Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2)

by Cassandra Clare

Tessa was aware of Jem whispering to Will, in Latin, she thought—“Me specta, me specta,” and Will not answering.

He whitened. “Tessa—,” he began, and leaned forward as if he meant to do she knew not what—strike the window and break it, shake her by the shoulders, or hold her as if he never meant to let her go. It was all one great bewilderment with him, wasn’t it?

Then the compartment door opened and Jem came in, carrying a damp cloth. He looked from Will to Tessa and raised his silvery eyebrows. “A miracle,” he said. “You got him to speak.” “Just to shout at me, really,” said Tessa. “Not quite loaves and fishes.” Will had gone back to staring out the window, and looked at neither of them as they spoke. “It’s a start,” said Jem, and he sat down beside her. “Here. Give me your hands.”

“Jessie would be horrified,” she said mournfully. “She’d tell me I had charwoman’s hands.” “And what, pray tell, is dishonorable about that?” said Jem as he gently cleaned the dirt from her scratches. “I saw you chase after us, and that automaton creature. If Jessamine does not know by now that there is honor in blood and dirt, she never will.” The cool cloth felt good on her fingers. She looked up at Jem, who was intent on his task, his lashes a fringe of lowered silver. “Thank you,” she said. “I doubt I was any help at all, and probably a hindrance, but thank you all the same.”

Jem glanced over at Will, who was still staring bitterly out the window. They had entered London, and gray buildings were beginning to rise up around them on either side. The look Jem gave Will was a tired, loving sort of look, a familial look, and Tessa realized that, though when she had imagined them as brothers, she had always imagined Will as the older, the caretaker, and Jem as the younger, the reality was far more complicated than that. “I do not,” he said, “though it makes me think that the game Mortmain is playing is a long one. Somehow he knew exactly where our investigations would lead us, and he arranged for this—encounter—to shock us as much as possible. He wishes us to be reminded who it is who has the power.”

don’t know what he wants from me, Jem,” she said in a low voice. “When he said to me that he made me, it was as if he were saying he could unmake me just as easily.” Jem’s warm arm touched hers. “You cannot be unmade,” he said just as softly. “And Mortmain underestimates you. I saw how you used that branch against the automaton—” “It was not enough. If it had not been for my angel—” Tessa touched the pendant at her throat. “The automaton touched it and recoiled. Another mystery I do not understand. It protected me before, and again this time, but in other situations lies dormant. It is as much a mystery as my talent.” “Which, fortunately, you did not need to use to Change into Starkweather. He seemed quite happy simply to give us the Shade files.” “Thank goodness,” said Tessa. “I wasn’t looking forward to it. He seems such an unpleasant, bitter man. But if it ever turns out to be necessary . . .” She took something from her pocket and held it up, something that glinted in the carriage’s dim light. “A button,” she said smugly. “It fell from the cuff of his jacket this morning, and I picked it up.”

“Very clever, Tessa. I knew we’d be glad we brought you with us—” He broke off with a cough. Tessa looked at him in alarm, and even Will was roused out of his silent despondency, turning to look at Jem with narrowed eyes. Jem coughed again, his hand pressed to his mouth, but when he ...

He looked not ill but very tired, though his exhaustion only served to point up the delicacy of his features. His beauty did not blaze like Will’s did in fierce colors and repressed fire, but it had its own muted perfection, the loveliness of snow falling against a silver-gray sky. “Your ring!” She started up suddenly as she remembered that she was still wearing it. She put the button back into her pocket, then reached to draw the Carstairs ring off her hand. “I had meant to give it back to you earlier,” she said, placing the silver circlet in his palm. “I forgot . . .” He curled his fingers around her...

Jem said something, but his words were lost in the noise; it sounded like a warning, but Will was already on his feet, his hand reaching for the compartment door latch. He swung it open and leaped out and down. If he were not a Shadowhunter, Tessa thought, he would have fallen, and badly, but as it was, he simply landed lightly on his feet and began to run, pushing his way among the crowding porters, the commuters, the gentility traveling north for the weekend with their massive trunks and hunting hounds on leashes, the newspaper boys and pickpockets and costermongers and all the other human traffic of the grand station. Jem was on his feet, hand reaching for the door—but he turned back and looked at Tessa, and she saw an expression cross his face, an expression that said that he realized that if he fled after Will, she could not follow. With another long look at her, he latched the door shut and sank into the seat opposite her as the train came to a stop. “But Will—,” she began. “He will be all right,” said Jem with conviction. “You know how he is. Sometimes he just wants to be alone. And I doubt he wishes to take part in recounting today’s experiences to Charlotte and the others.” When she didn’t move her eyes from his, he repeated, gently, “Will can take care of himself, Tessa.” She thought of the bleak look in Will’s eyes when he had spoken to her, starker than the Yorkshire moors they had just left behind them. She hoped Jem was right.

