Clockwork Prince

Page 14

"Jem!" Tessa cried. But he was nearly out of earshot already, racing after Will. The automaton had vanished from view. Tessa said an unladylike word, hiked up her skirts, and gave chase.
It was not easy, running up a wet Yorkshire hil in heavy skirts, brambles tearing at her as she went. Practicing in her training clothes had given Tessa a new appreciation for why it was that men could move so quickly and cleanly, and could run so fast. The material of her dress weighed a ton, the heels on her boots caught on rocks as she ran, and her corset left her uncomfortably short of breath.
By the time she reached the top of the ridge, she was only just in time to see Jem, far ahead of her, disappear into a dark copse of trees. She looked around wildly but could see neither the road nor the Starkweathers' carriage.
With her heart pounding, she dashed after him.
The copse was wide, spreading along the ridgeline. The moment Tessa ducked in among the trees, the light vanished; thick tree branches interweaving above her blocked out the sun. Feeling like Snow White fleeing into the forest, she looked around helplessly for a sign of where the boys had gone-broken branches, trodden leaves-and caught a shimmer of light on metal as the automaton surged out of the dark space between two trees and lunged for her.
She screamed, leaping away, and promptly tripped on her skirts. She went over backward, thumping painful y into the muddy earth. The creature stabbed one of its long insectile arms toward her. She rol ed aside and the metal arm sliced into the ground beside her. There was a fal en tree branch near her; her fingers scrabbled at it, closed around it, and lifted it just as the creature's other arm swung toward her. She swept the branch between them, concentrating on the parrying and blocking lessons she'd gotten from Gabriel.
But it was only a branch. The automaton's metal arm sheared it in half. The end of the arm sprang open into a multi-fingered metal claw and reached for her throat. But before it could touch her, Tessa felt a violent fluttering against her col arbone. Her angel. She lay frozen as the creature jerked its claw back, one of its "fingers" leaking black fluid. A moment later it gave a high- pitched whine and col apsed backward, a freshet of more black liquid pouring from the hole that had been sliced clean through its chest.
Tessa sat up and stared.
Will stood with a sword in his hand, its hilt smeared with black. He was bareheaded, his thick dark hair tousled and tangled with leaves and bits of grass. Jem stood beside him, a witchlight stone blazing through his fingers.
As Tessa watched, Will slashed out with the sword again, cutting the automaton nearly in half. It crumpled to the muddy ground. Its insides were an ugly, horribly biological-looking mess of tubes and wires.
Jem looked up. His gaze met Tessa's. His eyes were as silver as mirrors.
Will, despite having saved her, did not appear to notice she was there at all ; he drew back his foot and delivered a savage kick to the metal creature's side. His boot rang against metal.
"Tel us," he said through gritted teeth. "What are you doing here? Why are you following us?"
The automaton's razor-lined mouth opened. Its voice when it spoke sounded like the buzzing and grinding of faulty machinery. "I . . . am . . . a . . . warning . . . from the Magister."
"A warning to who? To the family in the manor? tell me!" Will looked as if he were going to kick the creature again; Jem laid a hand on his shoulder.
"It doesn't feel pain, Will," he said in a low voice. "And it says it has a message. Let it deliver it."
"A warning . . . to you, Will Herondale . . . and to all Nephilim . . ." The creature's broken voice ground out, "The Magister says . . . you must cease your investigation. The past . . . is the past. Leave Mortmain's buried, or your family will pay the price. Do not dare approach or warn them. If you do, they will be destroyed."
Jem was looking at Will ; Will was still ashy-pale, but his cheeks were burning with rage. "How did Mortmain bring my family here? Did he threaten them? What has he done?"
The creature whirred and clicked, then began to speak again. "I . . . am . . . a . . . warning . . . from . . ."
Will snarled like an animal and slashed down with the sword. Tessa remembered Jessamine, in Hyde Park, tearing a faerie creature to ribbons with her delicate parasol. Will cut at the automaton until it was little more than ribbons of metal; Jem, throwing his arms around his friend and yanking him bodily backward, finally stopped him.
"Will," he said. "Will, enough." He glanced up, and the other two fol owed his gaze. In the distance, through the trees, other shapes moved-more automatons, like this one. "We must go," Jem said. "If we want to draw them off, away from your family, we must leave."
Will hesitated.
