The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and it was a beautiful day at Shadowhunter Academy.
Well, Simon was pretty sure the sun was shining. There was a faint luminescence to the air in his and George’s underground chamber, casting a pleasant glow upon the green slime that coated their walls.
And all right, he could not hear the birds from his subterranean room, but George did come back from the showers singing.
“Good morning, Si! I saw a rat in the bathroom, but he was taking a nice nap and we didn’t bother each other.”
“Or the rat was dead of a very infectious disease, which has now been introduced to our water system,” Simon suggested. “We may be drinking plague-rat water for weeks.”
“Nobody likes a Gloomy Gus,” George scolded him. “Nobody likes a Sullen Si. Nobody is here for a Moody Mildred. No one fancies—”
“I have gathered the general tenor of your discourse, George,” said Simon. “I object strongly to being referred to as a Moody Mildred. Especially as I really feel like I’m a Mildly Good-Humored Mildred right now. I see you’re looking forward to your big day?”
“Have a shower, Si,” George urged. “Start the day refreshed. Maybe style your hair a little. It wouldn’t kill you.”
Simon shook his head. “There’s a dead rat in the bathroom, George. I am not going in the bathroom, George.”
“He’s not dead,” George said. “He’s just sleeping. I’m certain of it.”
“Senseless optimism is how plagues get started,” Simon said. “Ask the medieval peasants of Europe. Oh, wait, you can’t.”
“Were they a jolly bunch?” George asked skeptically.
“I’m sure they were much jollier before all the plague,” said Simon.
He felt he was making really good points, and that he was backed up by history. He pulled off the shirt he’d slept in, which read LET’S FIGHT! and below in tiny letters OUR ENEMY OFF WITH CUNNING ARGUMENTS. George whipped Simon’s back with his wet towel, which made Simon yelp.
Simon grinned as he pulled his gear out of their wardrobe. They were getting started right after breakfast, so he might as well change into gear straight off. Plus, every day wearing gear made for men was a victory.
He and George went up to breakfast in good humor with all the world.
“You know, this porridge isn’t at all bad,” Simon said, digging in. George nodded enthusiastically, his mouth full.
Beatriz looked sad for them, and possibly sad that boys were so stupid in general. “This isn’t porridge,” she told them. “These are scrambled eggs.”
“Oh no,” George whispered faintly, his mouth still full, his voice terribly sad. “Oh no.”
Simon dropped his spoon and stared into the depths of his bowl with horror.
“If they are scrambled eggs . . . ?” he asked. “And I’m not arguing with you, Beatriz, I’m just asking what I feel is a very reasonable question . . . if they are scrambled eggs, why are they gray?”
Beatriz shrugged and continued eating, carefully avoiding the lumps. “Who can say?”
That could be made into a sad song, Simon supposed. If they are eggs, why are they gray? Who can say, who can say? He found himself still thinking of song lyrics sometimes, even though he was out of the band.
Admittedly, “Why Are the Eggs So Gray?” might not be a big hit, even on the hipster circuit.
Julie plopped her bowl down on the table beside Beatriz.
“The eggs are gray,” she announced. “I don’t know how they do this. Surely at this point, it would actually make sense for them not to mess up the food sometimes. Every time, every day, for over a year? Is the Academy cursed?”
“I have been thinking it might be,” George said earnestly. “I hear an eldritch rattling sometimes, like ghosts shaking their terrible chains. Honestly, I was hoping the Academy was cursed, since otherwise it’s probably creatures in the pipes.” George shuddered. “Creatures.”
Julie sat down. George and Simon exchanged a private pleased look. They had been keeping track of how often Julie chose to sit with the three of them, rather than with Jon Cartwright. Currently they were winning, sixty percent to forty.
Julie choosing to sit with them seemed like a good sign, since this was George’s big day.
Now that they were Shadowhunter trainees in their second year, and in the words of Scarsbury “no longer totally hopeless and liable to cut off your own stupid heads,” they were given their own slightly more important missions. Every mission had an appointed team leader, and the team leader got double points if the mission was a success. Julie, Beatriz, Simon, and Jon had already been team leaders, and they had killed it: everyone’s mission accomplished, demons slain, people saved, Downworlders breaking the Law penalized severely but fairly. In some ways it was a pity that Jon’s mission had gone so well, as he had bragged about it for weeks, but they couldn’t help it. They were just too good, Simon thought, even as he slapped the wooden table so as not to jinx himself. There was no way for them to fail.
“Feeling nervous, team leader?” asked Julie. Simon had to admit she could sometimes be an unsettling companion.
“No,” said George, and under Julie’s gimlet eye: “Maybe. Yes. You know, an appropriate amount of nervous, but in a cool, collected, and good-under-pressure way.”
“Don’t go all to pieces,” said Julie. “I want a perfect score.”
An awkward silence followed. Simon comforted himself by looking over at Jon’s table. When Julie abandoned him, Jon had to eat all alone. Unless Marisol decided she wanted to sit with him and torment him. Which, Simon noted, she was doing today. Little devil. Marisol was hilarious.
Jon made urgent gestures for help, but Julie had her back turned to him and did not see.
“I’m not saying this to scare you, George,” she said. “That’s a side benefit, obviously. This is an important mission. You know faeries are the worst kind of Downworlder. Faeries crossing over into the mundane realm and tricking the poor things into eating faerie fruit is no joke. Mundanes can wither away and die after eating that fruit, you know. It’s murder, and it’s murder we can hardly ever get them for, because by the time the mundanes die, the faeries are long gone. You’re taking this seriously, right?”
“Yes, Julie,” said George. “I actually do know murder is bad, Julie.”
Julie’s whole face pursed up in that alarming way it did sometimes. “Remember it was you who almost screwed up my mission.”
“I hesitated slightly to tackle that vampire child,” George admitted.
“Precisely,” said Julie. “No more hesitation. As our team leader, you have to act on your own initiative. I’m not saying you’re bad, George. I am saying you need to learn.”
“I’m not sure anybody needs this kind of motivational speech,” Beatriz said. “It would freak anyone out. And it’s too easy to freak George out as it is.”
George, who had been looking touched at Beatriz’s gallant defense, stopped looking touched.
“I just think they should do a repeat team leader occasionally,” Julie grumbled, letting them know where all this hostility was coming from. She stabbed her gray eggs wistfully. “I was so good.”
Simon raised his eyebrows. “You had a horsewhip and threatened to beat me about the head and face if I didn’t do what you said.”
Julie pointed her spoon at him. “Exactly. And you did what I said. That’s leadership, that is. What’s more, I didn’t beat you about the head and face. Kind but firm, that’s me.”
Julie discussed her own greatness at some length. Simon got up to get another glass of juice.
“What kind of juice do you think this is?” Catarina Loss asked, joining him in the line.
“Fruit,” said Simon. “Just fruit. That’s all they would tell me. I found it suspicious as well.”
“I like fruit,” Catarina said, but she did not sound sure about that. “I know you’re excused from my class this afternoon. What are you up to this morning?”
“A mission to stop faeries from slipping over their borders and engaging in illicit trade,” Simon said. “George is team leader.”
“George is team leader?” Catarina asked. “Hm.”
“Why is everyone so down on George today?” Simon demanded. “What’s wrong with George? There’s nothing wrong with George. It is not possible to find fault with George. He’s a perfect Scottish angel. He always shares the snacks that his mother sends him, and he’s better-looking than Jace. There, I said it. I’m not taking it back.”
“I see you’re in a good mood,” said Catarina. “All right then. Go on, have a good time. Take care of my favorite student.”
“Right,” said Simon. “Wait, who’s that?”
Catarina gestured him away from her with her indeterminate juice. “Get lost, Daylighter.”
Everyone else was excited to go on another mission. Simon was looking forward to it as well, and pleased for George’s sake. But Simon was mostly excited because after the mission, he had somewhere else to be.
The Fair Folk had been seen last on a moor in Devon. Simon was a bit excited to Portal there and hoped there would be time to see red postboxes and drink lager at an English pub.
Instead, the moor turned out to be a huge stretch of uneven field, rocks, and hills in the distance, no red postboxes or quaint pubs in sight. They were immediately given horses by the contact with the Sight who was waiting for them.
