Chain of Iron

“Where should I start?” he said.

“Let me move my hair out of the way,” she answered, reaching up to sweep the heavy mass of it over her shoulder. James made a funny sort of sound. Probably stunned by the sheer number of buttons on the dress.

“Just start at the top,” she said, “and if you need to tear the fabric a bit, it’s all right. I won’t be wearing this again.”

She had tried for a bit of humor, but he was utterly silent. She felt his hands move to brush the back of her neck. She closed her eyes. His fingers were light, gentle. He was close enough for her to feel him there, feel his breath against her skin, raising all the tiny hairs along her arms.

His fingers moved down. The dress was loosening, beginning to sag. His palm slid across her shoulder blade. She felt her eyelids flutter. She still thought she might die, but not of humiliation now.

“Daisy,” he said, and his voice was thick, almost slurred. He must be horribly embarrassed, she thought. Perhaps this might even feel like infidelity to Grace. “There’s … something else we need to discuss. The matter of the second runes.”

Oh, Raziel. The second runes … the ones a bride and groom inscribed on each other’s skin in private. Was James suggesting that since her clothes were coming off anyway, they do it now?

“James,” she said, her throat dry. “I don’t have my stele with me—”

He paused. If she hadn’t known better, she’d have said his hands were shaking. “No, not now,” he interrupted, “but we will have to mark the runes sometime. If someone were to learn that we don’t have them …”

She could feel the first rune he had given her that day, burning on her arm. “We’ll just have to try,” she said, her teeth clenched, “not to get undressed in front of other people.”

“Very funny.” His fingers were moving again, sliding down her back. “I was thinking of Risa.” She heard him draw a breath in, sharply. He must have reached the last button, for the top of the dress crumpled like a wilted flower, sagging down to her waist. She stood frozen for a moment. All she was wearing on top now was her corset, and the thin chemise under it.

There was nothing in any etiquette book to cover this. Cordelia tugged the front of the dress up, holding it against her chest. The back of the dress slipped farther down, and she realized with horror that James could likely see where her hips flared beneath the corset, curving out from her nipped-in waist.

Her gaze fixed on the Oscar Wilde books propped next to Keats on the bookshelf. She thought of The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “Each man kills the thing he loves.” Cordelia wondered if it was possible to kill the thing you loved with embarrassment.

“Please go,” James said. His voice was nearly unrecognizable. What had she done?

“I really am—awfully sorry,” she said breathlessly, and fled. She had barely made it to her own bedroom when she heard the click of his door as it shut, and locked, behind her.

LONDON: 48 CURZON STREET



Huddled in the lee of a wall, he had watched them go in—James Herondale and his red-haired bride, the bearer of Cortana. They had climbed down from their carriage in Shadowhunter gold and splendor, both of them glimmering like precious trinkets in the fading light of the winter sun.

It was nearly dark now. Yellow light sprang into life at one upper window, then another. He knew he could not wait here much longer; he was risking frostbite, or some other sort of damage. Human bodies were cruelly frail. Trinkets indeed, he thought, huddling deeper within his coat. When the time was right, they would come apart so easily in his hands—like shiny, worthless baubles. Like broken child’s toys.

6



THINGS TO COME



Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles

is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

—John Keats, Letters

James never mentioned the episode with the wedding dress, much to Cordelia’s relief. Other than making sure Risa would always be around to assist her when she dressed, Cordelia was very content to go on as if nothing had happened.

She found it easier than she would have guessed. On the day of her wedding, she had been certain a year of horrible awkwardness lay before her. But to her surprise, as the next two weeks passed, the question of awkwardness never seemed to come into it. She was not reminded of Grace; in fact, she found herself forgetting, sometimes for hours at a time, that James’s sentiments were engaged elsewhere. Being with other people was easy, even enjoyable—she and James went out, had suppers with friends and at the Institute, though they had not yet been invited to Cornwall Gardens. Magnus had not yet visited—from Anna, they learned that he and Jem had encountered problems with the books at the Cornwall Institute, and had brought them to the Spiral Labyrinth for further investigation. It was not yet certain when they’d return.

However, the Merry Thieves came over to carouse and to eat Risa’s cooking nearly every day. Will, Tessa, and Lucie visited frequently. Anna stopped by in the evenings, once ending up in a four-hour conversation with James about draperies, during which Cordelia fell asleep on the divan.

Being alone with James, Cordelia discovered to her surprise, was just as easy.

It did not happen all at once, of course. They relaxed into it: often reading together, in opposite chairs by the fire in the drawing room. Other nights, they ate dinner in the study and played games: draughts, chess, backgammon. Cordelia couldn’t play cards and James offered to teach her, but she demurred; she preferred the physicality of the board games, the way they played out like a battle, in real space.

Each night, after the game was won, the winner would ask a question. It was how Cordelia discovered that James didn’t like parsnips, that he sometimes wished he were taller (though, as she reminded him, he was a very respectable six feet), that he’d always wanted to see Constantinople. And how she told James that she was afraid of snakes even though she knew it was silly, and that she wished she could play the cello, and that she thought her best feature was her hair. (James had only smiled at this, and when she tried to make him tell her what he was thinking of, he waved it away.) The teasing and laughter after was often the best part; Cordelia had loved James as a friend before she’d ever loved him another way, and this was when she was reminded why.

She liked the way conversation would fade and slow as they both became sleepier, but neither wanted to stop talking about anything and everything. She talked about traveling the world, and what she had seen: chained Barbary apes in Marrakech, the lemon trees of Menton, the Bay of Naples after a storm, a procession of elephants at the Red Fort in Delhi. James spoke longingly of travel: how as a boy he had kept a map on his wall with pins stuck into the places he hoped to one day go. Since neither had ever been to Constantinople, they spent a night pulling books and maps off the shelves, reading accounts of travels to the city aloud, discussing the sights they’d want to see—the minarets of mosques illuminated at night, St. Sophia, the ancient port, the city divided by its river. James lay on the rug with his arms crossed behind his head as Cordelia read aloud from an old travel memoir: “The Queen of Cities was before me, throned on her peopled hills, with the silver Bosphorus, garlanded with palaces, flowing at her feet.”