Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(158)

Julian paced restlessly up to the portrait of Jesse Blackthorn and stared into his ancestor’s green eyes. “So I begged Arthur to respond to the Clave, to do anything that would show that he was the head of the Institute. Letters were piling up. Urgent messages. We didn’t have weapons and he wouldn’t requisition them. We were running out of seraph blades. I came upstairs one night to ask him—” His voice cracked. “To ask him if he’d sign letters if I wrote them, about the territorial disputes, and I found him on the floor with a knife. He was cutting his skin open, he said, to let the evil out.”

He stared steadfastly at the portrait.

“I bandaged him up. But after that I talked to him, and I realized. Uncle Arthur’s reality is not our reality. He lives in a dreamworld where sometimes I’m Julian and sometimes I’m my father. He talks to people who aren’t there. Oh, there are times when he’s clear about who he is and where he is. But they come and go. There are bad periods where he doesn’t know any of us for weeks. Then times of clarity where you might imagine he was getting better. But he’ll never get better.”

“You’re saying he’s mad,” said Mark. “Madness” was the faerie word for it; it was a faerie punishment, in fact, the bringing down of madness, the shattering of someone’s mind. “Lunacy” was what Shadowhunters called it. Emma had a sense there were different words for it among mundanes—a faint sense she had from bits and pieces of movies she had seen, books she had read. That there was a less cruel and absolute way to think about those whose minds ran differently than most—whose thoughts gave them pain and fear. But the Clave was cruel and absolute. It was there in the words that described the code by which they lived. The Law is hard, but it is the Law.

“Lunatic, I guess the Clave would say,” said Julian with a bitter twist to his mouth. “It’s amazing that you’re still a Shadowhunter if you have a sickness of the body, but apparently not if you have a sickness of the mind. I knew even when I was twelve that if the Clave found out what kind of state Arthur was really in, they’d take the Institute. They’d break up our family and scatter us. And I would not let that happen.”

He looked from Mark to Emma, his eyes blazing.

“I had enough of my family taken from me during the war,” he said. “We all did. We’d lost so much. Mother, Father, Helen, Mark. They would have torn us apart until we were adults and by then we wouldn’t be a family anymore. They were my children. Livvy. Ty. Dru. Tavvy. I raised them. I became Uncle Arthur. I took the correspondence, I answered it. I did the requisitioning. I drew up the patrol schedules. I never let anyone know Arthur was sick. I said he was eccentric, a genius, hard at work in his attic. The truth was—” He looked away. “When I was younger I hated him. I never wanted him to come out of his attic, but sometimes he had to. The disputes over territory had to be handled in person. There were face-to-face meetings that couldn’t be avoided, and no one was going to hold their important summit with a twelve-year-old boy. So I went to Malcolm. He was able to create a drug that I could give to Uncle Arthur. It forced periods of clarity. They only lasted a few hours, and afterward Arthur would have headaches.”

Emma thought of the way Arthur had clutched his head after the meeting with the faerie representatives in the Sanctuary. The memory of the agony on his face—she couldn’t push it away, though she wanted to.

“Sometimes I’d try to keep him out of the way with other methods,” Julian said, his voice full of self-loathing. “Like tonight, Malcolm gave him a sleeping draught. I know it’s wrong. Believe me, I’ve felt like I might go to Hell for it. If there is a Hell. I knew I shouldn’t do what I was doing. Malcolm kept quiet, he never told anyone, but I could tell he didn’t exactly approve. He wanted me to tell the truth. But the truth would have destroyed our family.”

Mark leaned forward. His expression was unreadable. “What about Diana?”

“I never exactly told her,” said Julian. “But I think she’s guessed at least some of it.”

“Why couldn’t she have been asked to run the Institute? Instead of it being in the hands of a twelve-year-old boy?”

“I asked her. She said no. She said it was impossible. She was genuinely sorry, and she said she’d help however she could. Diana has—her own secrets.” He turned away from the portrait of Jesse. “One last thing. I said I hated Arthur. But that was a long time ago. I don’t hate him now. I hate the Clave for what they would do to him, to us, if they knew.”

He bent his head. The extraordinarily bright witchlight turned the edges of his hair to gold and the scars on his skin to silver.

“So now you know,” he said. His hands tightened on the back of the chair. “If you hate me, I understand. I can’t think of anything else I could have done. But I’d understand.”

Emma stood up from her chair. “I think we knew,” she said. “We didn’t know . . . but we knew.” She looked at Julian. “We did, didn’t we? We knew someone was taking care of everything and that it wasn’t Arthur. If we let ourselves believe he ran the Institute, it was because it was easier. It was what we wanted to be true.”

Julian closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were fixed on his brother. “Mark?” he said, and the question was implicit in the single word: Mark, do you hate me?