Lots of fields, lots of horses. Simon was not sure why they had bothered to leave the Academy, because this was an identical experience.
The first words George said as they were riding on the moor were: “I think it would be a good idea to split up.”
“Like in . . . a horror movie?” Simon asked.
Julie, Beatriz, and Jon gave him looks of irritated incomprehension. Marisol’s uncertain expression suggested she agreed with Simon, but she did not speak up and Simon didn’t want to be the one mutinying against his friend’s leadership. They would cover more moor if they split up. Maybe it was a great idea. More moor! How could it go wrong?
“I’ll be partners with Jon,” Marisol said instantly, a glint in her dark eyes. “I wish to continue our conversation from breakfast. I have many more things to say to him on the subject of video games.”
“I don’t want to hear any more about video games, Marisol!” snapped Jon, a Shadowhunter in a nightmare of torrential mundane information.
Marisol smiled. “I know.”
Marisol had only just turned fifteen. Simon was not sure how she had worked out that telling Jon every detail about the mundane world would be such effective psychological terrorism. Her evil had only grown in the year and change Simon had known her. Simon had to respect that.
“And Si and I will be together,” George said easily.
“Um,” said Simon.
Neither he nor George was a Shadowhunter yet, and though Catarina helped them see through glamours, no mundane . . . er, non-Shadowhunter . . . was as securely protected from faerie glamour as one of the Nephilim. But Simon didn’t want to question George’s authority or suggest he didn’t want to be partners. He was also scared of being partnered with Julie, and beaten about the head and face.
“Great,” Simon finished weakly. “Maybe we can split up but also stay . . . within hearing range of each other?”
“You want to split up but stay together?” Jon asked. “Do you not know what words mean?”
“Do you know what the words ‘World of Warcraft’ mean?” asked Marisol menacingly.
“Yes, I do,” said Jon. “All put together in that way, no, I do not, and I do not wish to.”
He urged his horse onward across the moor. Marisol followed in pursuit. Simon stared at the back of Jon’s head and worried he would go too far.
Except that they were meant to be splitting up. This was all right.
George gazed around at the remaining members of the team and appeared to come to a decision. “We’ll stay within hearing range of each other, and comb over the moors, and see if we can see the Fair Folk in any of the places they were reported lurking. Are you with me, team?”
“I’m with you to the end, if it doesn’t take too long! You know I’m going to Helen Blackthorn and Aline Penhallow’s wedding,” said Simon.
“Ugh, hate weddings,” said George sympathetically. “You have to wear a monkey suit and go sit around for ages while everybody secretly hates each other over some fight about the flower arrangements. Plus, bagpipes. I mean, I don’t know how Shadowhunter weddings go. Are there flowers? Are there bagpipes?”
“Can’t talk right now,” said Beatriz. “Picturing Jace Herondale in a tuxedo. In my head, he looks like a beautiful spy.”
“James Bond,” George contributed. “James Blond? I still don’t like monkey suits. But it doesn’t seem like you mind, Si.”
Simon lifted a hand from the reins to point proudly to himself, a maneuver that would’ve had him falling off his horse a year ago. “This monkey is going as Isabelle Lightwood’s date.”
Just saying the words suffused Simon with a sense of well-being. In such a wonderful world, how could anything go wrong?
He looked around at his team: the whole lot of them, wearing long-sleeved gear against the autumn chill, figures in black with bows strapped to their backs and their breath white plumes in the cold air, riding fast horses through the moors on a mission to protect humankind. His three friends by his side, and Jon and Marisol in the distance. George, so proud to be team leader. Marisol, scornful city kid, riding her horse with easy grace. Even Beatriz and Julie, even Jon, born Shadowhunters all, looked a little different to Simon, now that they were well into their second year at the Academy. Scarsbury had honed them, Catarina had lectured them, and even their fellow Academy students had changed them. Now the born Shadowhunters rode with mundanes and performed missions with them as a unit, and the so-called dregs could keep up.
The moor was rolling fields, tree line to their left all quivering leaves as if the trees were dancing in the slight breeze. The sunlight was pale and clear, shining on their heads and their black clothes alike. Simon found himself thinking, with affection and pride, that they looked like they might make real Shadowhunters after all.
He noticed that by silent mutual agreement, Beatriz and Julie were coaxing their mounts on faster. Simon squinted up into the distance, where he could just about still make out Jon and Marisol, and then squinted at Beatriz’s and Julie’s backs. He felt again that pang of uneasiness.
“Why are they all racing ahead?” Simon asked. “Um, not to tell you your job, but, brave team leader, maybe command them not to go too far.”
“Ah, give them a minute,” George said. “You know she kind of likes you.”
“What?” said Simon.
“Not that she’s going to do anything about it,” said George. “Nobody who likes you is going to do anything about it. On account of, nobody would enjoy having Isabelle Lightwood cut their head off.”
“Likes me?” Simon echoed. “Something about the way you’re talking suggests multiple people. Who like me.”
George shrugged. “Apparently you’re the type who grows on people. Don’t ask me. I thought girls liked abs.”
“I could have abs,” Simon told him. “I watched in the mirror once and I think I found an ab. I’m telling you, all this training is doing my body good.”
It wasn’t like Simon thought he was a hideous creature or anything. He’d now seen several demons who had tentacles coming out of their eyes, and he was fairly sure it did not revolt people merely to look upon him.
But he wasn’t Jace, who made girls’ heads spin around as if they were possessed. It made no sense that out of all the students in the Academy, Beatriz might like him.
George rolled his eyes. George did not truly understand the slow development of actual physical fitness. He’d probably been born with abs. Some were born with abs, some achieved abs, and some—like Simon—had abs thrust upon them by cruel instructors.
“Yes, Si, you’re a real killer.”
“Feel this arm,” said Simon. “Rock hard! I don’t mean to brag, but it’s all bone. All bone.”
“Si,” said George. “I don’t need to feel it. I believe in you, because that’s what bros do. And I’m happy for your mysterious popularity with the ladies, because that’s how bros are. But seriously, watch out for Jon, because I think he’s going to shank you one of these days. He does not get your indefinable but undeniable allure. He’s got abs to the chin and he thought he had the ladies of the Academy locked down.”
Simon rode on, somewhat dazed.
He’d been thinking that Isabelle’s affection for him was a stunning and inexplicable occurrence, like a lightning strike. (Gorgeous and courageous lightning whom he was lucky to be struck by!) Given current evidence, however, he was starting to believe it was time to reevaluate.
He had been reliably informed that he’d dated Maia, the leader of the New York werewolf pack, though he’d received the impression that he had well and truly messed that one up. He’d heard rumors about a vampire queen who might have been interested. He’d even gathered, strange as it seemed, that there was a brief period of time when he and Clary had gone out. And now possibly Beatriz liked him.
“Seriously, George, tell me the truth,” said Simon. “Am I beautiful?”
George burst out laughing, his horse wheeling back a few easy paces in the sunlight.
And Julie shouted: “Faerie!” and pointed. Simon looked toward a hooded and cloaked figure with a basket of fruit over one arm, emerging as if innocently from the mist behind a tree.
“After it!” roared George, and his horse charged for the figure, Simon plunging after him.
Marisol, far ahead, shouted: “Trap!” and then gave a scream of pain.
Simon looked desperately toward the trees. The faerie, he saw, had reinforcements. They had been warned the Fair Folk were all more wary and desperate in the aftermath of the Cold Peace. They should have listened better and thought harder. They should have planned for this.
Simon, George, Julie, and Beatriz were all riding hard, but they were too far from her. Marisol was swaying in her saddle, blood pouring down her arm: elfshot.
“Marisol!” Jon Cartwright shouted. “Marisol, to me!”
She pulled the horse toward his. Jon stood on his horse and leaped onto hers, bow already in hand and firing arrows into the trees, standing on the horse’s back and thus shielding Marisol like a strange bow-shooting acrobat. Simon knew he’d never be able to do anything like that, ever, unless he Ascended.
Julie and Beatriz turned their horses toward the trees where the concealed faeries were firing.
“They have Marisol,” George panted. “We can still get the fruit seller.”
