Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices Book 3)

by Cassandra Clare

Will said, slumping back against Cecily. He smelled like smoke and iron. She could feel his heart pounding through his back.

“Here.” It was Tessa, kneeling down; Cecily was dimly aware that all the others were standing, Charlotte with one hand over her mouth in shock. In Tessa’s right hand was a handkerchief, in which was perhaps half a handful of yin fen, all that Will had saved from the fire. “Take this,” she said, and put it in Jem’s free hand, the one that did not hold the stele. He looked as if he were about to speak to her, but she had already straightened up. Looking utterly shattered, Jem watched as she walked from the room.

And Will had to admit he liked it, liked having his sister there on the arm of his chair, liked the fiercely protective glares she shot at anyone who came near him, even Charlotte, sweet and harmless with her salve and her motherly clucking.

And Jem, at his feet, leaning a bit against his chair, as he had so many times when Will was being bandaged up from fights or iratzed because of wounds he’d gotten in battle.

He knew she would understand why he had done what he had done, why he had not thought twice about it, but the look in her eyes—as if her heart had broken for him. He only wished that she were still here. It was good to be here with Jem and Cecily and Charlotte, to be surrounded by their affection, but without her there would always be something missing, a Tessa-shaped part chiseled out of his heart that he would never get back.

“Oh, what is brighter than the light? What is darker than the night? What is keener than an axe? What is softer than melting wax? Truth is brighter than the light, Falsehood darker than the night. Revenge is keener than an axe, And love is softer than melting wax.”

You call it hope—that fire of fire! It is but agony of desire. —Edgar Allan Poe, “Tamerlane”

How could three people who cared for one another so much cause one another so much pain?

was odd to look at Will in the daylight and remember the boy who had held her as if she were a life raft in a storm on the steps of Woolsey’s house. Will’s daylight face was not untroubled, but it was not open or giving either. He had not been unfriendly or cold, but neither had he looked up, or smiled over the library table at her, or acknowledged in any way the events of the previous night.

No one understands what you feel but me, and no one understands what I feel but you, so can we not feel together?

Will would have told her; he was honorable. They were all honorable. If they had not been, she thought, looking down at her hands, perhaps everything would not be so awful.

Jem would live longer, and Jem and Will would have each other, and it would be as if she had never come to the Institute. But now, in the cold hours of the evening, she knew that nothing she could do would turn back the clock, or unmake the feelings that existed between them all.

Part of her wanted to run to Will, to see if his hands were healed and to tell him she understood. The rest of her wanted to flee across the hall to Jem’s room and beg him to forgive her. They had never been angry with each other before, and she did not know how to navigate a Jem who was furious.

Would he want to end their engagement? Would he be disappointed in her? Somehow that thought was as hard to bear, that...

In all Gabriel’s life he could not remember his brother giving even the prettiest of Shadowhunter girls a second glance. Yet he looked at this scarred mundane servant as if she were the sun rising. It was inexplicable, but it was also undeniable.

A peal of laughter escaped Sophie’s lips, and Gideon looked at her as if he had never seen anything so marvelous. Gabriel had to admit she did look quite pretty when she laughed, scar or not.

“If you would like aid in your plan to frustrate the Consul’s schemes, I am happy to give it. Let me keep the letter, and I shall ensure that it is posted tomorrow.”

Our hearts, they need a mirror, Tessa. We see our better selves in the eyes of those who love us. And there is a beauty that brevity alone provides.” He

Beside her Jem’s gasp turned into a hitch of laughter. “What—,” she began. “Church,” he said, and Tessa dropped her gaze down to see the cat sauntering across the floor of the music room, having nudged the door open, and looking very pleased with himself. “I’ve never seen a cat look so self-satisfied,” she said as Church—ignoring her, as always—padded up to Jem and nudged at him with his head. “When I said we might need a chaperon, this wasn’t what I had in mind,” said Jem, but he stroked the cat’s head anyway, and smiled at her out of the corner of his mouth. “Tessa,” he said. “Did you mean what you said? That you would marry me tomorrow?” She raised her chin and looked directly into his eyes. She could not bear the thought of waiting, and wasting another instant of his life. She wanted suddenly and fiercely to be tied to him—in sickness, in health, for better, for worse—tied to him with a promise and able to give him her word and her love without holding back. “I meant it,” she said.

