Chain of Iron

“Freed yourself from the clutches of your parents, have you?” said Matthew, after a hesitation so brief, Cordelia wondered if she’d imagined it. “Heard about Charles?”

James mimed a whistle. “Indeed. Much to be said on that topic, but for the moment—” He turned to Cordelia. “Mrs. Herondale, would you do me the honor of dancing the first waltz with me?”

Cordelia looked at him in surprise. “But husbands aren’t supposed to—I mean, they don’t dance with their wives.”

“Well, this one does,” said James, and whirled her away across the floor.

GRACE: 1896



Jesse’s was not a clean death. He had begun screaming in the night, and Grace had rushed in, to find her brother already a grotesque horror, a tangle of linens and blood, so much blood, screaming, inhuman in his torment. Grace shouted for her mother, her cries joining Jesse’s. She knew there were healing runes, Shadowhunter magic that could help, but she didn’t know how to draw them. Besides, she had no stele.

She held her brother, his blood soaking her nightclothes, and when she let go of him he was dead. In between she had a vague awareness of Tatiana’s arrival, of her own wailing, there next to Grace. At one point her mother held a gold locket to her son’s lips, sobbing violently, for what reason Grace did not then know, though she was to find out soon enough.

Grace had wanted her mother there, but she felt only more alone. Tatiana broke down, screaming, tearing at her clothes, crying prayers and imprecations to entities unknown to Grace to save him, save her boy, and once he was gone she sat on the floor, her legs splayed like a little girl, crying to herself. She didn’t show any awareness of Grace at all.

In the days after, if Grace had hoped to find comfort in her common grieving with her mother, she was to be disappointed. In the wake of Jesse’s death, her mother vanished further into herself, and often went long periods without acknowledging Grace or reacting when she spoke. While Grace sought to understand how to go on in the face of her desolation, her mother spat imprecations about the corruption of the Shadowhunters, their determination to ruin her, her unwillingness to go quietly without a fight. She even managed to throw blame in the direction of the Herondale family, though Grace could not see any connection between them and Jesse’s death.

In truth, while some part of her would have happily clung to the idea that someone was at fault for Jesse’s death, she knew that sometimes Shadowhunters could not take runes and died in the attempt. It was terrible—unfair, meaningless—but it was true. And so Grace found no comfort in her mother’s rage.

Nor was it comforting when her mother began disappearing into the manor’s cellar and emerging with the reek of sulfur on her, muttering to herself in strange languages. When she did talk to Grace, it was mostly on the topic of the treachery and ill-intent of the Nephilim. These lectures would start and stop seemingly at random, picking up in the middle of a thought as though the days since the previous talk hadn’t passed at all, and this was all one long continuous lesson.

Grace hadn’t thought anything evil of the Shadowhunters as a whole—she had lived among them for her first years of life, after all—but Tatiana illustrated her lessons well, delving into the dark corners of Blackthorn Manor and finding all manner of gruesome history there. In a dusty chest in the cellar, a collection of Downworlder spoils—vampire teeth, a desiccated preserved werewolf paw, what seemed to be an oversize moth’s wing floating in a clear, viscous liquid. These spoils had been illegal to take for the past thirty years, Tatiana admitted, but for the nine hundred years of Shadowhunter history prior to that, they were common. A diary entry, detailing the stripping of the Marks of someone’s insubordinate youngest son. “‘They threw him into the road,’” Tatiana read aloud, “‘for the good of the family and Clave.’”

The pièce de résistance of her collection, hidden in the study at Chiswick Manor, was an aletheia crystal, a faceted stone, enchanted to preserve a person’s memories. Grace would have thought that families would use such magic to record joyful events, but this one contained a short, grisly scene in which one Annabel Blackthorn, who had lived a hundred years ago, was tortured by the Inquisitor for consorting with a Downworlder and sentenced to be exiled to the Adamant Citadel.

“These are the Nephilim,” Tatiana said, “these are the ones who seek to destroy us. These are the ones who killed our Jesse.”

She broke down then, sobbing and collapsing onto the floor, and Grace snuck away to bed once she realized her mother would demand no more of her that evening. But though Grace closed her eyes, the image of the long-ago Blackthorn girl stayed in her mind for many hours. Her helplessness. Her terror. She had made one decision for herself, Annabel, and for it she lost everything. Grace wondered, then, whether her mother had intended a somewhat different lesson than the one she’d given.

 

One night, still only days after Jesse’s death, a black carriage pulled up to the front of the manor, and Grace was ordered to open the gates. It was a muddy, rainy evening, but she did as she was told, trudging down the gravel drive and pulling the heavy iron gates open; they groaned a keening wail from long disuse. The carriage passed through, and she followed, studying it curiously. There were strange symbols carved all over its surface—not Shadowhunter runes, and nothing she recognized.

The carriage came to a stop at the front door, and when Grace caught up to it, a figure emerged. It was a man—in her memory he was very tall, but perhaps that was only because she was still a child—wearing a black cloak with a hood pulled up, shadowing his face. He spoke in a deep, gravelly voice, harsher than Grace would have expected. “Where is Tatiana Blackthorn?”

“My mother,” she said quickly. “I’ll go and find her. Whom shall I say—”

“No need,” the figure rasped. “I am expected.” He brushed past her and went into the house, turning down the first hall as though he knew the way.

Grace had thought to follow him, but once he passed by her, she found she was shivering so hard that she could not walk. She clutched her arms around her waist, trying to warm herself, her teeth chattering, and after a minute she was able to make her way back to her bedroom. There was a small fire, and she built it up as best she could, though the shiver would not leave her bones.

 

Time seemed to lose all meaning after Jesse’s death. Grace woke, and went about her business mechanically, and slept at night without dreaming. The color of the leaves changed in the gardens, and the briars grew higher. Tatiana wandered from room to shadowy room, not speaking, often staring at the broken clocks on the walls, which always showed the hour of twenty to nine.

They did not comfort each other. Grace knew herself to be alone, so alone that she was nearly not surprised when she began to hallucinate that Jesse was there. She had woken up in the depths of the night, gasping for air. And there he was, still wearing the clothes he had died in. He seemed to float just out of the range of her vision, at the other end of the room. And then all at once he was there next to her, a full, detailed apparition of her dead brother, faintly glowing, smiling just as he would when he was alive.

It was too much to bear, the cruelty of death and the cruelty of her own mind. She screamed.