An orphan’s curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man’s eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

“Is this curse supposed to be some business about taking away your ability to love? Because that’s nonsense if I’ve ever heard it. Jem’s your parabatai. I’ve seen you with him. You love him, don’t you?” “Jem is my great sin,” said Will. “Don’t talk to me about Jem.”

Each day I must show cruelty to those I have chosen to make my home with, lest they let themselves feel too much affection for me.” “Tessa . . .” Magnus’s mind was suddenly full of the serious-faced gray-eyed girl who had looked at Will as if he were a new sun dawning on the horizon. “You think she does not love you?” “I do not think so. I have been foul enough to her.” Will’s voice was wretchedness and misery and self-loathing all combined. “I think there was a time when she almost—I thought she was dead, you see, and I showed her—I let her see what I felt. I think she might have returned my feelings after that. But I crushed her, as brutally as I could. I imagine she simply hates me now.” “And Jem,” said Magnus, dreading the answer, knowing it. “Jem is dying anyway,” Will said in a choked voice. “Jem is what I have allowed myself. I tell myself, if he dies, it is not my fault. He is dying anyway, and in pain. Ella’s death at least was swift. Perhaps through me he can be given a good death.” He looked up miserably, met Magnus’s accusing eyes. “No one can live with nothing,” he whispered. “Jem is all I have.” “You should have told him,” said Magnus. “He would have chosen to be your parabatai anyway, even knowing the risks.” “I cannot burden him with that knowledge! He would keep it secret if I asked him to, but it would pain him to know it—and the pain I cause others would only hurt him more. Yet if I were to tell Charlotte, to tell Henry and the rest, that my behavior is ...

“Charlotte.” Jem’s voice was soothing. They were in the drawing room, with its wallpaper of flowers and vines. Sophie was by the fire, using the poker to coax more flames from the coal. Henry sat behind the desk, fiddling with a set of copper instruments; Jessamine was on the chaise, and Charlotte was in an armchair by the fire. Tessa and Jem sat somewhat primly side by side on the sofa, which made Tessa feel peculiarly like a guest. She was full of sandwiches that Bridget had brought in on a tray, and tea, its warmth slowly thawing her insides. “It isn’t as if this is unusual. When do we ever know where Will is at nighttime?” “But this is different. He saw his family, or his sister at least. Oh, poor Will.” Charlotte’s voice shook with anxiety. “I had thought perhaps he was finally beginning to forget about them . . .” “No one forgets about their family,” said Jessamine sharply. She sat on the chaise longue with a watercolor easel and papers propped before her; she had recently made the decision that she had fallen behind in pursuing the maidenly arts, and had begun painting, cutting silhouettes, pressing flowers, and playing on the spinet in the music room, though Will said her singing voice made him think of Church when he was in a particularly complaining mood. “Well, no, of course not,” said Charlotte hastily, “but perhaps not to live with the memory constantly, as a sort of dreadful weight on you.” “As if we’d know what to do with Will if he didn’t have the morbs eve...

Charlotte glanced over at the tin on her desk that held her favorite lemon drops. “After Will’s parents came here to see him, when he was twelve, and he sent them away . . . I begged him to speak to them, just for a moment, but he wouldn’t. I tried to make him understand that if they left, then he could never see them again, and I could never tell him news of them. He took my hand, and he said, ‘Please just promise me you’ll tell me if they die, Charlotte. Promise me.’” She looked down, her fingers knotting in the material of her dress. “It was such an odd request for a little boy to make. I—I had to say yes.” “So you’ve been looking into the welfare of Will’s family?” Jem asked. “I hired Ragnor Fell to do it,” Charlotte said. “For the first three years. The fourth year he came back to me and told me that the Herondales had moved. Edmund Herondale—that’s Will’s father—had lost their house gambling. That was all Ragnor was able to glean. The Herondales had been forced to move. He could find no further trace of them.” “Did you ever tell Will?” Tessa said. “No.” Charlotte shook her head. “He had made me promise to tell him if they died, that was all. Why add to his unhappiness with the knowledge that they had lost their home? He never mentioned them. I had grown to hope he might have forgotten—” “He has never forgotten.” There was a force in Jem’s words that stopped the nervous movement of Charlotte’s fingers. “I should not have done it,” Charlotte said. “I should never have ...

