Chain of Gold

Page 15

James thought some of Jem’s training ideas were deliberate pranks—Silent Brothers had the best poker faces he could imagine, after all. His father assured him that it wasn’t in Jem’s nature, and that however odd the training, he was sure it was intended sincerely. And James had to admit that the strange regimen did seem to work.

Gradually his sleep became more restful, his mind less constantly watchful. The shadow realm receded from the corners of his vision, and he felt its influence retreat from him, a weight he’d had no awareness of until it lifted. Soon he was losing himself to shadow less and less. It had not happened even once in this past year, until two nights previously, when they’d fought the Deumas demon.

He had thought it might not happen again at all, until tonight.

Nobody had noticed, he told himself now. Well, perhaps Matthew, but that was the bond of parabatai: to some extent, Matthew could feel what James felt. Still, Matthew could not see what he saw. He had not seen the dancers turn sinister, the blasted room, or Barbara being pulled down into shadow.

And a few moments later, Barbara had collapsed.

James did not know what to think of it. The visions he saw in the shadow realm had never been echoed in the real world: they were sights of horror, but not of premonition. And Barbara was well—it was only a dizzy spell, she’d said—so perhaps it was a coincidence?

And yet. He distrusted coincidence. He wanted to talk to Jem. Jem was the one he confided in about the world of shadows: Jem was a Silent Brother, a keeper of all the wisdom the Shadowhunters had accrued through the ages. Jem would know what to do.

He took a box of matches from his pocket. It was a rather unusual item, the cover printed with a sketch of Hermes, the messenger god of the Greeks. Jem had given it to him some months ago, with strict instructions as to its use.

James struck one of the matches against the iron rail that ran around the roof. As it burned, he thought unexpectedly of one more person who he suspected had noticed something odd about his behavior: Cordelia. It was in the way she’d looked at him when he’d come up to her and asked her to take his stele.

It wasn’t as if Cordelia didn’t know about his world of shadows. Their families were close, and she had been with him when he had had the scalding fever at Cirenworth and had passed in and out of the shadow realm. He thought perhaps she had even read out loud to him then. It was difficult to recall: he had been very ill at the time.

The match had burned down to his fingertips: he flicked the burnt stub aside and tipped his head back to look at the moon, a milky crescent in the sky. He was glad Cordelia was in London, he realized. Not just for Lucie, but for himself. It was odd, he thought—almost as if he had forgotten what a steady light her presence could be when the world went dark.

DAYS PAST: CIRENWORTH HALL, 1900

After James was expelled from school at Shadowhunter Academy, his parents sent him to Cirenworth Hall to decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Cirenworth Hall was a rambling Jacobean pile in Devon that Elias Carstairs had fallen in love with in 1895 and bought on the spot, intending it as a place his family could return to in between their long travels.

James liked being there, because he liked the Carstairs family—well, other than Alastair, who was luckily spending the summer with Augustus Pounceby in Idris. But on this particular trip, rain had fallen without surcease. It had begun even before they left London, a gray spattering that had deepened during the ride to a steady, regular thrum, and then had settled in for a long residency over Cirenworth that showed no sign of ending. London in heavy rain was a bleak enough affair, but Cirenworth brought things to a new low of marshy wetness that led James to wonder why anyone had bothered to settle Britain at all.

At least it was not for long. His parents had a series of boring political meetings scheduled in Alicante, so he and Lucie were spending a little less than a month at Cirenworth. Afterward, they’d all return to Herondale Manor together, where the Carstairs would visit them in turn later in the season and where, James hoped, it would be a fine and clear summer.

The worst part was that everybody was carefully giving him so much room. He had the understanding that it was expected he desired room in which to feel things. This left him spending most days reading in the parlor while Lucie and Cordelia trained, drew in sketchbooks, put on Wellington boots and stomped out to the blackberry bushes to collect blackberries in the pouring rain, brewed and drank literally thousands of cups of tea, engaged in spirited swordplay in rooms definitely not built for swordplay, at one point caught some kind of small, loud bird and kept it in a cage for a few days, and allowed James so much space that he began to fear he was invisible.

He yearned for the quiet of Idris. Once they were at Herondale Manor, he could wander the woods by himself for hours and nobody would question it. (Except Grace, perhaps: What would he tell her? Would she have heard anything? He didn’t think she and her mother heard a lot of gossip.)

