Clockwork Princess
Page 57
"How-"
"I will tell you the story of it. Another story of Lightwoods and Herondales and Fairchilds. But it will take more than an hour in the telling, and you must be cold." He moved forward as if to touch her shoulder, then seemed to remember himself, and let his hand fall.
"I-" Words had deserted her. She was still feeling the shock of seeing him like this, bone-deep. Yes, she had seen him every year, here in this place, on this bridge. But it was not until this moment that she realized how much she had been seeing a Jem transmuted. But this-this was like falling into her own past, all the last century erased, and she felt dizzy and elated and terrified with it. "But-after today? Where will you go? To Idris?"
He looked, for a moment, honestly bewildered-and despite how old she knew him to be, so young. "I don't know," he said. "I've never had a lifetime to plan for before."
"Then ... to another Institute?" Don't go, Tessa wanted to say. Stay. Please.
"I do not think I will go to Idris, or to an Institute anywhere," he said, after a pause so long that she felt as if her knees might give way under her if he did not speak. "I don't know how to live in the world as a Shadowhunter without Will. I don't think I even want to. I am still a parabatai, but my other half is gone. If I were to go to some Institute and ask them to take me in, I would never forget that. I would never feel whole."
"Then what-"
"That depends on you."
"On me?" A sort of terror gripped her. She knew what she wanted him to say, but it seemed impossible. In all the time she had seen him, since he had become a Silent Brother, he had seemed remote. Not unkind or unfeeling, but as if there were a layer of glass between him and the world. She remembered the boy she had known, who'd given his love as freely as breathing, but that was not the man she had met only once each year for more than a century. She knew how much the time between then and now had changed her. How much more must it have changed him? She did not know what he wanted from his new life or, more immediately, from her. She wanted to tell him whatever he wanted to hear, wanted to catch at him and hold him, to seize his hands and reassure herself of their shape-but she did not dare. Not without knowing what he wanted from her. It had been so many years. How could she presume he still felt as he once had?
"I-" He looked down at his slender hands, gripping the concrete of the bridge. "For a hundred and thirty years every hour of my life has been scheduled. I thought often of what I would do if I were free, if there were ever a cure found. I thought I would bolt immediately, like a bird released from a cage. I had not imagined I would emerge and find the world so changed, so desperate. Subsumed in fire and blood. I wished to survive it, but for only one reason. I wished ..."
"What did you wish for?"
He did not reply. Instead he reached over to touch her pearl bracelet with light fingers. "This is your thirtieth-anniversary bracelet," he said. "You still wear it."
Tessa swallowed. Her skin was prickling, her pulse racing. She realized she hadn't felt this, this particular brand of excited nervousness, in so many years that she had nearly forgotten it. "Yes."
"Since Will, have you never loved anyone else?"
"Don't you know the answer to that?"
"I don't mean the way you love your children, or the way you love your friends. Tessa, you know what I'm asking."
"I don't," she said. "I think I need you to tell me."
"We were once going to be married," he said. "And I have loved you all this time-a century and a half. And I know that you loved Will. I saw you together over the years. And I know that that love was so great that it must have made other loves, even the one we had when we were both so young, seem small and unimportant. You had a whole lifetime of love with him, Tessa. So many years. Children. Memories I cannot hope to-"
He broke off with a violent start.
"No," he said, and let her wrist fall. "I can't do it. I was a fool to think- Tessa, forgive me," he said, and drew away from her, plunging into the throng of people surging across the bridge.
Tessa stood for a moment in shock; it was just a moment, but it was enough time for him to vanish into the crowd. She put out a hand to steady herself. The stone of the bridge was cold under her fingers-cold, just as it had been that night when they had first come to this place, where they had first talked. He had been the first person she had ever voiced her deepest fear to: that her power made her something other, something that was not human. You are human, he had said. In all the ways that matter.
