Jem burst out laughing, and then they were around the corner and out of sight. Sophie sagged against the door frame. She did not think she had ever made Jem laugh like that; she didn’t think anyone had, except for Wil . You had to know someone very wel to make them laugh like that. She had loved him for such a long time, she thought. How was it that she did not know him at al ?
With a sigh of resignation she made ready to depart her hiding place—when the door to Miss Jessamine’s room opened, and its resident emerged. Sophie shrank bank into the dimness. Miss Jessamine was dressed in a long velvet traveling cloak that concealed most of her body, from her neck to her feet. Her hair was bound tightly behind her head, and she carried a gentleman’s hat in one hand. Sophie froze in surprise as Jessamine looked down, saw the gear at her feet, and made a face. She kicked it swiftly into the room—giving Sophie a view of her foot, which seemed to be clad in a man’s boot—and closed the door soundlessly behind her. Glancing up and down the corridor, she placed the hat on her head, dropped her chin low into the cloak, and slunk off into the shadows, leaving Sophie staring, mystified, after her.
UNJUSTIFIABLE DEATH
A las! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
A nd constancy lives in realms above;
A nd life is thorny; and youth is vain;
A nd to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel”
After breakfast the next day Charlotte instructed Tessa and Sophie to return to their rooms, dress in their newly acquired gear, and meet Jem in the training room, where they would wait for the Lightwood brothers. Jessamine had not come to breakfast, claiming a headache, and Wil , likewise, was nowhere to be found. Tessa suspected he was hiding, in an attempt to avoid being forced to be polite to Gabriel Lightwood and his brother.
She could only partly blame him.
Back in her room, picking up the gear, she felt a flutter of nerves in her stomach; it was so very much unlike anything she’d ever worn before.
Sophie was not there to help her with the new clothes. Part of the training, of course, was being able to dress and to familiarize oneself with the gear: flat-soled shoes; a loose pair of trousers made of thick black material; and a long, belted tunic that reached nearly to her knees. They were the same clothes she had seen Charlotte fight in before, and had seen il ustrated in the Codex; she had thought them strange then, but the act of actual y wearing them was even stranger. If Aunt Harriet could have seen her now, Tessa thought, she would likely have fainted.
She met Sophie at the foot of the steps that led up to the Institute’s training room. Neither she nor the other girl exchanged a word, just encouraging smiles. After a moment Tessa went first up the steps, a narrow wooden flight with banisters so old that the wood had begun to splinter.
It was strange, Tessa thought, going up a flight of stairs and not having to worry about pul ing in your skirts or tripping on the hem. Though her body was completely covered, she felt peculiarly naked in her training gear.
It helped to have Sophie with her, obviously equal y uncomfortable in her own Shadowhunter gear. When they reached the top of the stairs, Sophie swung the door open and they made their way into the training room in silence, together.
They were obviously at the top of the Institute, in a room adjacent to the attic, Tessa thought, and nearly twice the size. The floor was polished wood with various patterns drawn here and there in black ink—circles and squares, some of them numbered. Long, flexible ropes hung from great raftered beams overhead, half-invisible in the shadows. Witchlight torches burned along the wal s, interspersed with hanging weapons—maces and axes and al sorts of other deadly-looking objects.
“Ugh,” said Sophie, looking at them with a shudder. “Don’t they look too horrible by half?”
“I actual y recognize a few from the Codex,” said Tessa, pointing. “That one there’s a longsword, and there’s a rapier, and a fencing foil, and that one that looks like you’d need two hands to hold it is a claymore, I think.”
“Close,” came a voice, very disconcertingly, from above their heads. “It’s an executioner’s sword. Mostly for decapitations. You can tel because it doesn’t have a sharp point.”
Sophie gave a little yelp of surprise and backed up as one of the dangling ropes began to sway and a dark shape appeared over their heads. It was Jem, clambering down the rope with the graceful agility of a bird. He landed lightly in front of them, and smiled. “My apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
He was dressed in gear as wel , though instead of a tunic he wore a shirt that reached only to his waist. A single leather strap went across his chest, and the hilt of a sword protruded from behind one shoulder. The darkness of the gear made his skin look even paler, his hair and eyes more silver than ever.