Clockwork Prince (11 page)

With a sigh Gabriel reached up and freed two long sticks from their holsters on the wall. He handed one to Tessa. “Today,” he began, “we shall be working on parrying and blocking . . .”

As usual, Tessa lay awake a long time that night before sleep began to come. Nightmares had plagued her recently—usually of Mortmain, his cold gray eyes, and his colder voice saying measuredly that he had made her, that
There is no Tessa Gray.

She had come face-to-face with him, the man they sought, and still she did not really know what he wanted from her. To marry her, but why? To claim her power, but to what end? The thought of his cold lizardlike eyes on her made her shiver; the thought that he might have had something to do with her birth was even worse. She did not think anyone—not even Jem, wonderful understanding Jem—quite understood her burning need to know what she
was
, or the fear that she was some sort of monster, a fear that woke her in the middle of the night, leaving her gasping and clawing at her own skin, as if she could peel it away to reveal a devil’s hide beneath.

Just then she heard a rustle at her door, and the faint scratch of something being gently pushed against it. After a moment’s pause she slid off the bed and padded across the room.

She eased the door open to find an empty corridor, the faint sound of violin music drifting from Jem’s room across the hall. At her feet was a small green book. She picked it up and gazed at the words stamped in gold on its spine: “
Vathek
, by William Beckford.”

She shut the door behind her and carried the book over to her bed, sitting down so she could examine it. Will must have left it for her. Obviously it could have been no one else. But
why
? Why these odd, small kindnesses in the dark, the talk about books, and the coldness the rest of the time?

She opened the book to its title page. Will had scrawled a note for her there—not just a note, in fact. A poem.

Tessa burst out laughing, then clapped a hand over her mouth.
Drat
Will, for always being able to make her laugh, even when she didn’t want to, even when she knew that opening her heart to him even an inch was like taking a pinch of some deadly addictive drug. She dropped the copy of
Vathek
, complete with Will’s deliberately terrible poem, onto her nightstand and rolled onto the bed, burying her face in the pillows. She could still hear Jem’s violin music, sweetly sad, drifting beneath her door. As hard as she could, she tried to push thoughts of Will out of her mind; and indeed, when she fell asleep at last and dreamed, for once he made no appearance.

It rained the next day, and despite her umbrella Tessa could feel the fine hat she had borrowed from Jessamine beginning to sag like a waterlogged bird around her ears as they—she, Jem, Will, and Cyril, carrying their luggage—hurried from the coach into Kings Cross Station. Through the sheets of gray rain she was conscious only of a tall, imposing building, a great clock tower rising from the front. It was topped with a weathercock that showed that the wind was blowing due north—and not gently, spattering drops of cold rain into her face.

Inside, the station was chaos: people hurrying hither and thither, newspaper boys hawking their wares, men striding up and down with sandwich boards strapped to their chests, advertising everything from hair tonic to soap. A little boy in a Norfolk jacket dashed to and fro, his mother in hot pursuit. With a word to Jem, Will vanished immediately into the crowd.

“Gone off and left us, has he?” said Tessa, struggling with her umbrella, which was refusing to close.

“Let me do that.” Deftly Jem reached over and flicked at the mechanism; the umbrella shut with a decided snap. Pushing her damp hair out of her eyes, Tessa smiled at him, just as Will returned with an aggrieved-looking porter who relieved Cyril of the baggage and snapped at them to hurry up, the train wouldn’t wait all day.

Will looked from the porter to Jem’s cane, and back. His blue eyes narrowed. “It will wait for
us
,” Will said with a deadly smile.

The porter looked bewildered but said “Sir” in a decidedly less aggressive tone and proceeded to lead them toward the departure platform. People—so many people!—streamed about Tessa as she made her way through the crowd, clutching at Jem with one hand and Jessamine’s hat with the other. Far at the end of the station, where the tracks ran out into open ground, she could see the steel gray sky, smudged with soot.