She remembered him, remembered the lovely dying boy who had taken the time to comfort a frightened girl he did not know, and had not voiced a word of his own fear. Of course he had left his fingerprints on her heart. How could it be otherwise?
She remembered the time he had offered her his mother's jade pendant, held out in his shaking hand. She remembered kisses in a carriage. She remembered walking into his room, spilled full with moonlight, and the silver boy standing in front of the window, wringing music more beautiful than desire out of the violin in his hands.
Will, he had said. Is it you, Will?
Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem's violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.
Jem was mortal now. He would grow old like Will, and like Will he would die, and she did not know if she could bear it again.
And yet.
Most people are lucky to have even one great love in their life. You have found two.
Suddenly her feet were moving, almost without her volition. She was darting into the crowd, pushing past strangers, gasping out apologies as she nearly tripped over the feet of passersby or knocked into them with her elbows. She didn't care. She was running flat out across the bridge, skidding to a halt at the very end of it, where a series of narrow stone steps led down to the water of the Thames.
She took them two at a time, almost slipping on the damp stone. At the bottom of the steps was a small cement dock, ringed around with a metal railing. The river was high and splashed up between the gaps in the metal, filling the small space with the smell of silt and river water.
Jem stood at the railing, looking out at the water. His hands were jammed tightly into his pockets, his shoulders hunched as if against a strong wind. He was staring ahead almost blindly, and with such fixed intent that he didn't seem to hear her as she came up behind him. She caught at his sleeve, swinging him around to face her.
"What," she said breathlessly. "What were you trying to ask me, Jem?"
His eyes widened. His cheeks were flushed, whether from running or the cold air, she wasn't sure. He looked at her as if she were some bizarre plant that had sprung up on the spot, astonishing him. "Tessa-you followed me?"
"Of course I followed you. You ran off in the middle of a sentence!"
"It wasn't a very good sentence." He looked down at the ground, and then up at her again, a smile, as familiar as her own memories, tugging at the corner of his mouth. It came back to her then, a memory lost but not forgotten: Jem's smile had always been like sunlight. "I never was the one who was good with words," he said. "If I had my violin, I would be able to play you what I wanted to say."
"Just try."
"I don't-I'm not sure I can. I had six or seven speeches prepared, and I was running through all of them, I think."
His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans. Tessa reached out and took him gently by the wrists. "Well, I am good with words," she said. "So let me ask you, then."
He drew his hands from his pockets and let her wrap her fingers around his wrists. They stood, Jem looking at her from under his dark hair-it had blown across his face in the wind off the river. There was still a single streak of silver in it, startling against the black.
"You asked me if I have loved anyone but Will," she said. "And the answer is yes. I have loved you. I always have, and I always will."
She heard his sharp intake of breath. There was a pulse pounding in his throat, visible under the pale skin still laced with the fading white lines of the Brotherhood's runes.
"They say you cannot love two people equally at once," she said. "And perhaps for others that is so. But you and Will-you are not like two ordinary people, two people who might have been jealous of each other, or who would have imagined my love for one of them diminished by my love of the other. You merged your souls when you were both children. I could not have loved Will so much if I had not loved you as well. And I could not love you as I do if I had not loved Will as I did."
Her fingers ringed his wrists lightly, just below the cuffs of his jumper. To touch him like this-it was so strange, and yet it made her want to touch him more. She had almost forgotten how much she missed the touch of someone she loved.
She forced herself to release her hold on him, though, and reached her hand into the collar of her shirt. Carefully she took hold of the chain around her throat and lifted it so that he could see, dangling from it, the jade pendant he had given her so long ago. The inscription on the back still gleamed as if new:
When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze.
"You remember, that you left it with me?" she said. "I've never taken it off."
He closed his eyes. His lashes lay against his cheeks, long and fine. "All these years," he said, and his voice was a low whisper, and it was not the voice of the boy he had been once, but it was still a voice she loved. "All these years, you wore it? I never knew."
