Wil realized his hands were shaking; he tightened them into fists. “You don’t understand—”
“I know you are parabatai,” said Magnus. “I know that his death wil be a great loss for you. But what I don’t know—”
“You know what you need to know.” Wil felt cold al over, though the room was warm and he stil wore his coat. “I can pay you more, if it wil make you stop asking me questions.”
Magnus put his feet up on the divan. “Nothing wil make me stop asking you questions,” he said. “But I wil do my best to respect your reticence.”
Relief loosened Wil ’s hands. “Then, you wil stil help me.”
“I wil stil help you.” Magnus put his hands behind his head and leaned back, looking at Wil through half-lowered lids. “Though I could help you better if you told me the truth, I wil do what I can. You interest me oddly, Wil Herondale.”
Wil shrugged. “That wil do wel enough as a reason. When do you plan to try again?”
Magnus yawned. “Probably this weekend. I shal send you a message by Saturday if there are . . . developments.”
Developments. Curse. Truth. Jem. Dying. Tessa. Tessa, Tessa, Tessa. Her name rang in Wil ’s mind like the chime of a bel ; he wondered if any other name on earth had such an inescapable resonance to it. She couldn’t have been named something awful, could she, like Mildred. He couldn’t imagine lying awake at night, staring up at the ceiling while invisible voices whispered “Mildred” in his ears. But Tessa— “Thank you,” he said abruptly. He had gone from being too cold to being too warm; it was stifling in the room, stil smel ing of burned candle wax.
“I wil look forward to hearing from you, then.”
“Yes, do,” said Magnus, and he closed his eyes. Wil couldn’t tel whether he was actual y asleep or simply waiting for Wil to leave; either way, it was clearly a hint that he expected Wil to depart. Wil , not entirely without relief, took it.
Sophie was on her way to Miss Jessamine’s room, to sweep the ashes and clean the grate of the fireplace, when she heard voices in the hal . In her old place of employment she had been taught to “give room”—to turn and look at the wal s while her employers passed by, and do her best to resemble a piece of furniture, something inanimate that they could ignore.
She had been shocked on coming to the Institute to find that things were not managed that way here. First, for such a large house to have so few servants had surprised her. She had not realized at first that the Shadowhunters did much for themselves that a typical family of good breeding would find beneath them—started their own fires, did some of their own shopping, kept rooms like the training area and the weapons room cleaned and neat. She had been shocked at the familiarity with which Agatha and Thomas had treated their employers, not realizing that her fel ow servants had come from families that had served Shadowhunters through the generations—or that they’d had magic of their own.
She herself had come from a poor family, and had been cal ed “stupid” and been slapped often when she’d first begun working as a maid— because she hadn’t been used to delicate furniture or real silver, or china so thin you could see the darkness of the tea through the sides. But she had learned, and when it had become clear that she was going to be very pretty, she had been promoted to parlor maid. A parlor maid’s lot was a precarious one. She was meant to look beautiful for the household, and therefore her salary had begun to go down each year that she’d aged, once she had turned eighteen.
It had been such a relief, coming to work at the Institute—where no one minded that she was nearly twenty, or demanded that she stare at the wal s, or cared whether she spoke before she was spoken to—that she had almost thought it worth the mutilation of her pretty face at the hands of her last employer. She stil avoided looking at herself in mirrors if she could, but the dreadful horror of loss had faded. Jessamine mocked her for the long scar that disfigured her cheek, but the others seemed not to notice, save Wil , who occasional y said something unpleasant, but in an almost perfunctory way, as if it were expected of him but his heart were not in it.
But that was al before she had fal en in love with Jem.