He would never have responded to Cordelia’s kindness with anything but kindness in return, but eventually Lucie became so obsequiously friendly that one afternoon James burst out, “You don’t have to be so careful when you talk to me, you know. I’m all right.”

“I know,” Lucie said, startled. “I know you’re all right.”

“Sorry,” he said. Lucie gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m going to do some training tomorrow, I think,” he added.

“All right,” she said. She hesitated, as though she was trying to decide whether to speak.

“Lucie,” James said heavily. “It’s me. Just say it.”

“Well… it’s only… do you want Cordelia and me there?”

“Yes,” he said. “You should come. That would be… that would be good.”

She smiled, and he smiled back, and he felt like maybe everything would someday, not today, but someday, be all right.

Then the next day he went to train with Lucie and Cordelia. Cordelia had brought with her the Carstairs’ famous sword, Cortana, which James had long wanted to admire up close. He didn’t get a chance, though, because ten minutes into their first exercise, he collapsed in a sudden spasm of unbearable pain.

The girls cried out and ran to him. He had crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut, and only the years of training he’d already put in kept him from accidentally falling onto his own blade. By the time he realized where he was and what had happened, he was on the floor.

The look on Lucie’s face as she touched his forehead did not reassure him.

“By the Angel,” she exclaimed, “you’re burning up.”

Cordelia was already racing toward the door, calling, “Mâmân!” in alarm. Her image wavered and faded as James closed his eyes.

* * *

Scalding fever, Sona and Elias declared. They’d seen it before. It was a disease unique to Shadowhunters. Most got it as infants, when it was very mild. Once it passed, you could never catch it again. Before James was even up from the floor of the training room, Sona was barking orders, her heavy skirts gripped in both hands. James was carried to his bedroom, Lucie dragged away to her own quarters, and messages dispatched to Will and Tessa, and the Silent Brothers.

Feverish, James lay in his bed and watched the light fade outside. As the night came on, he began to shiver. He wrapped himself in all the blankets available but shook like a leaf. He waited for the Silent Brothers to come—until they had checked him, nobody else could be in the room.

It was Brother Enoch who came, not Uncle Jem, to James’s disappointment. Yes, it is almost certainly scalding fever, he said. Everyone who has not had it before will need to depart the house. I will go to tell them.

Lucie had not had it before. James didn’t know about anyone else. He waited a long time for Enoch to come back, but he must have fallen asleep, because all of a sudden there was morning light casting silvery stripes on the wall, and the sound of a door, and footsteps, and then Cordelia was there.

James rarely saw Cordelia without Lucie. This was not how he would have chosen to present himself for one of their rare moments alone. He was half under his covers, shifting around restlessly, unable to get comfortable. His face was flushed with fever and his nightshirt clung to him, wet with sweat.

He took a breath to speak and broke into a pained cough. “Water?”

Cordelia hurried to pour him a glass from the carafe on the nightstand. She tried to press it into his hand, but he couldn’t grip it. She slid her hand behind his neck, warm against his skin, supporting him as she held the glass to his lips.

He flopped back on the pillows, his eyes closed. “Please tell me you’ve had scalding fever before.”

“Yes. My mother has too,” she said. “And the mundane servants are immune. Everyone else has gone. You should have some more water.”

“Is that the treatment?”

“No,” said Cordelia, “the treatment is a grayish concoction made by Brother Enoch, and I suggest you hold your nose when you try to get it down. It will help with the fever, but apparently there’s nothing else for it but time. I brought books,” she added. “They’re over on top of the chest of drawers. I… I could read to you.”

James flinched at the light but forced himself to look at Cordelia. Tendrils of her deep red hair curled against her cheekbones. They reminded him of the curlicues cut into the surface of his Uncle Jem’s beautiful violin.

He flicked his eyes over to the chest of drawers where, indeed, a surprisingly tall pile of books rested that had not been there before. She gave an apologetic smile. “I wasn’t sure what you might like, so I just took things from all over the house. There’s a copy of A Tale of Two Cities with the second half missing, so maybe it’s only a tale of one city. And a collection of poetry by Byron, but it’s a bit nibbled around the edges, I think by mice, so it might be theirs. Otherwise it’s Persian literature. There aren’t even Shadowhunter books around. Oh, except one copy of a book on demons. I think it’s called Demons, Demons, Demons.”

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