“No, George,” Simon began, but George had already wheeled his horse toward the hooded figure, now disappearing behind the tree and the mist.
There was a spear of sunlight shooting between the trunk and the branch of the tree, a dazzling white line between the crooked arc of tree limbs. It seemed to refract in Simon’s eyes, becoming broad and fair, like the path of moonlight on the sea. The hooded figure was slipping away, half-disappeared into the dazzle, and George’s horse was inches from danger, George’s hand reaching for the edge of the figure’s cloak, George heedless of the course he had placed himself upon.
“No, George!” Simon shouted. “We are not going to trespass into Faerie!”
He forced his own horse into George’s path, making George pull up, but he was so hell-bent on stopping George that he did not take into consideration his mount, now terrified and fleeing and urged to speed.
Until the white dazzling light filled Simon’s vision. He remembered suddenly the feeling of falling away into Faerie, soaked to the skin, in a pool filled with water: remembered Jace being kind to him, and how much he had resented that, how he’d thought: Don’t show me up any further, and his chest had burned with resentment.
Now he was tumbling into Faerie with the scream of a terrified horse in his ears, leaves blinding him and twigs scraping at his face and his arms. He tried to shield his eyes and found himself thrown on rock and bones, with darkness rushing at him. He would have been very grateful if Jace had been there.
Simon woke in Faerieland. His whole skull was throbbing, in the way your thumb did when you hit it with a hammer. He hoped nobody had hit his head with a hammer.
He woke in a gently swaying bed, slightly prickly under his cheek. He opened his eyes and saw that he was not exactly in a bed, but lying amid twigs and moss, scattered across a swaying surface constructed of wooden laths. There were strange stripes of darkness in front of his vision, obscuring his view of the vista beyond.
Faerieland almost looked like the moors in Devon, yet it was entirely different. The mists in the distance were faintly purple, like storm clouds clinging to the earth, and there was movement in the cloud suggesting odd and menacing shapes. The leaves on the trees were green and yellow and red like the trees of the mundane world, but they shone too brightly, like jewels, and when the wind rustled through them Simon could almost make out words, as if they were whispering together. This was nature run riot, alchemized into magic and strangeness.
And Simon was, he realized, in a cage. A big wooden cage. The stripes of darkness across his vision were his cage bars.
The thing that outraged him most was how familiar it felt. He remembered being trapped like this before. More than once.
“Shadowhunters, vampires, and now faeries, all longing to throw me in prison,” Simon said aloud. “Why exactly was I so anxious to get back all these memories? Why is it always me? Why am I always the chump in the cage?”
His own voice made his aching head hurt.
“You are in my cage now,” said a voice.
Simon sat up hastily, though it made his head throb fiercely and all of Faerieland reel drunkenly around him. He saw, on the other side of his cage, the hooded and cloaked figure whom George had tried so desperately to capture on the moors. Simon swallowed. He could not see the face beneath the hood.
There was a whirl in the air, like a shadow whipping over the sun. A new faerie dropped out of the clear blue sky, the leaves of the forest floor crunching under his bare feet. Sunlight washed his fair hair into radiance, and a long knife glittered in his hand.
The hooded and cloaked faerie dropped his hood and bowed his head in sudden deference. Unhooded, Simon saw, he had large ears, tinted purple, as if he had an eggplant stuck to each side of his face, and wisps of long white hair that curled over his eggplant ear like cloud.
“What has happened, and why are your tricks interfering with the work of your betters, Hefeydd? A horse from the mundane world ran into the path of the Wild Hunt,” the new faerie said. “I do hope the steed was not of immense emotional significance, because the hounds have it now.”
Simon’s heart bled for that poor horse. He wondered if he, too, was about to be fed to the hounds.
“I am so sorry to have disturbed the Wild Hunt,” the cloaked faerie said, bowing his white head even further.
“You should be,” answered the faerie of the Wild Hunt. “Those who cross the path of the Hunt always regret it.”
“This is a Shadowhunter,” continued the other anxiously. “Or at least one of the children they hope to change. They were lying in wait for me in the mortal world, and this one pursued me even into Faerie, so he is my rightful prey. I had no wish to disturb the Wild Hunt and bear no fault!”
Simon felt this was an inaccurate and hurtful summary of the situation.
“Is it so? Come now, I am in a merry mood,” said the Wild Hunt faerie. “Give me your regrets and words with your captive—as you know, I have some little interest in Shadowhunters—and I will not bring back my lord Gwyn your tongue.”
“Never was a fairer bargain made,” said the cloaked faerie in some haste, and ran off as though afraid the Wild Hunt faerie might change his mind, almost tripping over his own cloak.
As far as Simon was concerned, this was out of the faerie frying pan and into the faerie fire.
The new faerie looked like a boy of sixteen, not much older than Marisol and younger than Simon, but Simon knew that how faeries looked was no indicator of their age. He had mismatched eyes, one amber as the beads found in the dark heart of trees, and one the vivid blue-green of sea shallows when sunlight strikes through. The jarring contrast of his eyes and the light of Faerie, filtered green through wickedly whispering leaves and touched with false gold, made his thin, dirt-streaked face wear a sinister aspect.
He looked like a threat. And he was coming closer.
“What does a faerie of the Wild Hunt want with me?” Simon croaked.
“I am no faerie,” said the boy with eerie eyes, pointed ears, and leaves in his wild hair. “I am Mark Blackthorn of the Los Angeles Institute. It doesn’t matter what they say or what they do to me. I still remember who I am. I am Mark Blackthorn.”
He looked at Simon with wild hunger in his thin face. His thin fingers clutched the bars of the cage.
“Are you here to save me?” he demanded. “Have the Shadowhunters come for me at last?”
Oh no. This was Helen Blackthorn’s brother, the one who was half-faerie like her, the one who had believed his family dead and been taken by the Wild Hunt and never returned. This was very awkward.
This was worse than that. This was horrific.
“No,” said Simon, because hope seemed the cruelest blow he could deal Mark Blackthorn. “It’s just like the other faerie said. I wandered here by accident and I was captured. I’m Simon Lewis. I . . . know your name, and I know what happened to you. I’m sorry.”
“Do you know when the Shadowhunters are coming for me?” Mark asked with heartbreaking eagerness. “I—sent them a message, during the war. I understand the Cold Peace must make all dealings with faerie difficult, but they must know I am loyal and would be valuable to them. They must be coming, but it has been . . . it has been weeks and weeks. Tell me, when?”
Simon stared at Mark, dry-mouthed. It had not been weeks and weeks since the Shadowhunters had abandoned him here. It had been a year and more.
“They’re not coming,” he whispered. “I was not there, but my friends were. They told me what happened. The Clave took a vote. The Shadowhunters do not want you back.”
“Oh,” said Mark, a single soft sound that was familiar to Simon: It was the kind of sound creatures made when they died.
He turned away from Simon, his back arched in a spasm of pain that looked physical. Simon saw, on his bare lean arms, the old marks of a whip. Even though Simon could not see his face, Mark covered it for a moment, as if he could not even bear to look upon Faerieland.
Then he turned and snapped: “What about the children?”
“What?” Simon asked blankly.
“Helen, Julian, Livia, Tiberius, Drusilla, Octavian. And Emma,” said Mark. “You see? I have not forgotten. Every night, no matter what has happened during the day, no matter if I am torn and bloodied or so bone-tired I wish I were dead, I look up at the stars and I give each star a brother’s name or a sister’s face. I will not sleep until I remember every one. The stars will burn out before I forget.”
Mark’s family, the Blackthorns. They were all younger than Mark but Helen; Simon knew that. And Emma Carstairs lived with the younger Blackthorn kids in the Los Angeles Institute, the little girl with blond hair who had been orphaned in the war and who wrote to Clary a lot.
Simon wished he knew more about them. Clary had talked about Emma. Magnus had spoken passionately this summer, several times, about the Cold Peace and had given the Blackthorns as an example of the horrors that the Clave’s decision to punish faeries had visited on those of faerie blood. Simon had listened to Magnus and felt sorry for the Blackthorns, but they had seemed like just another tragedy of the war: something terrible but distant, and ultimately easy to forget. Simon had felt he had so much to remember himself. He had wanted to go to the Academy and become a Shadowhunter, to learn more about his own life and remember everything he had lost, to become someone stronger and better.
