CITY OF GLASS

I love you, Clary wanted to say. And, I would do it again. I would always ask for you. But those weren’t the words she said.

“You’re not my brother,” she told him, a little breathlessly, as if, having realized she hadn’t yet said them, she couldn’t get the words out of her mouth fast enough. “You know that, right?”

Very slightly, through the grime and blood, Jace grinned. “Yes,” he said. “I know that.”





EPILOGUE


I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands

and wrote my will across the sky in stars.

—T. E. Lawrence





ACROSS THE SKY IN STARS


THE SMOKE ROSE IN A LAZY SPIRAL, TRACING DELICATE LINES of black across the clear air. Jace, alone on the hill overlooking the cemetery, sat with his elbows on his knees and watched the smoke drift heavenward. The irony wasn’t lost on him: These were his father’s remains, after all.

He could see the bier from where he was sitting, obscured by smoke and flame, and the small group standing around it. He recognized Jocelyn’s bright hair from here, and Luke standing beside her, his hand on her back. Jocelyn had her head turned aside, away from the burning pyre.

Jace could have been one of that group, had he wanted to be. He’d spent the last couple of days in the infirmary, and they’d only let him out this morning, partly so that he could attend Valentine’s funeral. But he’d gotten halfway to the pyre, a stacked pile of stripped wood, white as bones, and realized he could go no farther. He’d turned and walked up the hill instead, away from the mourners’ procession. Luke had called after him, but Jace hadn’t turned.

He’d sat and watched them gather around the bier, watched Patrick Penhallow in his parchment white gear set the flame to the wood. It was the second time that week he’d watched a body burn, but Max’s had been heartbreakingly small, and Valentine was a big man—even flat on his back with his arms crossed over his chest, a seraph blade gripped in his fist. His eyes were bound with white silk, as was the custom. They had done well by him, Jace thought, despite everything.

They hadn’t buried Sebastian. A group of Shadowhunters had gone back to the valley, but they hadn’t found his body—washed away by the river, they’d told Jace, though he had his doubts.

He had looked for Clary in the crowd around the bier, but she wasn’t there. It had been more than two days now since he’d seen her last, at the lake, and he missed her with an almost physical sense of something lacking. It wasn’t her fault they hadn’t seen each other. She’d been worried he wasn’t strong enough to Portal back to Alicante from the lake that night, and she’d turned out to be right. By the time the first Shadowhunters had reached them, he’d been drifting into a dizzy unconsciousness. He’d woken up the next day in the city hospital with Magnus Bane staring down at him with an odd expression—it could have been deep concern or merely curiosity; it was hard to tell with Magnus. Magnus told him that though the Angel had healed Jace physically, it seemed that his spirit and mind had been exhausted to the point that only rest could heal them. In any event, he felt better now. Just in time for the funeral.

A wind had come up and was blowing the smoke away from him. In the distance he could see the glimmering towers of Alicante, their former glory restored. He wasn’t totally sure what he hoped to accomplish by sitting here and watching his father’s body burn, or what he would say if he were down there among the mourners, speaking their last words to Valentine. You were never really my father, he might say, or You were the only father I ever knew. Both statements were equally true, no matter how contradictory.

When he’d first opened his eyes at the lake—knowing, somehow, that he’d been dead, and now wasn’t—all Jace could think about was Clary, lying a little distance away from him on the bloody sand, her eyes closed. He’d scrambled to her in a near panic, thinking she might be hurt, or even dead—and when she’d opened her eyes, all he’d been able to think about then was that she wasn’t. Not until there were others there, helping him to his feet, exclaiming over the scene in amazement, did he see Valentine’s body lying crumpled near the lake’s edge and feel the force of it like a punch in the stomach. He’d known Valentine was dead—would have killed him himself—but still, somehow, the sight was painful. Clary had looked at Jace with sad eyes, and he’d known that even though she’d hated Valentine and had never had any reason not to, she still felt Jace’s loss.

He half-closed his eyes and a flood of images washed across the backs of his eyelids: Valentine picking him up off the grass in a sweeping hug; Valentine holding him steady in the prow of a boat on a lake, showing him how to balance. And other, darker memories: Valentine’s hand cracking across the side of his face, a dead falcon, the angel shackled in the Waylands’ cellar.