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

The idea that if the Unseelie King was responsible for Livvy’s and Robert’s deaths, all Downworlders were guilty, made no sense to Kit, but if he was hoping for a protest from the crowd, he was disappointed. The gathering was strangely quiet, but Kit didn’t get the sense that they were against Horace. Rather they seemed as if they felt it would be impolite to cheer. Magnus looked on with no expression at all, as if it had been wiped from his face with an eraser.

“Death serves as a reminder,” said Horace, and Kit glanced over at Julian, whose dark brown hair was blowing in the rising wind. Kit doubted this was a reminder Julian had needed. “A reminder that we have only one life and we must live it as warriors. A reminder that we have only one chance to make the correct choices. A reminder that the time is coming soon when all Shadowhunters will have to decide where they stand. Do they stand with traitors and Downworlder-lovers? Do they stand with those who would destroy our way of life and our very culture? Do they—young man, what are you doing? Get down from there!”

“Oh, by the Angel,” Diana whispered.

Ty was climbing up the side of his sister’s pyre. It didn’t look easy—the wood had been piled up for maximum-efficiency burning, not for clambering, but he was finding handholds and footholds anyway. He was already high enough off the ground that Kit felt a bolt of fear go through him at the thought of what would happen if one of the logs of wood came free and he fell.

Kit started after him without thinking, only to feel a hand close on his collar. He was jerked back by Diana. “No,” she said. “Not you.” Her face was set in grim lines.

Not you. Kit saw what she meant in a moment: Julian Blackthorn was already running, shoving past the Inquisitor—who squawked indignantly—and leaping for the pyre. He began to climb after his brother.

*

“Julian!” Emma called, but she doubted he could hear her. Everyone was shouting now—the Council guards, the mourners, the Consul and Inquisitor. Zara and her friends were hooting with laughter, pointing at Ty. He had nearly reached the top of the pyre and didn’t seem to hear anyone or anything around him: He was climbing with a dogged intensity. Julian, below him, climbing more carefully, couldn’t match his speed.

Only the Blackthorns were utterly silent. Emma tried to push forward, but Cristina held on to her wrist, shaking her head. “Don’t—it’s not safe, better not to distract Julian—”

Ty had reached the platform atop the pyre. He sat down there, perched beside his sister’s body.

Helen gave a little whimper in her throat. “Ty.”

There was no protection from the wind at the top of the pyre. Ty’s hair whipped around his face as he bent over Livvy. It looked as if he were touching her folded hands. Emma felt a wave of empathic sorrow like a punch to the gut, followed by another wave of anxiety.

Julian reached the platform beside Ty and Livvy. He knelt beside his brother. They looked like two pale chess pieces, only the color of their hair—Ty’s a little darker—differentiating them in color.

Emma felt her heartbeat in her throat. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, not to run to the pyre and climb it. Everything else but Julian and Ty seemed distant and far off, even when she heard Zara and her friends giggle that the Silent Brothers should light the pyre, should burn Ty and Julian along with Livvy if they wanted to be with her so badly.

She felt Cristina stiffen beside her. Mark was walking across the grass, toward the two pyres. Zara and her friends were muttering about him now, about his pointed ears, his faerie blood. Mark walked with his head down, determined, and Emma couldn’t stand it anymore: She broke away from Cristina and ran across the grass. If Mark was going to go after Julian and Ty, then she was too.

She caught a glimpse of Jia, beside Maryse and Jocelyn, all of them motionless, a horrified tableau. Shadowhunters didn’t do this sort of thing. They didn’t make a spectacle of their grief. They didn’t scream or rage or collapse or break down or climb to the tops of pyres.

Julian had bent and taken his brother’s face in his hands. It made for a peculiarly tender portrait, despite their location. Emma could imagine how difficult this was for him: He hated showing emotion in front of anyone he couldn’t trust, but he didn’t seem to be thinking about that; he was murmuring to Ty, their foreheads almost touching.

“The ladders,” Emma said to Mark, and he nodded without asking anything further. They pushed past a knot of onlookers and grabbed one of the heavy ladders the Silent Brothers had carried to the Field, propping it against the side of Livvy’s pyre.

“Julian,” Emma called, and she saw him glance down at her as she and Mark held the ladder steady. Somewhere Horace was shouting at them to leave it alone and for the Council guards to come and drag the boys down. But nobody moved.

Julian touched Ty once on the cheek and Ty hesitated, his arms coming up to hug himself briefly. He dropped them and followed Julian as they climbed down the ladder, Julian first. When he hit the ground he didn’t move, just looked up, poised to catch his brother if he fell.

Ty reached the ground and walked away from the pyre without stopping to catch his breath, heading across the grass toward Kit and Diana.

Someone was shouting at them to move the ladder: Mark hoisted it and carried it over to the Silent Brothers, while Emma took hold of Julian’s wrists and drew him gently away from the site of the pyres.

He looked stunned, as if he’d been hit with enough force to make him dizzy. She stopped some distance from any other people and took both his hands in hers.

No one would think anything odd of it; that was a normal sort of affection between parabatai. Still, she shivered, at the combination of touching him and the horror of the situation and the blank look on his face.

“Julian,” she said, and he winced.

“My hands,” he said, sounding surprised. “I didn’t feel it.”

She glanced down and sucked in her breath. His palms were a crazy quilt of bloody splinters from the kindling wood. Some were small dark lines against his skin, but others were bigger, snapped-off toothpicks of wood that had gone in at an angle, oozing blood.

“You need an iratze,” she said, letting go of one of his wrists and reaching to her belt for a stele. “Let me—”

“No.” He drew his other wrist free of her hold. His expression was colder than glacial ice. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.”

He walked away as Emma struggled to breathe. Ty and Mark had returned to where the Blackthorns were standing: Ty was near Kit, as he almost always was, like a magnet clicking into place.

She saw Mark reach out to take Cristina’s hand and hold it and thought: I should be holding Julian’s hands, I should be there for him, reminding him there are still things in the world worth living for.

But Julian’s hands were bloody and wounded and he didn’t want her to touch them. As his soul was torn and bloody and maybe he didn’t want anyone near that, either, but she was different, she was his parabatai, wasn’t she?

It is time. The silent voice of one of the Brothers rippled across the Fields: They all heard it—except Magnus and Max, who looked around in confusion. Emma barely had time to brace herself before the Silent Brothers touched their torches to the kindling wood at the foot of each pyre. Fire blasted upward, rippling in shades of gold and red, and for a moment it was almost beautiful.

Then the roar of the flames hit her, like the sound of a crashing wave, and the heat rolled across the grass, and Livvy’s body vanished behind a sheet of smoke.

*

Kit could barely hear the soft chant of the Nephilim over the greedy crackle of the flames: “Vale, vale, vale. Farewell, farewell, farewell.”