"It seemed that it would only have been a burden on you, when you were a Silent Brother. I feared you might think that my wearing it meant I had some sort of expectation of you. An expectation you could not fulfill."
He was silent for a long time. Tessa could hear the lap of the river, the traffic in the distance. It seemed to her she could hear the clouds move across the sky. Every nerve in her body screamed for him to speak, but she waited: waited as the expressions chased themselves across his face, and finally he spoke.
"To be a Silent Brother," he said, "it is to see everything and nothing all at once. I could see the great map of life, spread out before me. I could see the currents of the world. And human life began to seem a sort of passion play, acted at a distance. When they took the runes from me, when the mantle of the Brotherhood was removed, it was as if I had awoken from a long dream, or as if a shield of glass around me had shattered. I felt everything, all at once, rushing in upon me. All the humanity the Brotherhood's spells had taken from me. That I had so much humanity to return to me ... That is because of you. If I had not had you, Tessa, if I had not had these yearly meetings as my anchor and my guide, I do not know if I could have come back."
There was light in his dark eyes now, and her heart soared in her chest. She had only ever loved two men in her life, and she had never thought to see either of their faces again. "But you have," she whispered. "And it is a miracle. And you remember what I once told you about miracles."
He smiled again at that. "'One does not question miracles, or complain that they are not constructed perfectly to one's liking.' I suppose that is true. I wish that I could have come back to you earlier. I wish I were the same boy I was when you loved me, once. I fear that the years have changed me into someone else."
Tessa searched his face with her eyes. In the distance she could hear the sound of traffic passing, but here, by the river's edge, she could almost imagine that she was a girl again, and the air full of fog and smoke, the rattling sound of the railway in the distance ... "The years have changed me, too," she said. "I have been a mother and a grandmother, and I have seen those I love die, and seen others be born. You speak of the currents of the world. I have seen them too. If I were still the same girl I was when you knew me first, I would not have been able to speak my heart as freely to you as I just have. I would not be able to ask you what I am about to ask you now."
He brought his hand up and cupped her cheek. She could see the hope in his expression, slowly dawning. "And what is that?"
"Come with me," she said. "Stay with me. Be with me. See everything with me. I have traveled the world and seen so much, but there is so much more, and no one I would rather see it with than you. I would go everywhere and anywhere with you, Jem Carstairs."
His thumb slid along the arch of her cheekbone. She shivered. It had been so long since someone had looked at her like that, as if she were the world's great marvel, and she knew she was looking at him like that too. "It seems unreal," he said huskily. "I have loved you for so long. How can this be true?"
"It is one of the great truths of my life," Tessa said. "Will you come with me? For I cannot wait to share the world with you, Jem. There is so much to see."
She was not sure who reached for who first, only that a moment later she was in his arms and he was whispering "Yes, of course, yes," against her hair. He sought her mouth tentatively-she could feel his gentle tension, the weight of so many years between their last kiss and this. She reached up, curling her hand around the back of his neck, drawing him down, whispering "Bie zhao ji." Don't worry, don't worry. She kissed his cheek, the edge of his mouth, and finally his mouth, the pressure of his lips on hers intense and glorious, and Oh, the beat of his heart, the taste of his mouth, the rhythm of his breath. Her senses blurred with memory: how thin he had been once, the feeling of his shoulder blades as sharp as knives beneath the fine linen of the shirts he had once worn. Now she could feel strong, solid muscle when she held him, the thrum of life through his body where it pressed against hers, the soft cotton of his jumper gripped between her fingers.
Tessa was aware that above their small embankment people were still walking along Blackfriars Bridge, that the traffic was still passing, and that passersby were probably staring, but she didn't care; after enough years you learned what was important and what wasn't. And this was important: Jem, the speed and stutter of his heart, the grace of his gentle hands sliding to cup her face, his lips soft against hers as he traced the shape of her mouth with his. The warm solid definitive realness of him. For the first time in many long years she felt her heart open, and knew love as more than a memory.
