Chain of Gold

This went on for a few weeks. Cordelia’s feelings changed from disappointment, to sorrow, to blaming herself, to annoyance, and then to anger. At dinner one night she threw a spoon at him and shouted, “Why won’t you talk to me?” Alastair caught the spoon out of the air, put it down on the table, and glared at her in silence.

“Don’t throw things, Cordelia,” her mother said.

“Mâmân!” Cordelia protested in a tone of betrayal. Her father ignored the entire business and went on eating as though nothing had happened. Risa glided by and set a new spoon down at Cordelia’s place, which Cordelia found extremely irritating.

Alastair’s refusal to engage with Cordelia was, she understood, meant to cause her to give up and stop trying. So she redoubled her efforts. “Well,” she would announce, if she found herself in the same room with him, “I’m going to collect wild blackberries down the lane.” (Alastair loved blackberries.) Or, “I think I’ll do some tumbling in the training room after lunch.” (Alastair was always on her to practice how to fall safely, and she’d need a partner for that.)

One day when he went out for one of his walks, Cordelia waited a minute and then followed. It was good practice, she told herself—stealthy movement, awareness of her surroundings, honing her senses. She made it a game: How long could she track her brother before he noticed? Could she remain undetected long enough to find out where he went?

It turned out Alastair didn’t go anywhere. He just walked and walked, knowing these woods well enough not to get lost. Cordelia began to get tired after a couple of hours. Then she began to get hungry.

Then she got distracted, and hooked her foot into a protruding tree root, and fell in a thud on the hard-packed dirt. Ahead, Alastair turned at the noise and spotted her as she, annoyed, scrambled to her feet. She folded her arms and held up her chin, stubborn and determined to retain her pride in the face of whatever unpleasant reaction he was preparing: his contempt, his rage, his dismissal.

Instead, he let out a sigh and walked over to her. Without preamble he said gruffly, “Are you hurt?”

Cordelia lifted her foot and wiggled it experimentally. “I’ll be okay. Just bruised, I think.”

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

They walked in silence, Alastair a few steps ahead, not speaking. Eventually, driven mad by the silence, Cordelia burst out, “Don’t you want to know why I was following you?”

He turned and considered her. “I assume you thought I was coming out here to do something exciting.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, growing—as always—more agitated in the face of Alastair’s imperturbable calm. “I’m sorry that since you went away to the Academy you’ve become all grown-up and mature and you have fancy new friends. I’m sorry I’m just your stupid little sister.”

Alastair stared at her a moment, and then let out a bark of laughter. There was no humor in it. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I’m sorry you’re too good for your family now! I’m sorry you’re too good to train with me!”

He shook his head, dismissive. “Don’t be daft, Cordelia.”

“Just talk to me!” she said. “I don’t know why you’re so grumpy. You’re the lucky one who got to go away. Who got to have fun in Idris. You know how alone I’ve been all year?”

For a moment, Alastair looked lost, hesitant. It had been a long time since Cordelia had seen an expression so open on his face. Then he slammed shut like an iron gate. “We’re all of us alone,” he said. “In the end.”

“What does that mean?” she demanded, but he’d turned to walk away. After a moment, wiping the wetness from her face with her sleeve, she followed.

When they got back to the house, she left him in the entryway while she retrieved the entire stock of throwing knives from the china cabinet that served as the house’s armory. She walked past her brother on the way from cabinet to training room, glaring at him, barely able to carry the pile. He watched her in silence.

In the training room she set up and went through her paces. Thunk. Thunk. Throwing knives were not her strongest weapon, but she needed the sense of impact, of getting to hurt something, even just a target on a backstop. As usual, the rhythm of training soothed her. Her breathing became more calm and even. The repetition grounded her: five throws, then the walk to retrieve the knives from the target and the walk back to try again. Five throws. Walk. Retrieve. Walk. Five throws.

After twenty minutes or so of this she realized that Alastair was standing in the doorway of the training room. She ignored him.

Someone else might have said that she’d gotten better since he saw her last, or asked if he could take a turn. Alastair, though, eventually cleared his throat and said, “You’re turning your left foot on the release. That’s why you’re so inconsistent.”

She glared and went back to throwing. But she paid more attention to her footwork.

After a while Alastair said, “It’s stupid to say I’m lucky. I’m not lucky.”

