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

Mark buried his face in the crook of Kieran’s neck, breathing in his familiar scent: grass and sky. Perhaps this was the last grass and sky he would ever know.

The door to the cell swung open and a burst of light cut at Mark’s eyes. He felt Kieran go tense against him.

Winter, the redcap general, stood in the doorway, his shirt and cap the color of rusty old blood, his iron-soled boots clanging on the stone floor. In his hand was a long, steel-tipped pike.

“Move apart, the both of you,” he said, voice clipped. “The King will see you now.”

*

Emma flew to the front of the cell—and remembered the thorns just in time, leaping back from touching them. Julian followed with a greater hesitation.

“Oh, thank the Angel you’re here,” said Emma. “I mean, not that you’re here, in prison, that’s bad, but—” She threw up her hands. “I’m glad to see you.”

Clary chuckled wanly. “We know what you mean. I’m glad to see you, too.” Her face was smudged and dirty, her red hair tied up in a knot at the back of her head. In the light of the rune-stone, Emma could see that she looked a little thin; her dirt-stained jean jacket hung loose around her shoulders. Jace, behind her, was tall and golden as ever, his eyes bright-burning in the dimness, his chin shadowed with rough beard.

“What are you doing here?” he said, dispensing with pleasantries. “Were you in Faerie? Why?”

“We were on a mission,” said Julian.

Clary ducked her face down. “Please don’t tell me it was to find us.”

“It was to find the Black Volume of the Dead. The Inquisitor sent us.”

Jace looked incredulous. “Robert sent you here?”

Emma and Julian glanced at each other. There was an awful silence.

Jace moved closer to the thorned bars of the cage that held him and Clary. “Whatever you’re not telling us, don’t hold it back,” he said. “If something happened, you need to let us know.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, it was Julian who spoke. “Robert Lightwood is dead.”

The witchlight blinked out.

In the darkness, with her Night Vision rune useless, Emma could see nothing. She heard Jace make a muffled noise, and Clary whispering. Words of comfort, words of soothing—Emma was sure of it. She recognized herself, murmuring to Julian in the quiet of night.

The whispering stopped, and the witchlight flickered back on. Jace was holding it in one hand, his other wrapped tightly around one of the vines. Blood ran from between his fingers, down his arm. Emma imagined the thorns stabbing into his palm and winced.

“What about everyone else?” he said in a voice so tight it was barely human. “What about Alec?”

Emma moved closer to the front of the cell. “He’s fine,” she said, and filled them in as quickly as she could on what had happened, from Annabel’s murder of Robert and Livvy to Horace’s ascension as Inquisitor.

There was a silence when she was done, but at least Jace had let go of the vine.

“I’m so sorry about your sister,” Clary said softly. “I’m sorry we weren’t there.”

Julian said nothing.

“There isn’t anything you could have done,” said Emma.

“The King is close to getting the Black Volume,” said Jace. He opened and closed his bloody hand. “This is really bad news.”

“But you didn’t come here for that,” said Julian. “You came here to find Ash. He’s the weapon you’re looking for, right?”

Clary nodded. “We got a tip-off from the Spiral Labyrinth that there was a weapon in Faerie that the Unseelie King had access to, something that could nullify Shadowhunter powers.”

“We were sent here because of our angelic blood. Rumors of the ineffectiveness of Shadowhunter magic in the Courts were swirling; the Silent Brothers said we would be more resistant to the effects,” said Jace. “We don’t suffer from time slippage here, and we can use runes—or at least we could, before they took our steles away. At least we still have these.” He held up the glowing witchlight, pulsing in his hand.

“So we knew we were looking for something,” said Clary. “But not that it was my—that it was Ash.”

“How did you figure it out?” said Emma.

“We found out pretty early on that the King had kidnapped the Seelie Queen’s son,” said Jace. “It’s something of an open secret in the Courts. And then the first time Clary saw him—from a distance, we were captured before we ever got close—”

Clary moved restlessly inside the cell. “I knew who he was right away. He looks exactly like my brother.”

Emma had heard Julian and Livvy and Mark and Dru say the words “my brother” more times than she could count. It had never sounded the way it did when Clary said it: imbued with bitterness and regret.

“And now the King has the Black Volume, which means we have hardly any time,” said Jace, brushing his hand lightly across the back of Clary’s neck.

“Okay,” said Julian. “What exactly does the King plan to do with the Black Volume to make Ash a weapon?”

Jace lowered his voice, though Emma doubted anyone could hear them. “There are spells in the Black Volume that would imbue Ash with certain powers. The King did something like this once before—”

“Have you heard of the First Heir?” said Clary.

“Yes,” Emma said. “Kieran mentioned him—or at least mentioned the story.”

“It was something his brother Adaon told him.” Julian was frowning. “Kieran said his father had wanted the book since the First Heir was stolen. Maybe to raise the child from the dead? But what does that have to do with Ash?”

“It’s an old story,” said Jace. “But as you know—all the stories are true.”

“Or at least true in part.” Clary smiled up at him. Emma felt a spark of longing—even in the darkness and cold of this prison, their love was undamaged. Clary turned back to Julian and Emma. “We learned that long ago the Unseelie King and the Seelie Queen decided to unite the Courts. Part of their plan involved having a child together, a child who would be heir to both Courts. But that wasn’t enough for them—they wanted to create a faerie child so powerful that he could destroy the Nephilim.”

“Before the child was born, they used rites and spells to give the child ‘gifts,’?” said Jace. “Think Sleeping Beauty but the parents are the wicked faeries.”

“The child would be perfectly beautiful, a perfect leader, inspiring of perfect loyalty,” said Clary. “But when the child was born, she was a girl. It had never even occurred to the King that the child wouldn’t be male—being who he is, he thought the perfect leader had to be a man. The King was furious and thought that the Queen had betrayed him. The Queen, in turn, was furious that he wanted to abandon their whole plan just because the child was a girl. Then the child was kidnapped, and possibly murdered.”

“No wonder—all that stuff about the King hating daughters,” Emma mused.

“What do you mean ‘possibly’?” said Julian.

Jace said, “We weren’t able to find out what happened to that child. No one knows—the claim of the King was that she was kidnapped and murdered, but it seems likely she escaped Faerie and lived on.” He shrugged. “What’s clear is that Ash has mixed in him the blood of royal faeries, the blood of the Nephilim, and the blood of demons. The King believes he’s the perfect candidate to finish what they began with the First Heir.”

“The end of all Shadowhunters,” Julian said slowly.

“The blight the King has already brought here has been taking hold slowly,” Clary said. “But if the King is allowed to perform the spells he wants to on Ash, Ash will become a weapon even more powerful than the blight. We don’t even know everything he’ll be able to do, but he’ll have the same mixture of seraphic and infernal blood that Sebastian did.”

“He’d be demonic, but impervious to runes or angelic magic,” said Jace. “He could bear runes, but nothing demonic could hurt him. The touch of his hands could make the blight spread like wildfire.”