Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices #3)

Aline stomped back into the room. She had quite a stomp for a woman who was built along delicate lines. “Also, what is this?” she demanded, holding up the Mortal Sword.

Tavvy made a delighted noise. “I know that one! It’s the Mortal Sword!”

“No, the Mortal Sword is broken,” Dru said. “That’s got to be something else.” She frowned. “What is it, Jules?”

“It’s the Mortal Sword,” Julian said. “But we have to keep its existence here an absolute secret.”

Another hubbub broke out. Someone pounded on the door; it turned out Kit and Ty were in the corridor. They’d been downstairs with Kieran, Alec, and Magnus and had just found out Emma was awake. Cristina scolded everyone in Spanish for making noise, and Jace wanted to hold the Mortal Sword, and Julian indicated to Mark that he could stand on his own, and Aline stuck her head into the hallway to say something to Ty and Kit, and Emma looked at Julian, who was looking directly back at her.

“All right, stop,” Emma said, throwing her hands up. “Give me and Julian a second alone to talk. Then we’ll tell you everything.” She frowned. “But not in my bedroom. It’s crowded and giving me privacy issues.”

“The library,” Clary said. “I’ll help set it up, and get you some food. You must be starving, even though we gave you a few of these.” She tapped the Nourishment rune on Emma’s arm. “Okay, come on, clear the room. . . .”

“Give Ty a hug for me,” Emma said to Tavvy as he hopped down. He looked dubious about the transference of hugs, but filed out with everyone else.

And then the room was quiet and empty except for Emma and Julian. She slid out of bed, and this time she managed to stand without dizziness. She felt the slight twinge of her rune and thought: It’s because Julian’s here, I’m drawing strength from him.

“Do you feel it?” she said, touching her left bicep. “The parabatai rune?”

“I don’t feel much,” he said, and Emma’s heart sank. She’d known it, really, from the moment he’d walked in, but she hadn’t realized how much hope she still had hanging on the idea that somehow, the spell might have been broken.

“Turn around,” she said dully. “I have to get dressed.”

Julian raised his eyebrows. “I have seen it all before, you know.”

“Which does not entitle you to further viewing privileges,” said Emma. “Turn. Around.”

Julian turned around. Emma fished into her closet for the least Thule-esque clothes she had and eventually fished out a flowered dress and vintage sandals. She changed, watching Julian as he watched the wall.

“So just to be clear, the spell is back,” she said once the dress was on. Quietly, she picked up the vest she’d worn in Thule, took Livvy’s letter, and transferred it to the pocket of her dress.

“Yes,” he said, and she felt the word like a needle in her heart. “I had some dreams, dreams with emotions in them, but by the time I woke up . . . they faded. I know that I felt, even how I felt, but I can’t feel it. It’s like knowing I had a wound, but I can’t remember what the pain was like.”

Emma kicked her feet into her sandals and twisted her hair up into a knot. She suspected she probably looked pallid and horrible, but did it matter? Julian was the only person she wanted to impress, and he didn’t care.

“Turn around,” she said, and he turned. He looked grimmer than she would have thought, as if the spell being unbroken was bitter to him, too. “So what are you going to do?”

“Come here,” he said, and she came close to him with a little reluctance as he began to unwind the bandages on his arm. It was hard not to remember the way he’d spoken to her in Thule, the way he’d placed each bit of himself, his hope and yearning and desire and fear, in her hands.

I’m not myself without you, Emma. Once you dissolve dye in water, you can’t take it back out. It’s like that. I can’t take you out of me. It means cutting out my heart, and I don’t like myself without my heart.

The bandages came free and he extended his forearm to her. She sucked in her breath. “Who did this?” she demanded.

“I did,” he said. “Before we left Thule.”

Across the skin of his inner arm, he had cut words: words that had healed now, into red-black scars.

YOU ARE IN THE CAGE.

“Do you know what this means?” he said. “Why I did this?”

Her heart felt like it was breaking into a thousand pieces. “I do,” she said. “Do you?”

Someone knocked on the door; Julian jumped back and began hurriedly rewrapping his arm.

“What’s up?” Emma called. “We’re almost ready.”

“I just wanted to tell you to come down,” Mark said. “We are all eager to hear your story, and I’ve made my famous doughnut sandwiches.”

“I’m not sure ‘Tavvy likes them’ is exactly what most people mean when they say ‘famous,’?” Emma said.

Julian, her Julian, would have laughed. This Julian just said, “We’d better go,” and walked past her to the door.

*

At first Cristina thought Kieran’s hair had turned white from shock or annoyance. It took a few minutes for her to realize it was powdered sugar.

They were in the kitchen, helping Mark as he put together plates of apples and cheese and “doughnut sandwiches”—truly horrible concoctions involving doughnuts cut in half and filled with peanut butter, honey, and jelly.

Kieran liked the honey, though. He licked some off his fingers and started to peel an apple with a small, sharp knife.

“Guácala.” Cristina laughed. “Gross! Wash your hands after you lick them.”

“We never washed our hands in the Hunt,” said Kieran, sucking honey from his finger in a way that made Cristina’s stomach feel fluttery.

“That’s true. We didn’t,” Mark agreed, slicing a doughnut in half and sending up another cloud of powdered sugar.

“That is because you lived like savages,” said Cristina. “Go wash your hands!” She steered Kieran to the sink, whose taps still confused him, and went over to dust sugar off the back of Mark’s shirt.

He turned to smile at her, and her stomach flipped again. Feeling very odd, she left Mark and went back to cutting cheese into small cubes as Kieran and Mark squabbled fondly about whether or not it was disgusting to eat sugar directly out of the box.

There was something about being with both of them that was sweetly, calmly domestic in a way she hadn’t felt since she’d left home. Which was odd, because there was nothing ordinary at all about either Mark or Kieran and nothing normal about how she felt about the two of them.

She had, in fact, hardly seen either of them since they’d returned from Faerie. She’d spent her time in Emma’s room, worried that Emma would wake up and she wouldn’t be there. She’d slept on a mattress next to the bed, though she hadn’t slept all that much; Emma had tossed restlessly night and day and called out over and over: for Livvy, for Dru and Ty and Mark, for her parents, and most often, for Julian.

That was another reason Cristina wanted to be in the room with Emma, one she had not admitted to anyone. In her incoherent state, Emma was calling out to Julian that she loved him, for him to come and hold her. Any of those statements might be written off as the love felt between parabatai—but then again, they might not be. As a keeper of Emma and Julian’s secret, Cristina felt she owed it to them both to protect Emma’s unconscious confidences.

She knew Mark felt the same: He’d been with Julian, though he reported that Julian cried out much less. It was one of the few things Mark had said to her since they’d gotten back from Faerie. She’d been avoiding both Mark and Kieran deliberately—Diego and Jaime were in prison, the Consul was under house arrest, the Dearborns were still in power, and Emma and Julian were unconscious; she was far too frayed to deal with her mess of a love life at the moment.

She hadn’t realized till this moment quite how much she’d missed them.