Chain of Gold

“It’s not on the way to Spain,” Thomas had said. “And that will be plenty of excitement for me.”

“Nonsense,” said Matthew. “Only Paris is like Paris. And you must stay in my absolutely favorite digs, the Hotel d’Alsace. On the Left Bank. Everyone calls it L’Hotel.”

“Doesn’t that just mean ‘the hotel’ in French?” James had said, barely looking up from his book.

“That’s because it’s the hotel where anybody who is anybody stays.”

“I’m not anybody,” Thomas had protested.

“Oscar Wilde stayed there,” said James. “When Matthew says ‘anybody,’ that’s usually who he means.”

“Not only Oscar Wilde,” Matthew had said. “But yes, Oscar Wilde. He died there.”

“I trust you’ll have a more pleasant time,” said James.

Thomas really had intended to confine his travels to Spain, but Matthew’s words had stuck with him, and when the head of the Madrid Institute had suggested that Thomas take two weeks off to see a bit more of the world, Thomas had recalled Matthew’s promises that the whole world would be changed in his eyes after he had beheld the City of Lights.

L’Hotel felt like being in someone’s home, albeit someone a bit scruffy. It was in the sixth arrondissement, which on the whole had a friendly but slightly shabby feeling. It was full of mundanes who were attending the Sorbonne nearby, and Thomas found it easy to feel part of the crowd as he strode the neighborhood streets at sunset, thinking about where to dine. He declined to check in with the Paris Institute, saw only a bare handful of Downworlders, and set out to enjoy himself.

Unfortunately, Thomas had grown used to being in easy reach of his closest friends, and even the Madrid Institute was a lively place where company was always close at hand. The solitude quickly began to wear on him. Here he knew no one and spoke essentially none of the language. Whole days passed where his only conversation was with a waiter, or a museum employee, or the desk clerk at L’Hotel.

He grew lonely, and in his loneliness he grew bored. He dutifully went to the Louvre and had thoughts about what he saw, but nobody to share them with. He wrote them down in a notebook and wondered if he would ever look at it again. He counted the days until he returned to Spain, wondering how to tell Matthew that the city itself was not enough of a companion to satisfy him.

And then, unaccountably, he saw someone he knew.

Not a friend. Alastair Carstairs was definitely not a friend. But more than an acquaintance, surely. They’d been at the Academy together. Where Carstairs had been, not to put too fine a point on it, awful. He had been one of the “mean boys,” the ones who played cruel and dangerous pranks. The ones who identified any other boy’s quality that stood out and made sure to hammer it down with the force of their contempt and their laughter. In Thomas’s case, that had been his size. He was short for his age, and narrow-shouldered, and he looked younger than he was.

Of course, that had been years ago. Thomas now towered above most people. In fact, he only spotted Alastair because he could see over the heads of the crowd between them.

Matthew had directed Thomas to Librairie Galignani, on the Rue de Rivoli, as a must-visit location—“It’s the oldest English-language bookshop on the whole continent!” Thomas lingered over books of poetry, allowing himself to take a long time to decide what to buy. And then Alastair appeared.

Thomas hadn’t decided yet whether to acknowledge Alastair, but he wasn’t given much choice. Alastair was staring directly at him. As Thomas watched, Alastair’s face went through a series of expressions: mild recognition, confusion, shock, exasperation, long-suffering forbearance.

Thomas gave him a little wave.

Alastair pushed his way through the people between them. “By the Angel, Lightwood,” he said. “You’ve become gigantic.”

Thomas raised his eyebrows. A few other people nearby did as well.

“This is your revenge, I suppose,” Alastair went on, as if Thomas had done this to him personally, “for all the times I called you ‘wee little Thomas’ or ‘half pint’ or—I can’t remember, I’m sure I had something cutting and witty to say.”

“What are you doing in Paris?” Thomas said.

“What are you doing in Paris?” Alastair said back in a superior tone, as though he’d caught Thomas at something.

“I’m on holiday from my travel year in Spain.”

Alastair nodded. A silence fell. Thomas began to panic. They were not friends. What Thomas knew about Alastair was mostly negative. He did not know what his duties were here.

He was thinking of ways to politely excuse himself, perhaps by fleeing the bookstore and returning some hours later, when Alastair spoke up. “Do you want to come to the Louvre, then? I’m going over there after this.”

Thomas could have said, I’ve been already, thanks, or Actually, I have a pressing lunch engagement, but he didn’t. He had been alone for days. He said, “All right.”

