Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Princess

Charlotte, Henry, and Gideon were sitting around one of the long tables. Magnus stood a distance away, by the window, his hands clasped behind him. His back was rigid and straight. Henry looked wan and tired, Charlotte tearstained. Gideon’s face was a mask.

The laughter died on Cecily’s lips. “What is it? Has there been word? Is Will—”

“It is not Will,” said Charlotte. “It is Jem.” Cecily bit her lip, even as her heartbeat slowed with guilty relief. She had thought first of her brother, but of course it was his parabatai who was in more imminent peril.

“Jem?” she breathed.

“He is still alive,” Henry said, in answer to her unspoken question.

“Well, then. We got everything,” Gabriel said, putting the parcels down on the table. “Everything Magnus asked for—the damiana, the bat’s head root—”

“Thank you.” Magnus spoke from the window, without turning.

“Yes, thank you,” Charlotte said. “You did all I asked, and I am grateful. But I am afraid your errand was in vain.” She looked down at the parcel, and then back up again. It was clear that it was taking her a great effort to speak. “Jem has made a decision,” she said. “He wishes us to cease searching for a cure. He has had the last of the yin fen ; there is no more, and it is a matter of hours now. I have summoned the Silent Brothers. It is time to say good-bye.”

It was dark in the training room. The shadows lay long upon the floor, and moonlight came in through the high arched windows. Cecily sat on one of the worn benches and stared down at the patterns the moonlight made on the splintered wooden floor.

Her right hand idly worried at the red pendant around her throat. She could not help but think of her brother. Part of her mind was there in the Institute, but the rest was with Will: on the back of a horse, leaning into the wind, riding hell-for-leather over the roads that separated London from Dolgellau. She wondered if he was frightened. She wondered if she would see him again.

So deep in thought was she that she started at the creak of the door as it opened. A long shadow was cast across the floor, and she looked up to see Gabriel Lightwood blinking at her in surprise.

“Hiding here, are you?” he said. “That’s—awkward.”

“Why?” She was surprised at how ordinary her voice sounded, even calm.

“Because I had intended to hide here myself.”

Cecily was silent for a moment. Gabriel actually looked a little uncertain—it hung strangely on him; he was usually so confident. Though it was a more fragile confidence than his brother’s. It was too dark for her to see the color of his eyes or hair, and for the first time she could actually see the resemblance between him and Gideon. They had the same determined set to their chins, the same wide-spaced eyes and careful stance. “You may hide here with me,” she said, “if you wish.”

He nodded, and crossed the room to where she sat, but instead of joining her he moved to the window and glanced outside. “The Silent Brothers’ carriage is here,” he said.

“Yes,” said Cecily. She knew from her reading of the Codex that the Silent Brothers were both the doctors and the priests of the Shadowhunter world; one might expect to find them at deathbeds and sickbeds and childbed alike. “I thought I should see Jem. For Will. But I could—I could not bring myself. I am a coward,” she added as an afterthought. It was not something she had ever thought about herself before.

“Then I am too,” he replied. The moonlight fell across one side of his face, making him look as if he were wearing a half mask. “I had come up here to be alone and, frankly, to be away from the Brothers, for they give me the chills. I thought I might play solitaire. We could, if you’d like, have a game of Beggar My Neighbor.”

“Like Pip and Estella in Great Expectations ,” said Cecily, with a flash of amusement. “But, no—I do not know how to play cards. My mother tried to keep cards out of the house, as my father . . . had a weakness for them.” She looked up at Gabriel. “You know, in some ways we are the same. Our brothers left and we were alone without brother or sister, with a father who was deteriorating. Mine went a bit mad for a while after Will left and Ella died. It took him years to recover himself, and in the meantime we lost our home. Just as you lost Chiswick.”

“Chiswick was taken from us,” said Gabriel with an acidic flash of bitterness. “And to be quite honest, I am both sorry and not. My memories of the place—” He shuddered. “My father locked himself in his study a fortnight before I came here for help. I should have come earlier, but I was too proud. I did not want to admit that I had been wrong about Father. For that two weeks I barely slept. I banged on the door of the study and begged my father to come out, to speak to me, but I heard only inhuman noises. I turned the lock on my door at night and in the morning there would be blood on the stairs. I told myself the servants had fled. I knew better. So no, we are not the same, Cecily, because you left . You were brave. I stayed until there was no choice but to leave. I stayed even though I knew it was wrong.”

“You are a Lightwood,” Cecily said. “You stayed because you were loyal to your family name. It is not cowardice.”

“Wasn’t it? Is loyalty still a commendable quality when it is misdirected?”

Cecily opened her mouth, and then closed it again. Gabriel was looking at her, his eyes shining in the moonlight. He seemed genuinely desperate to hear her answer. She wondered if he had anyone else to talk to. She could see how it might be terrifying to take one’s moral qualms to Gideon; he seemed so staunch, as if he had never questioned himself in his life and would not understand those who did.

“I think,” she said, choosing her words with care, “that any good impulse can be twisted into something evil. Look at the Magister. He does what he does because he hates the Shadowhunters, out of loyalty to his parents, who cared for him, and who were killed. It is not beyond the realm of understanding. And yet nothing excuses the result. I think when we make choices—for each choice is individual of the choices we have made before—we must examine not only our reasons for making them but what result they will have, and whether good people will be hurt by our decisions.”

There was a pause. Then, “You are very wise, Cecily Herondale,” he said.

“Do not regret too much the choices you have made in the past, Gabriel,” she said, aware that she was using his Christian name, but not able to help it. “Only make the right ones in future. We are ever capable of change and ever capable of being our better selves.”

“That,” said Gabriel, “would not be the self my father wanted me to be, and despite everything, I find myself reluctant to dismiss the hope of his approval.”

Cecily sighed. “We can do our best, Gabriel. I tried to be the child my parents wanted, the lady they wished me to be. I left to bring Will back to them because I thought it was the right thing to do. I knew they were grieved he had chosen a different path—and it is the right one for him, for all that he came to it strangely. It is his path. Do not choose the path your father would have chosen or the path your brother would choose. Be the Shadowhunter you want to be.”

He sounded very young when he replied. “How do you know that I will make the right choice?”

Outside the window horses’ hooves sounded on the flagstones of the courtyard. The Silent Brothers, leaving. Jem, Cecily thought, with a pang in her heart. Her brother had always looked to him as a kind of North Star, a compass that would ever point him toward the right decision. She had never quite thought of her brother as lucky before, and certainly would not have expected to do so today, and yet—and yet in a way he had been. To always have someone to turn to like that, and not to worry constantly that one was looking to the wrong stars.