“No,” said Tessa. “We arrived, and he just up and dusted—sorry, got up and ran,” she corrected herself, their blank looks alerting her to the fact that she was using American slang. “‘Up and dusted,’” said Jem. “I like that. Makes it sound like he left a cloud of dust spinning in his wake.

Henry frowned. “It will be a dark day when you cannot trust your fellow Shadowhunters, Lottie.” “It is a dark day already, Henry dear,” Charlotte replied without looking at him.

Magnus ran both hands through his thick hair and thought, suddenly and irrationally, of Camille. And was pleased. Here in this room, with Will, he had gone nearly two hours without thinking of her at all. Progress.

They say time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of the grief is finite.

“I feel myself diminished, parts of me spiraling away into the darkness, that which is good and honest and true—If you hold it away from yourself long enough, do you lose it entirely? If no one cares for you at all, do you even really exist?”

ahhhh he’s read Tessas letters 😭💔

He said this last so softly that Magnus had to strain to hear him. “What was that?” “Nothing. Something I read somewhere once.”

I might find what I am looking for. It is my only chance—and without that chance my life is worthless to me anyway.” “Easy enough to say at seventeen,” said Magnus, with no small amount of coldness. “You are in love and you think that is all there is in the world. But the world is bigger than you, Will, and may have need of you. You are a Shadowhunter. You serve a greater cause. Your life is not yours to throw away.” “Then nothing is mine,” said Will, and pushed himself away from the mantel, staggering a little as if he really were drunk. “If I don’t even own my own life—” “Who ever said we were owed happiness?” Magnus said softly, and in his mind he saw the house of his childhood, and his mother flinching away from him with frightened eyes, and her husband, who was not his father, burning. “What about what we owe to others?” “I’ve given them everything I have already,” said Will, seizing his coat off the back of the chair. “They’ve had enough out of me, and if this is what you have to say to me, then so have you—warlock.” He spat the last word ...

“Look well on this, my son,” said the green-skinned man, “for one day I shall rule a clockwork kingdom of such beings, and you shall be its prince.”

“He’s not frightened at all, Anne.” The man laughed, and set the boy down on the ground, ruffling his hair. “My little clockwork prince . . .”

Oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for “the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,” bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure from blood. —Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

In the morning when Tessa went down for breakfast, she found to her surprise that Will was not there. She had not realized how completely she had expected him to return during the night, and she found herself pausing in the doorway, scanning the seats around the table as if somehow she had accidentally glanced past him. It was not until her gaze came to rest on Jem, who returned her look with a rueful and worried expression of his own, that she knew that it was true. Will was still gone.

“He always does come crawling home. Look at the two of you. Like you’ve lost a favorite puppy.” Tessa shot Jem an almost guilty, conspiratorial look as she sat down across from him and took a slice of bread from the toast rack.

Charlotte, at the head of the table, was very clearly trying not to look nervous and worried, and failing. “Of course he will,” she said. “Will can take care of himself.”

“What if Will chooses to leave the Clave forever?” Tessa said. “Would he return to his family to protect them?” “No,” Charlotte replied a little sharply. “No. I don’t think he will do that.” She would miss Will if he were gone, Tessa thought with surprise. Will was always so unpleasant—and often so to Charlotte—that Tessa sometimes forgot the stubborn love Charlotte seemed to feel for all her charges.

Tessa looked across the table at Jem. She felt a hollowness in her stomach, the ache of not knowing where Will was, and wondered if he felt it too. His normally expressive face was still and unreadable, though when he caught her glance, he smiled a gentle, encouraging smile. Jem was Will’s parabatai, his blood brother; surely if there were truly something to be concerned about where Will was involved, Jem would not be able to hide it—would he?