So they went. It was crowded, and Alastair was grumpy about it, but he didn’t take it out on Thomas. He didn’t belittle the art. He didn’t speak in rapturous tones, either; to Thomas’s surprise, Alastair seemed content to place himself before a work of art and simply behold it for a long moment, letting it wash over his senses. His face was serious, his brow wrinkled, but Thomas was sure that it was the most content he had ever seen Alastair.

For his part, Thomas had visited this very museum and had assembled a number of, he thought, insightful observations about a number of pieces. He shared a few of these with Alastair, tentatively. He waited for Alastair to scoff, but Alastair just acknowledged Thomas’s comments with a nod. Thomas had no reason to like Alastair, had in fact every reason to dislike Alastair, but in these small moments standing next to one another in the presence of a beautiful object, he was glad Alastair was there, and Alastair’s acknowledgment of him, however small, made him feel better than he had since he’d arrived in Paris.

Maybe he had changed, Thomas thought. Maybe everyone grew up sooner or later. Maybe he had not even been that bad in the first place.

He thought back to his time at the Academy and decided that, no, Alastair had definitely been terrible in the first place. But he seemed calmer now, more thoughtful.

After they left the museum, Thomas and Alastair went for a walk along the Seine. Alastair wanted to know all about Madrid, and Thomas was even able to rise some stories from Alastair about his time in Damascus, and Morocco, and Paris itself. Having grown up in Idris and London, Thomas felt that Alastair must be very worldly. And yet he wondered if so much relocation would make a person lonely.

The Eiffel Tower rose in front of them, and Alastair gestured at it. “Have you been up there yet?”

“I have,” Thomas answered. “The view is stunning.”

“What do you think of the view from here?” Alastair asked.

Thomas had the distinct feeling that a trap was being laid for him, but he wasn’t sure why, or how to avoid stepping into it. “I think it’s a fascinating structure,” he said. “There’s nothing like it.”

Alastair gave a mirthless chuckle. “Indeed there isn’t. In fact, many Parisians are horrified by it. They find it ugly, hideous even, and they call it ‘Eiffel’s folly.’ ”

Thomas looked up at the tower again. The sun was sinking, burnishing the metal with an orange-pink glow. For a moment it put him in mind of the soaring adamas towers that protected the Shadowhunter capital of Alicante, the way they caught the light of the setting sun and held it a little longer than one expected. “It isn’t ugly,” he said. “It’s just unusual.”

Alastair looked satisfied. “Quite right. Gustave Eiffel is a genius, and I feel certain he shall one day be appreciated. Sometimes you have to stand back and let people do what they are good at, even if it seems like madness at the time.”

They had dinner together at a bistro nearby, which Thomas thought was fairly decent, but Alastair described as “indifferent.” They talked late into the night; they closed down the restaurant while everyone else left and they were still talking: about books, travel, music, history. Thomas told Alastair that he planned to get a tattoo of a compass rose on the inside of his arm. He hadn’t told anyone else that, and Alastair seemed curious.

“Where on your arm?” he asked, and when Thomas showed him, Alastair ran his fingers over the spot, unselfconsciously, his fingertips tracing a path from the sensitive skin of Thomas’s inner wrist to the crook of his elbow.

Thomas sat stunned and shivering, though he was hot all over. Alastair didn’t seem to notice, only took his hand back and asked the waiter for the bill, which he paid. Alastair refused to tell Thomas where he was staying, but he told Thomas to meet him at a certain address the next afternoon, for a surprise.

Fifteen minutes after the meeting time, Thomas decided that Alastair was not coming, and was probably somewhere laughing about it, but Alastair did in fact appear, and even apologized for his lateness. He led Thomas to the doors of the Théâtre Robert-Houdin.

“I know we’re supposed to avoid mundane things,” said Alastair, “but you must see this. It’s a film. A moving picture! This one is the latest. It’s called Le Voyage dans la Lune.”

Even Thomas could translate this, and for seventeen minutes they marveled together at what the mundanes had done—made pictures move, like a theater but in images projected onto a screen. There was a narrator who, Thomas supposed, told the story, but he couldn’t follow it at all. He enjoyed it anyway, watching these mundanes in their strange costumes climb into a large metal box like an artillery shell, go to the moon, and be chased away by strange creatures already living there.

“Do you think it’s real?” he said to Alastair as they walked out, blinking in the sudden light of the daytime.

“What? No, don’t be stupid,” Alastair said, pushing a lock of dark hair behind his ears. People always fussed over blond hair, like Matthew’s, as if it were special, but privately Thomas thought dark hair and eyes were much more striking. “It’s like a play, or a magic trick. That’s what mundanes do; they can’t do magic, so they play tricks that look like magic, but it isn’t really.”