Clockwork Princess (32 page)

“You’ll win,” Jem said. “You always do. You would make an excellent Consul, Charlotte.”

Charlotte wrinkled her nose. “A woman Consul? After all the trouble I’ve had simply for running the Institute!”

“There must always be a first,” said Jem. “It is not easy to be first, and it is not always rewarding, but it is important.” He ducked his head. “You carry with you one of my few regrets.”

Charlotte looked at him, puzzled.

“I would have liked to see the baby.”

It was a very simple, wistful thing to say, but it lodged itself in Charlotte’s heart like a sliver of glass. She began to cry, the tears slipping silently down her face.

“Charlotte,” Jem said, as if comforting her. “You’ve always taken care of me. You’ll take amazing care of this baby. You’ll be a wonderful mother.”

“You cannot give up, Jem,” she said in a choked voice. “When they brought you to me, at first they said you would live only a year or two. You’ve lived nearly six. Please just live a few more days. A few more days for me.”

Jem gave her a softly measured look. “I lived for you,” he said. “And I lived for Will, and then I lived for Tessa—and for myself, because I wanted to be with her. But I cannot live for other people forever. No one can say that death found in me a willing comrade, or that I went easily. If you say you need me, I will stay as long as I can for you. I will live for you and yours, and go down fighting death until I am worn away to bone and splinters. But it would not be my choice.”

“Then …” Charlotte looked at him hesitantly. “What would be your choice?”

He swallowed, and his hand dropped to touch the violin by his side. “I made a decision,” he said. “I made it when I told Will to go.” He ducked his head, and then looked up at Charlotte, his pale, blue-shadowed eyes fixed on her face as if willing her to understand. “I want it to stop,” he said. “Sophie says everyone is still searching for a cure for me. I know I gave Will my permission, but I want everyone to cease looking now, Charlotte. It is over.”

It was growing dark by the time Cecily and Gabriel returned to the Institute. To be out and about in the city with someone besides Charlotte or her brother had been a unique experience for Cecily, and she was astonished at what good company Gabriel Lightwood had been. He had made her laugh, though she had done her best to hide it, and he had quite obligingly carried all the parcels, though she would have expected him to protest at being treated like a harried footman.

It was true that he probably should not have thrown that faerie through the shopwindow—or into the Limehouse canal afterward. But she could hardly blame him. She knew perfectly well that it was not the fact that the satyr had shown her improper images that had snapped his temper, but the reminder of his father.

It was odd, she thought as they mounted the Institute steps, how unlike his brother he was. She had liked Gideon perfectly well since she had arrived in London, but found him quiet and contained. He did not speak much, and though he sometimes helped Will with her training, he was distant and thoughtful with everyone but Sophie. With her it was possible to see flashes of humor in him. He could be quite dryly funny when he wished to be, and had a darkly observant nature alongside his calm soul.

In bits and pieces gleaned from Tessa, Will, and Charlotte, Cecily had pieced together the story of the Lightwoods and had begun to understand why Gideon was so quiet. In a way like Will and herself, he had turned his back on his family deliberately, and he carried the scars of that loss. Gabriel’s choice had been a different one. He had stayed by his father’s side and watched the slow deterioration of his body and mind. What had he thought, while it was happening? At what point had he realized the choice he had made had been the wrong one?

Gabriel opened the Institute door, and Cecily went through; they were greeted by Bridget’s voice floating down the steps.

“O see ye not yon narrow road,
So thick beset with thorns and briers?
That is the path of righteousness,
Tho after it but few enquires
.

“And see not ye that broad, broad road
That lies across the lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness,
Tho some call it the road to Heaven.”

“She’s singing,” said Cecily, starting up the steps. “Again.”

Gabriel, balancing the parcels nimbly, made an equable noise. “I’m famished. I wonder if she’ll scare me up some cold chicken and bread in the kitchen if I tell her I don’t mind the songs?”

“Everyone minds the songs.” Cecily looked at him sideways; he had an awfully fine profile. Gideon was good-looking as well, but Gabriel was all sharp angles, chin, and cheekbones, which she thought altogether more elegant. “It isn’t your fault, you know,” she said abruptly.

