The Lost Herondale

“Lazlo Balogh knows only the version of this story as it’s been handed down to him by generations of Shadowhunters. Tobias is no longer a person to them, or an ancestor. He’s nothing but a cautionary tale. There are few of us left to remember him as the kind boy he once was.”


“How did you know him so well?” Simon asked. “I thought back then, warlocks and Shadowhunters weren’t exactly . . . you know. On speaking terms.” Actually, Simon had thought it was more like killing terms; from what he’d learned from the Codex and his history classes, the Shadowhunters of the past had gone after warlocks and other Downworlders the way big-game hunters went after elephants. Sportingly and with bloodthirsty abandon.

“That’s a different story,” Catarina chided him. “I’m not telling you my story, I’m telling you Tobias’s. Suffice it to say, he was a kind boy, even to Downworlders, and his kindness was remembered. What you know, what all Shadowhunters today think they know, is that Tobias was a coward who abandoned his fellows in the heat of battle. The truth is never so simple, is it? Tobias hadn’t wanted to leave behind his wife when she was ill and pregnant, but he went anyway, doing as he was told. Deep in those Bavarian woods, he encountered a warlock who knew his greatest fear, and used it against him. He found the chink in Tobias’s armor, found a way into his mind by convincing him his wife was in terrible danger. He showed him a vision of Eva, bloody and dying and screaming for Tobias to save her. Tobias was held spellbound and stricken, and the warlock hurled vision after vision of all the horrors in the world Tobias could not bear. Yes, Tobias ran away. His mind broke. He abandoned his fellows and fled into the woods, blinded and tormented by waking nightmares. Like all Herondales, his ability to love without measure, without end, was both his great gift and his great curse. When he thought Eva was dead, he shattered. I know who I blame for the destruction of Tobias Herondale.”

“They can’t have known he was driven mad!” Simon protested. “No one could punish him for that!”

“They did know,” Catarina told him. “That didn’t matter. What mattered was his treason against his duty. Eva was never in danger, of course—at least, not until Tobias abandoned his post. That was the last cruel irony of Tobias’s life: that he doomed the woman he would have died to save. The warlock had shown him a glimpse of the future, a future that would never have come to pass if Tobias had been able to resist him. He could not resist. He could not be found. The Clave came for Eva.”

“You were there,” Simon guessed.

“I was,” she agreed.

“And you didn’t try to stop them?”

“I did not waste my time trying, no. The Nephilim do not pay heed to interfering Downworlders. Only a fool would try to get between the Shadowhunters and their Law.”

There was something about the way she said it, wry and sorrowful at the same time, that made him ask, “You’re a fool, aren’t you?”

She smiled. “It’s dangerous to call a warlock names like that, Simon. But . . . yes. I tried. I looked for Tobias Herondale, using ways the Nephilim do not have access to, and found him wandering mad in the forest, not even knowing his own name.” She lowered her head. “I couldn’t save him or Eva. But I saved the baby. I managed that much.”

“But how? Where—?”

“I used a certain amount of magic and cunning to make my way into the prison of the Shadowhunters, where you were held once,” said Catarina, nodding to him. “I made the baby come early, and cast a spell to make it seem as if she was still carrying the child. Eva was steel that night, relentless and bright in the darkness that had come upon her. She did not falter and she did not flinch and she did not betray herself by any sign as she walked to meet her death. She kept our secret to the very end, and the Shadowhunters who killed her never suspected a thing. After that, it was almost easy. The Nephilim seldom have any interest in the doings of Downworlders—and Downworlders often find their blindness very convenient. They never noticed when I sailed away to the New World with a baby. I stayed there for twenty years, before I went back to my people and my work, and raised the child until he was grown. He has been dust for years, but I can close my eyes and see his face when he was as young as you are now. Tobias and Eva’s child. He was a sweet boy, kind as his father and fierce as his mother. The Nephilim believe in living by hard laws and paying high prices, but their arrogance means they do not fully understand the cost of what they do. The world would have been poorer without that boy in it. He had a mundane love, and a mundane life filled with small acts of grace, which would have meant very little to a Shadowhunter. They did not deserve him. I left him as a gift to the mundane world.”