"I will tell you the story of it. Another story of Lightwoods and Herondales and Fairchilds. But it will take more than an hour in the telling, and you must be cold." He moved forward as if to touch her shoulder, then seemed to remember himself, and let his hand fall.
"I-" Words had deserted her. She was still feeling the shock of seeing him like this, bone-deep. Yes, she had seen him every year, here in this place, on this bridge. But it was not until this moment that she realized how much she had been seeing a Jem transmuted. But this-this was like falling into her own past, all the last century erased, and she felt dizzy and elated and terrified with it. "But-after today? Where will you go? To Idris?"
He looked, for a moment, honestly bewildered-and despite how old she knew him to be, so young. "I don't know," he said. "I've never had a lifetime to plan for before."
"Then ... to another Institute?" Don't go, Tessa wanted to say. Stay. Please.
"I do not think I will go to Idris, or to an Institute anywhere," he said, after a pause so long that she felt as if her knees might give way under her if he did not speak. "I don't know how to live in the world as a Shadowhunter without Will. I don't think I even want to. I am still a parabatai, but my other half is gone. If I were to go to some Institute and ask them to take me in, I would never forget that. I would never feel whole."
"Then what-"
"That depends on you."
"On me?" A sort of terror gripped her. She knew what she wanted him to say, but it seemed impossible. In all the time she had seen him, since he had become a Silent Brother, he had seemed remote. Not unkind or unfeeling, but as if there were a layer of glass between him and the world. She remembered the boy she had known, who'd given his love as freely as breathing, but that was not the man she had met only once each year for more than a century. She knew how much the time between then and now had changed her. How much more must it have changed him? She did not know what he wanted from his new life or, more immediately, from her. She wanted to tell him whatever he wanted to hear, wanted to catch at him and hold him, to seize his hands and reassure herself of their shape-but she did not dare. Not without knowing what he wanted from her. It had been so many years. How could she presume he still felt as he once had?
"I-" He looked down at his slender hands, gripping the concrete of the bridge. "For a hundred and thirty years every hour of my life has been scheduled. I thought often of what I would do if I were free, if there were ever a cure found. I thought I would bolt immediately, like a bird released from a cage. I had not imagined I would emerge and find the world so changed, so desperate. Subsumed in fire and blood. I wished to survive it, but for only one reason. I wished ..."
"What did you wish for?"
He did not reply. Instead he reached over to touch her pearl bracelet with light fingers. "This is your thirtieth-anniversary bracelet," he said. "You still wear it."
Tessa swallowed. Her skin was prickling, her pulse racing. She realized she hadn't felt this, this particular brand of excited nervousness, in so many years that she had nearly forgotten it. "Yes."
"Since Will, have you never loved anyone else?"
"Don't you know the answer to that?"
"I don't mean the way you love your children, or the way you love your friends. Tessa, you know what I'm asking."
"I don't," she said. "I think I need you to tell me."
"We were once going to be married," he said. "And I have loved you all this time-a century and a half. And I know that you loved Will. I saw you together over the years. And I know that that love was so great that it must have made other loves, even the one we had when we were both so young, seem small and unimportant. You had a whole lifetime of love with him, Tessa. So many years. Children. Memories I cannot hope to-"
He broke off with a violent start.
"No," he said, and let her wrist fall. "I can't do it. I was a fool to think- Tessa, forgive me," he said, and drew away from her, plunging into the throng of people surging across the bridge.
Tessa stood for a moment in shock; it was just a moment, but it was enough time for him to vanish into the crowd. She put out a hand to steady herself. The stone of the bridge was cold under her fingers-cold, just as it had been that night when they had first come to this place, where they had first talked. He had been the first person she had ever voiced her deepest fear to: that her power made her something other, something that was not human. You are human, he had said. In all the ways that matter.
