Chain of Iron
Oh, Daisy, Lucie thought. If only it were that easy. She thought of Grace—her bluntness, her maddening secrecy—and knew that Cordelia would not understand Lucie’s decision to work with her. “I can’t,” she said. “It is not my secret to tell.”
After a moment Cordelia withdrew her hand. “I trust you,” she said, but her voice sounded a bit … small. “I hope you can tell me sometime soon, but I understand you’re trying to protect someone. I won’t push any further. Now, let’s get back to the others, shall we?”
Surely I could have managed that better, Lucie thought, as they rejoined their companions. James and Matthew were speaking to a gentry faerie wearing a fur cap in the Russian style, the flaps covering his ears. He was shaking his head: no, he didn’t know anyone buying or selling adamas. As the girls started toward them, a pixie brushed by Lucie’s ear and whispered, “Malcolm Fade wishes to see you. Find him in the blue tent.”
Startled, Lucie stopped in the middle of the aisle, causing a collision with a selkie loaded down with shopping bags. “Watch where you’re going, Shadowhunter!” the creature hissed, making a gesture with her flipper-like hand. It was a rude gesture, to be sure, but it also clearly indicated a stall in the distance—one draped with swaths of cheap blue velvet.
“Luce, are you all right?” Cordelia asked.
“Yes … I just remembered something. Something I need to tell Christopher. I’m just going to find him—I’ll be right back.”
“Lucie—wait!”
But Lucie had darted away before Cordelia could stop her—or before James caught sight of her; he’d made his position clear on wandering off alone. Pushing through the crowd until it swallowed her, Lucie bit her lip, guilt and regret weighing like a stone in her chest. Keeping secrets from James, hiding from Daisy—she hated every bit of it. But Malcolm Fade might be Jesse’s only chance. Glancing behind her once to make sure she was out of sight of her friends, she slipped inside the blue tent.
“Well, that was a waste of time,” Matthew said, giving the side of the stall they had just left a lingering kick.
“Nonsense,” said James. “No time spent playing bridge whist with Welsh slate-mine goblins can be truly said to have been wasted. Besides, if I ever want to buy a werewolf-hair rug, I will know exactly where to come.”
The truth was that he was just as discouraged as Matthew. They’d spoken to dozens of vendors and turned up nothing useful yet, but as his parabatai seemed nervous and unhappy tonight, James was treating him with kid gloves. Earlier, James had left Matthew alone for a moment to read a sign directing customers toward UNTOLD MIRACLES OF NATURE, PRESERVED IN THE MOST LIFELIKE MANNER, only to turn back around to see Matthew swiping a bottle of wine from behind the counter of a Sighted mundane who was showing a bottle of horn polish to a faerie customer. By the time James caught back up with him, Matthew had stowed the entire bottle in his coat.
Matthew obviously did not want to be here. He seemed brightly, cheerfully miserable, alternating between chatter and silence. He was drunk already, having emptied his flask and started in on the wine bottle. It was puzzling; James had always wondered why Matthew didn’t seem to care to visit the Market. The Market-goers were a motley and disreputable lot, but Matthew enjoyed nothing more than the company of the motley and the disreputable, in James’s experience at least. Perhaps he was simply worried about Thomas? Especially since Thomas was locked in a room with Alastair Carstairs; James felt Thomas could fend for himself, but he didn’t dislike Alastair as much as Matthew did.
James stopped to consult the directory once again. It had begun to snow—thick flakes drifted down as Matthew wandered over to a display of potions that promised to attract unicorns, whether you were “virginal” or not. He was examining them when Cordelia appeared, white crystals of snow caught like delicate flowers in her red hair.
It reminded James of their wedding day. He leaned back against the post to which the directory had been nailed, heedless of the snow that tumbled lightly down the back of his collar. He had been trying not to think of the night before—it felt far away and so close, all at the same time. He had been in Hell, thinking of Belial, and yet in the middle of it all there had been that space with Cordelia—a space of quiet and tumult, utterly intense yet somehow peaceful. The memory of her perfume, smoke and jasmine, heated his blood, making the cold of the snow a relief.
Through the white fall of it, he saw Cordelia go up to Matthew. He wasn’t sure whether they could see him: he was likely a shadow among shadows, half-concealed by snow.
Cordelia laid her hand over Matthew’s and leaned in to say something to him. The sight sent a jolt through James, as if his hand had brushed a live wire. He supposed Matthew had taken her for a drive the day before to cheer her up—and many times, when James had been getting the Curzon Street house prepared, Matthew had gone around to keep Cordelia company—but he had not thought Cordelia and Matthew were such good friends as to have secrets. Yet everything in the way they leaned into each other bespoke confidences.
Cordelia stroked Matthew’s hand gently and walked away; James could hear her inquiring about the adamas from a satyr manning a stall that sold faerie fruit. A snowy owl perched atop a bowl of white peaches hooted gently at her, and she smiled.
Pulling the wine bottle out of his coat, Matthew trod a meandering path toward James, squinting at him through the snow. “So it is you,” he said, as he drew closer. “If you keep standing about letting the snow fall on you, you’ll wind up as the ice sculpture at the Wentworths’ next party.”
“Seems a relaxing existence,” James said, still looking at Cordelia. “Where’s Lucie? Weren’t she and Cordelia together?”
“Went off to find Christopher, apparently,” said Matthew. “No explanation why. Maybe she remembered something.”
“She’s been acting peculiar lately,” said James. “Grace even asked me about her—”
He broke off, but it was too late. Matthew’s eyes, which usually grew wider and more liquid green as he drank, had narrowed. “When did you see Grace?”
James knew he could say at the Wentworths’ party and put an end to the questioning. But it would feel like lying to Matthew. “Yesterday. When you and Daisy were out driving.”
Matthew stared. There was something alarming in his total stillness—despite his tousled hair, his bright waistcoat, the bottle in his hand.
“She came to Curzon Street,” said James. “She—”
But Matthew had caught hold of his arm with a surprising strength and was steering James through a gap between two stalls. They found themselves in an alley—barely an alley, really: more a narrow space between the wooden side of a stall and the brick wall of a railway arch.
Only when James’s back hit the brick wall did he realize Matthew had shoved him. It hadn’t been a hard shove, especially one-handed— Matthew was still gripping the neck of his wine bottle with a white-knuckled hand. But the gesture alone was enough to startle James into an exclamation of annoyance: “Math, what are you doing?”
“What are you doing?” Matthew demanded. The air was full of the thick smell of incense, and glassy bubbles floated past them, illuminating the space in star-bright shades of emerald, ruby, and sapphire. Matthew pushed one away impatiently. “Having Grace to your house while your wife is away mourning the death of her father is hardly in the spirit of the agreement you have with Daisy.”