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

Kieran strode toward the door, where he paused and turned to her. “I have known how Cristina loves you, and I understand why. If you had been born a faerie, you would be a great knight of the Court. You are one of the bravest people I have ever known.”

Emma stammered a thank-you, but Kieran was already gone, like a shadow melting into the forest. She stared after him, realizing what it was she’d heard earlier in the way he said Cristina’s name, as if it were a torment that he adored: She had never heard him speak any name but Mark’s that way before.

*

“Is there anything you want to talk to me about?” Magnus asked as Julian prepared to leave the library.

He’d thought Magnus was asleep—he was leaning back on his couch, his eyes closed. There were deep shadows beneath them, the kind that came from multiple sleepless nights.

“No.” Julian tensed all over. He thought of the words cut onto the skin of his arm. He knew if he showed them to Magnus, the warlock would want to take the spell off him immediately, and Magnus was too weak for that. The effort might kill him.

He also knew his reaction to the thought of Magnus dying was off-kilter and wrong. It was dulled down, flattened. He didn’t want Magnus to die, but he knew he should feel more than not wanting, just as he should have felt more than flat relief at being reunited with his siblings.

And he knew he should feel more when he saw Emma. It was as if a white space of nothingness had been cut out all around her and when he stepped into it, everything went blank. It was difficult to even speak. It was worse than it had been before, he thought. Somehow, his emotions were even more damped down than they had been before Thule.

He felt despair, but it was dull and distant too. It made him want to grip the blade of a knife just to feel anything at all.

“I suppose you wouldn’t,” Magnus said. “Given that you probably don’t feel much.” His cat eyes glittered. “I shouldn’t have put that spell on you. I regret it.”

“Don’t,” Julian said, and he wasn’t sure if he meant don’t say that to me or don’t regret it. His emotions were too distant for him to reach. He did know he wanted to stop talking to Magnus now, and he went out into the corridor, tense and breathless.

“Jules!” He turned around and saw Ty, coming toward him along the hallway. The distant part of himself said Ty looked—different. His mind scrambled for the words “bruised/hurt/fragile” and couldn’t hold them. “Can I talk to you?”

Askew, he thought. He looks atypical for Ty. He stopped trying to find words and followed Ty into one of the vacant bedrooms along the hall, where Ty closed the door behind them, turned around, and threw his arms around Julian without a word of warning.

It was awful.

Not because being hugged by Ty was awful. It was nice, as much as Julian could sense that it was nice: His brain said this is your blood, your family, and his arms went up automatically to hug Ty back. His brother was fragile in his arms, all soft hair and sharp bones, as if he were made out of seashells and dandelion fluff and strung together with fine silk thread.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Ty said in a muffled voice. He’d pressed his head against Julian’s shoulder, and his headphones had tilted sideways. Ty reached up automatically to right them. “I was afraid we’d never all be back together again.”

“But we are back together,” Julian said.

Ty leaned back a little, his hands gripping the front of Julian’s jacket. “I want you to know I’m sorry,” he said, in the rushed tones of someone who had practiced a speech for a long time. “At Livvy’s funeral I climbed the pyre and you cut up your hands coming after me, and I thought maybe you left because you didn’t want to deal with me.”

Something in Julian’s head was screaming. Screaming that he loved his little brother more than he loved almost anything else on earth. Screaming that Ty rarely reached out like this, rarely initiated physical contact with Julian like this. A Julian who felt very far away was scrambling desperately, wanting to react correctly, wanting to give Ty what he needed so he could recover from Livvy’s death and not be wrecked or lost.

But it was like pounding on soundproofed glass. The Julian he was now couldn’t hear. The silence of his heart was almost as profound as the silence he felt around Emma.

“That’s not it,” he said. “I mean, that wasn’t it. We left because of the Inquisitor.” Distant Julian was bruising his hands slamming them against the glass. This Julian struggled for words and said, “It’s not your fault.”

“Okay,” Ty said. “I have a plan. A plan to fix everything.”

“Good,” Julian said, and Ty looked surprised, but he didn’t see it. He was scrambling to hold on, to try to find the right words, the feeling words to say to Ty, who had thought Julian had gone away because he was angry. “I’m sure you have a great plan. I trust you.”

He let go of Ty and turned toward the door. Better to be done than to risk saying the wrong thing. He would be all right as soon as the spell was off him. He could talk to Ty then.

“Jules . . . ?” Ty said. He stood uncertainly by the arm of the sofa, fiddling with the cord of his headphones. “Do you want to know . . . ?”

“It’s great that you’re doing better, Ty,” Julian said, not looking at Ty’s face, his eloquently moving hands.

It was only a few seconds, but by the time Julian made it out into the hallway he was breathing as hard as if he had escaped from a monster.





23


THAT WINDS MAY BE


Diego was starting to be seriously worried about Jaime.

It was hard to tell how many days the brothers had been in the Gard’s prisons. They could hear only murmurs from the other cells: The thick stone walls muffled noise deliberately to prevent communication among the prisoners. They hadn’t seen Zara again either. The only people who came to their cell were the guards who brought occasional meals.

Sometimes Diego would beg the guards—dressed in the dark blue and gold of Gard Watchmen—to bring him a stele or medicine for his brother, but they always ignored him. He thought bitterly that it was exactly Dearborn’s kind of clever to make sure the Watchmen who worked in the Gard were suborned to the Cohort’s cause.

Jaime moved restlessly on the pile of clothes and straw Diego had managed to cobble together as a bed. He’d donated his own sweater and sat shivering in his light undershirt. Still, he wished there was more he could do. Jaime was flushed, his skin tight-looking and shiny with fever.

“I swear I saw her last night,” he murmured.

“Who?” said Diego. He sat with his back to the cold stone wall, close enough to touch his brother if Jaime needed him. “Zara?”

Jaime’s eyes were closed. “The Consul. She was wearing her robes. She looked at me and she shook her head. Like she thought I shouldn’t be in here.”

You shouldn’t. You’re barely seventeen. Diego had done what he could to clean Jaime up after Zara had dumped him in the cell. Most of his wounds were shallow cuts, and he had two broken fingers—but there was one deep, dangerous wound in his shoulder. Over the past days, it had puffed up and turned red. Diego felt impotently rageful—Shadowhunters didn’t die of infections. They were healed by iratzes or they died in battle, in a blaze of glory. Not like this, of fever, on a bed of rags and straw.

Jaime smiled his crooked smile. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he said. “You got the worse end of the deal. I got to run all over the world with the Eternidad. You had to romance Zara.”

“Jaime—”

Jaime wheezed a cough. “I hope you pulled out one of your famous Diego Rosales moves, like winning her a big stuffed animal at a carnival.”

“Jaime, we must be serious.”

Jaime’s wide dark eyes opened. “My dying wish is that we not be serious.”

Diego sat up angrily. “You are not dying! And we need to talk about Cristina.”