Except that you did not become someone stronger and better by only thinking about yourself.
He did not know what they were doing to Mark in Faerie, to make his family slip away from him.
“Helen’s well,” he said awkwardly. “I saw her recently. She came and lectured at the Academy. I’m sorry. I had a demon take—a lot of memories from me, not so long ago. I know what it’s like, not to remember.”
“Fortunate are the ones who know the name of their heart. They are the ones whose hearts are never truly lost. They can always call their heart back home,” Mark said, his voice almost a chant. “Do you remember the name of your heart, Simon Lewis?”
“I think so,” Simon whispered.
“How are they?” Mark asked in a low, worn voice. He sounded very tired.
“Helen’s getting married,” Simon offered. It was the only good thing, he felt, that he had to offer Mark. “To Aline Penhallow. I think—they really love each other.”
He almost said he was going to their wedding, but even that felt cruel. Mark could not go to his own sister’s wedding. He had not been invited. He had not even been told.
Mark did not seem angry or hurt. He smiled, softly as a child being told a bedtime story, and leaned his face against the bars of Simon’s cage.
“Sweet Helen,” he said. “My father used to tell stories about Helen of Troy. She was born out of an egg, and the most beautiful woman in the world. Being born out of an egg is very unusual for humans.”
“I’ve heard that,” said Simon.
“She was very unhappy in love,” Mark continued. “Beauty can be like that. Beauty cannot be trusted. Beauty can slip through your fingers like water and burn on your tongue like poison. Beauty can be the shining wall that keeps you from all you love.”
“Um,” said Simon. “Totally.”
“I am glad that my beautiful Helen will be happier than the last beautiful Helen,” said Mark. “I am glad she will be given beauty for beauty, love for love, and no false coin. Tell her that her brother Mark sends her felicitations on her wedding day.”
“If I make it there, I will.”
“Aline will be able to help her with the children, too,” Mark said.
He was paying very little attention to Simon, his face still wearing that fixed and faraway expression, as if he were listening to a story or recalling a memory. Simon feared that stories and memory were becoming much the same to Mark Blackthorn: longed-for, beautiful, and unreal.
“Ty needs special attention,” Mark went on. “I remember my parents talking about it.” His mouth twisted. “I mean my father and the woman who sang me to sleep every night though I was not of her blood, the Shadowhunter I am no longer allowed to call my mother. Songs are not blood. Blood is all that matters to Shadowhunters and faeries alike. The songs matter only to me.”
Blood is all that matters to Shadowhunters.
Simon could not remember the context, but he could remember the constant refrain, from people he loved now but had not loved then. Mundane, mundane, mundane. And later, vampire. Downworlder.
He remembered that the first prison he had ever been inside was a Shadowhunter prison.
He wished he could tell Mark Blackthorn that anything he said was wrong.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
He was sorry for not listening, and sorry for not caring more. He’d thought he was the voice of reason in the Academy, and had not realized how complacent he’d grown, how easy it was to hear his friends sneer at people who were—after all—not like him anymore, and let them get away with it.
He wished he knew how to say any of this to Mark Blackthorn, but he doubted Mark would care.
“If you are sorry, speak,” said Mark. “How is Ty? There is nothing wrong with Ty, but he is different, and the Clave hates all that is different. They will try to punish him, for being who he is. They would punish a star for burning. My father was there to stand between him and our cruel world, but my father is gone and I am gone too. I might as well be dead, for all the good I am to my brothers and sisters. Livvy would walk over hot coals and hissing serpents for Ty, but she is as young as he is. She cannot do and be everything to him. Is Helen having difficulties with Tiberius? Is Tiberius happy?”
“I don’t know,” Simon said helplessly. “I think so.”
All he knew was that there were a bunch of Blackthorn kids: faceless, nameless victims of the war.
“And there’s Tavvy,” said Mark.
His voice grew stronger as he kept talking, and he used nicknames for his brothers and sisters rather than the full names he had worked so laboriously to remember. Simon supposed Mark was not usually allowed even to speak of his mortal life or his Nephilim family. He didn’t want to think about what the Wild Hunt might do to Mark, if he tried.
“He is so little,” said Mark. “He won’t remember Dad, or M—or his mother. He’s the littlest thing. They let me hold him, the day he was born, and his head fit into the palm of my hand. I can still feel its weight there, even when I cannot grasp his name. I held him and I knew I had to support his head: that he was mine to support and protect. Forever. Oh, but forever lasts such a short time in the mortal world. He will not remember me either. Maybe Drusilla will forget as well.” Mark shook his head. “I do not think so, though. Dru learns everything by heart, and she has the sweetest heart of us all. I hope her memories of me stay sweet.”
Clary must have told Simon every one of the Blackthorns’ names, and talked a little bit about how each of them was doing. She must have let fall some scrap of information, which Simon had discarded as useless and which would be better than treasure to Mark.
Simon stared at him helplessly.
“Just tell me if Aline is helping with the younger ones,” said Mark, his voice growing sharper. “Helen cannot do it all by herself, and Julian will not be able to help her!” His voice softened again. “Julian,” he said. “Jules. My artist, my dreamer. Hold him up to the light and he would shine a dozen different colors. All he cares about is his art and his Emma. He will try to help Helen, of course, but he is still so young. They are so young and so easily lost. I know what I am saying, Shadowhunter. In the land under the hill we prey on the tender and new-hearted. And they never grow old, with us. They never have the chance.”
“Oh, Mark Blackthorn, what are they doing to you?” Simon whispered.
He could not keep the pity out of his voice, and he saw it sting Mark: the slow flush that rose to his thin cheeks, and the way he lifted his chin, holding his head high.
Mark said: “Nothing I cannot bear.”
Simon was silent. He did not remember everything, but he remembered how much he had been changed. People could bear so much, but Simon did not know how much of the original you was left when the world had twisted you into a whole different shape.
“I remember you,” Mark said suddenly. “We met when you were on your way to Hell. You were not human then.”
“No,” said Simon awkwardly. “I don’t remember much about it.”
“There was a boy with you,” Mark continued. “Hair like a halo and eyes like hellfire, a Nephilim among Nephilim. I’d heard stories about him. I—admired him. He pressed a witchlight into my hand, and it meant—it meant a lot to me. Then.”
Simon could not remember, but he knew who that must have been.
“Jace.”
Mark nodded, almost absentmindedly. “He said, ‘Show them what a Shadowhunter is made of; show them you aren’t afraid.’ I thought I was showing them, the Fair Folk and the Shadowhunters both. I could not do what he asked me. I was afraid, but I did not let it stop me. I got a message back to the Shadowhunters and I told them the Fair Folk were betraying them and allying with their enemy. I made sure they knew and could protect the City of Glass. I warned them, and the Hunters could have killed me for it, but I thought if I died I would die knowing my brothers and sisters were saved, and that everyone would know I was a true Shadowhunter.”
“You did,” said Simon. “You got the message back. Idris was protected, and your brothers and sisters were saved.”
“What a hero I am,” Mark murmured. “I proved my loyalty. And the Shadowhunters left me here to rot.”
His face twisted. In the depths of Simon’s heart, fear twined with pity.
“I tried to be a Shadowhunter, even in the depths of Faerie, and what good did it do me? ‘Show them what a Shadowhunter is made of!’ What is a Shadowhunter made of, if they desert their own, if they throw away a child’s heart like rubbish left on the side of the road? Tell me, Simon Lewis, if that is what Shadowhunters are, why would I wish to be one?”
“Because that’s not all they are,” Simon said.
“And what are faeries made of? I hear Shadowhunters say they are all evil now, barely more than demons set upon the earth to do wicked mischief.” Mark grinned, something wild and fey in the grin, like sunlight glittering through a spiderweb. “And we do love mischief, Simon Lewis, and sometimes wickedness. But it is not all bad, to ride the winds, run upon the waves, and dance upon the mountains, and it is all I have left. At least the Wild Hunt wants me. Maybe I should show Shadowhunters what a faerie is made of instead.”
“Maybe,” said Simon. “There’s more to both sides than the worst.”
