Chain of Gold

“Do stop babbling rot, Matthew,” she said. “Now come along, the both of you, they’re expecting us.”

It was deep night, the forest deep and dark. The beautiful Cordelia, astride her white palfrey, galloped along the twisting road that gleamed white in the moon’s graceful light. Her shining scarlet hair blew behind her, and her radiantly beautiful face was set with steely determination.

Suddenly she cried out. A black stallion had appeared, blocking the road ahead of her. She pulled back on the reins, skidding to a halt with a gasp.

It was him! The man from the inn! She recognized his handsome face, his radiant green eyes. Her head swam. What could he possibly be doing out here in the midst of the night, wearing very tight breeches?

“My word,” he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “I was warned that the ladies in this neighborhood were fast, but I didn’t think that was meant to be taken literally.”

Cordelia gasped. The nerve of him! “Pray, remove yourself from my path, sir! For I have an urgent errand this night, upon whose completion many lives depend!”

Lucie reached the end of her sentence—and her typewriter ribbon—and clapped her hands together in delight. Pray, remove yourself from my path, sir! Cordelia had such spirit! And sparks were about to fly between her and the handsome highwayman, who was in reality a duke’s son, convicted of a crime he hadn’t committed and forced to make his living on the roads. It was all so romantic—

“Miss Herondale?” said a soft voice behind her.

Lucie, seated at her desk by the window, turned in surprise. She had forgotten to kindle the witchlight in her room as dusk had fallen, and for a moment all she could see was a male figure in dark clothes, standing smack in the center of her bedroom.

She shrieked. When nothing happened, she shrieked again, lifted the neat stack of completed pages that she’d set aside, and hurled it at the figure in the middle of her room.

He leaped aside nimbly, but not nimbly enough. The manuscript struck him and exploded into a white cloud of paper.

Lucie reached toward the lamp on her desk. In the sudden illumination she saw him clearly: black hair, as pin-straight as her brother’s was wild and untidy. Green eyes looked out at her beneath dark lashes.

“So this is what people mean when they say the pages just flew by,” said Jesse dryly, as the last of the papers settled to his feet. “Was that necessary?”

“Was it necessary to invade my bedroom?” Lucie demanded, her hands on her hips. She could feel her heart pounding, and was a little surprised at herself. It wasn’t as if seeing ghosts was that rare an occurrence for her. Jessamine drifted in and out of Lucie’s bedroom frequently: she loved to look at Lucie’s clothes when she took them out of the wardrobe and to give her unwanted fashion advice. Lucie had been almost ten years old before she’d realized—when Rosamund and Piers Wentworth had laughed at her—that most girls didn’t have a pestering ghost friend.

Jesse had picked up a page and was looking at it critically. “Too many uses of the word ‘radiant,’ ” he said. “At least three times on the same page. Also ‘golden’ and ‘shining.’ ”

“I don’t recall asking your advice,” Lucie said, rising to her feet. Thank goodness she had changed for dinner and wasn’t still sitting about in her dressing gown. She did sometimes forget to get dressed when deep into a story, the words flying from her fingers. “What was the last book you read?”

“Great Expectations,” he said promptly. “I told you, I read a great deal.”

He sat down on the edge of Lucie’s bed—and immediately leaped back up, blushing. Lucie took her hands off her hips, amused.

“A ghost with a sense of propriety. That is funny.”

He looked at her darkly. He really did have a most arresting face, she thought. His black hair and green eyes made a wintry contrast against his pale skin. As a writer, one had to pay attention to these things. Descriptions were very important.

“There is actually a purpose in my coming here,” he said.

“Other than mocking and humiliating me? I’m so glad!”

Jesse ignored this. “My sister and your brother have arranged a secret rendezvous tonight—”

“Oh, by the Angel.” It was Lucie’s turn to sit down heavily on the edge of her bed. “That’s dreadfully awkward.”

Before Jesse could say another word, the bedroom door jerked open and Lucie’s father stood on the threshold, looking alarmed.

“Lucie?” he said. “Did you call out? I thought I heard you.”

Lucie tensed, but the expression in her father’s blue eyes didn’t change—mild worry mixed with curious puzzlement. He really couldn’t see Jesse.

Jesse looked at her and, very irritatingly, shrugged as if to say, I told you so.

“No, Papa,” she said. “Everything is all right.”

