Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Princess

We cannot save them from themselves, Jem had replied. He wore his hood up, but the wind blew it back, showing her the edge of his scarred cheek.

“There is something coming. A horror Mortmain could only have imagined. I feel it in my bones.”

No one can rid the world of all evil, Tessa.

And when she drew his dagger, wrapped in silk, though still dirty and stained with earth and Will’s blood, from the pocket of her coat and gave it to him, he bent his head and held it to him, hunching his shoulders over it, as if protecting a wound to his heart.

“Will wanted you to see it,” she said. “I know you cannot take it with you.”

Keep it for me. There may come a day .

She did not ask him what he meant, but she kept it. Kept it when she left England, the white cliffs of Dover retreating like clouds in the distance as she crossed the Channel. In Paris she found Magnus, who was living in a garret apartment and painting, an occupation for which he had no aptitude whatsoever. He let her sleep on a mattress by the window, and in the night, when she woke up screaming for Will, he came and put his arms around her, smelling of turpentine.

“The first one is always the hardest,” he said.

“The first?”

“The first one you love who dies,” he said. “It gets easier, after.”

When the war came to Paris, they went to New York together, and Magnus reintroduced her to the city she had been born in—a busy, bright, buzzing metropolis she barely recognized, where motorcars crowded the streets like ants, and trains whizzed by on elevated platforms. She did not see Jem that year, because the Luftwaffe was strafing London with fire and he had deemed it too dangerous to meet, but in the years after—

“Tessa?”

Her heart stopped.

A great wave of lurching dizziness passed over her, and for a moment she wondered if she were going mad, if after so many years the past and present had blended within her memories until she could no longer tell the difference. For the voice she heard was not the soft, silent voice-within-her-mind of Brother Zachariah. The voice that had echoed in her head once a year for the past one hundred and thirty years.

This was a voice that drew out memories stretched thin by years of recollection, like paper unfolded and refolded too many times. A voice that brought back, like a wave, the memory of another time on this bridge, a night so long ago, everything black and silver and the river rushing away under her feet . . .

Her heart was pounding so hard, she felt as if it might break through her rib cage. Slowly she turned, away from the balustrade. And stared.

He stood on the pavement in front of her, smiling shyly, hands in the pockets of a pair of very modern jeans. He wore a blue cotton jumper pushed up to the elbows. Faint white scars decorated his forearms like lacework. She could see the shape of the rune of Quietude, which had been so black and strong against his skin, faded now to a faint imprint of silver.

“Jem?” she whispered, realizing why she had not seen him when she’d been searching the crowd for him. She had been looking for Brother Zachariah, wrapped in his parchment-white robe, moving, unseen, through the throng of Londoners. But this was not Brother Zachariah.

This was Jem.

She couldn’t tear her gaze away from him. She had always thought Jem was beautiful. He was no less beautiful to her now. Once he had had silver-white hair and eyes like gray skies. This Jem had raven-black hair, curling slightly in the humid air, and dark brown eyes with glints of gold in the irises. Once his skin had been pale; now it had a flush of color to it. Where his face had been unmarked before he’d become a Silent Brother, there were two dark scars, the first runes of the Brotherhood, standing out starkly and blackly at the arch of each cheekbone.

Where the collar of his jumper dipped slightly, she could see the delicate shape of the parabatai rune that had once tied him to Will. That might tie them still, if one imagined souls could be tied even over the divide of death.

“Jem,” she breathed again. At first glance he looked perhaps nineteen years old, or twenty, a bit older than he had been when he had become a Silent Brother. When she looked more deeply, she saw a man—the long years of pain and wisdom at the backs of his eyes; even the way he moved spoke of the care of quiet sacrifice. “You are”—her voice rose with wild hope—“this is permanent? You are not bound to the Silent Brothers anymore?”

“No,” he said. There was a rapid hitch in his breath; he was looking at her as if he had no idea how she would react to his sudden appearance. “I am not.”

“The cure—you found it?”

“I did not find it myself,” he said slowly. “But—it was found.”

“I saw Magnus in Alicante only a few months ago. We spoke of you. He never said . . .”

“He didn’t know,” Jem said. “It has been a hard year, a dark year, for Shadowhunters. But out of the blood and the fire, the loss and the sorrow, there have been born some great new changes.” He held out his arms, self-deprecatingly, and with a little amazement in his voice, as he said: “I myself am changed.”

“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 . . .”