Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(65)

“It’s a computer thing. Ty knows about it. You’ll be able to look at her when you talk to her.”

“Like the scrying glass of the fey?”

“Sort of like that.” Emma edged a little closer to him, as if she were sidling up to a wild animal that might spook at her approach. “Come back downstairs?”

“I prefer it here. I was choking inside on all that dead air, crushed under the weight of all that building—roof and timbers and glass and stone. How do you live like that?”

“You did just fine for sixteen years.”

“I barely remember,” he said. “It seems like a dream.” He glanced back toward the ocean. “So much water,” he said. “I can see it and through it. I can see the demons down under the sea. I look at it and it doesn’t seem real.”

That was something Emma could understand. The sea was what had taken her parents’ bodies and then returned them, broken and empty. She knew from the reports that they’d been dead when they’d been cast into the water, but it didn’t help. She remembered the lines of a poem Arthur had recited once, about the ocean: water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits.

That was what the sea beyond the waves was, to her. Deep death waiting.

“Surely there’s water in Faerie?” she said.

“Not any sea. And never enough water. The Wild Hunt would often ride for days without water. Only if we were fainting would Gwyn let us stop to drink. And there are fountains in the Wild of Faerie, but they run with blood.”

“‘For all the blood that’s shed on earth, runs through the springs of that country,’” said Emma. “I didn’t realize that was literal.”

“I didn’t realize you knew the old rhymes,” said Mark, glancing over with the first real interest he’d shown in her since his return.

“The whole family has always tried to learn everything they can about Faerie,” said Emma, sitting down beside him. “Ever since we came back from the Dark War, Diana has taught us, and even the little ones wanted to know about the Fair Folk. Because of you.”

“That must be a rather unpopular part of the Shadowhunter curriculum,” said Mark, “considering recent history.”

“It isn’t your fault, what the Clave thinks of faeries,” said Emma. “You’re a Shadowhunter, and you were never part of the betrayal.”

“I am a Shadowhunter,” Mark agreed. “But I am part Fair Folk, too, like my sister. My mother was the Lady Nerissa. She died after I was born, and with no one to raise us, Helen and I were given back to our father. My mother was gentry, though, one of the highest rank of the fey.”

“Did they treat you better in the Hunt because of her?”

Mark shook his head once. “I believe they think of my father as responsible for her death. For breaking her heart by leaving her. That did not dispose them well toward me.” He tucked a lock of pale hair behind his ear. “Nothing the Fair Folk did to my body or mind was as cruel as the moment I was told that the Clave would not be coming to find me. That they would send no rescue parties. Jace told me, when he saw me in Faerie, ‘show them what a Shadowhunter is made of.’ But what are Shadowhunters made of, if they desert their own?”

“The Council isn’t all Shadowhunters in the world,” said Emma. “A lot of Nephilim thought what was done to you was wrong. And Julian never stopped trying to get the Clave to change their minds.” She considered reaching to pat his arm, then thought better of it. There was still something a little feral about him; it would have been like reaching to pat a leopard. “You’ll see, now that you’re home.”

“Am I home?” asked Mark. He shook his head, like a dog shaking off water. “Perhaps I was unfair to my brother,” he said. “Perhaps I should not have lashed out. I feel like—like I am in a dream. It seems weeks ago they came to me at the Hunt and told me I was to go back to the world.”

“Did they tell you that you’d be coming home?”

“No,” he said. “They told me I had no choice but to leave the Hunt. That the King of the Unseelie Court had commanded it. They pulled me down from my horse and bound my hands. We rode for days. They gave me something to drink, something that made me hallucinate and imagine things that were not there.” He looked down at his hands. “It was so I would not be able to find my way back, but I wish they had not done it,” he said. “I wish I could have arrived here as I have been for years, a capable member of the Hunt. I would have liked my brothers and sisters to see me standing tall and proud, not fearful and crawling.”

“You do seem very different now,” Emma said. It was true. He seemed like someone who had woken up after a hundred years of sleep, shaking the dust of a century’s dreams from his feet. He had been terrified; now his hands were steady, his expression somber.

Suddenly he smiled wryly.

“When they ordered me to reveal myself in the Sanctuary, I thought it was another dream.”

“A good dream?” Emma said.

He hesitated, then shook his head. “In the early days of the Hunt, when I disobeyed, I was made to see dreams, horrors, visions of my family dying. I thought that was what I was meant to be seeing again. I was terrified—not for myself, but for Julian.”