Clockwork Prince (27 page)

“Or the daughters,” said Will.

Gideon looked at him and gave him a crooked smile. There was no dislike in it; in fact, it was jarringly the look of someone who understood Will, and why he behaved as he did. Even Will looked a bit surprised. “There is the problem that Gabriel will never come back here, of course,” said Gideon. “Not after this.”

Sophie, whose color had started to return, paled again. “Mrs. Branwell will be furious—”

Tessa waved her back. “I’ll go after him and apologize, Sophie. It will be all right.”

She heard Gideon call after her, but she was already hurrying from the room. She hated to admit it, but she’d felt a spark of sympathy for Gabriel when Gideon had been telling his story. Losing a mother when you were so young you could barely remember her later was something she had familiarity with. If someone had told her that her mother had had a dying wish, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have done everything in her power to execute it . . . whether it made sense or not.

“Tessa!” She was partway down the corridor when she heard Will calling after her. She spun and saw him striding down the hall in her direction, a half smile on his face.

Her next words wiped his smile away. “
Why
are you following me? Will, you shouldn’t have left them alone! You must go back to the training room, right away.”

Will planted his feet. “Why?”

Tessa threw up her hands. “Don’t men notice anything? Gideon has designs on Sophie—”

“On
Sophie
?”

“She’s a very beautiful girl,” flared Tessa. “You’re an idiot if you haven’t noticed the way he looks at her, but I don’t want him taking advantage of her. She’s had enough such trouble in her life—and besides, if you’re with me, Gabriel won’t talk to me. You know he won’t.”

Will muttered something under his breath and seized her wrist. “Here. Come with me.”

The warmth of his skin against hers sent a jolt up her arm. He pulled her into the drawing room and across to the great windows that looked down over the courtyard. He released her wrist just in time for her to lean forward and see the Lightwoods’ carriage rattling furiously across the stone yard and under the iron gates.

“There,” Will said. “Gabriel’s gone anyway, unless you want to chase after the carriage. And Sophie’s perfectly sensible. She’s not going to let Gideon Lightwood have his way with her. Besides, he’s about as charming as a postbox.”

Tessa, surprising even herself, let out a gasp of laughter. She put her hand up to cover her mouth, but it was too late; she was already laughing, leaning a little against the window.

Will looked at her, his blue eyes quizzical, his mouth just beginning to quirk up in a grin. “I must be more amusing than I thought. Which would make me very amusing indeed.”

“I’m not laughing at you,” she told him in between giggles. “Just—Oh! The look on Gabriel’s face when Sophie slapped him. My goodness.” She pushed her hair out of her face and said, “I really shouldn’t be laughing. Half the reason he was so awful was your goading him. I should be angry with you.”

“Oh,
should
,” said Will, spinning away to drop into a chair near the fire, and stretching out his long legs toward the flames. Like every room in England, Tessa thought, it was chilly in here except just in front of the fire. One roasted in the front and froze in the back, like a badly cooked turkey. “No good sentences ever include the word ‘should.’ I
should
have paid the tavern bill; now they’re coming to break my legs. I
should
never have run off with my best friend’s wife; now she devils me constantly. I
should
—”

“You
should
,” Tessa said softly, “think about the way the things you do affect Jem.”

Will rolled his head back against the leather of the chair and regarded her. He looked drowsy and tired and beautiful. He could have been some Pre-Raphaelite Apollo. “Is this a serious conversation now, Tess?” His voice still held humor but was edged, like a gold blade edged in razored steel.

Tessa came and sat down in the armchair across from his. “Aren’t you worried that he’s cross with you? He’s your
parabatai
. And he’s Jem. He’s never cross.”

“Perhaps it’s better that he’s cross with me,” said Will. “So much saintlike patience cannot be good for anyone.”

“Do not mock him.” Tessa’s tone was sharp.

“Nothing is beyond mockery, Tess.”

“Jem is. He has always been good to you. He is nothing but goodness. That he hit you last night, that only shows how capable you are of driving even saints to madness.”

