Cassandra Clare - Clockwork Prince

Jem shook his head, still smiling. “He asked me,” he said. “Or rather he told me. We were training, up in the training room, with longswords. He asked me and I said no, he deserved someone who was going to live, who could look out for him all his life. He bet me he could get the sword away from me, and if he succeeded, I’d have to agree to be his blood brother.”

“And he got it away from you?”

“In nine seconds flat.” Jem laughed. “Pinned me to the wall. He must have been training without my knowing about it, because I’d never have agreed if I’d thought he was that good with a longsword. Throwing daggers have always been his weapons.” He shrugged. “We were thirteen. They did the ceremony when we were fourteen. Now it’s been three years and I can’t imagine not having a parabatai .”

“Why didn’t you want to do it?” Tessa asked a little hesitantly. “When he first asked you.”

Jem ran a hand through his silvery hair. “The ceremony binds you,” he said. “It makes you stronger. You have each other’s strength to draw on. It makes you more aware of where the other one is, so you can work seamlessly together in a fight. There are runes you can use if you are part of a pair of parabatai that you can’t use otherwise. But . . . you can choose only one parabatai in your life. You can’t have a second, even if the first one dies. I didn’t think I was a very good bet, considering.”

“That seems a harsh rule.”

Jem said something then, in a language she didn’t understand. It sounded like “ khalepa ta kala .”

She frowned at him. “That isn’t Latin?”

“Greek,” he said. “It has two meanings. It means that that which is worth having—the good, fine, honorable, and noble things—are difficult to attain.” He leaned forward, closer to her. She could smell the sweet scent of the drug on him, and the tang of his skin underneath. “It means something else as well.”

Tessa swallowed. “What’s that?”

“It means ‘beauty is harsh.’”

She glanced down at his hands. Slim, fine, capable hands, with blunt-cut nails, and scars across the knuckles. Were any of the Nephilim unscarred? “These words, they have a special appeal to you, don’t they?” she asked softly. “These dead languages. Why is that?”

He was leaning close enough to her that she felt his warm breath on her cheek when he exhaled. “I cannot be sure,” he said, “though I think it has something to do with the clarity of them. Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, they contain pure truths, before we cluttered our languages with so many useless words.”

“But what of your language?” she said softly. “The one you grew up speaking?”

His lips twitched. “I grew up speaking English and Mandarin Chinese,” he said. “My father spoke English, and Chinese badly. After we moved to Shanghai, it was even worse. The dialect there is barely intelligible by someone who speaks Mandarin.”

“Say something in Mandarin,” said Tessa with a smile.

Jem said something rapidly, that sounded like a lot of breathy vowels and consonants run together, his voice rising and falling melodically: “Ni hen piao liang.”

“What did you say?”

“I said your hair is coming undone. Here,” he said, and reached out and tucked an escaping curl back behind her ear. Tessa felt the blood spill hot up into her cheeks, and was glad for the dimness of the carriage. “You have to be careful with it,” he said, taking his hand back slowly, his fingers lingering against her cheek. “You don’t want to give the enemy anything to grab hold of.”

“Oh—yes—of course.” Tessa looked quickly toward the window—and stared. The yellow fog hung heavy over the streets, but she could see well enough. They were in a narrow thoroughfare—though broad, perhaps, by London’s standards. The air seemed thick and greasy with coal dust and fog, and the streets were lined with people. Filthy, dressed in rags, they slumped against the walls of tipsy-looking buildings, their eyes watching the carriage go by like hungry dogs following the progress of a bone. Tessa saw a woman wrapped in a shawl, a basket of flowers drooping from one hand, a baby folded into a corner of the shawl propped against her shoulder. Its eyes were closed, its skin as pale as curd; it looked sick, or dead. Barefoot children, as dirty as homeless cats, played together in the streets; women sat leaning against one another on the stoops of buildings, obviously drunk. The men were worst of all, slumped against the sides of houses, dressed in dirty, patched topcoats and hats, the looks of hopelessness on their faces like etchings on gravestones.

“Rich Londoners from Mayfair and Chelsea like to take midnight tours of districts like these,” said Jem, his voice uncharacteristically bitter. “They call it slumming.”

“Do they stop and—and help in some way?”

“Most of them, no. They just want to stare so they can go home and talk at their next tea party about how they saw real ‘mug-hunters’ or ‘dollymops’ or ‘Shivering Jemmys.’ Most of them never get out of their carriages or omnibuses.”

“What’s a Shivering Jemmy?”

Jem looked at her with flat silver eyes. “A freezing, ragged beggar,” he said. “Someone likely to die of the cold.”

Tessa thought of the thick paper pasted over the cracks in the windowpanes in her New York apartment. But at least she had had a bedroom, a place to lie down, and Aunt Harriet to make her hot soup or tea over the small range. She had been lucky.

The carriage came to a stop at an unprepossessing corner. Across the street the lights of an open public house spilled out onto the street, along with a steady stream of drunkards, some with women leaning on their arms, the women’s brightly colored dresses stained and dirty and their cheeks highly rouged. Somewhere someone was singing “Cruel Lizzie Vickers.”

Jem took her hand. “I can’t glamour you against the glances of mundanes,” he said. “So keep your head down and keep close to me.”

Tessa smiled crookedly but didn’t take her hand out of his. “You said that already.”

He leaned close and whispered into her ear. His breath sent a shiver racing through her whole body. “It’s very important.”

He reached past her for the door and swung it open. He leaped down onto the pavement and helped her down after him, pulling her close against his side. Tessa looked up and down the street. There were some incurious stares from the crowds, but the two of them were largely ignored. They headed toward a narrow door painted red. There were steps around it, but unlike all the other steps in the area, they were bare. No one was sitting on them. Jem took them quickly, pulling her up after him, and rapped sharply on the door.

It was opened after a moment by a woman in a long red dress, fitted so tightly to her body that Tessa’s eyes widened. She had black hair piled on her head, kept in place by a pair of gold chopsticks. Her skin was very pale, her eyes rimmed with kohl—but on closer examination Tessa realized she was white, not foreign. Her mouth was a sulky red bow. It turned down at the corners as her gaze came to rest on Jem.

“No,” she said. “No Nephilim.”

She moved to shut the door, but Jem had raised his cane; the blade shot out from the base of it, holding the door open wide. “No trouble,” he said. “We’re not here for the Clave. It’s personal.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“We’re looking for someone,” he said. “A friend. Take us to him, and we won’t bother you further.”

At that, she threw her head back and laughed. “I know who you’re looking for,” she said. “There’s only one of your kind here.” She turned away from the door with a shrug of contempt. Jem’s blade slid back into its casing with a hiss, and he ducked under the low lintel, drawing Tessa after him.