Tessa did not answer, for at that moment Will and Cecily had crowded in through the doorway. “I have such a crick in my neck,” Cecily was saying with a smile. I can hardly believe I managed to fall asleep in such a position—”

Will did seem better rested than he had the day before, and pleased to have Cecily by him, though that cautious good mood was clearly evaporating as he glanced around at the expressions of the others in the room. “What’s going on?” he said. “Has something happened?” “Tessa and I have decided to move up our wedding ceremony,” Jem said. “It will be in the next few days.” Will said nothing, and his expression did not change, but he went very white. He did not look at Tessa.

There was a pulse pounding at his throat. Tessa thought of the delicate rapport they had begun to build between them over the past few days and wondered if this would destroy it, dashing it into pieces like a fragile craft against rocks.

Jem went rigid beside Tessa, his hand stiff in hers. Will started forward, but Tessa was already on her feet, burning holes in Gabriel Lightwood with her eyes. “Do not dare speak about it as if Jem has all the choice about it and I have none,” she said, never moving her eyes from his face. “This engagement was not forced on me, nor do I have any illusions about Jem’s health. I choose to be with him for however many days or minutes we are granted, and to count myself blessed to have them.”

“I was only concerned for your welfare, Miss Gray.” “Better to look out for your own,” Tessa snapped. And now those green eyes narrowed. “Meaning?” “I believe the lady means,” Will drawled, “that she is not the one who killed her father. Or have you so quickly recovered from it that we have no need for concern for your sensibilities, Gabriel?” Cecily gave a gasp. Gabriel rose to his feet, and in his expression Tessa saw again the boy who had challenged Will to single combat the first time she had met him—all arrogance, stiffness, and hate. “If you ever dare—,” he began.

As she started down the stairs toward the entryway, she stumbled, distracted. A hand on her arm steadied her. She looked up, and saw Will. They stood there for a moment, frozen together like a statue.

Will’s hand was gentle on Tessa’s arm, though his face was almost expressionless, seeming carved out of granite. “You do not agree with the rest of them, do you?” she said, with more of a sharp edge than she meant. “That I should not marry Jem today. You asked me if I loved him enough to marry him and make him happy, and I told you I did. I don’t know if I can make him happy entirely, but I can try.” “If anyone can, you can,” he said, his eyes locking with hers. “The others think I have illusions about his health.” “Hope is not illusion.” The words were encouraging, but there was something in his voice, something dead that frightened her. “Will.” She caught at his wrist. “You would not abandon me now—not leave me the only one who still searches for a cure? I cannot do it without you.” He took a deep breath, half-closing his shadowed blue eyes. “Of course not. I would not give up on him, on you.

I love you now more desperately, this moment, than I have ever loved you before, and in an hour I will love you more than that. It is unfair to tell you this, I know, when you can do nothing about it.”

Tessa felt as if the ground had dropped out from beneath her. She remembered what she had told herself the night before: that surely Will’s feelings for her had faded. That over the term of years, his pain would be less than hers. She had believed it. But now—“I do not despise you, Will. You have been nothing but honorable—more honorable than ever I could have asked you to be—”

“I have expected everything of you, Will,” she whispered. “More than you ever expected of yourself. But you have given even more than that.” Her voice faltered. “They say you cannot divide your heart, and yet—”

Tessa looked helplessly at Will, but the moment between them had snapped; his expression had closed; the desperation that had fueled him a moment before was gone. He was shut away as if a thousand locked doors stood between them. “You go on down. I will be there shortly.” He said it without inflection, turned, and sprinted up the steps.

Tessa put a hand against the wall as she made her way numbly down the stairs. What had she almost done? What had she nearly told Will? And yet I love you. But God in Heaven, what good would that do, what benefit would it be to anyone to say those words? Only the most awful burden on him, for he would know what she felt but not be able to act on it. And it would tie him to her, would not free him to seek out someone else to love—someone who was not engaged to his best friend. Someone else to love. She stepped out onto the front stairs of the Institute, feeling the wind cut through her dress like a knife.

Tessa barely noticed them. She felt sick at the heart and knew it was not the cold. It was the idea of Will in love with someone else. But that was pure selfishness. If Will found someone else to love, she would suffer through it, biting her lips in silence, as he had suffered her engagement to Jem. She owed him that much, she thought, as a dark carriage driven by a man in the parchment robes of the Silent Brothers rattled through the open gates. She owed Will behavior that was as honorable as his own.

The liquid ore he drained Into fit moulds prepared; from which he formed First his own tools; then, what might else be wrought Fusil or graven in metal. —John Milton, Paradise Lost

He was irritable about it, and his irritable mood had not been helped by his encounter with Tessa on the stairs. After two months of being so careful around her that it had felt like walking a knife’s edge, he had spilled what he was feeling like blood from an open wound, and only Charlotte’s call had prevented his foolishness from turning into disaster.

