Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)(70)

“There are worse things than physical pain, Miss Gray. Mortmain has little mercy.”

“Exactly.” Tessa leaned forward, her clockwork angel beating double time under the bodice of her dress. “Why do what he asks you? You know you can’t trust him, you know he would happily destroy you—”

“I need what he can give me,” Mrs. Black said. “And I will do what I must do to obtain it.”

“And what is that?” Tessa demanded.

She heard Mrs. Black laugh, and then the Dark Sister slipped back her hood and unfastened the collar of her cloak.

Tessa had read in history books about heads on spikes over London Bridge, but she had never imagined how horrific it would actually look. Obviously whatever decay Mrs. Black had suffered after her head had been severed had not been reversed, so ragged gray skin hung down around the spike of metal that impaled her skull. She had no body, only a smooth column of metal from which two sticklike jointed arms protruded. The gray kid gloves that covered whatever sort of hands jutted from the ends of the arms added the last macabre touch.

Tessa screamed.





12

GHOSTS ON THE ROAD


Oh ever beauteous, ever friendly! tell,

Is it, in Heav’n, a crime to love too well?

To bear too tender, or too firm a heart,

To act a lover’s or a Roman’s part?

Is there no bright reversion in the sky,

For those who greatly think, or bravely die?

—Alexander Pope,

“Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady”



Will stood upon the crest of a low hill, his hands jammed into his pockets, gazing out impatiently over the placid countryside of Bedfordshire.

He had ridden with all the speed he and Balios could muster out of London toward the Great North Road. Leaving so near to dawn had meant that the streets had been fairly clear as he’d pounded through Islington, Holloway, and Highgate; he had passed a few costermonger carts and a pedestrian or two, but otherwise there had been nothing much to hold him up, and as Balios did not tire as quickly as an ordinary horse, Will had soon been out of Barnet and able to gallop through South Mimms and London Colney.

Will loved to gallop—flat to the horse’s back, with the wind in his hair, and Balios’s hooves eating up the road underneath him. Now that he was gone from London, he felt both a tearing pain and a strange freedom. It was odd to feel both at once, but he could not help it. Near Colney there were ponds; he had stopped to water Balios there before journeying on.

Now, almost thirty miles north of London, he could not help recalling coming through this way on his way to the Institute years ago. He had brought one of his father’s horses part of the way from Wales, but had sold it in Staffordshire when he’d realized he did not have money for the toll roads. He knew now that he had gotten a very bad price, and it had been a struggle to say good-bye to Hengroen, the horse that he had grown up riding, and even more of a struggle to trudge the remaining miles to London on foot. By the time he’d reached the Institute, his feet had been bleeding, and his hands, too, where he had fallen on the road and scraped them.

He looked down at his hands now, with the memory of those hands laid over them. Thin hands with long fingers—all the Herondales had them. Jem had always said it was a shame he didn’t have a bit of musical talent, as his hands were made to span a piano. The thought of Jem was like the stab of a needle; Will pushed the memory away and turned back to Balios. He had stopped here not just to water the horse but to feed him a handful of oats—good for speed and endurance—and let him rest. He had often heard of cavalry riding their horses until they died, but desperate as he was to get to Tessa, he could not imagine doing something so cruel.

There was a deal of traffic; carts on the road, dray horses with brewery wagons, dairy vans, even the odd horse-drawn omnibus. Really, did all these people have to be out and about in the middle of a Wednesday, cluttering up the roads? At least there were no highwaymen; railways, toll roads, and proper police had put an end to highway robbers decades ago. Will would have hated to have to waste time killing anybody.

He had skirted Saint Albans, not bothering to stop for lunch in his hurry to catch up to Watling Street—the ancient Roman road that now split at Wroxeter, with one half crossing up to Scotland and the other cutting through England to the port of Holyhead in Wales. There were ghosts on the road—Will caught whispers of old Anglo-Saxon on the winds, calling the road W?celinga Str?t and speaking of the last stand of the troops of Boadicea, who had been defeated by the Romans along this road so many years ago.

Now, with his hands in his pockets, staring out over the countryside—it was three o’clock and the sky was beginning to darken, which meant that Will would soon have to consider the nightfall, and finding an inn to stop at, rest his horse, and sleep—he could not help remembering when he had told Tessa that Boadicea proved that women could be warriors too. He had not told her then that he had read her letters, that he already loved the warrior soul in her, hidden behind those quiet gray eyes.

He remembered a dream he had had, blue skies and Tessa sitting down beside him on a green hill. You will always come first in my heart. A fierce rage blossomed in his soul. How dare Mortmain touch her. She was one of them. She did not belong to Will—she was too much herself to belong to anyone, even Jem—but she belonged with them, and silently he cursed the Consul for not seeing it.