"Will, you know you cannot go near them," Jem said desperately. "If nothing else, it is the Law. If we bring danger to them, the Clave Will not move to help them in any way. They are not Shadowhunters anymore. Will."
Slowly Will lowered his arm to his side. He stood, with one of Jem's arms stil around his shoulders, staring down at the pile of scrap metal at his feet.
Black liquid dripped from the blade of the sword that dangled in his hand, and scorched the grass below.
Tessa exhaled. She hadn't realized she'd been holding her breath until that moment. Will must have heard her, for he raised his head and his gaze met hers across the clearing. Something in it made her look away. Agony stripped so raw was not meant for her eyes.
* * * In the end they hid the remains of the destroyed automaton as swiftly as possible, by burying them in the soft earth beneath a rotting log. Tessa helped as best she could, hampered by her skirts. By the end of it her hands were as black with dirt and mud as Will 's and Jem's were.
None of them spoke; they worked in an eerie silence. When they were done, Will led the way out of the copse, guided by the light of Jem's witchlight rune-stone. They emerged from the woods nearly at the road, where the Starkweather carriage waited, Gottshal dozing in the driver's seat as if only a few moments had passed since they had arrived.
If their appearances-filthy, smeared with mud, and with leaves caught in their hair-surprised the old man at all, he didn't show it, nor did he ask them if they had found what they had come looking for. He only grunted a Hello and waited for them to climb up into the carriage before he signaled the horses with a click of his tongue to turn around and begin the long journey back to York.
The curtains inside the carriage were drawn back; the sky was heavy with blackish clouds, pressing down on the horizon. "It's going to rain," Jem said, pushing damp silvery hair out of his eyes.
Will said nothing. He was staring out the window. His eyes were the color of the Arctic sea at night.
"Cecily," said Tessa in a much gentler voice than she was used to using with Will these days. He looked so miserable-as bleak and stark as the moors they were passing through. "Your sister-she looks like you."
Will remained silent. Tessa, seated next to Jem on the hard seat, shivered a little. Her clothes were damp from the wet earth and branches, and the inside of the carriage was cold. Jem reached down and, finding a slightly ragged lap rug, settled it over the both of them. She could feel the heat that radiated off his body, as if he were feverish, and fought the urge to move closer to him to get warm.
"Are you cold, Will ?" she asked, but he only shook his head, his eyes stil staring, unseeing, at the passing countryside. She looked at Jem in desperation.
Jem spoke, his voice clear and direct. "Will," he said. "I thought . . . I thought that your sister was dead."
Will drew his gaze from the window and looked at them both. When he smiled, it was ghastly. "My sister is dead," he said.
And that was all he would say. They rode the rest of the way back to the city of York in silence.
Having barely slept the night before, Tessa fell in and out of a fitful doze that lasted until they reached the York train station. In a fog she dismounted from the carriage and fol owed the others to the London platform; they were late for the train, and nearly missed it, and Jem held the door open for her, for her and Will, as both of them stumbled up the steps and into the compartment after him. Later she would remember the way he looked, hanging on to the door, hatless, call ing to both of them, and recal staring out the window of the train as it pulled away, seeing Gottshal standing on the platform looking after them with his unsettling dark eyes, his hat pulled low. Everything else was a blur.
There was no conversation this time as the train puffed its way through countryside increasingly darkened by clouds, only silence. Tessa rested her chin on her palm, cradling her head against the hard glass of the window.
Green hil s flew by, and smal towns and vil ages, each with their own neat smal station, the name of it picked out in gold on a red sign. Church spires rose in the distance; cities swel ed and vanished, and Tessa was aware of Jem whispering to Will, in Latin, she thought-"Me specta, me specta," and Will not answering. Later she was aware that Jem had left the compartment, and she looked at Will across the smal dimming space between them. The sun had begun to go down, and it lent a rosy flush to his skin, belying the blank look in his eyes.
"Will," she said softly, sleepily. "Last night-" You were kind to me, she was going to say. Thank you.
The glare from his blue eyes stabbed through her. "There was no last night," he said through his teeth.
At that, she sat up straight, almost awake. "Oh, truly? We just went right from one afternoon on through til the next morning? How odd no one else has remarked on it. I should think it some sort of miracle, a day with no night -"
"Don't test me, Tessa." Will 's hands were clenched on his knees, his fingernails, half-moons of dirt under them, digging into the fabric of his trousers.