Mark smiled, a faint terrible smile. “Where has the best gone? I try to remember my father’s stories, about Jonathan Shadowhunter, about all the golden heroes who have served as shields for humanity. But my father is dead. His voice fades away with the north wind, and the Law he held sacred is something written in the sand by a child. We laugh and point, that anyone should be so foolish as to think it would last. All that is good, and true, is lost.”
Simon had never thought there was much of a silver lining about his memory loss. It occurred to him now that he had been shown some small accidental mercy. All his memories had been stripped away at once.
While Mark’s memories were being torn at and worn away, sliding from him one by one, in the cold dark under the hill where nothing gold lasted.
“I wish I could remember,” Simon said, “when we first met.”
“You weren’t human then,” said Mark bitterly. “But you’re human now. And you look like more of a Shadowhunter than I do.”
Simon opened his mouth and found all words wanting. He did not know what to say: It was true, as everything Mark said was true. When he’d first seen Mark, he’d thought faerie, and felt instinctively uneasy. Shadowhunter Academy must have been rubbing off on him even more than he’d thought.
And the environment Mark was in had changed him, too, changed him already almost past reclaiming. There was an eerie quality to him that went beyond the fine bones and delicately pointed ears of faerie. Helen had possessed those too, but ultimately she had moved like a fighter, stood tall like a Shadowhunter, spoken as the Clave and the people of the Institutes spoke. Mark spoke like a poem and walked like a dance. Simon wondered, even if Mark found his way back, if he could possibly fit into the Shadowhunter world now.
He wondered if Mark had forgotten how to lie.
“What do you think I am, apprentice Shadowhunter?” Mark asked. “What do you think I should do?”
“Show them what Mark Blackthorn is made of,” said Simon. “Show them all.”
“Helen, Julian, Livia, Tiberius, Drusilla, Octavian. And Emma,” Mark whispered, his voice low and reverent, one Simon recognized from the synagogue, from the voice of mothers calling their children, from all the times and places he had heard people call on what they held most sacred. “My brothers and sisters are Shadowhunters, and in their name I will help you. I will.”
He turned and shouted: “Hefeydd!”
Hefeydd of the purple ears sidled back into view, back from among the trees.
“This Shadowhunter is my kinsman,” said Mark, with some difficulty. “Do you dare to insist you have a claim on a kinsman of the Wild Hunt?”
That was ridiculous. Simon was not even a Shadowhunter yet, Hefeydd was never going to believe— Only here was Mark, Simon realized. A faerie, to all appearances, and a faerie somewhat to be feared. Even Simon had not known if he could lie.
“Of course I would not insist,” Hefeydd said, bowing. “That is—”
Simon was watching the sky. He had not even realized he was doing so, that he had been scanning the skies since someone had dropped from them, until now.
Now that Simon was watching, he could see what was happening more clearly: not someone falling from the sky, but a wild sky-bound horse charging for the earth and letting fall its rider. This horse was white as a cloud or mist given proud and shining shape, and the rider who hurtled toward the ground was in dazzling white as well. He had cobalt hair, the dark blue of evening before it became the black of night, and one gleaming-jet and one gleaming-silver eye.
“The prince,” whispered Hefeydd.
“Mark of the Hunt,” said the new faerie. “Gwyn sent you to find out why the Hunt had been so disturbed. He did not suggest you delay the Hunt yourself by tarrying a year and a day. Are you running away?”
The question was asked with emotion behind it, though Simon could not tell if it was suspicion or something else. He could tell that the question was more serious, perhaps, than the asker had meant it to be.
Mark gestured to himself. “No, Kieran. As you see. Hefeydd has caught himself a Shadowhunter, and I was a little curious.”
“Why?” asked Kieran. “The Nephilim are behind you, and looking behind causes nothing but broken spells and wasted pain. Look forward, to the wild wind and to the Hunt. And to my back, because I am like to be before you in any hunt.”
Mark smiled, in the way you did with a friend you were used to teasing. “I can recall several hunts in which that has not been the case. But I see you hope for better luck in the future, while I rely on skill.”
Kieran laughed. Simon felt a leap of hope—if this faerie was Mark’s friend, then the rescue mission was still on. He had moved unconsciously closer to Mark, his hand closing on one of the bars of his cage. Kieran’s eye was drawn to the movement, and for an instant he glared at Simon with eyes gone perfectly cold: shark-black, mirror-shard eyes.
Simon knew, with absolute bone-deep certainty and with no idea why, that Kieran did not like Shadowhunters and did not wish Simon any good.
“Leave Hefeydd with his toy,” said Kieran. “Come away.”
“He told me something interesting,” Mark informed Kieran in a brittle voice. “He said the Clave voted against coming for me. My people, the people I was raised among and taught by and trusted, agreed to leave me here. Can you believe that?”
“Can you be surprised? His kind has always liked cruelty full as much as justice. His kind have nothing to do with you any longer,” Kieran said, voice caressing and persuasive, laying a hand on Mark’s neck. “You are Mark of the Wild Hunt. You ride on the air, a hundred dizzy wheeling miles above them all. They will never hurt you again, save that you let them. Do not let them. Come away.”
Mark hesitated, and Simon found himself doubting. Kieran was right, after all. Mark Blackthorn owed the Shadowhunters nothing.
“Mark,” Kieran said, a thread of steel in his voice. “You know there are those in the Hunt who would seize any reason to punish you.”
Simon could not tell if Kieran’s words were a warning or a threat.
A smile crossed Mark’s face, dark as a shadow. “Better than you,” he said. “But I thank you for your care. I will go with you and explain myself to Gwyn.” He turned to look at Simon, his bicolored eyes unreadable, sea glass and bronze. “I will come back. Do not harm him,” he told Hefeydd. “Give him water.”
He nodded toward Hefeydd, slight emphasis in the gesture, and nodded toward Simon. Simon nodded in return.
Kieran, whom Hefeydd had called a prince, kept his grip on Mark and turned him so that he was facing away from Simon. He whispered something to Mark that Simon could not hear, and Simon could not tell if the tight grasp of Kieran’s hand was affection, anxiety, or a wish to imprison.
Simon had no doubt that if Kieran had his way, Mark would not come back.
Mark whistled, and Kieran made the same sound. On the wind, as a shadow and a cloud, came a dark and a light horse swooping down for their riders. Mark leaped into the air and was gone in a flicker of darkness, with a cry of joy and challenge.
Hefeydd chuckled, the low sound creeping through the undergrowth.
“Oh, I will give you water with pleasure,” he said, and came over with a cup fashioned out of bark, filled to the brim with water that seemed to shine with light.
Simon reached out through the bars and accepted the drink, but fumbled it and spilled half the water. Hefeydd cursed and caught the cup, holding it to Simon’s lips and smiling a darkly encouraging smile.
“There is still some left,” he whispered. “You can drink. Drink.”
Except Simon was Academy trained. He had no intention of accepting food or drink from faeries, and he was sure Mark had not meant him to. Mark had been nodding at the key dangling from one of the long sleeves of Hefeydd’s cloak.
Simon pretended to drink as Hefeydd smiled. He slipped the key into his gear, and when Hefeydd trotted away he waited, and counted the minutes until he thought the coast was clear. He slid his hand through the bars, slipped the key into the lock, and swung the cage door slowly open.
Then he heard a sound, and froze.
Stepping out of the whispering green trees, wearing a red velvet jacket and a long black lace dress that turned into transparent cobwebs around the knees, in boots and red gloves that Simon thought he might remember, graceful as a gazelle and intent as a tiger, was Isabelle Lightwood.
“Simon!” she exclaimed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Simon drank her in with his eyes, better than water from any land. She had come for him. The others must have fled back to the Academy and said that Simon was lost in Faerie, and Isabelle had gone charging into Faerieland to find him. First out of anybody, when she was meant to be getting ready to attend a wedding. But she was Isabelle, and that meant she was always ready to fight and defend.
Simon recalled feeling conflicted when she had rescued him from a vampire last year. Right now he could not imagine why.
He knew her better now, he thought, knew her all over again, and knew why she would always come.