“
Jem
hit me?” Will, fingering his cheek, looked amazed. “I must confess, I remember very little of last night. Only that the two of you woke me, though I very much wanted to stay asleep. I remember Jem shouting at me, and you holding me. I knew it was you. You always smell of lavender.”

Tessa ignored this. “Well, Jem hit you. And you deserved it.”

“You
do
look scornful—rather like Raziel in all those paintings, as if he were looking down on us. So tell me, scornful angel, what did I do to deserve being hit in the face by James?”

Tessa reached for the words, but they eluded her; she turned to the language she and Will shared—poetry. “You know, in that essay of Donne’s, what he says—”

“‘License my roving hands, and let them go’?” quoted Will, eyeing her.

“I meant the
essay
about how no man is an island. Everything you do touches others. Yet you never think about it. You behave as if you live on some sort of—of Will island, and none of your actions can have any consequences. Yet they do.”

“How does my going to a warlock den affect Jem?” Will inquired. “I suppose he had to come and haul me out, but he’s done more dangerous things in the past for me. We protect each other—”

“No, you
don’t
,” Tessa cried in frustration. “Do you think he cares about the danger? Do you? His whole life has been destroyed by this drug, this
yin fen,
and there you go off to a warlock den and drug yourself up as if it doesn’t even matter, as if it’s just a game to you. He has to take this foul stuff every day just so he can live, but in the meantime it’s killing him. He hates to be dependent on it. He can’t even bring himself to buy it; he has
you
do that.” Will made a sound of protest, but Tessa held up a hand. “And then
you
swan down to Whitechapel and throw your money at the people who make these drugs and addict other people to them, as if it were some sort of holiday on the Continent for you. What were you thinking?”

“But it had nothing to do with Jem at all—”

“You didn’t think about him,” said Tessa. “But perhaps you should have. Don’t you understand he thinks you made a mockery out of what’s killing him? And you’re supposed to be his brother.”

Will had whitened. “He can’t think that.”

“He does,” she said. “He understands you don’t care what other people think about you. But I believe he always expected you’d care what he thought. What he felt.”

Will leaned forward. The firelight made odd patterns against his skin, darkening the bruise on his cheek to black. “I do care what other people think,” he said with a surprising intensity, staring into the flames. “It’s all I think about—what others think, what they feel about me, and I about them; it drives me mad. I wanted escape—”

“You can’t mean that. Will Herondale, minding what others think of him?” Tessa tried to make her voice as light as possible. The look on his face startled her. It was not closed but open, as if he were caught half-entangled in a thought he desperately wanted to share, but could not bear to.
This is the boy who took my private letters and hid them in his room,
she thought, but she could work up no anger about it. She had thought she would be furious when she saw him again, but she was not, only puzzled and wondering. Surely it showed a curiosity about other people that was quite un-Will-like, to want to read them in the first place?

There was something raw in his face, his voice. “Tess,” he said. “That is
all
I think about. I never look at you without thinking about what you feel about me and fearing—”

He broke off as the drawing room door opened and Charlotte came in, followed by a tall man whose bright blond hair shone like a sunflower in the dim light. Will turned away quickly, his face working. Tessa stared at him.
What
had he been going to say?

“Oh!” Charlotte was clearly startled to see them both. “Tessa, Will—I didn’t realize you were in here.”

Will’s hands were in fists at his sides, his face in shadow, but his voice was level when he replied: “We saw the fire going. It’s as chill as ice in the rest of the house.”

Tessa stood up. “We’ll just be on our way—”

“Will Herondale, excellent to see you looking well. And Tessa Gray!” The blond man broke away from Charlotte and came toward Tessa, beaming as if he knew her. “The shape-changer, correct? Enchanted to meet you. What a curiosity.”

Charlotte sighed. “Mr. Woolsey Scott, this is Miss Tessa Gray. Tessa, this is Mr. Woolsey Scott, head of the London werewolf pack, and an old friend of the Clave.”

“Very well, then,” said Gideon as the door shut behind Tessa and Will. He turned toward Sophie, who was suddenly acutely aware of the largeness of the room, and how small she felt inside it. “Shall we continue with the training?”