She remembered him, remembered the lovely dying boy who had taken the time to comfort a frightened girl he did not know, and had not voiced a word of his own fear. Of course he had left his fingerprints on her heart. How could it be otherwise?
She remembered the time he had offered her his mother's jade pendant, held out in his shaking hand. She remembered kisses in a carriage. She remembered walking into his room, spilled full with moonlight, and the silver boy standing in front of the window, wringing music more beautiful than desire out of the violin in his hands.
Will, he had said. Is it you, Will?
Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem's violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.
Jem was mortal now. He would grow old like Will, and like Will he would die, and she did not know if she could bear it again.
And yet.
Most people are lucky to have even one great love in their life. You have found two.
Suddenly her feet were moving, almost without her volition. She was darting into the crowd, pushing past strangers, gasping out apologies as she nearly tripped over the feet of passersby or knocked into them with her elbows. She didn't care. She was running flat out across the bridge, skidding to a halt at the very end of it, where a series of narrow stone steps led down to the water of the Thames.
She took them two at a time, almost slipping on the damp stone. At the bottom of the steps was a small cement dock, ringed around with a metal railing. The river was high and splashed up between the gaps in the metal, filling the small space with the smell of silt and river water.
Jem stood at the railing, looking out at the water. His hands were jammed tightly into his pockets, his shoulders hunched as if against a strong wind. He was staring ahead almost blindly, and with such fixed intent that he didn't seem to hear her as she came up behind him. She caught at his sleeve, swinging him around to face her.
"What," she said breathlessly. "What were you trying to ask me, Jem?"
His eyes widened. His cheeks were flushed, whether from running or the cold air, she wasn't sure. He looked at her as if she were some bizarre plant that had sprung up on the spot, astonishing him. "Tessa-you followed me?"
"Of course I followed you. You ran off in the middle of a sentence!"
"It wasn't a very good sentence." He looked down at the ground, and then up at her again, a smile, as familiar as her own memories, tugging at the corner of his mouth. It came back to her then, a memory lost but not forgotten: Jem's smile had always been like sunlight. "I never was the one who was good with words," he said. "If I had my violin, I would be able to play you what I wanted to say."
"Just try."
"I don't-I'm not sure I can. I had six or seven speeches prepared, and I was running through all of them, I think."
His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans. Tessa reached out and took him gently by the wrists. "Well, I am good with words," she said. "So let me ask you, then."
He drew his hands from his pockets and let her wrap her fingers around his wrists. They stood, Jem looking at her from under his dark hair-it had blown across his face in the wind off the river. There was still a single streak of silver in it, startling against the black.
"You asked me if I have loved anyone but Will," she said. "And the answer is yes. I have loved you. I always have, and I always will."
She heard his sharp intake of breath. There was a pulse pounding in his throat, visible under the pale skin still laced with the fading white lines of the Brotherhood's runes.
"They say you cannot love two people equally at once," she said. "And perhaps for others that is so. But you and Will-you are not like two ordinary people, two people who might have been jealous of each other, or who would have imagined my love for one of them diminished by my love of the other. You merged your souls when you were both children. I could not have loved Will so much if I had not loved you as well. And I could not love you as I do if I had not loved Will as I did."
Her fingers ringed his wrists lightly, just below the cuffs of his jumper. To touch him like this-it was so strange, and yet it made her want to touch him more. She had almost forgotten how much she missed the touch of someone she loved.
She forced herself to release her hold on him, though, and reached her hand into the collar of her shirt. Carefully she took hold of the chain around her throat and lifted it so that he could see, dangling from it, the jade pendant he had given her so long ago. The inscription on the back still gleamed as if new:
When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze.
"You remember, that you left it with me?" she said. "I've never taken it off."
He closed his eyes. His lashes lay against his cheeks, long and fine. "All these years," he said, and his voice was a low whisper, and it was not the voice of the boy he had been once, but it was still a voice she loved. "All these years, you wore it? I never knew."