They say you cannot divide your heart, and yet— And yet what? What had she been about to say?

For I wondered that others, subject to death, did live, since he whom I loved, as if he should never die, was dead; and I wondered yet more that myself, who was to him a second self, could live, he being dead. Well said one of his friends, “Thou half of my soul”; for I felt that my soul and his soul were “one soul in two bodies”: and therefore was my life a horror to me, because I would not live halved. And therefore perchance I feared to die, lest he whom I had much loved should die wholly. —Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book IV

“Will would not care so much if I were lying in that bed.” Gabriel snorted. “Your brother would not have taken so much trouble to warn me off you if he did not care about you, Miss Herondale.”

“One girl, who is not Nephilim, is not, cannot, be our priority!” “She is my priority!” Will shouted.

“Atque in pepetuum, frater, ave atque vale,”

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. —Sarah Williams, “The Old Astronomer”

Wo men shi jie bai xiong di—we are more than brothers, Will. Undertake this journey, and you undertake it not for yourself alone but for both of us.” “I cannot leave you to face death alone,” Will whispered, but he knew he was beaten; the sands of his will had run out. Jem touched the parabatai rune on his shoulder, through the thin material of his nightshirt. “I am not alone,” he said. “Wherever we are, we are as one.”

“If there is a life after this one,” he said, “let me meet you in it, James Carstairs.”

“The world is a wheel,” he said. “When we rise or fall, we do it together.” Will tightened his grip on Jem’s hand. “Well, then,” he said, through a tight throat, “since you say there will be another life for me, let us both pray I do not make as colossal a mess of it as I have this one.” Jem smiled at him, that smile that had always, even on Will’s blackest days, eased his mind. “I think there is hope for you yet, Will Herondale.” “I will try to learn how to have it, without you to show me.” “Tessa,” Jem said. “She knows despair, and hope as well. You can teach each other. Find her, Will, and tell her that I loved her always. My blessing, for all that it is worth, is on you both.” Their eyes met and held. Will could not bring himself to say good-bye, or to say anything at all. He only gripped Jem’s hand one last time and released it, and then turned and walked out the door.

“Cecily.” The word was a soft exhale. “For years you were my—my talisman. I thought I had killed Ella. I left Wales to keep you safe. As long as I could imagine you thriving and happy and well, the pain of missing you and Mother and Father was worth it.”

“Jem—” “But even if he dies,” she said, and he flinched, “you will not come home to Mam and Dad, will you? You are a Shadowhunter, through and through. As Father never was. It is why you have been so stubborn about writing to them. You do not know how to both ask forgiveness and also say that you are not coming home.” “I can’t come home, Cecily, or at least, it is not my home any longer. I am a Shadowhunter. It is in my blood.” “You know I am your sister, do you not?” she said. “It is also in my blood.” “You said you were pretending.” He searched her face for a moment and said slowly, “But you are not, are you? I have seen you, training, fighting. You feel it as I did. As if the floor of the Institute is the first really solid ground under your feet. As if you have found the place you belong. You are a Shadowhunter.”

Will felt his mouth twist into a sideways smile. “I am glad,” he said. “Glad there will be a Herondale in the Institute, even if I—” “Even if you do not come back? Will, let me come with you, let me help you—” “No, Cecily. Is it not enough that I accept that you will choose this life, a life of fighting and danger, though I have always wanted greater safety for you? No, I cannot let you come with me, even if you hate me for it.”

“Don’t be so dramatic, Will. Must you always insist that people hate you when they obviously don’t?” “I am dramatic,” said Will. “If I had not been a Shadowhunter, I would have had a future on the stage. I...

“I cannot promise that,” Will said. “But if I can come back to you, I will. And if I do come back, I will write to Mother and Father. I can promise that much.”

“No letters. Promise me that if you do come back, you will return to Mother and Father with me, and tell them why you left, and that you do not blame them, and that you love them still. I do not ask that you go home to stay. Neither you nor I can ever go home to stay, but to comfort them is little enough to ask. Do not tell me that it is against the rules, Will, because I know all too well that you enjoy breaking those.” “See?” Will asked. “You do know your brother a little after all. I give you my word, that if all those conditions are met, I will do as you ask.”

“And Cecy,” he said softly, “before I go, I wish to give you one more thing.”