“Must I go bound while you go free Must I love a man who doesn’t love me Must I be born with so little art As to love a man who’ll break my heart?”

Having changed from her day dress into gear, Tessa sat down on the edge of her bed and picked up the copy of Vathek Will had given her. It did not bring the thought of Will smiling to her mind, but other images of Will—Will bending over her in the Sanctuary, covered in blood; Will squinting into the sun on the roof of the Institute; Will rolling down the hill in Yorkshire with Jem, splattering himself with mud and not caring; Will falling off the table in the dining room; Will holding her in the dark. Will, Will, Will. She threw the book. It struck the fireplace mantel and bounced off, landing on the floor. If only there were some way to scrape Will out of her mind, like scraping the mud off your shoe. If only she knew where he was. Worry made it worse, and she could not stop herself from worrying. She could not forget the look on his face as he had gazed at his sister.

Gabriel and Gideon Lightwood came in, followed by Jem. He winked at Tessa before disappearing, closing the door behind him.

His slim mouth curled up at the corners. “Or are you too busy worrying about Herondale’s whereabouts to practice today?” Tessa nearly dropped the knife. “What?” “I heard you and Miss Collins when I was coming up the stairs. Disappeared, has he? Not surprising, considering I don’t think Will Herondale and a sense of responsibility are even on speaking terms.” Tessa set her chin. Conflicted as she was about Will, there was something about someone outside the Institute’s small family criticizing him that set her teeth on edge. “It’s quite a common occurrence, nothing to fuss about,” she said. “Will is a—free spirit. He’ll return soon enough.” “I hope not,” said Gabriel. “I hope he’s dead.” Tessa’s hand tightened around the knife.

“Hmph,” she said. “I’d like to see you learn how to manage sitting and standing up straight in stays and petticoats and a dress with a foot’s worth of train!” “So would I,” said Gideon from across the room. “Oh, by the Angel,” said Gabriel, and he took her by the shoulders, flipping her around so she stood with her back to him. He put his arms around her, straightening her spine, arranging the knife in her hand. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck, and it made her shiver—and filled her with annoyance. If he was touching her, it was only because he presumed he could, without asking, and because he thought it would irritate Will. “Let me go,” she said, under her breath. “This is part of your training,” said Gabriel in a bored voice.

She had grown so used to Jem’s presence, the ease with which she could converse with him, the comfort of his hand on her arm when they walked, the fact that he was the only person in the world now she felt she could say absolutely anything to. She realized with surprise that though she had just seen him at breakfast, she missed him, with what felt almost like an ache inside.

“Gabriel, what is the problem, exactly?” Gabriel turned his gaze on Tessa. “She won’t listen to me,” he said spitefully. “I can’t instruct someone who won’t listen.” “Maybe if you were a better instructor, she’d be a better listener.” “And maybe you would have seen the knife coming,” said Gabriel, “if you paid more attention to what’s going on around you and less to the back of Miss Collins’s head.” So even Gabriel had noticed, Tessa thought, as Sophie blushed. Gideon gave his brother a long, steady look—she sensed there would be words between the two of them at home—then turned to Sophie and said something in a low voice, too low for Tessa to hear.

“No, you shouldn’t. And after the way you criticize Will—” He flushed along his high cheekbones. “I’ve apologized, Miss Gray. What more do you want of me?” “A change in behavior, perhaps. An explanation of your dislike of Will—” “I’ve told you! If you wish to know why I dislike him, you can ask him yourself!” Gabriel whirled and stalked out of the room. Tessa looked at the knives stuck into the wall and sighed. “So ends my lesson.”

With Will she was like a scalded cat, and with Jem, blushing and watchful, but beside Gideon she seemed . . . Well, it was hard to define. But it was most peculiar.

His eyes on Tessa were steady. This close up she could see that they were not precisely the same color as his brother’s. They were more of a gray-green, like the ocean under a cloudy sky.

I hope to have him back to you at our next session in a better humor.” He bowed to Sophie, then Tessa. “Miss Collins, Miss Gray.”

“I can tell you he gave himself that name,” said Fell. “It sounds like a Shadowhunter name. It is the sort of name someone with a grudge against Nephilim, and a dark sense of humor, would take. Mort main—” “Hand of death,” supplied Jessamine, who was proud of her French.

