Cassandra Clare - The Last Stand of the New York Institute

“Jocelyn Fairchild,” Tessa said. “Descended from Henry Branwell and Charlotte Fairchild.”

Jocelyn blinked as if she had not been expecting a lecture on her own genealogy.

“That’s right,” she said cautiously.

“I knew them, you see,” Tessa explained. “You have a great look of Henry.”

“ Knew them? Then you must be . . .”

Henry had been dead for the better part of a century, and Tessa looked no older than twenty-five.

“Are you a warlock too, then?” Jocelyn asked suspiciously. Magnus saw her eyes drift from the top of Tessa’s head to her feet, searching for a demon’s mark, the sign that would indicate to Shadowhunters that she was unclean, inhuman, and to be despised. Some warlocks could hide their marks under their clothes, but Jocelyn could look at as much of Tessa as she wished and never find a mark.

Tessa did not draw herself up obtrusively, but it was clear suddenly that Tessa was taller than Jocelyn was, and her gray eyes could be very cold.

“I am,” said Tessa. “I am Theresa Gray, daughter of a Greater Demon and Elizabeth Gray, who was born Adele Starkweather, one of your kind. I was the wife of William Herondale, who was the head of the London Institute, and I was the mother of James Herondale and Lucie Blackthorn. Will and I raised our Shadowhunter children to protect mundanes, to live by the Laws of Clave and Covenant, and to keep to the Accords.”

She spoke in the way she well knew how, in the manner of the Nephilim.

“Once, I lived among the Shadowhunters,” Tessa said softly. “Once I might almost have seemed like a person to you.”

Jocelyn looked lost, in the way that people did when they learned something so strange that the whole world seemed unfamiliar.

“I understand if you find my crimes against Downworlders unforgivable,” Jocelyn said, “but I—I have nowhere else to go. And I need help. My daughter needs your help. She is a Shadowhunter and Valentine’s daughter. She cannot live among her own kind. We can never go back. I need a spell to shield her eyes from all but the mundane world. She can grow up safe and happy in the mundane world. She never needs to know what her father was.” Jocelyn almost choked, but she lifted her chin and added, “Or what her mother did.”

“So you come begging to us,” Magnus said. “The monsters.”

“I have no quarrel with Downworlders,” Jocelyn said at last. “I . . . my best friend is a Downworlder, and I do not believe he is so changed from the person I always loved. I was wrong. I’ll have to live forever with what I did. But please, my daughter did nothing.”

Her best friend, the Downworlder. Magnus supposed that Lucian Graymark was still alive, then, though nobody had seen him since the Uprising. Magnus thought a little better of Jocelyn for claiming him as her best friend. People did say she and Lucian had planned to defeat Valentine together, though Jocelyn had not been there to confirm the rumor after the battle. Magnus had not seen Jocelyn during the Uprising. He had not known whether to believe the claim or not.

Magnus had often considered that Shadowhunter justice was more like cruelty, and he did not want to be cruel. He looked at the woman’s weary desperate face and the bundle in her arms, and he could not be cruel. He believed in redemption, the inchoate grace in every person he met. It was one of the few things he had to believe in, the possibility of beauty when faced with the reality of so much ugliness.

“You said you were married to a Herondale.” Jocelyn appealed to Tessa, voice as faint as if she could already see the weakness of this argument but she had none other to make. “Stephen Herondale was my friend—”

“Stephen Herondale would have killed me if he’d ever met me,” said Tessa. “I would not have been safe living among people like you, or like him. I am the wife and mother of warriors who fought and died and never dishonored themselves as you have. I have worn gear, wielded blades, and slain demons, and all I wished was to overcome evil so that I could live and be happy with those I loved. I’d hoped I had made this a better, safer world for my children. Because of Valentine’s Circle, the Herondale line, the line that was my son’s children’s children, is finished. That happened through you and your Circle and your husband. Stephen Herondale died with hate in his heart and the blood of my people on his hands. I can imagine no more horrible way for mine and Will’s line to end. I will have to carry for the rest of my life the wound of what Valentine’s Circle has done to me, and I will live forever.”

Tessa paused, and looked at Jocelyn’s white despairing face, and then said, more gently, “But Stephen Herondale made his own choices, and you have made other choices besides the one to hate. I know that Valentine could not have been defeated without your help. And your child has done no wrong to anybody.”

“That does not mean she has a right to our help,” Magnus interrupted. He didn’t want to reject Jocelyn, but there was still a nagging voice inside him that told him she was an enemy. “Besides which, I am not a Shadowhunter charity, and I doubt she has the money to pay for my help. Fugitives are so seldom well funded.”

“I’ll find the money,” said Jocelyn. “I am not a charity case, and I am not a Shadowhunter any longer. I want nothing more to do with the Shadowhunters. I want to be someone else. I want to raise my daughter to be someone else, not bound to the Clave or led astray by anybody. I want her to be braver than I was, stronger than I was, and to let nobody decide her fate but herself.”

“Nobody could ask for more than that for their child,” Tessa said, and edged closer. “May I hold her?”

Jocelyn hesitated for a moment, holding the tightly wrapped bundle of the child close. Then slowly, reluctantly, her movements almost jerky, she leaned forward and placed her baby with enormous care into the arms of a woman she had just met.

“She’s beautiful,” Tessa murmured. Magnus did not know if Tessa had held a baby in decades, but she moved the child to her hip, held fast in the circle of her arm, with the instinctive loving and casual air of a parent. Magnus had seen her once, holding one of her grandchildren in just this way. “What’s her name?”

“Clarissa,” said Jocelyn, looking at Tessa intently, and then, as if she were telling them a secret, she said, “I call her Clary.”

Magnus looked over Tessa’s shoulder and into the child’s face. The girl was older than Magnus had thought, small for her age, but her face had lost the roundness of babyhood: she must be almost two, and already looked like her mother. She looked like a Fairchild. She had red curls, the same color Henry’s had been, clustering on her small head, and green eyes, glass-clear and jewel-bright and blinking around curiously at her surroundings. She did not seem to object to being handed to a stranger. Tessa tucked the baby’s blanket more securely around her, and Clary’s small fat fist closed determinedly around Tessa’s finger. The child waved Tessa’s finger back and forth, as if to display her new possession.

Tessa smiled down at the baby, a slow bright smile, and whispered, “Hello, Clary.”

It was clear that Tessa at least had made up her mind. Magnus leaned in, his shoulder resting lightly against Tessa’s, and peered into the child’s face. He waved to catch her attention, moving his fingers so all his rings sparkled in the light. Clary laughed, all pearly teeth and the purest joy, and Magnus felt the knot of resentment in his chest ease.

Clary wriggled in a clear and imperious signal that she wanted to be let down, but Tessa handed her to Jocelyn so that Clary’s mother could decide whether she should be put down or not. Jocelyn might not want her child roaming a warlock’s home.