Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices, #3)(83)

“You are a Lightwood,” Cecily said. “You stayed because you were loyal to your family name. It is not cowardice.”

“Wasn’t it? Is loyalty still a commendable quality when it is misdirected?”

Cecily opened her mouth, and then closed it again. Gabriel was looking at her, his eyes shining in the moonlight. He seemed genuinely desperate to hear her answer. She wondered if he had anyone else to talk to. She could see how it might be terrifying to take one’s moral qualms to Gideon; he seemed so staunch, as if he had never questioned himself in his life and would not understand those who did.

“I think,” she said, choosing her words with care, “that any good impulse can be twisted into something evil. Look at the Magister. He does what he does because he hates the Shadowhunters, out of loyalty to his parents, who cared for him, and who were killed. It is not beyond the realm of understanding. And yet nothing excuses the result. I think when we make choices—for each choice is individual of the choices we have made before—we must examine not only our reasons for making them but what result they will have, and whether good people will be hurt by our decisions.”

There was a pause. Then, “You are very wise, Cecily Herondale,” he said.

“Do not regret too much the choices you have made in the past, Gabriel,” she said, aware that she was using his Christian name, but not able to help it. “Only make the right ones in future. We are ever capable of change and ever capable of being our better selves.”

“That,” said Gabriel, “would not be the self my father wanted me to be, and despite everything, I find myself reluctant to dismiss the hope of his approval.”

Cecily sighed. “We can do our best, Gabriel. I tried to be the child my parents wanted, the lady they wished me to be. I left to bring Will back to them because I thought it was the right thing to do. I knew they were grieved he had chosen a different path—and it is the right one for him, for all that he came to it strangely. It is his path. Do not choose the path your father would have chosen or the path your brother would choose. Be the Shadowhunter you want to be.”

He sounded very young when he replied. “How do you know that I will make the right choice?”

Outside the window horses’ hooves sounded on the flagstones of the courtyard. The Silent Brothers, leaving. Jem, Cecily thought, with a pang in her heart. Her brother had always looked to him as a kind of North Star, a compass that would ever point him toward the right decision. She had never quite thought of her brother as lucky before, and certainly would not have expected to do so today, and yet—and yet in a way he had been. To always have someone to turn to like that, and not to worry constantly that one was looking to the wrong stars.

She tried to make her voice as firm and strong as it could be, for herself as much as for the boy at the window. “Perhaps, Gabriel Lightwood, I have faith in you.”





14

PARABATAI


Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,

He hath awaken’d from the dream of life;

’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife

Invulnerable nothings. We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley,

“Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”



The courtyard of the Green Man Inn was a churned mess of mud by the time Will drew up his spent horse and slid down from Balios’s broad back. He was weary, stiff, and saddle-sore, and with the bad condition of the roads and the exhaustion of himself and his horse, he had made the last few hours in very bad time. It was already quite dark, and he was relieved to see a stable-boy hurrying toward him, boots splashed with mud to the knee and carrying a lantern that gave off a warm yellow glow.

“Oi, but it’s a wet evening, sir,” said the boy cheerfully as he grew nearer. He looked like an ordinary enough human boy, but there was something mischievous and a bit spritelike about him—faerie blood, sometimes, handed down over generations, could express itself in humans and even Shadowhunters with the curve of an eye or the bright shine of a pupil. Of course the boy had the Sight. The Green Man was a well-known Downworld way station. Will had been hoping to reach it by nightfall. He was tired of pretending in front of mundanes, tired of being glamoured, tired of hiding.

“Wet? You think?” Will muttered as water ran off his hair and into his eyelashes. He had his eyes on the front door of the inn, through which welcoming yellow light poured. Overhead almost all light had drained from the sky. Ponderous black clouds loomed overhead, heavy with the promise of more rain.

The boy took Balios by the bridle. “You’ve got one of them magic horses,” he exclaimed.

“Yes.” Will patted the horse’s lathered side. “He needs a rubdown, and special care.”

The boy nodded. “You a Shadowhunter, then? We don’t get many of them around these parts. One a little while ago, but ‘e were old an’ disagreeable—”

“Listen,” Will asked, “are there rooms available?”

“Not sure if there are any private ones, sir.”