He held out a knife to her, shining like a silver wand in the room’s dimness. His green eyes were steady.
Everything
about Gideon was steady—his gaze, his voice, the way he held himself. She remembered what it felt like to have those steady arms around her, and shivered involuntarily. She had never been alone with him before, and it frightened her. “I don’t think my heart would be in it, Mr. Lightwood,” she said. “I appreciate the offer all the same, but . . .”

He lowered his arm slowly. “You think that I don’t take training you seriously?”

“I think you’re being very generous. But I ought to face facts, oughtn’t I? This training was never about me or Tessa. It was about your father and the Institute. And now that I’ve slapped your brother—” She felt her throat tighten. “Mrs. Branwell would be so disappointed in me if she knew.”

“Nonsense. He deserved it. And the little matter of the
blood feud
between our families does come to mind.” Gideon spun the silver knife carelessly about his finger and thrust it through his belt. “Charlotte would probably give you a rise in salary if she knew.”

Sophie shook her head. They were only a few steps from a bench; she sank down onto it, feeling exhausted. “You don’t know Charlotte. She’d feel honor-bound to discipline me.”

Gideon settled himself on the bench—not beside her, but against the far side of it, as distant from her as he could get. Sophie couldn’t decide whether she was pleased about that or not. “Miss Collins,” he said. “There is something you ought to know.”

She laced her fingers together. “What is that?”

He leaned forward a little, his broad shoulders hunched. She could see the flecks of gray in his green eyes. “When my father called me back from Madrid,” he said, “I did not want to come. I had never been happy in London. Our house has been a miserable place since my mother died.”

Sophie just stared at him. She could think of no words. He was a Shadowhunter and a gentleman, and yet he seemed to be unburdening his soul to her. Even Jem, for all his gentle kindness, had never done that.

“When I heard about these lessons, I thought they would be a dreadful waste of my time. I pictured two very silly girls uninterested in any sort of instruction. But that describes neither Miss Gray nor yourself. I should tell you, I used to train younger Shadowhunters in Madrid. And there were quite a few of them who didn’t have the same native ability that you do. You’re a talented student, and it’s a pleasure to teach you.”

Sophie felt herself flush scarlet. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am. I was pleasantly surprised the first time I came here, and again so the next time and the next. I found that I was looking forward to it. In fact, it would be fair to say that since my return home, I have hated everything in London except these hours here, with you.”

“But you said ‘
ay Dios mio
’ every time I dropped my dagger—”

He grinned. It lit up his face, changed it. Sophie stared at him. He was not beautiful like Jem was, but he was very handsome, especially when he smiled. The smile seemed to reach out and touch her heart, speeding its pace.
He is a Shadowhunter,
she thought.
And a gentleman. This is not the way to think about him. Stop it.
But she could not stop, any more than she had been able to put Jem out of her mind. Though, where with Jem she had felt safe, with Gideon she felt an excitement like lightning that coursed up and down her veins, shocking her. And yet she did not want to let it go.

“I speak Spanish when I’m in a good mood,” he said. “You might as well know that about me.”

“So it wasn’t that you were so weary of my ineptitude that you were wishing to hurl yourself off the roof?”

“Just the opposite.” He leaned closer to her. His eyes were the green-gray of a stormy sea. “Sophie? Might I ask you something?”

She knew she should correct him, ask him to call her Miss Collins, but she didn’t. “I—yes?”

“Whatever happens with the lessons—might I see you again?”

Will had risen to his feet, but Woolsey Scott was still examining Tessa, his hand under his chin, studying her as if she were something under glass in a natural history exhibit. He was not at all what she would have thought the leader of a pack of werewolves would look like. He was probably in his early twenties, tall but slender to the point of slightness, with blond hair nearly to his shoulders, dressed in a velvet jacket, knee breeches, and a trailing scarf with a paisley print. A tinted monocle obscured one pale green eye. He looked like drawings she’d seen in
Punch
of those who called themselves “aesthetes.”