“What is not my fault?” They turned from the steps onto the corridor of the second floor. It seemed dark to Cecily, the witchlights turned down low. She could hear Bridget, still singing:

“It was dark, dark night, there was no starlight,
And they waded through red blood to the knee;
For all the blood that’s shed on earth
Runs through the springs of that country.”

“Your father,” Cecily said.

Gabriel’s face tightened. For a moment Cecily thought he was going to make an angry retort, but instead he said only: “It may or may not be my fault, but I chose to be blind to his crimes. I believed in him when it was wrong to do so, and he has disgraced the name of Lightwood.”

Cecily was silent for a moment. “I came here because I believed Shadowhunters were monsters who had taken my brother. I believed it because my parents believed it. But they were wrong. We are not our parents, Gabriel. We do not have to carry the burden of their choices or their sins. You can make the Lightwood name shine again.”

“That is the difference between you and me,” he said, with not a little bitterness. “You chose to come here. I was driven out of my home—chased here by the monster that was once my father.”

“Well,” Cecily said kindly, “not chased all the way here. Only as far as Chiswick, I thought.”

“What—”

She smiled at him. “I am Will Herondale’s sister. You can’t expect me to be serious
all
the time.”

His expression at that was so comical that she giggled; she was still giggling when they pushed the library door open and entered—and both stopped dead in their tracks.

Charlotte, Henry, and Gideon were sitting around one of the long tables. Magnus stood a distance away, by the window, his hands clasped behind him. His back was rigid and straight. Henry looked wan and tired, Charlotte tearstained. Gideon’s face was a mask.

The laughter died on Cecily’s lips. “What is it? Has there been word? Is Will—”

“It is not Will,” said Charlotte. “It is Jem.” Cecily bit her lip, even as her heartbeat slowed with guilty relief. She had thought first of her brother, but of course it was his
parabatai
who was in more imminent peril.

“Jem?” she breathed.

“He is still alive,” Henry said, in answer to her unspoken question.

“Well, then. We got everything,” Gabriel said, putting the parcels down on the table. “Everything Magnus asked for—the damiana, the bat’s head root—”

“Thank you.” Magnus spoke from the window, without turning.

“Yes, thank you,” Charlotte said. “You did all I asked, and I am grateful. But I am afraid your errand was in vain.” She looked down at the parcel, and then back up again. It was clear that it was taking her a great effort to speak. “Jem has made a decision,” she said. “He wishes us to cease searching for a cure. He has had the last of the
yin fen
; there is no more, and it is a matter of hours now. I have summoned the Silent Brothers. It is time to say good-bye.”

It was dark in the training room. The shadows lay long upon the floor, and moonlight came in through the high arched windows. Cecily sat on one of the worn benches and stared down at the patterns the moonlight made on the splintered wooden floor.

Her right hand idly worried at the red pendant around her throat. She could not help but think of her brother. Part of her mind was there in the Institute, but the rest was with Will: on the back of a horse, leaning into the wind, riding hell-for-leather over the roads that separated London from Dolgellau. She wondered if he was frightened. She wondered if she would see him again.

So deep in thought was she that she started at the creak of the door as it opened. A long shadow was cast across the floor, and she looked up to see Gabriel Lightwood blinking at her in surprise.

“Hiding here, are you?” he said. “That’s—awkward.”

“Why?” She was surprised at how ordinary her voice sounded, even calm.

“Because I had intended to hide here myself.”

Cecily was silent for a moment. Gabriel actually looked a little uncertain—it hung strangely on him; he was usually so confident. Though it was a more fragile confidence than his brother’s. It was too dark for her to see the color of his eyes or hair, and for the first time she could actually see the resemblance between him and Gideon. They had the same determined set to their chins, the same wide-spaced eyes and careful stance. “You may hide here with me,” she said, “if you wish.”

He nodded, and crossed the room to where she sat, but instead of joining her he moved to the window and glanced outside. “The Silent Brothers’ carriage is here,” he said.

