounds of London passing by outside, her heart had clenched with sudden, painful homesickness. She’d thought of the green hills of Wales, and of her mother and father, and had bolted out of the bed as if she had been pushed, stumbling to the desk and taking up pen and paper, the ink staining her fingers in her haste. And yet the right words would not come. She felt as if she bled her regret and her loneliness from her very pores, and yet she could not shape those feelings into any sentiment she could imagine her parents could bear reading.

At that moment there was a knock on the door. Cecily reached for a book she had left resting on the desk, propped it up as if she had been reading, and called: “Come in.”

The door swung open; it was Tessa, standing hesitantly in the doorway. She was no longer wearing her destroyed wedding dress but a simple gown of blue muslin with her two necklaces glittering at her throat: the clockwork angel and the jade pendant that had been her bridal gift from Jem. Cecily looked at Tessa curiously. Though the two girls were friendly, they were not close. Tessa had a certain wariness around her that Cecily suspected the source of without ever being able to prove it; on top of that there was something fey and strange about her. Cecily knew she could shape-shift, could transform herself into the likeness of any person, and Cecily could not rid herself of the sense that it was unnatural. How could you know someone’s true face if they could change it as easily as someone else might change a gown?

“Yes?” Cecily said. “Miss Gray?”

“Please call me Tessa,” said the other girl, shutting the door behind her. It was not the first time she had asked Cecily to call her by her given name, but habit and perversity kept Cecily from doing it. “I came to see if you were all right and if you needed anything.”

“Ah.” Cecily felt a slight pang of disappointment. “I am quite all right.”

Tessa moved forward slightly. “Is that Great Expectations?”

“Yes.” Cecily did not say that she had seen Will reading it, and had picked it up to try to gain insight into what he was thinking. So far she was woefully lost. Pip was morbid, and Estella so awful that Cecily wanted to shake her.