Jem helped her up into their compartment; there was much bustling about the luggage, and Will tipping the porter in among shouts and whistling as the train prepared to depart. The door swung shut behind them just as the train pulled forward, steam rushing past the windows in white drifts, wheels clacking merrily.

“Did you bring anything to read on the journey?” asked Will, settling into the seat opposite Tessa; Jem was beside her, his cane leaning up against the wall.

She thought of the copy of
Vathek
and his poem in it; she had left it at the Institute to avoid temptation, the way you might leave behind a box of candies if you were banting and didn’t want to put on weight. “No,” she said. “I haven’t come across anything I particularly wanted to read lately.”

Will’s jaw set, but he said nothing.

“There is always something so exciting about the start of a journey, don’t you think?” Tessa went on, nose to the window, though she could see little but smoke and soot and hurtling gray rain; London was a dim shadow in the mist.

“No,” said Will as he sat back and pulled his hat down over his eyes.

Tessa kept her face against the glass as the gray of London began to fall away behind them, and with it the rain. Soon they were rolling through green fields dotted with white sheep, with here and there the point of a village steeple in the distance. The sky had turned from steel to a damp, misty blue, and small black clouds scudded overhead. Tessa watched it all with fascination.

“Haven’t you ever been in the countryside before?” asked Jem, though unlike Will’s, his question had the flavor of actual curiosity.

Tessa shook her head. “I don’t remember ever leaving New York, except to go to Coney Island, and that isn’t really countryside. I suppose I must have passed through some of it when I came from Southampton with the Dark Sisters, but it was dark, and they kept the curtains across the windows, besides.” She took off her hat, which was dripping water, and laid it on the seat between them to dry. “But I feel as if I have seen it before. In books. I keep imagining I’ll see Thornfield Hall rising up beyond the trees, or Wuthering Heights perched on a stony crag—”

“Wuthering Heights is in Yorkshire,” said Will, from under his hat, “and we’re nowhere near Yorkshire yet. We haven’t even reached Grantham. And there’s nothing that impressive about Yorkshire. Hills and dales, no proper mountains like we have in Wales.”

“Do you miss Wales?” Tessa inquired. She wasn’t sure why she did it; she knew asking Will about his past was like poking a dog with a sore tail, but she couldn’t seem to help it.

Will shrugged lightly. “What’s to miss? Sheep and singing,” he said. “And the ridiculous language.
Fe hoffwn i fod mor feddw, fyddai ddim yn cofio fy enw.
”

“What does that mean?”

“It means ‘I wish to get so drunk I no longer remember my own name,’ Quite useful.”

“You don’t sound very patriotic,” observed Tessa. “Weren’t you just reminiscing about the mountains?”

“Patriotic?” Will looked smug. “I’ll tell you what’s patriotic,” he said. “In honor of my birthplace, I’ve the dragon of Wales tattooed on my—”

“You’re in a
charming
temper, aren’t you, William?” interrupted Jem, though there was no edge to his voice. Still, having observed them now for some time, together and apart, Tessa knew it meant something when they called each other by their full first names instead of the familiar shortened forms. “Remember, Starkweather can’t stand Charlotte, so if this is the mood you’re in—”

“I promise to charm the dickens out of him,” said Will, sitting up and readjusting his crushed hat. “I shall charm him with such force that when I am done, he will be left lying limply on the ground, trying to remember his own name.”

“The man’s eighty-nine,” muttered Jem. “He may well have that problem anyway.”

“I suppose you’re storing up all that charm now?” Tessa inquired. “Wouldn’t want to waste any of it on us?”

“That’s it exactly.” Will sounded pleased. “And it isn’t Charlotte the Starkweathers can’t stand, Jem. It’s her father.”

“Sins of the fathers,” said Jem. “They’re not inclined to like any Fairchild, or anyone associated with one. Charlotte wouldn’t even let Henry come up—”

“That is because every time one lets Henry out of the house on his own, one risks an international incident,” said Will. “But yes, to answer your unasked question, I do understand the trust Charlotte has placed in us, and I do intend to behave myself. I don’t want to see that squinty-eyed Benedict Lightwood and his hideous sons in charge of the Institute any more than anyone else does.”