He grinned around his fork. “I do suppose they’ve looked everywhere?” “I’m sure Will’s tried,” said Jessamine in a bored tone. Tessa’s silverware clattered to her plate. Jessamine, who had been mashing her peas flat with the side of her knife, looked up when Charlotte let out an aghast, “Jessamine!” Jessamine shrugged. “Well, he’s like that.” Fell turned back to his plate with a faint smile on his face. “I remember Will’s father. Quite the ladies’ man, he was. They couldn’t resist him. Until he met Will’s mother, of course. Then he threw it all in and went to live in Wales just to be with her. What a case he was.” “He fell in love,” said Jem. “It isn’t that peculiar.” “‘Fell’ into it,” said the warlock, still with the same faint smile. “Hurtled into it is more like. Headlong-crashed into it. Still, there are always some men like that—just one woman for them, and only she will do, or nothing.”

Tessa thought of Will—a twelve-year-old Will, clinging to Charlotte’s hand, begging to be told if his family died. Why run? she thought for the hundredth time. Why put them behind you? She had thought perhaps he did not care, but clearly he had cared. Cared still. She could not stop the tightening at her heart as she thought of him calling out for his sister. If he loved Cecily as she had once loved Nate . . . Mortmain had done something to his family, she thought. As he had to hers. That bound them to each other in a peculiar way, she and Will. Whether he knew it or not.

A Tale of Two Cities,

Dear sensible Miss Gray, I write to you on behalf of a mutual friend, one William Herondale. I know that it is his habit to come and go—most often go—from the Institute as he pleases, and that therefore it may be some time before any alarm is raised at his absence. But I ask you, as one who holds your good sense in esteem, not to assume this absence to be of the ordinary sort. I saw him myself last night, and he was, to say the least, distraught when he left my residence. I have reason for concern that he might do himself an injury, and therefore I suggest that his whereabouts be sought and his safety ascertained. He is a difficult young man to like, but I believe you see the good in him, as I do, Miss Gray, and that is why I humbly address my letter to you— Your servant, Magnus Bane Postscript: If I were you, I would not share the contents of this letter with Mrs. Branwell. Just a suggestion. M.B.

Tatiana—Gabriel

🤮🤮🤢🤢 go die Tatiana ‘you are nothing but a pawn to me Grace Blackthorn’ Blackthorn 🤮🙄

“Tessa?” Without a word she handed him the note. He glanced up and down the corridor, then gestured her inside the room. She shut the door behind him as he read Magnus’s scrawl once, and then again, before balling it up in his hand, the crackling paper loud in the room. “I knew it,” he said. It was Tessa’s turn to blink. “Knew what?” “That this wasn’t an ordinary sort of absence.” He sat down on the trunk at the foot of his bed and shoved his feet into his shoes. “I felt it. Here.” He put his hand over his chest. “I knew there was something strange. I felt it like a shadow on my soul.” “You don’t think he’d really hurt himself, do you?” “Hurt himself, I don’t know. Put himself in a situation where he might be hurt—” Jem stood up. “I should go.” “Don’t you mean ‘we’? You weren’t thinking of going looking for Will without me, were you?” she asked archly, and when he said nothing, she said, “That letter was addressed to me, James. I didn’t have to show it to you.” He half-closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he was smiling crookedly. “James,” he said. “Ordinarily only Will calls me that.” “I’m sorry—” “No. Don’t be. I like the sound of it on your lips.” Lips. There was something strangely, delicately indelicate about the word, like a kiss itself. It seemed to hover in the air between them while they both hesitated. But it’s Jem, Tessa thought in bewilderment. Jem. Not Will, who could make her feel as if he were running his fingers along her bare skin just by...

A soft knock on the door drew her out of her reverie, and she turned, flinging it open to find Jem on the threshold. He was fully dressed in Shadowhunter gear—the tough leather-looking black coat and trousers, the heavy boots. He put a finger to his lips and gestured for her to follow him.

Jem pushed the door open and ushered her in after him; he closed the door firmly behind them, slipping the key he had used back into his pocket. “This,” he said, “is Will’s room.” “Gracious,” Tessa said. “I’ve never been in here. I was starting to imagine he slept upside down, like a bat.”

Her heart was beating fast, as if she were seeing something she wasn’t meant to see—some secret, hidden part of Will.