Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices Book 3)

by Cassandra Clare

Confidence was flowing through her veins like new blood. She knew she could do this.

she was far better out of the whole thing.

“I am,” Will said, “perhaps, not someone to take advice from if you are seeking happiness.”

And yet the right words would not come. She felt as if she bled her regret and her loneliness from her very pores, and yet she could not shape those feelings into any sentiment she could imagine her parents could bear reading.

“You saved my life,” Will had said. A smile had spread across Jem’s face, as brilliant as the sunrise breaking over the Thames. “That is all I ever wanted.”

“Pointless, needless suffering and pain? I don’t suppose it would help if I told you that is the way life is. The good suffer, the evil flourish, and all that is mortal passes away.”

“Who am I?” he whispered. “For years I pretended I was other than I was, and then I gloried that I might return to the truth of myself, only to find there is no truth to return to. I was an ordinary child, and then I was a not very good man, and now I do not know how to be either of those things any longer. I do not know what I am, and when Jem is gone, there will be no one to show me.”

“Well, that is what most songs are about,” said Will. “Requited love is ideal but doesn’t make much of a ballad.”

“There is more to life than surviving,” he said.

“It is a very strange thing, to be in love,” he said. “It changes you.”

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

the thought had seized her as fiercely as a passion.

She felt hollow inside, as if a piece of her were missing, and yet she was paralyzed.

“Every heart has its own melody,” he said. “You know mine.”

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.”

“If anyone can, you can,” he said, his eyes locking with hers.

“Hope is not illusion.”

“And yet I am beginning to come to see that many things that I had always thought were certain, are not certain.

He felt as if he were hurtling down a dark tunnel, one that had no end, no sides to grip to slow his fall.

“Will. You asked me for my wisdom, as someone who has lived many lifetimes and buried many loves. I can tell you that the end of a life is the sum of the love that was lived in it, that whatever you think you have sworn, being here at the end of Jem’s life is not what is important. It was being here for every other moment. Since you met him, you have never left him and never not loved him. That is what matters.”

And yet it still did not seem real to him, as if it were a dream.

His heart was pounding, half with relief and half with a sickly dread.

A sense of hopelessness had invaded his bones, as chill and inescapable as the rain.

“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.”

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

“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 thought of it seemed like an enormous relief—all pain gone, all responsibility gone, a simple submersion in death and forgetting.

Terror was like a live thing inside her. All the tales she had ever heard of monsters in the dark woods seemed to be fighting for space in her mind.

Instead of pain he felt hollowness.

You could not lose something you had never had.

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.

“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, I will meet you in another life, and if there is a river, you will wait on the shores for me to come to you, so that we can cross together.”

There was human goodness in the world, she thought—all caught up with desires and dreams, regrets and bitterness, resentments and powers, but it was there, and Mortmain would never see it.

The journey was what mattered.

These all seemed the distant fancies of a child now. There was only the road ahead, more riding and more exhaustion, and probable death at the end of it.

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.

To have chosen this life is a very different thing from having been born into it.

But he is loved and loving.

“Do not seek revenge and call it justice.”

All men thought of themselves as good in the end, surely. No one believed themselves a villain.

“I believe you can find your better self; I believe we all can.”

There is more to life than living.

Faith has brought us this far; it will bring us a little farther.

I am strong enough for this, he told himself, lifting her hand gently. “Life is not just surviving,” he said.

Guilt and sorrow drove through her like a spear, and she arched backward, her hands scrabbling for purchase in the darkness. Fire ran through her veins, a thousand branching streams of agony.

“Have faith in yourself. You can be your own mirror.”

Every meeting led to a parting, and so it would, as long as life was mortal. In every meeting there was some of the sorrow of parting, but in every parting there was some of the joy of meeting as well. He would not forget the joy.