Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices Book 3)

by Cassandra Clare

“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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.

“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.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

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.

She tried to make her voice as firm and strong as it could be, for herself as much as for the boy at the window. “Perhaps, Gabriel Lightwood, I have faith in you.”

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep, He hath awaken’d from the dream of life; ’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife Invulnerable nothings. We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. — Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”

“Tessa!” The voice echoed in her ear, a ragged shout. She sat bolt upright on the riverbank, her body trembling. “Will?” She scrambled to her feet and looked around. The moon had passed behind a cloud. The sky above was like dark gray marble, shot through with veins of black. The river ran before her, dark gray in the poor light, and glancing around, she saw only gnarled trees, the steep cliff down which she had fallen, a broad swatch of countryside stretching away in the other direction—fields and stone fences, the occasionally distant dotting of a farmhouse or habitation. She could see nothing like a city or a town, not even a cluster of lights that might have indicated a tiny hamlet. “Will,” she whispered again, drawing her arms about herself. She was sure it had been his voice she had heard calling her name. No one else’s voice sounded like his. But it was ridiculous. He was not here. He could not be. Perhaps, like Jane Eyre, who had heard Rochester’s voice calling for her on the moors, she was half-dreaming.

Sometimes, when I have to do something I don’t want to do, I pretend I’m a character from a book. It’s easier to know what they would do. A character from a book, Tessa thought, a good, sensible one, would follow the stream. A character from a book would know that human habitations and towns are often built by water, and would seek out help, rather than blundering into the woods. Resolutely she wrapped her arms about herself and began to trudge downstream.

Charlotte: I am sorry for leaving the Institute without your permission. I ask for your forgiveness; I felt I had no other choice. That, however, is not why I am sending this letter. By the side of the road I have found evidence of Tessa’s passage. Somehow she had managed to cast her jade necklace from the carriage window, I believe so that we might trace her by it. I have it with me now. It is proof undeniable that we were correct in our supposition about Mortmain’s whereabouts. He must be in Cadair Idris. You must write to the Consul and demand that he send a full force to the mountain. Will Herondale

Will sat back, considering whether he should force down another glass of wine to ensure that he could sleep—when a sharp, stabbing pain shot through his chest. It felt like being shot with an arrow, and Will jerked back. His wineglass crashed to the floor and shattered. He lurched to his feet, leaning both hands on the table. He was vaguely aware of stares, and the landlord’s anxious voice in his ear, but the pain was too great to think through, almost too great to breathe through.

He pushed the doors open and half-tumbled out into the night. For a moment the pain in his chest eased, and he fell back against the wall of the inn. Rain was sheeting down, soaking his hair and clothes. He gasped, his heart stuttering with a mixture of terror and desperation. Was this just the distance from Jem affecting him? He had never felt anything like this, even when Jem had been at his worst, even when he’d been injured and Will had ached with sympathetic pain. The cord snapped. For a moment everything went white, the courtyard bleaching through as if with acid. Will jackknifed to his knees, vomiting up his supper into the mud.

He fetched up against the wall of the stables, beside the horse trough. He dropped to his knees to plunge his hands into the icy water—and saw his own reflection. There was his face, as white as death, and his shirt, and a spreading stain of red across the front. With wet hands he seized at his lapels and jerked the shirt open. In the dim light that spilled from the inn, he could see that his parabatai rune, just over his heart, was bleeding. His hands were covered in blood, blood mixed with rain, the same rain that was washing the blood away from his chest, showing the rune as it began to fade from black to silver, changing all that had been sense in Will’s life into nonsense. Jem was dead.

Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. —Shakespeare, Macbeth

His eyes opened and looked into hers. They were blue, achingly blue, the blue of the sky where it meets the sea. “Tessa?” Will said, and she realized it was Will in her arms, Will who was dying, Will breathing out his last breath—and there was blood on his shirt, just over his heart, a spreading red stain—

Out of the saddlebag he took the knife Jem had given him: a narrow blade with the intricate silver handle. In the shadow of the oak tree, he cut the palm of his hand and watched as the blood ran onto the ground, soaking the earth. Then he knelt and plunged the blade into the bloody ground. Kneeling, he hesitated, one hand on the hilt. “James Carstairs,” he said, and swallowed. It was always this way; when he needed words the most, he could not find them. The words of the biblical parabatai oath came into his head: Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee—for whither thou goest, I will go, and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried. The Angel do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me. But no. That was what was said when you were joined, not when you were cut apart. David and Jonathan had been separated, too, by death. Separated but not divided. “I told you before, Jem, that you would not leave me,” Will said, his bloody hand on the hilt of the dagger. “And you are still with me. When I breathe, I will think of you, for without you I would have been dead years ago. When I wake up and when I sleep, when I lift up my hands to defend myself or when I lie down to die, you will be with me. You say we are born and born again. I say there is a river that divides the dead and the living. What I do know is that if we are born again, ...