“Er, I was escaping my terrible captivity,” said Simon. Then he took a step back from the cage door, met Isabelle’s eyes, and grinned. “But, you know . . . not if you don’t want me to.”
Isabelle’s eyes, which had been hard with worry and purpose, were suddenly glittering like jet.
“What are you saying, Simon?”
Simon spread his hands. “I’m just saying, if you came all the way here to rescue me, I don’t wish to appear ungrateful.”
“Oh no?”
“No, I’m the grateful type,” Simon said firmly. “So here I am, humbly awaiting rescue. I hope you can see your way clear to saving me.”
“I think I could possibly be persuaded,” Isabelle said. “Given an incentive.”
“Oh, please,” Simon said. “I languished in prison, praying that someone brave and strong and babelicious would swoop in and save me. Save me!”
“Brave and strong and babelicious? You don’t ask for much, Lewis.”
“That’s what I need,” Simon said, with growing conviction. “I need a hero. I’m holding out for a hero, in fact, until the morning light. And she’s gotta be sure, and it’s gotta be soon—because I have been kidnapped by evil faeries—and she’s gotta be larger than life.”
Isabelle did look larger than life, like a girl on a big screen with her lip gloss glittering like starlight and music playing to accompany every swish of her hair.
She opened the cage door and stepped inside, twigs crackling under her boots, and crossed the floor of the cage to slide her arms around Simon’s neck. Simon drew her face to his and kissed her lips. He felt the luxurious give of her ruby mouth, the slide of her tall strong beautiful body against his. Isabelle’s kiss was like rich wine laid out for him alone, like a challenge offered and a promise kept.
He felt, curving against his mouth, her smile.
“Why, Lord Montgomery,” Isabelle murmured. “It’s been such a long time. I was worried I’d never see you again.”
Simon wished he had braved the showers in the Academy this morning. What did dead rats matter, in the face of true love?
There was a rush of blood in his ears, and the sound of a tiny creak: the cage door swinging shut again.
Simon and Isabelle pulled abruptly apart. Isabelle looked ready to spring, like a tiger in lace. Hefeydd did not look particularly worried.
“Two Shadowhunters for the price of one, and a new bird for my cage,” Hefeydd said. “And such a pretty bird.”
“You think your cage can hold this bird?” Isabelle demanded. “You’re dreaming. I got in, and I can get out.”
“Not without your stele and your bag of tricks,” Hefeydd said. “Throw them all through the bars of the cage, or I shoot your lover with elfshot and you watch him die before your eyes.”
Isabelle looked at Simon and, stone-faced, began to strip off her weapons and shove them through the cage bars. Simon was now, perhaps unsettlingly, aware of the placement of many of Isabelle’s weapons, and he noted that she had skipped the knife on the inside of her left boot. Oh, and the long knife in the sheath at her back.
Isabelle had many, many knives.
“It will not be so long until you need water to live, pretty bird,” said Hefeydd. “I can wait.”
He shimmered away. Isabelle collapsed at the bottom of the cage as if her strings had been cut.
Simon stared at her in horror. “Isabelle—”
“I am so humiliated,” said Isabelle, her face in her hands. “I didn’t even hear him coming. I have brought shame upon the Lightwood name. Utter shame. Total, total humiliation.”
“I’m really flattered, if that helps.”
“I got distracted making out with a boy, and then locked up by a goblin,” Isabelle moaned. “You don’t understand! You don’t remember, but I was never like this before you. No boy ever meant anything to me. I had poise. I had purpose. I didn’t get dumb crushes, because I was never dumb. I was pure battle skill in a bustier. Nobody could shatter my sheer demon-hunting sangfroid. I was cool before I met you! And now I spend my time chasing after a guy with demon amnesia and losing my head in enemy territory! Now I’m a chump.”
Simon reached out for one of Isabelle’s hands, and after a moment Isabelle let him peel the hand off her face and link her fingers with his. “We can be two chumps in a cage together.”
“You’re definitely a chump,” Isabelle snapped. “Remember, you’re still a mundane.”
“How could I forget?”
“Did it never occur to you that I might be a faerie wearing a strong glamour, sent to deceive you?”
Do you remember the name of your heart?
“No,” said Simon. “I’m a chump, but I’m not that much of a chump. I don’t remember everything about our past, but I remember enough. I haven’t learned everything about you now that we have another chance, but I have learned enough. I know you when I see you, Isabelle.”
Isabelle looked at him for a long moment, and then smiled her lovely defiant smile.
“We’re two chumps going to a wedding,” she said. “I hope you noticed that I let him think I busted my way into this cage myself. Of course, I secured the key before I ever stepped into the cage.” She pulled the key out of the front of her dress and held it up, glittering in the light of Faerie. “I may be a chump, but I’m not an idiot.”
She leaped to her feet, her lace skirts swaying around her like a bell, and let them out of the cage. She picked up her weapons and stele from where they were lying in the dirt, and once her weapons were secured, she took Simon’s hand.
They were only a few steps into the faerie forest when a shadow swooped down and upon them. Isabelle went for her knives, but it was only Mark.
“You have not escaped yet?” Mark demanded, looking harried. “And you stopped to acquire a paramour?”
Isabelle stopped dead. She, unlike Simon, recognized him right away. “Mark Blackthorn?” she asked.
“Isabelle Lightwood,” Mark noted, mimicking her tone of voice.
“We met earlier,” said Simon. “He helped me get that key.”
“Oh now,” said Mark, tilting his head in a birdlike movement. “It was no uneven bargain. You gave me some very interesting information about the Shadowhunters, and the great loyalty they have shown one of their own.”
Isabelle’s back straightened as it did at any challenge, black hair flying like a flag as she took a step toward him. “You have been done a terrible wrong,” she said. “I know you are a true Shadowhunter.”
Mark took a step back. “Do you?” he asked softly.
“For what it’s worth, I disagree with the Clave’s decision.”
“That’s the Clave, isn’t it? I mean, I like Jia Penhallow okay, and it’s not that I . . . dislike your dad,” Simon, who did not actually like Robert Lightwood, said awkwardly. “But the Clave, basically assholes, am I right? We all know that.”
Isabelle held her hand out, palm down, and rocked it back and forth in a gesture that said You’ve got a point but I refuse to agree with it out loud.
Mark laughed. “Yeah,” he said, and he sounded a little more sane, a little more human, as if the laugh had grounded him somehow. There was an accent to his words that made Simon think not faerie but: L.A. boy. “Basically assholes.”
There was a rustle in the trees, a rising of the wind. Simon thought he could hear laughter and calling voices, hoofbeats upon the cloud and the currents of the air, the baying of hounds. The sounds of a hunt, the Hunt, the most remorseless hunt in this or any world. Faint, but not far enough away, and coming closer.
“Come with us,” said Isabelle suddenly. “Whatever price there is to be paid, I will pay it.”
Mark gave her a look that was equal parts admiring and disdainful. He shook his fair head, leaves quivering and light lancing through the bright locks.
“What do you think would happen if I did? I would go home . . . home . . . and the Wild Hunt would follow me there. Do you imagine I have not dreamed of running home a thousand times? Every time, I see gentle Julian pierced with the spears of the Wild Hunt. I see little Dru and baby Tavvy ridden down. I see my Ty, ripped apart by their hounds. I cannot go until there is some way to go to them without bringing destruction down on them. I will not go. You go, and go fast.”
Simon pulled Isabelle backward, toward the trees. She resisted, her eyes still on Mark, but she let him draw her away into concealing leaves as more faerie horses hurtled down, lightning amid the trees, shadows against the sun.
“What trouble are you causing now, Shadowhunter?” asked a faerie on a roan horse, laughing as the steed whirled. “What is this word of more of your kind?”
“No word,” said Mark.
There were more horses joining the roan, more and more of the Wild Hunt. Simon saw Kieran, a white silent presence. The faerie on the roan turned his horse toward the place where Simon and Isabelle stood, and Simon saw the roan sniff the air like a dog.
The rider pointed. “Why do I spy Shadowhunters, then, in our land and answerable to us? Should I ask them what they are about?”
He rode forward, but he did not make it far. He was wearing a cloak embroidered with silver, showing the constellations, the silver enchanted to move as though time were sped up and planets spun fast enough for the eye to see. His horse stopped short, its rider almost falling, when his beautiful silvery cloak was suddenly pinned to a tree by a well-placed arrow.
