Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(157)

“He did,” Mark said. “I refused.”

“What? Why did you do that?”

Mark said nothing, only looked at her. “Your hand,” he said. “It’s bleeding.”

Emma glanced down. He was right; there was a cut across her knuckles. “It’s nothing.”

He reached out to take her hand in his, gazing critically at the blood. “I could draw you an iratze,” he said. “Just because I don’t want them on my skin doesn’t mean I won’t draw them on anyone else.”

Emma retracted her hand. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, returning to peeking into the entryway.

“What about next time?” Ty was asking. “We’re going to have to call the Conclave. We can’t do this on our own or expect Malcolm always to be there.”

“The Conclave can’t know,” Julian said.

“Jules,” Livvy said. “I mean, we all get it, but isn’t there some way— I mean, the Conclave would have to understand about Mark—he’s our brother—”

“I’ll handle it,” Julian said.

“What if they come back?” Dru said in a small voice.

“Do you trust me?” Julian asked gently. She nodded. “Then don’t worry about it. They won’t be back.”

Emma sighed to herself as Julian sent his siblings upstairs. He stood, watching them go, and then turned toward the dining room. Emma drew away from the door and sat down in one of the high-backed chairs just as Julian came into the room.

The witchlight chandelier above glared down brightly: an unforgivingly harsh interrogation white. Julian shut the door behind him and leaned against it. His blue-green eyes blazed in his colorless face. When he reached up to push his hair off his forehead, Emma saw that his fingers were bleeding where he had bitten his nails down to the quick.

The quick. She’d learned the term from Diana, watching Julian bite his hands bloody while Ty and Livvy practiced in the training room. “Biting his nails down to the quick won’t help him learn to hold a sword,” Diana had said, and Emma had gone and looked the term up.

The quick: the soft, tender flesh underneath the fingernail.

Also means “living,” as in “the quick and the dead.”

She couldn’t help thinking of it as life after that, as if Julian were trying to bite into the bloody matter of his life, to cauterize the messiness somehow. She knew he did it when he was upset and anxious: when Ty was unhappy, when Uncle Arthur had a meeting with the Clave, when Helen called and he told her everything was fine, she and Aline shouldn’t worry, and yes, he understood why they couldn’t come back from Wrangel Island.

And he was doing it now.

“Julian,” said Emma. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. You don’t have to tell us anything—”

“I do, actually,” he said. “I need to talk for a little while without being interrupted. After that, I’ll answer any questions you have. All right?”

Mark and Emma nodded.

“After the Dark War, it was only because of Uncle Arthur that they let us come back here, to our home,” he said. “It was only because we had a guardian that we were allowed to stay together. A guardian who was related to us, not too young or too old, someone willing to promise to look after six children, make sure they were tutored and trained. No one else would have done it except Helen, and she was exiled—”

“And I was gone,” Mark said bitterly.

“It wasn’t your fault—” Julian stopped, took a deep breath, and shook his head minutely. “If you talk,” he said, “if you say anything, I won’t be able to get through this.”

Mark ducked his chin. “My apologies.”

“Even if you hadn’t been taken, Mark, you’d have been too young. Only someone over eighteen can run an Institute and be the guardian of children.” Julian glanced down at his hands, as if struggling internally, and then looked back up. “The Clave thought Uncle Arthur would be that guardian. So did we. I thought it when he came here, and even for weeks afterward. Maybe months. I don’t remember. I know that he never really bothered to try to get to know any of us, but I told myself it didn’t matter. I told myself we didn’t need a guardian who would love us. Just someone who would keep us together.”

His eyes locked with Emma’s, and the next words he spoke seemed to be directly to her.

“We loved each other enough, I thought. For it not to matter. Maybe he couldn’t show affection, but he could still be a good custodian of the Institute. Then as he came downstairs less and less, and the letters from other Institutes and calls from the Clave went unanswered, I started to realize there was more that was seriously wrong. It was soon after the Cold Peace, and territorial disputes were ripping the city apart, vamps and werewolves and warlocks going after what used to belong to faeries. We were besieged with calls, visits, demands we handle the problem. I’d go up to the attic, bring Arthur his food, beg him to deal with what needed to be done to keep the Clave from stepping in. Because I knew what would happen if they did. We’d no longer have a guardian, and then we’d no longer have a home. And then—”

He took a deep breath.

“They would have sent Emma to the new Academy in Idris. It was what they wanted to do in the first place. They would have sent the rest of us to London, probably. Tavvy was just a baby. They would have placed him with another family. Drusilla too. As for Ty—imagine what they would have done with Ty. The moment he didn’t act the way they thought he should, they would have shoved him into the ‘dregs’ program at the Academy. Separated him from Livvy. It would have killed them both.”