Balios and Xanthos, after the immortal horses of Achilles. We two can fly as swiftly as Zephyrus, who they say is the fleetest of all winds.

Tessa could not help but feel that if Will were there, he would have commented that they looked like turnips, and perhaps made up a song about it.

Howe’er it be, it seems to me, ’Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Lady Clara Vere de Vere”

Cecily wondered, just for a moment, what it would be like to have someone look at her as Henry looked at Charlotte—as

“I am going to send a message to all the members of the Clave,” Charlotte said. “At once. Not the Enclave. The Clave.” “But only the Consul is allowed—,” Henry began, then shut his mouth like a box. “Ah.”

“Miss Collins has a natural talent,” said Gideon. He spoke slowly, the conflict clear on his face. He did not want Sophie in the fighting, in danger, and yet would not lie about her abilities. “She should be allowed to Ascend and become a Shadowhunter.”

“I—it is what I have always wanted, Mrs. Branwell, but not if it meant I had to leave your service. You have been so kind to me, I would not wish to repay that by abandoning you—” “Nonsense,” Charlotte said. “I can find another maid; I cannot find another Sophie. If being a Shadowhunter was what you wanted, my girl, I wish you had spoken. I could have gone to the Consul before I was at odds with him. Still, when we return—”

“After all, I have my father’s place on the Council—his friends will listen to me; they still owe loyalty to our family—and besides, how else can we be married?” “What?” said Gabriel with a wild hand gesture that accidentally flipped the nearest plate onto the floor, where it shattered. “Married?” said Henry. “You’re marrying your father’s friends on the Council? Which of them?” Gideon had gone an odd sort of greenish color; clearly he had not meant those words to escape him, and he did not know what to do now that they had. He was staring at Sophie in horror, but it didn’t seem she was likely to be much help either. She looked as shocked as a fish that had been stranded unexpectedly on land. Cecily stood up and dropped her serviette onto her plate. “All right,” she said, doing her best to approximate the commanding tones her mother used when she needed something done about the house. “Everyone out of the room.” Charlotte, Henry, and Gideon began to rise to their feet. Cecily threw her hands up. “Not you, Gideon Lightwood,” she said. “Honestly! But you”—she pointed at Gabriel—“do stop staring. And come along.” And taking him by the back of the jacket, she half-dragged him from the room, Henry and Charlotte hard on their heels.

Charlotte strode off toward the drawing room with the announced purpose of composing a message for the Clave, Henry by her side. (She paused at the turn of the corridor to look back at Gabriel with an amused quirk of her mouth, but Cecily suspected he did not see it.)

“You shouldn’t do that,” he said finally. “Eavesdropping is most incorrect behavior, Miss Herondale.” “It’s your brother,” Cecily whispered, ear against the wood. She could hear murmurs inside but nothing definite. “I should think you’d want to know.”

Cecily’s gaze darted from his hand to the thoughtful expression on his face. “Can you hear them?” she demanded. “Oh, that is not at all fair!” “It’s all very romantic,” Gabriel said, and then frowned. “Or it would be, if my brother could get a word out without sounding like a choking frog. I fear he will not go down in history as one of the world’s great wooers of women.” Cecily crossed her arms in vexation. “I do not see why you are being so difficult,” she said. “Or are you bothered that your brother wishes to marry a servant girl?”

“Nothing I can think of him doing would be worse than what my father did. At least his taste runs to human women.” And yet it was so difficult not to tweak him. He was so aggravating. “That is hardly a great endorsement for a woman as fine as Sophie.”

“I did not mean it like that. She is a fine girl and will be a fine Shadowhunter when she Ascends. She will bring honor to our family, and the Angel knows we need it.” “I believe you will bring honor to your family too,” Cecily said quietly. “What you just did, what you confessed to Charlotte—that took courage.”

“Take my hand,” he said. “You will be able to hear what is going on in the dining room, through me, if you desire.” After a moment’s hesitation Cecily took Gabriel’s hand. It was warm and rough in hers. She could feel the thrum of his blood through his skin, oddly comforting—and indeed, through him, as if she had her own ear pressed to the door, she could hear the low rumble of spoken words: Gideon’s soft hesitant voice, and Sophie’s delicate one. She closed her eyes and listened.

Gideon flushed. “My dear Miss Collins,” he began again. “It is true that my feelings for you go far beyond admiration. I would describe them as the most ardent affection. Your kindness, your beauty, your generous heart—they have quite overset me, and it is to that alone that I can ascribe my behavior of this morning. I do not know what came over me, to speak the dearest wishes of my heart aloud. Please do not feel obligated to accept my proposal simply because it was public. Any embarrassment over the matter would and should be mine.”