Mark lowered his bow. “I see nothing,” he said, pronouncing the lie with a certain satisfaction. “And nothing should go—now.”
“Oh, boy, you will pay for this,” hissed the rider on the roan.
The horses and the riders shrieked like pterodactyls, circling him, but Mark Blackthorn of the Los Angeles Institute stood his ground.
“Run!” he shouted. “Get home safe! Tell the Clave that I have saved more Shadowhunter lives, that I will be a Shadowhunter and be damned to them, that I will be a faerie and curse them! And tell my family that I love them, I love them, and I will never forget. One day I will go home.”
Simon and Isabelle ran.
George threw himself on Simon the instant he and Isabelle appeared in the grounds of the Academy, his arms strangling-tight. Beatriz and, to Simon’s amazement, even Julie flew at him only a second behind George, and both of them mercilessly pummeled his arms.
“Ow,” said Simon.
“We’re so glad you’re alive!” said Beatriz, punching him again.
“Why must you hurt me with your love?” asked Simon. “Ow.”
He disentangled himself from their grip, touched but also mildly bruised, then looked around for another familiar face. He felt a cold touch of fear.
“Is Marisol all right?” he demanded.
Beatriz snorted. “Oh, she’s better than all right. She’s in the infirmary with Jon waiting on her hand and foot. Because you mundanes can’t be healed with runes and she is milking that for all it’s worth. I’m not sure which has Jon more terrified, the thought of how fragile mundanes are, or the fact that she keeps threatening to explain X-ray machines to him.”
Simon was very impressed that even elfshot could not slow down Marisol and all her evil.
“We thought you might be dead,” said Julie. “The Fair Folk will do anything to vent their spite against Shadowhunters, those evil, treacherous snakes. They could have done anything to you.”
“And it would have been my fault,” George said, pale-faced. “You were trying to stop me.”
“It would have been the faeries’ fault,” said Julie. “But you were careless. You have to remember what they are, less human than sharks.”
George was nodding humbly. Beatriz looked as if she was in full agreement.
“You know what?” said Simon. “I’ve had enough.”
They all stared at him in blank incredulity. But Isabelle glanced at him and smiled. He thought he finally understood the fire that burned in Magnus, what made him keep talking when the Clave would not listen.
“I know you all think I’m always criticizing the Nephilim,” Simon went on. “I know you believe I don’t think enough of—the sacred traditions of the Angel, and the fact that you are ready to lay down your lives, any day, to protect humans. I know you think it doesn’t matter to me, but it does matter. It means a lot. But I don’t have the luxury of only seeing things from one perspective. You all notice when I put down Shadowhunters, but none of you check yourselves when you talk about Downworlders. I was a Downworlder. Today I was saved by someone the Clave decided to condemn as a Downworlder, even though he was brave as any Shadowhunter, even though he was loyal. It seems like you want me to just accept that the Nephilim are great and nothing needs to change, but I won’t accept anything.”
He took a deep breath. He felt as if all the comfort of the morning had been stripped away. But maybe that was for the best. Maybe he’d been getting too comfortable.
“I wouldn’t want to be a Shadowhunter if I thought I was going to be a Shadowhunter like your father or your father’s father before him. And I wouldn’t like any of you as much as I do if I thought you were going to be Shadowhunters like all the Shadowhunters before you. I want all of us to be better. I haven’t figured out how to change everything yet, but I want everything to change. And I’m sorry if it upsets you, but I’m going to keep complaining.”
“Later,” said Isabelle. “He’s going to keep complaining later, because we’re going to a wedding right now.”
Everyone looked mildly stunned that their emotional reunion had turned into a speech on Downworlder rights. Simon thought Julie might beat him about the head and face, but instead she patted him on the back.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll listen to your tedious whining later. Please try to keep it brief.”
She walked off with Beatriz. Simon squinted after her, and noticed that Isabelle was squinting after as well, a look of faint suspicion on her face.
Simon had a moment of doubt. George had meant Beatriz when he was talking about a girl liking Simon, right?
Surely not Julie. It couldn’t be Julie.
No, surely not. Simon was pretty certain he was just getting a pass on account of the narrow escape in Faerie.
George hung back. “I really am so sorry, Si,” he told Simon. “I lost my head. I—I maybe wasn’t quite ready to lead a team. But I’m going to be ready one day. I’m going to do what you said. I’m going to become a better Shadowhunter than any Shadowhunters before us. You won’t have to pay for my mistakes again.”
“George,” Simon said. “It’s fine.”
None of them was perfect. None of them could be.
George’s sunny face still looked under a cloud, unhappy as he almost never did. “I’m not going to fail again.”
“I believe in you,” said Simon, and grinned at him, until finally George grinned back. “Because that’s what bros do.”
Once he arrived in Idris, Simon found himself plunged into a state of wedding chaos. Wedding chaos seemed to be very different from normal kinds of chaos. There were, in fact, many flowers. Simon had a sheaf of lilies shoved upon him and he stood holding it, afraid to move in case the flowers spilled and he was responsible for ruining the whole wedding.
Many wedding guests were running about, but there was only one group that was all kids and no adults. Simon clutched his lilies and focused his attention on the Blackthorns.
If he had not met Mark Blackthorn, he was pretty sure he would’ve thought of them as a riot of anonymous kids.
Now, though, he knew they were someone’s family: someone’s heart’s desire.
Helen, Julian, Livia, Tiberius, Drusilla, Octavian. And Emma.
Willow-slim, silver-fair Helen, Simon already knew. She was in one of the many rooms he was forbidden to go into, having mysterious bridal things done to her.
Julian was the next oldest, and he was the calm center of a bustling Blackthorn crowd. He had a kid in his arms, who was a little big for Julian to carry but was clinging tenaciously to Julian’s neck like an octopus in unfamiliar surroundings. The kid must be Tavvy.
All the Blackthorns were dressed up for the wedding, but already a little grubby around the edges, in that mysterious way kids got. Simon wasn’t sure how. They were all, aside from Tavvy, a little too old to be playing in the dirt.
“I’ll get Dru all cleaned up,” volunteered Emma, who was tall for fourteen, with a crown of blond hair that made her stand out among the dark-haired Blackthorns like a daffodil in a bed of pansies.
“No, don’t bother,” said Julian. “I know you want to spend some quality time with Clary. You’ve only been talking about it for, oh, fifteen thousand years, give or take.”
Emma shoved him playfully. She was taller than he was: Simon remembered being fourteen and shorter than all the girls too.
All the girls except one, he recalled slowly, the real picture of his fourteenth year sliding over the false one, where the most important person in his life had been clumsily photoshopped out. Clary had always been tiny. No matter how short or awkward Simon had felt, he had always towered over her and felt it was his right to protect her.
He wondered if Julian wished Emma were shorter than he was. From the look on Julian’s face as he regarded Emma, there was not one thing about her he would change. His art and his Emma, Mark had said, as if they were the two essential facts about Julian. His love of beauty and his wish to create it, and his best friend in all the world. They were going to be parabatai, Simon was pretty sure. That was nice.
Emma sped away on a quest to find Clary, with one last grin for Julian.
Only, Mark had been wrong. Art and Emma were clearly not all that occupied Julian’s thoughts. Simon watched as he held on to Tavvy and stooped over a small girl with a round beseeching face and a cloud of brown hair.
“I lost my flower crown and I can’t find it,” whispered the girl.
Julian smiled down at her. “That’s what happens when you lose things, Dru.”
“But if I’m not wearing a flower crown like Livvy, Helen will think I’m careless and I don’t mind my things and I don’t like her as much as Livvy does. Livvy still has her flower crown.”
The other girl in the group, taller than Dru and in that coltish stage where her arms and legs were thin as sticks and too long for the rest of her body, was indeed wearing a flower crown on her light brown hair. She was sticking close to the side of a boy who had headphones on in the midst of the chaos of the wedding, and winter-gray eyes fixed on some distant private sight.
Livvy would walk over hot coals and hissing serpents for Ty, Mark had said. Simon remembered the infinite tenderness with which Mark had said: my Ty.