“Yes,” said Cecily. She knew from her reading of the
Codex
that the Silent Brothers were both the doctors and the priests of the Shadowhunter world; one might expect to find them at deathbeds and sickbeds and childbed alike. “I thought I should see Jem. For Will. But I could—I could not bring myself. I am a coward,” she added as an afterthought. It was not something she had ever thought about herself before.

“Then I am too,” he replied. The moonlight fell across one side of his face, making him look as if he were wearing a half mask. “I had come up here to be alone and, frankly, to be away from the Brothers, for they give me the chills. I thought I might play solitaire. We could, if you’d like, have a game of Beggar My Neighbor.”

“Like Pip and Estella in
Great Expectations
,” said Cecily, with a flash of amusement. “But, no—I do not know how to play cards. My mother tried to keep cards out of the house, as my father … had a weakness for them.” She looked up at Gabriel. “You know, in some ways we are the same. Our brothers left and we were alone without brother or sister, with a father who was deteriorating. Mine went a bit mad for a while after Will left and Ella died. It took him years to recover himself, and in the meantime we lost our home. Just as you lost Chiswick.”

“Chiswick was taken from us,” said Gabriel with an acidic flash of bitterness. “And to be quite honest, I am both sorry and not. My memories of the place—” He shuddered. “My father locked himself in his study a fortnight before I came here for help. I should have come earlier, but I was too proud. I did not want to admit that I had been wrong about Father. For that two weeks I barely slept. I banged on the door of the study and begged my father to come out, to speak to me, but I heard only inhuman noises. I turned the lock on my door at night and in the morning there would be blood on the stairs. I told myself the servants had fled. I knew better. So no, we are not the same, Cecily, because you
left
. You were brave. I stayed until there was no choice but to leave. I stayed even though I knew it was wrong.”

“You are a Lightwood,” Cecily said. “You stayed because you were loyal to your family name. It is not cowardice.”

“Wasn’t it? Is loyalty still a commendable quality when it is misdirected?”

Cecily opened her mouth, and then closed it again. Gabriel was looking at her, his eyes shining in the moonlight. He seemed genuinely desperate to hear her answer. She wondered if he had anyone else to talk to. She could see how it might be terrifying to take one’s moral qualms to Gideon; he seemed so staunch, as if he had never questioned himself in his life and would not understand those who did.

“I think,” she said, choosing her words with care, “that any good impulse can be twisted into something evil. Look at the Magister. He does what he does because he hates the Shadowhunters, out of loyalty to his parents, who cared for him, and who were killed. It is not beyond the realm of understanding. And yet nothing excuses the result. I think when we make choices—for each choice is individual of the choices we have made before—we must examine not only our reasons for making them but what result they will have, and whether good people will be hurt by our decisions.”

There was a pause. Then, “You are very wise, Cecily Herondale,” he said.

“Do not regret too much the choices you have made in the past, Gabriel,” she said, aware that she was using his Christian name, but not able to help it. “Only make the right ones in future. We are ever capable of change and ever capable of being our better selves.”

“That,” said Gabriel, “would not be the self my father wanted me to be, and despite everything, I find myself reluctant to dismiss the hope of his approval.”

Cecily sighed. “We can do our best, Gabriel. I tried to be the child my parents wanted, the lady they wished me to be. I left to bring Will back to them because I thought it was the right thing to do. I knew they were grieved he had chosen a different path—and it is the right one for him, for all that he came to it strangely. It is
his
path. Do not choose the path your father would have chosen or the path your brother would choose. Be the Shadowhunter you want to be.”

He sounded very young when he replied. “How do you know that I will make the right choice?”

Outside the window horses’ hooves sounded on the flagstones of the courtyard. The Silent Brothers, leaving.
Jem
, Cecily thought, with a pang in her heart. Her brother had always looked to him as a kind of North Star, a compass that would ever point him toward the right decision. She had never quite thought of her brother as lucky before, and certainly would not have expected to do so today, and yet—and yet in a way he had been. To always have someone to turn to like that, and not to worry constantly that one was looking to the wrong stars.