Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices Book 3)

by Cassandra Clare

“That ba—bad man,” he finished, with a quick glance at Cecily, who rolled her eyes.

“I fail to see how that is germane to the matter at hand,” said the Inquisitor. “One may be rude in one’s personal life but also correct about larger matters.”

“You might want to get up,” he said. “Everyone will be here quite soon to rescue you, and you may prefer to have clothes on when they arrive.” He shrugged. “I would, at any rate, but then, I am well known to be remarkably shy.”

“Listen to you,” he said. “You said ‘by the Angel.’ Like a Shadowhunter.”

“After all,” she said, “you weren’t lying about that tattoo of the dragon of Wales, were you?”

“I like that stick of yours,” he said. “It’s a staff.” Jem swung out to knock another automaton sideways. “Made by the Iron Sisters, only for Silent Brothers.”

“Anyone can sharpen a stick.” “It’s a staff,” Jem repeated, and saw Will’s quicksilver smile out of the corner of his eye.

“It is a cord that ties each of them to the other, and unless it is dissolved properly, I fear it may harm them both.”

She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red.’ ”

“Have you been reading to Henry, Will?” “Yes, some dreadful thing, all full of poetry.”

Perhaps he could return there, with Cecily, if the Institute was lost, make some kind of life for themselves in their home country. It would not be a Shadowhunting life, but without Charlotte, without Henry, without Jem or Tessa or Sophie or even the bloody Lightwoods, he did not want to be a Shadowhunter. They were his family, and precious to him—just another realization, he thought, that had come to him all at once and yet too late.

He remembered his father once saying that women, the gentler sex, liked to be wooed with charming words and pithy phrases. He wasn’t sure exactly what a pithy phrase was, but he was sure that “You seem to like that horse very much” was not one.

“It is your choice to make now, to stay or return.” “I will stay,” Cecily said. “I choose the war.” Gabriel let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “You will give up your home?” “A drafty old house in Yorkshire?” Cecily said. “This is London.” “And give up what is familiar?” “Familiar is dull.” “And give up seeing your parents? It is against the Law . . .” She smiled, the glimmer of a smile. “Everyone breaks the Law.”

“Come back to me, Tessa. Henry said that perhaps, since you had touched the soul of an angel, that you dream of Heaven now, of fields of angels and flowers of fire. Perhaps you are happy in those dreams. But I ask this out of pure selfishness. Come back to me. For I cannot bear to lose all my heart.”

“We were engaged, Tessa. A proposal—an offer of marriage—is a promise. A promise to love and care for someone always. I did not mean to break mine to you. But it was that or die. I wanted to wait, to be married to you and live with you for years, but that wasn’t possible. I was dying too fast.

I would have given it up—all of it up—to be married to you for a day.

“Yes. I loved you. I love you still. I love Will, too. I cannot explain it. I didn’t know it when I agreed to marry you. I loved you, I still love you, I never loved you less for all that I love him. It sounds mad, but if anyone might ever understand—”

There’s nothing you could have done that would cause me to cease loving either of you. Will is myself, my own soul, and if I am not to have the keeping of your heart, then there is no other I would rather have that honor. And when I am gone, you must help Will. This will be—it will be hard for him.”

Some secrets, she thought, were better told; some were better left the burden of the carrier, that they might not cause pain to others.

“Do you remember when we stood together on Blackfriars Bridge?” he asked softly, and his eyes were like that night had been, all black and silver. “Of course I remember.” “It was the moment I first knew I loved you,” Jem said. “I will make you a promise. Every year, Tessa, on one day, I will meet you on that bridge. I will come from the Silent City and I will meet you, and we will be together, if only for an hour. But you must tell no one.”

“When I am in the darkness, I want to think of it in the light, with you,”

“I shall see you on Blackfriars Bridge, Tessa.”

“Listen to me. I am leaving, but I am living. I will not be gone from you entirely, Will. When you fight now, I will be still by you. When you walk in the world, I will be the light at your side, the ground steady under your feet, the force that drives the sword in your hand. We are bound, beyond the oath. The Marks did not change that. The oath did not change that. It merely gave words to something that existed already.”

But if there is one thing I could ask of you, it is that you be happy. I want you to have a family and grow old with those who love you. And if you wish to marry Tessa, then do not let the memory of me keep you apart.”

“She and I have plans to meet once a year. I trust you with that secret. It is a small thing, and yet enormous. It will remind me of who I am. Who I was. You and Tessa must find your own way to each other. Form your own bond.”

Will smiled back, and for just that moment they were Jem-and-Will again. Will could see Jem, but also through him, to the past. Will remembered the two of them, running through the dark streets of London, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, seraph blades gleaming in their hands; hours in the training room, shoving each other into mud puddles, throwing snowballs at Jessamine from behind an ice fort in the courtyard, asleep like puppies on the rug in front of the fire.

“We spoke of how to say good-bye,” Jem said. “When Jonathan bid farewell to David, he said, ‘Go in peace, for as much as we have sworn, both of us, saying the Lord be between me and thee, forever.’ They did not see each other again, but they did not forget. So it will be with us. When I am Brother Zachariah, when I no longer see the world with my human eyes, I will still be in some part the Jem you knew, and I will see you with the eyes of my heart.” “Wo men shi sheng si ji jiao,” said Will, and he saw Jem’s eyes widen, fractionally, and the spark of amusement inside them. “Go in peace, James Carstairs.”

