Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices Book 3)

by Cassandra Clare

For a moment the garden, the noise, the stench of blood and demon, vanished away, and he was alone in a soundless place with only Tessa. He wanted to run to her, wrap her in his arms. Protect her. But it was Jem’s place to do those things, not his. Not his.

“By the Angel, it just crushed Sophocles,” noted Will as the worm vanished behind a large structure shaped like a Greek temple. “Has no one respect for the classics these days?”

“I cannot stop recollecting something you told me once,” she said. He looked at her in surprise. “Yes? And what is that?” “That sometimes when you cannot decide what to do, you pretend you are a character in a book, because it is easier to decide what they would do.” “I am,” Will said, “perhaps, not someone to take advice from if you are seeking happiness.”

“Sometimes one must choose whether to be kind or honorable,” he said. “Sometimes one cannot be both.”

“You know that feeling,” she said, “when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing close around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage, and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.”

“You fear for Jem,” Will said. “Yes,” she said. “And I fear for you, too.” “No,” Will said hoarsely. “Don’t waste that on me, Tess.”

“The habits of years are not unlearned so quickly,”

“There is more to living than not dying,” he said. “Look at the way you live, Will. You burn as bright as a star.

“I am not going to live!” And Jem was on his feet, his cheeks flushed; it was the angriest, Will thought, that he had ever seen him. “I am not going to live, and I can choose to be as much for her as I can be, to burn as brightly for her as I wish, and for a shorter time, than to burden her with someone only half-alive for a longer time. It is my choice, William, and you cannot make it for me.”

“So you are dying for love, then,” Will said finally, his voice sounding constricted to his own ears. “Dying a little faster for love. And there are worse things to die for.”

“My conscience,” Will whispered. “You are my conscience. You have ever been, James Carstairs. I will do this for you, but I will extract one promise first.” “What sort of promise?” “You asked me years ago to cease looking for a cure for you,” Will said. “I want you to release me from that promise. Free me to look, at least. Free me to search.”

“No, more’s the pity,” Will muttered. “Jem—Jem is all the better part of myself. I would not expect you to understand. I owe him this.” “Then what am I?” Cecily asked. Will exhaled, too exasperated to check himself. “You are my weakness.” “And Tessa is your heart,” she said, not angrily but thoughtfully. “Not a fool, as I told you,” she added at his startled expression. “I know that you love her.”

“If Jem dies, I cannot be with Tessa,” said Will. “Because it will be as if I were waiting for him to die, or took some joy in his death, if it let me have her. And I will not be that person. I will not profit from his death. So he must live.” He lowered his arm, his sleeve bloody. “It is the only way any of this can ever mean anything.

“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.”

“Perhaps, but you would not exist without a woman, would you? However little use you may find us, we are cleverer and more determined and more patient than men. Men may be stronger, but it is women who endure.”

“A heart divided against itself cannot stand, as they say. You love them both, and it tears you apart.”

“It was like I saw your soul in the notes of the music. And it was beautiful.”

“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.”

“I would give you everything of myself,” he said. “I would give you more in two weeks than most men would give you in a lifetime.”

“I want you to be happy, and him to be happy. And yet when you walk that aisle to meet him and join yourselves forever you will walk an invisible path of the shards of my heart, Tessa. I would give over my own life for either of yours. I would give over my own life for your happiness. I thought perhaps that when you told me you did not love me that my own feelings would fall away and atrophy, but they have not. They have grown every day. 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.

I can tell you that the end of a life is the sum of the love that was lived in it,

“You asked me how I, being immortal, survive so many deaths. There is no great secret. You endure what is unbearable, and you bear it. That is all.”

I always loved you, Will, whatever you did. And now I need you to do for me what I cannot do for myself. For you to be my eyes when I do not have them. For you to be my hands when I cannot use my own. For you to be my heart when mine is done with beating.”

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

“I think there is hope for you yet, Will Herondale.”

Did they really think they could hurt him, after what he had lost? For five years it had been his absolute truth. Jem and Will. Will and Jem. Will Herondale lives, therefore Jem Carstairs lives also. Quod erat demonstrandum. To lose an arm or a leg would be painful, he imagined, but to lose the central truth of your life felt—fatal.

“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, 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,

His grief was so palpable, it mixed with her own to create a sharp sadness, lighter for being shared, though it was hard to say who was comforting who now. “You were always half his heart as well.”

“Don’t say those things, Tessa. Don’t say them.” “Why not?” “You said I am a good man,” he said. “But I am not that good a man. And I am—I am catastrophically in love with you.” “Will—” “I love you so much, so incredibly much,” he went on, “and when you’re this close to me, I forget who you are. I forget you’re Jem’s. I’d have to be the worst sort of person to think what I’m thinking right now. But I am thinking it.”

“For this I would have been damned forever. For this I would have given up everything.”

“Can one regret a thing that, however unwise, was beautiful?”