“Helen knows you better than that,” Julian said.
“Yes, but . . .” Drusilla tugged at his sleeve so he would bend down and she could say, in an agonized whisper: “She’s been gone such a long time. Maybe she doesn’t remember . . . everything about me.”
Julian turned his face away, so none of his siblings could see his expression. Only Simon saw the flash of pain, and he knew he wasn’t meant to. He knew he wouldn’t have seen it, if he hadn’t seen Mark Blackthorn, if he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Dru, Helen has known you since you were born. She does remember everything.”
“But just in case,” said Drusilla. “She’s going away again really soon. I want her to think I’m good.”
“She knows you’re good,” Julian told her. “The best. But we’ll find your flower crown, all right?”
The younger kids did not know Helen in the same way Julian did, as a sibling who was there all the time. They could not rely on someone who was so far away.
Julian was their father, Simon thought with a dawning of horror. There was nobody else.
Even though the Blackthorns had family who wanted to be there for them, wanted it desperately. The Clave had ripped a family apart, and Simon did not know what effects that would have in the future or how the wounds the Clave had inflicted would heal.
He thought, again, as if he were still speaking to his friends at the Academy: We have to be better than this. Shadowhunters have to be better than this. We have to figure out what kind of Shadowhunters we want to be, and show them.
Maybe Mark had not known Julian as well as he thought. Or maybe Mark’s little brother, with no choice, had changed quietly and profoundly.
They all had to change. But Julian was so young.
“Hey,” said Simon. “Can I help?”
The two brothers did not look much alike, but Julian flushed and lifted his chin in the same way Mark had: as if no matter what, he was too proud to admit he might be hurting.
“No,” he said, and gave Simon a bright warm smile that was actually very convincing. “I’m fine. I have this.”
It seemed true, until Julian Blackthorn had gone out of Simon’s reach, and then Simon noticed again that Julian was carrying a kid who was too big for him to carry, with another kid holding on to his shirt. Simon could actually see how much there was on those thin young shoulders.
Simon did not fully understand the traditions of the Shadowhunter people.
There was a lot in the Law about whom you could and could not marry: If you married a mundane who did not Ascend, you got your Marks stripped and were out on your ear. You could marry a Downworlder in a mundane or a Downworlder ceremony, and you wouldn’t be out on your ear but everyone would be embarrassed, some people would act like your marriage did not count, and your terribly traditional Nephilim great-aunt Nerinda would start referring to you as the shame of the family. Plus with the Cold Peace functioning as it was, any Shadowhunter wanting to marry a faerie was probably out of luck.
But Helen Blackthorn was a Shadowhunter, by their own Law, no matter how many people might despise or distrust her for her faerie blood. And Shadowhunters had not actually built it into their precious Law that Shadowhunters could not marry someone of the same sex. Possibly this was just because it hadn’t occurred to anyone even as an option way back when.
So Helen and Aline actually could be married, in a full Shadowhunter ceremony, in the eyes of both their families and their world. Even if they were exiled again right afterward, they got this much.
In a Shadowhunter wedding, Simon had been told, you dressed in gold and placed the wedding rune over each other’s hearts and arms. There was a tradition a little like giving away the bride, for both parties in a marriage. The bride and groom (or in this case, the bride and bride) would each choose the most significant person to them from their family—sometimes a father, but sometimes a mother, or a parabatai or a sibling or chosen friend, or their own child or an elder who symbolized the whole family—and the chosen one, or suggenes, would give the bride or groom to their beloved, and welcome the beloved to their own family.
This was not always possible in Shadowhunter weddings, on account of sometimes your whole family and all your friends had been eaten by snake demons. You never knew with Shadowhunters. But Simon thought it was kind of beautiful that Jia Penhallow, Consul and most important member of the Clave, was standing as suggenes to give her daughter Aline to the tainted, scandalous Blackthorns, and to receive Helen into the bosom of her family.
Aline’d had some nerve suggesting it. Jia’d had some nerve agreeing to it. But Simon supposed that the Clave had already effectively exiled Jia’s daughter: What more could they do to her? And how better to politely spit in their eye than to say: Helen, the faerie girl you spat on and sent away, is now as good as the Consul’s daughter.
What is a Shadowhunter made of, if they desert their own, if they throw away a child’s heart like rubbish left on the side of the road?
Julian was the one standing to give Helen away. He stood in his gold-inscribed clothes, his sister on his arm, and his sea-in-the-sunlight eyes shone as if he was happy as any kid could be. As though he had not a care in the world.
Helen and Aline were both dressed in golden gowns, golden thread glittering like starlight in Aline’s black hair. They were both so happy, their faces outshone their gowns. They stood at the center of the ceremony, twin suns, and for a moment all the world seemed to spin and turn on them.
Helen and Aline drew the marriage runes over each other’s hearts with steady hands. When Aline drew Helen’s bright head down to her own for a kiss, there was applause all throughout the hall.
“Thank you for letting us come,” whispered Helen after the ceremony was over, embracing her new mother-in-law.
Jia Penhallow folded her daughter-in-law in her arms and said, in a voice considerably louder than a whisper: “I am sorry I must let you be sent away again.”
Simon did not tell Julian Blackthorn about meeting Mark, any more than he had told Mark that Helen was not there to care for the Blackthorn children. It seemed hideous cruelty, to load another burden on shoulders already burdened almost past bearing. It seemed better to lie, as faeries could not.
But when he went to Helen and Aline to congratulate them, he stepped up and kissed Helen on the cheek, so he could whisper to her: “Your brother Mark sends you his love, and his happiness for your love.”
Helen stared at him, sudden tears in her eyes but her smile even more radiant than before.
Everything is going to change for the Shadowhunters, Simon thought. For all of us. It has to.
Simon had special permission to stay the night in Idris, so he would not have to leave the wedding celebrations early.
There was going to be dancing later, but for now people were standing about in groups talking. Helen and Aline were sitting on the floor, in the center of the Blackthorns, like two golden flowers who had sprung up from the ground and bloomed. Tiberius was describing to Helen, in a serious voice, how he and Julian had prepared for the wedding.
“We went through any potential scenario that might occur,” he told her. “As if we were reconstructing a crime scene, but in reverse. So I know exactly what to do, no matter what happens.”
“That must have been a lot of work,” Helen said. Tiberius nodded. “Thanks, Ty. I really appreciate it.”
Ty looked pleased. Dru, wearing her flower crown and beaming ear to ear, tugged at Helen’s golden skirts for her attention. Simon thought he had rarely seen any group of people who all seemed so happy.
He tried not to think of what Mark would have given to be here.
“You want to go for a walk down the river with me and Izzy?” Clary asked, nudging him.
“What, no Jace?”
“Ah, I see him all the time,” said Clary, with the comfort of familiar and trusted love. “Not like my best friend.”
Jace—who was sitting talking with Alec, Alec who once again had not addressed a single word to Simon—made an obscene gesture to Simon as he left with Isabelle and Clary on either arm. Simon was not actually fooled that Jace was angry. Jace had hugged him when he saw him, and more and more Simon was coming to believe that he and Jace had not had a relationship in which they hugged before.
But apparently they were huggers now.
Simon, Isabelle, and Clary went walking down by the river. The waters looked like black crystal in the moonlight, and in the distance the demon towers gleamed like columns of moonlight itself. Simon walked a little more slowly than the girls, not used as they were to the strangeness and magic of this city, a city most of the world did not know existed, the shining heart of a secret and hidden land.
Simon was used to the Academy now. He would no doubt get used to all of Idris in time.
So much had changed, and Simon had changed too. But in the end, he had not lost what was most precious to him. He had been given back the name of his heart.
Isabelle and Clary looked back at him, walking so close that Isabelle’s waterfall of raven hair mingled with Clary’s fiery sunset of curls. Simon smiled and knew how lucky he was, lucky compared to Mark Blackthorn, who was locked away from what he loved best, lucky compared to a billion other people who did not know what it was they loved best of all.
“Are you coming, Simon?” Isabelle called out.
“Yes,” Simon called back. “I’m coming.”
He was lucky to know them, and lucky to know what they were to him, what he was to them: beloved, remembered, and not lost.