She felt as if she were split into two different people. One was counting her blessings over and over that Jem was alive, that he would survive to see the sun rise again, that the poisonous drug he had suffered from so long would not burn the life out of his veins. The other—

I would spare him that if I could.” “You have spared him everything you could spare him,” Tessa said quietly. “As he spared you, and we all tried so hard to spare one another. In the end we must all make our own choices.”

“You regret what happened between us?” “Can one regret a thing that, however unwise, was beautiful?” she said, and the hurt in his eyes softened into confusion.

The measure of love is to love without measure. —attributed to Saint Augustine

But she had been determined. Her own heart had been broken, but to mend Will’s, she was sure, would mean to mend her own somehow. As soon as she’d been strong enough, she had set herself to bring him tea he did not want, and books that he did, and harried him, in and out of the library, and demanded his help with training. She told Charlotte to stop treating him like glass that would break and to send him out into the city to fight, as he had been sent before, with Gabriel or Gideon instead of Jem. And Charlotte had done it, uneasily, but Will had come back from them bloody and bruised, but with his eyes alive and alight.

“Being Nephilim gives my brother a purpose. Shadowhunting will mend the cracks in him. Shadowhunting, and you.”

“Mr. Rochester never courted Jane Eyre,” Tessa pointed out. “No, he dressed up as a woman and terrified the poor girl out of her wits. Is that what you want?” “You would make a very ugly woman.” “I would not. I would be stunning.”

“There is Will. Isn’t that better? Don’t you think so?” “I don’t know,” Will said, eyeing her. “I’m afraid to answer that. I’ve heard that when I speak, it makes American women wish to strike me with umbrellas.”

And now at last I am free, and I can finally tell you, without fear of danger to you, all that I feel in my heart. You are not the last dream of my soul. You are the first dream, the only dream I ever was unable to stop myself from dreaming. You are the first dream of my soul, and from that dream I hope will come all other dreams, a lifetime’s worth. With hope at last, Will Herondale

“I wrote it just after I discovered the curse was false,” Will said. “I had meant to give it to you then, but—” His hand tightened in her hair. “When I found out you were engaged to Jem, I put it away. I did not know when I could, when I should, give it to you. And then yesterday, when you wanted me to be myself, I had hope enough to take out those old dreams again, to dust them off and give them to you.”

But when I asked him if he would come to me in Idris, he said no, he could not. I asked him to reconsider. Told him I was his family, his blood. But he said he could not leave his parabatai, that there were some things more important than blood.”

“Jem still loves Will,” Tessa said. “Whether he is a Silent Brother or not. There are things no magic can destroy, for they are magic in themselves.

“Though you are near to driving me mad.” “I?” “Indeed. I always said you would be a dreadful suitor, Will, and you are nigh on proving it.” “Truly?” Will said. “You have come back from death like the ghost of Old Marley, but to nag me about my romantic prospects?” “What prospects? You’ve taken Tessa on so many carriage rides, I’d wager she could draw a map of London from memory, but have you proposed to her? You have not. A lady cannot propose to herself, William, and she cannot tell you she loves you if you do not state your intentions!” Will shook his head. “Jessamine, you are incorrigible.” “I am also right,” she pointed out. “What is it you are afraid of?” “That if I do state my intentions, she will say she does not love me back, not the way she loved Jem.”

“Where will you go?” “New York. The New World! A new life, a new continent.” Magnus threw his hands up. “I may even take your cat with me. Charlotte says he has been mourning since Jem left.” “Well, he bites everyone. You’re welcome to him. Do you think he’ll like New York?”

“What you are, what you can do, it is like some great miracle of the earth, like fire or wildflowers or the breadth of the sea. You are unique in the world, just as you are unique in my heart, and there will never be a time when I do not love you. I would love you if you were not in any part a Shadowhunter at all—”

“Of course you can have a true Shadowhunter name,” Will said. “You can have mine.”

“Marry me,” he said. “Marry me, Tess. Marry me and be Tessa Herondale. Or be Tessa Gray, or be whatever you wish to call yourself, but marry me and stay with me and never leave me, for I cannot bear another day of my life to go by that does not have you in it.”

Your words have changed me, Tess; they have made me a better man than I would have been otherwise. Life is a book, and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read. I would read them together with you, as many as I can, before I die—”

I know how you are with your words, and, Will—I love all of them. Every word you say. The silly ones, the mad ones, the beautiful ones, and the ones that are only for me. I love them, and I love you.”

“I love your words, my Will, but hold them for a moment,” she said, and smiled into his eyes. “Think of all the words I have held inside all this time, while I did not know your intentions. When you came to me in the drawing room and told me that you loved me, it was the hardest thing I have ever done to send you away. You said you loved the words of my heart, the shape of my soul. I remember. I remember every word you said from that day to this. I will never forget them. There are so many words I wish to say to you, and so many I wish to hear you say to me. I hope we have all our lives to say them to each other.” “Then you will marry me?” Will said, looking dazed, as if he did not quite believe in his good fortune. “Yes,” she said—the last, the simplest, and most important word of all.

“Be brave,” she said. “It’s not a duck, is it?”

“Miss Cecily,” she gasped, and then her eyes went to Will. She clapped a hand over her mouth, turned, and bolted back into the house. “Oh, dear,” said Tessa. “I have that effect on women,” Will said. “I probably should have warned you before you agreed to marry me.” “I can still change my mind,” Tessa said sweetly. “Don’t you dare—,”

though his prose was excellent—he had written several histories of the Shadowhunters when he’d retired that had been very well respected—his poetry had always been awful, though that had never stopped him from reciting it.