"Your sister's alive," she said, knowing perfectly well that she was provoking him. "Oughtn't you be glad?"
He whitened. "Tessa-," he began, and leaned forward as if he meant to do she knew not what-strike the window and break it, shake her by the shoulders, or hold her as if he never meant to let her go. It was all one great bewilderment with him, wasn't it? Then the compartment door opened and Jem came in, carrying a damp cloth.
He looked from Will to Tessa and raised his silvery eyebrows. "A miracle,"
he said. "You got him to speak."
"Just to shout at me, real y," said Tessa. "Not quite loaves and fishes."
Will had gone back to staring out the window, and looked at neither of them as they spoke.
"It's a start," said Jem, and he sat down beside her. "Here. Give me your hands."
Surprised, Tessa held her hands out to him-and was horrified. They were filthy, the nails cracked and broken and thick with half-moons of dirt where she had clawed at the Yorkshire earth. There was even a bloody scratch across her knuckles, though she had no memory of having gotten it.
Not a lady's hands. She thought of Jessamine's perfect pink and white paws. "Jessie would be horrified," she said mournful y. "She'd tell me I had charwoman's hands."
"And what, pray tell, is dishonorable about that?" said Jem as he gently cleaned the dirt from her scratches. "I saw you chase after us, and that automaton creature. If Jessamine does not know by now that there is honor in blood and dirt, she never will."
The cool cloth felt good on her fingers. She looked up at Jem, who was intent on his task, his lashes a fringe of lowered silver. "Thank you," she said.
"I doubt I was any help at all, and probably a hindrance, but thank you all the same."
He smiled at her, the sun coming out from behind clouds. "That's what we're training you for, isn't it?"
She lowered her voice. "Have you any idea what could have happened? Why Will 's family would be living in a house Mortmain once owned?"
Jem glanced over at Will, who was still staring bitterly out the window. They had entered London, and gray buildings were beginning to rise up around them on either side. The look Jem gave Will was a tired, loving sort of look, a familial look, and Tessa realized that, though when she had imagined them as brothers, she had always imagined Will as the older, the caretaker, and Jem as the younger, the reality was far more complicated than that. "I do not,"
he said, "though it makes me think that the game Mortmain is playing is a long one. Somehow he knew exactly where our investigations would lead us, and he arranged for this-encounter-to shock us as much as possible. He wishes us to be reminded who it is who has the power."
Tessa shuddered. "I don't know what he wants from me, Jem," she said in a low voice. "When he said to me that he made me, it was as if he were saying he could unmake me just as easily."
Jem's warm arm touched hers. "You cannot be unmade," he said just as softly. "And Mortmain underestimates you. I saw how you used that branch against the automaton-"
"It was not enough. If it had not been for my angel-" Tessa touched the pendant at her throat. "The automaton touched it and recoiled. Another mystery I do not understand. It protected me before, and again this time, but in other situations lies dormant. It is as much a mystery as my talent."
"Which, fortunately, you did not need to use to Change into Starkweather.
He seemed quite happy simply to give us the Shade files."
"Thank goodness," said Tessa. "I wasn't looking forward to it. He seems such an unpleasant, bitter man. But if it ever turns out to be necessary . . ."
She took something from her pocket and held it up, something that glinted in the carriage's dim light. "A button," she said smugly. "It fell from the cuff of his jacket this morning, and I picked it up."
Jem smiled. "Very clever, Tessa. I knew we'd be glad we brought you with us-"
He broke off with a cough. Tessa looked at him in alarm, and even Will was roused out of his silent despondency, turning to look at Jem with narrowed eyes. Jem coughed again, his hand pressed to his mouth, but when he took it away, there was no blood visible. Tessa saw Will 's shoulders relax.
"Just some dust in my throat," Jem reassured them. He looked not il but very tired, though his exhaustion only served to point up the delicacy of his features. His beauty did not blaze like Will 's did in fierce colors and repressed fire, but it had its own muted perfection, the loveliness of snow fal ing against a silver-gray sky.
"Your ring!" She started up suddenly as she remembered that she was stil wearing it. She put the button back into her pocket, then reached to draw the Carstairs ring off her hand. "I had meant to give it back to you earlier," she said, placing the silver circlet in his palm. "I forgot . . ."