“You weren’t stuck here all year.”

“Oh?” Alastair sneered. “How many people came here this year to mock you? How many asked what was wrong with you that you didn’t have a private tutor? Or suggested your family was some kind of ne’er-do-wells because we’ve moved around a lot?”

Cordelia looked over at him, expecting to see vulnerability and sadness there, but Alastair’s eyes were hard, his mouth a thin line. “They treated you badly?”

Alastair let out another mirthless laugh. “For a while. I realized I had a choice. There were only two kinds of people at the Academy. The bullies and the bullied.”

“And you…?”

Alastair said tightly, “Which would you have chosen?”

“If those were my only two choices,” Cordelia said, “I would have left and come home.”

“Yes, well,” he said. “I chose the one where I wasn’t made to feel like a laughingstock.”

Cordelia was very still and silent. Alastair’s face was impassive.

“And how has that worked out?” she said, as mildly as she dared.

“Awful,” he said. “It’s awful.”

Cordelia did not know what to say or what to do. She wanted to go and throw her arms around her brother, to tell him that she loved him, but he stood rigid, with his arms crossed in front of him, and she didn’t dare. Finally she held out the knife in her hand. “Do you want to have a throw? You’re much better than I am.”

When he looked suspicious, she said, “I could use some help, Alastair. You see how careless my form is.”

Alastair came and took the knife from her. “Very careless,” he agreed. “I know swordplay comes naturally to you, but not everything will. You must slow down. Pay attention to your feet. Now, follow my gestures. That’s it, Layla. Stay with me.”

And she would.

21 BURN

My heart is bound by beauty’s spell.

My love is indestructible.

Although I like a candle burn,

And almost to a shadow turn,

I envy not the heart that’s free:

Love’s soul-encircling chains for me.

—Nizami Ganjavi, Layla and Majnun

James lay on the bed in his room, atop the covers, his arm flung behind his head. He was gazing at a familiar crack in the ceiling that was shaped a bit like a duck. His father would be horrified.

Matthew sat beside him, wearing a velvet jacket and matching trousers. James had wavered in and out of consciousness for the first two days after his visit to Belial’s realm. Sometimes he dreamed of the demon world and woke up yelling, reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there. His knives might not have been beside him, but Matthew always was.

If there was anyone in the world who understood about parabatai, it was James’s parents. On the first night of their return from Highgate, Matthew had dragged a pile of bedding into James’s room, rolled himself up in it, and gone to sleep. No one tried to make him leave—when Tessa brought soup and tea to James, she brought some for Matthew, too. When Will came and brought card games to while away the time, Matthew played as well, and usually lost.

Not that others weren’t kind as well. When Anna brought James a stylish new necktie to cheer him, she brought one for Matthew. When Lucie smuggled in midnight tarts from the kitchen, there were extras for Matthew. It was possible, as a result, that Matthew was never going home. James could hardly blame him: Charles had certainly been a pill lately. Everyone was hailing Christopher as a hero for having created the antidote to the Mandikhor poison—a tale made even more romantic by the fact that Christopher had been stricken down and healed himself. Few knew Charles almost hadn’t let Thomas use the lab to make it. The words “If it hadn’t been for Alastair Carstairs, everything would have been ruined,” had actually passed Thomas’s lips, causing James to wonder if he’d wandered back into the demon realm.

Thomas and Christopher visited every day, carrying stories of the aftermath of the sickness. None of those who had been ill remembered chanting James’s name, nor did Ariadne recall her brief possession. The quarantine had been lifted and Charlotte and Henry were returning shortly; Christopher and James were currently both heroes, which angered James greatly as, he pointed out, Cordelia had been with him in the demon realm and had it not been for her, he would have died. Lucie had also saved the day, as had Matthew. Thomas had helped retrieve the malos root from Chiswick House and had made the antidote with his own hands. Anna had taken them to the Hell Ruelle. They were all heroes, in his opinion.

It was Matthew who asked him, when they were alone, if he thought he might be missing Cordelia. She alone hadn’t come to visit him: the break in her leg was a bad one, it turned out, and would take several days to heal. Lucie had been to see her and reported her in good spirits. “I read to her from The Beautiful Cordelia and she went right to sleep,” Lucie said with delight, “so she must have been very tired.”