“They’re not hideous,” said Tessa.

Will blinked at her. “What?”

“Gideon and Gabriel,” said Tessa. “They’re really quite good-looking, not hideous at all.”

“I spoke,” said Will in sepulchral tones, “of the pitch-black inner depths of their souls.”

Tessa snorted. “And what color do you suppose the inner depths of
your
soul are, Will Herondale?”

“Mauve,” said Will.

Tessa looked over at Jem for help, but he only smiled. “Perhaps we should discuss strategy,” he said. “Starkweather hates Charlotte but knows that she sent us. So how to worm our way into his good graces?”

“Tessa can utilize her feminine wiles,” said Will. “Charlotte said he enjoys a pretty face.”

“How did Charlotte explain my presence?” Tessa inquired, realizing belatedly that she should have asked this earlier.

“She didn’t really; she just gave our names. She was quite curt,” said Will. “I think it falls to us to concoct a plausible story.”

“We can’t say I’m a Shadowhunter; he’ll know immediately that I’m not. No Marks.”

“And no warlock mark. He’ll think she’s a mundane,” said Jem. “She could Change, but . . .”

Will eyed her speculatively. Though Tessa knew it meant nothing—worse than nothing, really—she still felt his gaze on her like the brush of a finger across the back of her neck, making her shiver. She forced herself to return his look stonily. “Perhaps we could say she’s a mad maiden aunt who insists on chaperoning us everywhere.”

“My aunt or yours?” Jem inquired.

“Yes, she doesn’t really look like either of us, does she? Perhaps she’s a girl who’s fallen madly in love with me and persists in following me wherever I go.”

“My talent is shape-shifting, Will, not acting,” said Tessa, and at that, Jem laughed out loud. Will glared at him.

“She had the better of you there, Will,” he said. “It does happen sometimes, doesn’t it? Perhaps I should introduce Tessa as my fiancée. We can tell mad old Aloysius that her Ascension is underway.”

“Ascension?” Tessa remembered nothing of the term from the
Codex.

Jem said, “When a Shadowhunter wishes to marry a mundane—”

“But I thought that was forbidden?” Tessa asked, as the train slid into a tunnel. It was dark suddenly in their compartment, though she had the feeling nevertheless that Will was looking at her, that shivering sense that his gaze was on her somehow.

“It is.
Unless
the Mortal Cup is used to turn that mundane into a Shadowhunter. It is not a common result, but it does happen. If the Shadowhunter in question applies to the Clave for an Ascension for their partner, the Clave is required to consider it for at least three months. Meanwhile, the mundane embarks on a course of study to learn about Shadowhunter culture—”

Jem’s voice was drowned out by the train whistle as the locomotive emerged from the tunnel. Tessa looked at Will, but he was staring fixedly out the window, not looking at her at all. She must have imagined it.

“It’s not a bad idea, I suppose,” said Tessa. “I do know rather a lot; I’ve finished nearly all of the
Codex
.”

“It would seem reasonable that I brought you with me,” said Jem. “As a possible Ascender, you might want to learn about Institutes other than the one in London.” He turned to Will. “What do you think?”

“It seems as fine an idea as any.” Will was still looking out the window; the countryside had grown less green, more stark. There were no villages visible, only long swathes of gray-green grass and outcroppings of black rock.

“How many Institutes are there, other than the one in London?” Tessa asked.

Jem ticked them off on his hands. “In Britain? London, York, one in Cornwall—near Tintagel—one in Cardiff, and one in Edinburgh. They’re all smaller, though, and report to the London Institute, which in turn reports to Idris.”

“Gideon Lightwood said he was at the Institute in Madrid. What on earth was he doing there?”

“Faffing about, most likely,” said Will.