“But you haven’t proposed,” Gideon looked startled. “I— What?” “You haven’t proposed,” Sophie said with equanimity. “You did announce to the whole breakfast table that you intended to marry me, but that is not a proposal. That is only a declaration. A proposal is when you ask me.”

“Now that’s putting my brother in his place,” said Gabriel, looking delighted in that manner that younger siblings did when their brothers or sisters were entirely set down. “Oh, shush!” whispered Cecily, squeezing his hand hard. “I want to hear what Mr. Lightwood says!”

“Very well, then,” said Gideon, in the decided (yet slightly terrified) manner of Saint George setting off to fight the dragon. “A proposal it shall be.” Sophie’s eyes tracked him as he crossed the room toward her and knelt down at her feet. Life was an uncertain thing, and there were some moments one wished to remember, to imprint upon one’s mind that the memory might be taken out later, like a flower pressed between the pages of a book, and admired and recollected anew.

“My dear Miss Collins,” he said. “Please forgive me for my untoward outburst. It is simply that I have such—such strong esteem—no, not esteem, adoration—for you that I feel as if it must blaze from me every moment of the day. Ever since I came to this house, I have been struck more forcibly each day by your beauty, your courage, and your nobility. It is an honor I could never deserve but most earnestly aspire to if you could only be mine—that is, if you would consent to be my wife.” “Gracious,” Sophie said, startled out of all countenance. “Have you been practicing that?” Gideon blinked. “I assure you it was entirely extemporaneous.” “Well, it was lovely.” Sophie squeezed his hands. “And yes. Yes, I love you, and yes, I will marry you, Gideon.” A brilliant smile broke out over his face, and he startled both of them by reaching for her and kissing her soundly on the mouth. She held his face between her hands as they kissed—he tasted slightly of tea leaves, and his lips were soft and the kiss entirely sweet. Sophie floated in it, in the prism of the moment, feeling safe from all the rest of the world. Until Bridget’s voice broken in on her happiness, drifting lugubriously from the kitchen.

“On a Tuesday they were wed And by Friday they were dead And they buried them in the churchyard side by side, Oh, my love, And they buried them in the churchyard side by side.”

“Please forgive me, my dear Mr. Lightwood—I mean Gideon—but I must go and murder the cook. I shall be directly back.”

“Ohhh,” Cecily breathed. “That was so romantic!” Gabriel took his hand away from the door and smiled down at her. His face quite changed when he smiled: all the sharp lines were softened, and his eyes went from the color of ice to the green of leaves in spring sunshine. “Are you crying, Miss Herondale?” She blinked damp eyelashes, suddenly aware that her hand was still in his—she could still feel the soft pulse beat in his wrist against hers. He leaned toward her, and she caught the early-morning scent of him: tea and shaving soap— She pulled away hastily, freeing her hand. “Thank you for allowing me to listen,” she said. “I must—I need to go to the library. There is something I must do before tomorrow.” His face crinkled in confusion. “Cecily—” But she was already hurrying away down the corridor, without looking back.

“Do not seek revenge and call it justice.”

From the corner of her eye, she’d thought she’d seen a black horse pounding through the streets of the village, a rider on its back. Someone escaping the carnage, she’d prayed.

NO IT IS WILL. WILL IS ON THE HORSE TESSA 😭😭😭😭😭

You see here only a fraction of what I am. In my true form I am deadly glory.

I cannot let you die. The angel’s voice was full of grief. Tessa was reminded of Jem’s violin, playing out the music of his heart. It is my mandate.

“Uffern gwaedlyd,” he swore in Welsh.

Her hand tightened on his arm. “Tessa,” he said. “I am alone.” The word “alone” came out broken, as if he could taste the bitterness of loss on his tongue and struggled to speak around it. “Jem?” she said. It was more than a question. Will said nothing; his voice seemed to have fled.

“No,” she whispered. “Tessa . . .” She took a step back from him, shaking her head. “No, it’s not possible. I would have known—it can’t be possible.” He reached out a hand to her. “Tess—” She had begun to shake violently. “No,” she said again. “No, don’t say it. If you don’t say it, it won’t be true. It can’t be true. It isn’t fair.” “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Her face crumpled, shattered like a dam under too much pressure. She sank to her knees, folding in on herself. Her arms went around her body. She was holding herself tightly, as if she could keep from breaking apart. Will felt a fresh wave of the helpless agony he had experienced in the courtyard of the Green Man. What had he done? He had come here to save her, but instead of saving her he had only succeeded in inflicting agony. It was as if he were truly cursed—capable only of bringing suffering to those he loved. “I am sorry,” he said again, with all his heart in the words. “So sorry. I would have died for him if I could.”

She shook her head. “How can you bear to have me near you?” she said in despair. “I took your parabatai from you. And now we will both die here. Because of me.”