CITY OF GLASS

“I don’t think Jace has left the Penhallows’ since they got here. He mostly seems to be skulking in his room. He hurt his hand pretty badly yesterday too—”

“Hurt his hand? How?” Clary, forgetting to look where she was going, stumbled over a rock. The road they’d been walking on had somehow turned from cobblestones to gravel without her noticing. “Ouch.”

“We’re here,” Sebastian announced, stopping in front of a high wood-and-wire fence. There were no houses around—they had rather abruptly left the residential district behind, and there was only this fence on one side and a gravelly slope leading away toward the forest on the other.

There was a door in the fence, but it was padlocked. From his pocket Sebastian produced a heavy steel key and opened the gate. “I’ll be right back with our ride.” He swung the gate shut behind him. Clary put her eye to the slats. Through the gaps she could glimpse what looked like a low-slung red clapboard house. Though it didn’t appear to really have a door—or proper windows—

The gate opened, and Sebastian reappeared, grinning from ear to ear. He held a lead in one hand: Pacing docilely behind him was a huge gray and white horse with a blaze like a star on his forehead.

“A horse? You have a horse?” Clary stared in amazement. “Who has a horse?”

Sebastian stroked the horse fondly on the shoulder. “A lot of Shadowhunter families keep a horse in the stables here in Alicante. If you’ve noticed, there are no cars in Idris. They don’t work well with all these wards around.” He patted the pale leather of the horse’s saddle, emblazoned with a crest of arms that depicted a water serpent rising out of a lake in a series of coils. The name Verlac was written beneath in delicate script. “Come on up.”

Clary backed up. “I’ve never ridden a horse before.”

“I’ll be riding Wayfarer,” Sebastian reassured her. “You’ll just be sitting in front of me.”

The horse grunted softly. He had huge teeth, Clary noticed uneasily; each one the size of a PEZ dispenser. She imagined those teeth sinking into her leg and thought of all the girls she’d known in middle school who’d wanted ponies of their own. She wondered if they were insane.

Be brave, she told herself. It’s what your mother would do.

She took a deep breath. “All right. Let’s go.”

Clary’s resolution to be brave lasted as long as it took for Sebastian—after helping her into the saddle—to swing himself up onto the horse behind her and dig in his heels. Wayfarer took off like a shot, pounding over the graveled road with a force that sent jolting shocks up her spine. She clutched at the bit of the saddle that stuck up in front of her, her nails digging into it hard enough to leave marks in the leather.

The road they were on narrowed as they headed out of town, and now there were banks of thick trees on either side of them, walls of green that blocked any wider view. Sebastian drew back on the reins, and the horse ceased his frantic galloping, Clary’s heartbeat slowing along with his pace. As her panic receded, she became slowly conscious of Sebastian behind her—he was holding the reins on either side of her, his arms making a sort of cage around her that kept her from feeling like she was about to slide off the horse. She was suddenly very aware, not just of the hard strength in the arms that held her, but that she was leaning back against his chest and that he smelled of, for some reason, black pepper. Not in a bad way—it was spicy and pleasant, very different from Jace’s smell of soap and sunlight. Not that sunlight had a smell, really, but if it did—

She gritted her teeth. She was here with Sebastian, on her way to see a powerful warlock, and mentally she was maundering on about the way Jace smelled. She forced herself to look around. The green banks of trees were thinning out and now she could see a sweep of marbled countryside to either side. It was beautiful in a stark sort of way: a carpet of green broken up here and there by a scar of gray stone road or a crag of black rock rising up out of the grass. Clusters of delicate white flowers, the same ones she’d seen in the necropolis with Luke, starred the hills like occasional snowfall.

“How did you find out where Ragnor Fell is?” she asked as Sebastian skillfully guided the horse around a rut in the road.

“My aunt élodie. She’s got quite a network of informants. She knows everything that’s going on in Idris, even though she never comes here herself. She hates to leave the Institute.”

“What about you? Do you come to Idris much?”

“Not really. The last time I was here I was about five years old. I haven’t seen my aunt and uncle since then either, so I’m glad to be here now. It gives me a chance to catch up. Besides, I miss Idris when I’m not here. There’s nowhere else like it. It’s in the earth of the place. You’ll start to feel it, and then you’ll miss it when you’re not here.”