He looked at the manuscript pages scattered all over the rug. “Spot of writer’s block, Lulu?”

Jesse raised an eyebrow. Lulu? he mouthed.

Lucie considered whether it was possible to die of humiliation. She did not dare look at Jesse. She stared straight at her father instead. He still looked worried. “Is something wrong, Papa?”

Will shook his head. Lucie could not remember when the white threads at his temples had appeared, salting the black of his hair. “Long ago,” he said, “I was the one warning the Clave that something terrible was coming. A threat we did not know how to face. Now I am the Clave, and I still cannot convince those around me that more steps should be taken than simply setting patrols in a park.”

“Is that really all they are doing?”

“Your mother believes the answer is to be found in the library,” Will said, running his fingers distractedly through his hair. The backs of her father’s hands were scarred from a demon attack that had happened years ago, when Lucie was a child. “Your uncle Jem believes the warlocks may have some useful knowledge hidden in their Spiral Labyrinth.”

“And what do you believe?” said Lucie.

“I believe there are always those who stay vigilant and seek the truth rather than easy answers,” he said, with a smile that Lucie could tell was more for her than for himself. “In the meantime, I shall be with your mother in the library. We are still under the A section of the Unusual Demons book. Who knew there was a wormlike creature called the Aaardshak common in Sri Lanka?”

“Cordelia, perhaps,” said Lucie. “She has been everywhere.” She frowned. “Is it selfishly awful to worry that all this business will delay our becoming parabatai? I feel I will be a better Shadowhunter when it is done. Were you not one, after you became parabatai with Uncle Jem?”

“A better Shadowhunter and a better man,” said Will. “All the best of me, I learned from Jem and your mother. All I want for you and Cordelia is to have what I had, a friendship that shall shape all your days. And never to be parted.”

Lucie knew her parents had done great deeds that had become famous Nephilim stories, but they had suffered too much. Lucie had long ago decided that living in a story would be terribly uncomfortable. Far better to write them, and control the tale so it was never too sad or too scary, only just enough to be intriguing.

Will sighed. “Get some sleep, fy nghariad bach. Hopefully our infirmary dwellers will be better tomorrow.”

The door clicked shut behind her father, and Lucie gazed around her shadowed room. Where was her ghost?

“Well, that was interesting,” said Jesse in a thoughtful voice.

Lucie spun around and glared at Jesse, who was sitting on the windowsill, all pale skin and dark eyebrows like slashes in his face. He did not reflect against the glass panes. They were black and empty behind him.

“You’re just lucky I didn’t tell him you were here,” she said. “He would have believed me. And if he thought there was a boy in his daughter’s room, he would have figured out how to tear him limb from limb, even if he couldn’t see him.”

Jesse didn’t seem particularly concerned. “What did he call you? When he was leaving the room?”

“Fy nghariad bach. It means ‘my darling’ in Welsh. ‘My little darling.’ ”

She gazed at him challengingly, but he didn’t seem inclined to mock her. “My mother speaks often of your father,” he said. “I did not think he would be like that.”

“Like what?”

His gaze slid away from hers. “My own father died before I was born. I thought perhaps I would see him when I died, but I have not. The dead go somewhere far away. I cannot follow them.”

“Why not?” Lucie had once asked Jessamine what happened after one died: Jessamine had replied that she did not know, that the limbo ghosts inhabited was not the land of death.

“I am held here,” said Jesse. “When the sun rises, I go into darkness. I am not conscious again until the night. If there is an afterlife, I have never seen it.”

“But you can speak to your sister and mother,” said Lucie. “They must know how odd all this is. But they keep it a secret? Has Grace ever told James?”

“She has not,” said Jesse. “The Blackthorns are used to keeping secrets. It is only by accident that I discovered Grace was meeting your brother tonight. I saw her writing to James, though she didn’t know I was there.”

“Oh, yes—the secret rendezvous,” Lucie said. “Are you worried that Grace will be ruined?”

It was distressingly easy for a young lady to be “ruined”—her reputation destroyed if she was found alone with a gentleman. The mother always hoped the gentleman would do the right thing and marry the lady rather than doom her to a life of a shame, even if he didn’t love her, but it was far from a sure thing. And if he didn’t, one could be sure no other man would go near her. She would never marry.

Lucie thought of Eugenia.

“Nothing so trivial,” said Jesse. “You know the stories of my grandfather, I am sure?”