"It seemed that it would only have been a burden on you, when you were a Silent Brother. I feared you might think that my wearing it meant I had some sort of expectation of you. An expectation you could not fulfill."
He was silent for a long time. Tessa could hear the lap of the river, the traffic in the distance. It seemed to her she could hear the clouds move across the sky. Every nerve in her body screamed for him to speak, but she waited: waited as the expressions chased themselves across his face, and finally he spoke.
"To be a Silent Brother," he said, "it is to see everything and nothing all at once. I could see the great map of life, spread out before me. I could see the currents of the world. And human life began to seem a sort of passion play, acted at a distance. When they took the runes from me, when the mantle of the Brotherhood was removed, it was as if I had awoken from a long dream, or as if a shield of glass around me had shattered. I felt everything, all at once, rushing in upon me. All the humanity the Brotherhood's spells had taken from me. That I had so much humanity to return to me ... That is because of you. If I had not had you, Tessa, if I had not had these yearly meetings as my anchor and my guide, I do not know if I could have come back."
There was light in his dark eyes now, and her heart soared in her chest. She had only ever loved two men in her life, and she had never thought to see either of their faces again. "But you have," she whispered. "And it is a miracle. And you remember what I once told you about miracles."
He smiled again at that. "'One does not question miracles, or complain that they are not constructed perfectly to one's liking.' I suppose that is true. I wish that I could have come back to you earlier. I wish I were the same boy I was when you loved me, once. I fear that the years have changed me into someone else."
Tessa searched his face with her eyes. In the distance she could hear the sound of traffic passing, but here, by the river's edge, she could almost imagine that she was a girl again, and the air full of fog and smoke, the rattling sound of the railway in the distance ... "The years have changed me, too," she said. "I have been a mother and a grandmother, and I have seen those I love die, and seen others be born. You speak of the currents of the world. I have seen them too. If I were still the same girl I was when you knew me first, I would not have been able to speak my heart as freely to you as I just have. I would not be able to ask you what I am about to ask you now."
He brought his hand up and cupped her cheek. She could see the hope in his expression, slowly dawning. "And what is that?"
"Come with me," she said. "Stay with me. Be with me. See everything with me. I have traveled the world and seen so much, but there is so much more, and no one I would rather see it with than you. I would go everywhere and anywhere with you, Jem Carstairs."
His thumb slid along the arch of her cheekbone. She shivered. It had been so long since someone had looked at her like that, as if she were the world's great marvel, and she knew she was looking at him like that too. "It seems unreal," he said huskily. "I have loved you for so long. How can this be true?"
"It is one of the great truths of my life," Tessa said. "Will you come with me? For I cannot wait to share the world with you, Jem. There is so much to see."
She was not sure who reached for who first, only that a moment later she was in his arms and he was whispering "Yes, of course, yes," against her hair. He sought her mouth tentatively-she could feel his gentle tension, the weight of so many years between their last kiss and this. She reached up, curling her hand around the back of his neck, drawing him down, whispering "Bie zhao ji." Don't worry, don't worry. She kissed his cheek, the edge of his mouth, and finally his mouth, the pressure of his lips on hers intense and glorious, and Oh, the beat of his heart, the taste of his mouth, the rhythm of his breath. Her senses blurred with memory: how thin he had been once, the feeling of his shoulder blades as sharp as knives beneath the fine linen of the shirts he had once worn. Now she could feel strong, solid muscle when she held him, the thrum of life through his body where it pressed against hers, the soft cotton of his jumper gripped between her fingers.
Tessa was aware that above their small embankment people were still walking along Blackfriars Bridge, that the traffic was still passing, and that passersby were probably staring, but she didn't care; after enough years you learned what was important and what wasn't. And this was important: Jem, the speed and stutter of his heart, the grace of his gentle hands sliding to cup her face, his lips soft against hers as he traced the shape of her mouth with his. The warm solid definitive realness of him. For the first time in many long years she felt her heart open, and knew love as more than a memory.
