Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

“So once the King wanted the book for necromancy,” Cristina said. “Now he wants it so he can destroy Shadowhunters?”


“Not all necromancy is raising the dead.” Magnus was gazing at the glass of wine by his plate as if there was some kind of secret hidden in its depth. “One moment,” he said, and scooped up Rafe from the chair beside him. He turned to Tavvy. “Would you like to come with us? And play with Alexander and Max?”

After a glance at Julian, Tavvy nodded. The group of them left the room, Magnus gesturing that he would be right back.

“This is just one meeting,” said Emma. “First we need to get the Council to believe that the Unseelie Court is an immediate threat. Right now they can’t tell good faeries from bad and aren’t interesting in trying.”

“Which is where Kieran’s testimony comes in,” said Mark. “And there is some evidence—there’s the blight Diana said she saw in Brocelind Forest, and the report from the Shadowhunters who said they fought a band of faeries but their weapons malfunctioned.”

“It’s not a lot to go on,” said Livvy. “Especially considering Zara and her nasty little band of bigots. They are going to try to seize power at this meeting. They’re going to try to grab the Institute. They couldn’t care less about some vague faerie threat.”

“I can make the Clave fear my father,” said Kieran. “But it may take all of us to make them understand that if they do not wish for a new era of darkness, they must abandon their dreams of extending the Cold Peace.”

“No registering warlocks,” said Ty. “No putting werewolves into camps.”

“The Downworlders who have seats on the Council all know about the Cohort,” said Magnus, returning without the children. “If it actually comes down to a vote about who heads the Los Angeles Institute, they’ll have to bring in Maia and Lily, as well as me. We’re entitled to vote.” He threw himself down in the chair at the head of the table.

“That’s still just three votes, even if you vote against the Cohort,” said Julian.

“It’s a tricky business,” Magnus agreed. “According to Diana, Jia doesn’t want Zara heading up the Los Angeles Institute any more than we do. She’ll be hard to discredit at the moment—with her lie about killing Malcolm, she’s pretty popular right now.”

Emma made a growling noise low in her throat. Cristina patted her hand.

“Meanwhile what we have is the promise that the Queen will fight with us against a threat the Council is unlikely to believe in, and even then only if she gets a book that we don’t currently have and wouldn’t be allowed to give her if we did,” Magnus said.

“Our bargain with the Seelie Queen is our business,” said Julian. “Right now, we say that she’s shown herself willing to cooperate under the right circumstances. Kieran’s empowered to promise she’ll help. He doesn’t need to go into details.”

“Brother, you think like a faerie,” said Mark, in a tone that made Julian wonder if that was a good thing or not.

“Maybe the King wants to raise an army of the dead,” said Dru hopefully. “I mean, it is a book of necromancy.”

Magnus sighed, tapping a fingernail against his glass thoughtfully. “Necromancy is about doing magic that uses the energy of death to power it. All magic needs fuel. Death energy is incredibly powerful fuel. It’s also incredibly destructive. The destruction of the land that you saw in Faerie, the blight in Brocelind—they are the scars left by terrible magic. The question remains—what is his ultimate goal?”

“You mean he needs more energy to spread those spells,” said Julian. “The ones that Malcolm helped with, that cancel out Shadowhunter magic.”

“I mean your magic is angelic in its nature,” said Magnus. “It comes from light, from energy and life. The opposite of that is Sheol, Hell, whatever you want to call it. The absence of light and life. Of any kind of hope.” He coughed. “When the Council voted for the Cold Peace, they were voting for a time that never existed. Just as the Cohort wishes everything to return to a lost Golden Age when Shadowhunters walked the world like gods and Downworlders and mundanes bowed before them.” Everyone stared at him. This was a Magnus Bane people rarely saw, Julian thought. A Magnus whose good cheer and casual optimism had deserted him. A Magnus who was remembering the darkness of all he had seen over the centuries: the death and the loss; the same Magnus Julian had seen in the Hall of Accords when he was twelve, begging the Council in vain not to pass the Cold Peace, knowing that they would. “The King wants the same. To unite two kingdoms that have always been separate but in his mind were one land once. We must stop the King, but in a way he is only doing what the Cohort would do. What we have to hope the Clave would not do.”

“You mean,” said Julian, “this is vengeance?”

Magnus shrugged. “It is the whirlwind,” he said. “Let us hope we can stop it.”





26


WALK IN SHADOW


Emma sat on Cristina’s bed, brushing her friend’s hair. She was beginning to understand why her mother had loved brushing her hair so much when she was a little girl: There was something oddly soothing about the smooth dark locks slipping through her fingers, the repetitive motion of the brush.

It soothed the ache in her head, her chest. The one that felt not just her own pain, but Julian’s. She knew how much he hated saying good-bye to Tavvy, even if it was for Tavvy’s own good, and she felt a hollowness inside herself where Julian was parting from his smallest brother now.

Being with Cristina helped. Emma had spilled everything that happened in Cornwall while clucking over Cristina’s wrist and rubbing a mundane cream called Savlon into the red mark from the binding rune. Cristina ouched and complained that it stung, and handed Emma the hairbrush and told her to do something actually useful.

“So does anything help the binding?” said Emma. “Like if Mark came in here and lay down directly on top of you, would the pain go away?”

“Yes,” Cristina said, sounding a bit muffled.

“Well, it’s very inconsiderate of him not to, if you ask me.”

Cristina gave a little wail that sounded like “Kieran.”

“Right, Mark has to pretend he still cares about Kieran. I guess lying on top of you wouldn’t do much for that.”

“He does care about Kieran,” Cristina said. “It’s just—I think he cares about me, too.” She half-turned to look at Emma. Her eyes were big and dark and worried. “I danced with him. With Mark. And we kissed.”

“That’s good! That is good, right?”

“It was, but then Kieran came in—”

“What?”

“But he wasn’t angry, he just told Mark that he should dance better, and he danced with me. It was like dancing with fire.”

“Whoa, sexy weirdness,” said Emma. “This may be more sexy weirdness than I can handle.”

“It is not weird!”

“It is,” said Emma. “You are headed for a faerie threesome. Or some kind of war.”

“Emma!”

“Hot faerie threesome,” said Emma cheerfully. “I can say I knew you when.”

Cristina groaned. “Fine. What about you and Julian? Do you have a plan, after what happened in Cornwall?”

Emma sighed and put the hairbrush down. It was a lovely old silver-backed Victorian object. She wondered if it had been in the room when Cristina got here or if she’d found it somewhere else in the Institute. Already Cristina’s London room bore signs of her personality—pictures had been cleaned and straightened, she’d found a colorful coverlet for her bed somewhere, and her balisong hung on a new hook by the fireplace.

Emma began to braid Cristina’s hair, plaiting the thick strands between her fingers. “We don’t have a plan,” she said. “It’s always the same thing—we’re together and we feel like we’re invincible. And then we start to realize it’s still all the same choices and they’re all bad ones.”