Chain of Iron

“James,” said Anna, brushing dirt from the sleeves of her gear jacket. “Explain yourself.”

“Christopher made it,” Matthew said, breaking the shocked silence. “He wanted to make a runed gun that could fire. But only James can shoot it.”

“Are you sure?” Anna said. She approached James, holding out her hand. “Let me try.”

James handed the gun over. Anna pointed it at a window and pulled the trigger; everyone winced, but nothing happened. She handed it back to James with a curious look.

“Well,” she said. “That is interesting.”

James looked at Lucie. “It might work for you, as well,” he said. “I’m not the only one—you know.”

But Lucie held her hands up, shaking her head. “No. I don’t want to try, James.”

“But you ought, Luce,” said Matthew. “What if Christopher could make a second one? Think what we could do against demons with two of them. Two of you.”

“Oh, all right,” Lucie said crossly, and went toward James, taking the gun from him. As he started to show Lucie how to use it, Cordelia took the opportunity to move away from the others. There was her sword—Cortana, gleaming like lamplight among the rubble and dust. Cordelia bent to retrieve it, touching the hilt tentatively, half expecting it to burn her again.

Nothing happened. With shaking hands, she sheathed the sword. She could not help but remember the moment at the Wentworths’ when she had reached for Cortana. It had stung her palm. She had not thought about it then, but the memory was vivid now.

She glanced down at her palm. There was a red mark across it, almost in the shape of an L, where the crosspiece had burned her. Had rejected her.

But Cortana is my sword, whispered a small voice in the back of her head. It chose me.

Could a sword of Wayland the Smith change its mind?

With a shudder, Cordelia returned to the others: they were crowded around Lucie, who was shaking her head and handing the revolver back to James.

“Nothing,” Lucie said. “It doesn’t appear to be a talent we share, James. Like seeing the shadow realm.” She glanced around the factory. “Speaking of which, this place gives me the creeps. I’d rather be elsewhere, gun or not.”

No one disagreed. As they headed back out of the factory, into the grim drizzle, Cordelia could not help but hear, over and over, the last words Filomena had spoken to her. She thought she would hear them for the rest of her life.

Cordelia, you are a great heroine. Even in the realm of the dead they speak of you. You are the bearer of the blade Cortana, which can slay anything. You have spilled the blood of a Prince of Hell.

You could have saved me.

GRACE: 1897



Some time after Jesse’s death, Tatiana told Grace that she had a surprise for her, and that she would take her to Brocelind Forest to receive it. But, she added, Grace must be blindfolded for the whole trip, as she was not permitted to know where in the forest she was going, or who she was meeting there.

For some reason the excursion had to happen in the dead of night, and Grace was sorry to have to miss her appointment with Jesse that evening. He always managed to get away from Tatiana—who liked to weep over his ghost when the mood took her—long enough to spend some time reading aloud to Grace. They were halfway through Mr. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Grace found it deliciously frightening in a way that had nothing to do with the terrors of her everyday life.

The trip into the forest in the pitch dark was eerie. Grace, blindly following her mother, tripped over roots and lost her balance stepping into unexpected divots, sending unpleasant jolts up her legs. Tatiana did not hurry her, but nor did she break her stride. And when they did stop, she did not remove the blindfold, but let her daughter stand in confused silence as minutes passed.

Grace wasn’t sure if she would be in trouble if she spoke, so she kept her silence and quietly counted to herself. When she got to about two hundred, a voice spoke out of the darkness, though there had been no sound to indicate someone approaching.

“Yes,” the voice said consideringly—a man’s, with a dark, sweet timbre. “She’s just as beautiful as you said.”

There was another silence, and then her mother said, “Well, go on, then.”

“Little one,” said the voice. Grace couldn’t tell where the man was standing, how close or how far, ahead of her or to her side. His voice seemed to be everywhere at once. “I’ve come to give you a great gift. The gift your mother asked for you. Power over the minds of men. Power to cloud their thoughts. Power to influence their opinions. Power to make them feel what you wish them to feel.”

Hands were suddenly at her temples, only they were not human hands, they were burning-hot pokers. Grace started in pain and alarm. “What—”

The world turned white, and then pure black, and Grace awoke with a shriek, disoriented, in her own bed, as if from a dream of falling. Light shone through the dingy lace curtains, casting yellow stripes on the coverlet, and she was even more disoriented until she realized that she must have slept the whole night and it was now the next day.

Shakily, she emerged from bed and found her slippers. There was no way to call for her mother; their bedrooms were too far apart and the walls too thick for her mother to hear such a call. So she padded through the stone halls of the manor in her dressing gown, feeling the wet draft chill her ankles and wishing Jesse were there to talk to. But of course he wouldn’t appear until the sun set again.

“You seem to have come through all right,” her mother said, when Grace found her in the old office, studying a parchment with a magnifying lens. She looked at Grace appraisingly. “None the worse for your new gift.”

Grace wouldn’t dare argue otherwise; she only said, “What is the gift, Mama?”

“You have been given power over men,” Tatiana said. “You have the power to make them do whatever you ask, only to please you. To fall in love with you, if that is your desire.”

Grace had never given much thought to love—not that kind of love, anyway. She understood that grown-ups fell in love, and even people as young as Jesse had. (But Jesse had never been in love, and now he was dead, and never would be.) “But if I can get them to do what I want regardless,” Grace said, “why would I require them to love me?”

“I forget how little you know,” her mother said thoughtfully. “I have kept you here to protect you, and it is good that you’ve encountered so little of the wickedness that pervades the world outside this house.” She sighed. “My child, as a woman, you will be at a disadvantage in this cruel world. If you marry, your husband will own everything and you nothing. Your very name will go away, in favor of his. See how my brothers flourish, where we crouch in penury. See how the word of Will Herondale is taken as more credible than the word of Tatiana Blackthorn.”

That is not an answer. “But who was the man? The one who bestowed the gift?”

“The point is,” Tatiana said, “we must take all power that is available to us, for we are so far below others. We must take it just to have a chance to survive at all.”

“The power to … make men do as I wish,” Grace said, uncertain. “And to make them love me?”