Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

She hung back, waiting to hear Gwyn call her name. Why were there only five horses, not six? She got her answer when Mark swung himself up onto Windspear and reached down to pull Kieran up after him. The elf-bolt around Mark’s throat gleamed in the multicolored starlight.

Nene came up to Windspear then, and reached for Mark’s hands, ignoring Kieran. Emma couldn’t hear what she was whispering to him, but there was deep pain on her face; Mark’s fingers clung to hers for a moment before he released them. Nene turned and went back into the hill.

Silent, Kieran settled himself into place behind Mark, but he didn’t touch the other boy.

Mark half-turned in his seat. “Are you worried?” he asked Kieran.

Kieran shook his head. “No,” he said. “Because I am with you.”

Mark’s face tightened. “Yes,” he said. “You are.”

Beside Emma, the Queen laughed softly. “So many lies in just three words,” she said. “And he did not even say ‘I love you.’?”

A dart of anger went through Emma. “You would know lies,” she said. “In fact, if you ask me, the biggest lie the Fair Folk have ever told is that they don’t tell them.”

The Queen drew herself up. She seemed to be looking down at Emma from a great height. The stars wheeled behind her, blue and green, purple and red. “Why are you angry, girl? I have offered you a fair bargain. Everything you might desire. I have given you fair hosting. Even the clothes on your back are Faerie clothes.”

“I don’t trust you,” Emma said flatly. “We bargained with you because we had no choice. But you have manipulated us every step of the way—even the dress I’m wearing is a manipulation.”

The Queen arched an eyebrow.

“Besides,” Emma said, “you allied yourself with Sebastian Morgenstern. You helped him wage the Dark War. Because of the war, Malcolm got the Black Volume and my parents died. Why shouldn’t I blame you?”

The Queen’s eyes raked Emma, and now Emma could see in them what the Queen had been at pains to hide before: her anger, and her viciousness. “Is that why you have set yourself as the protector of the Blackthorns? Because you could not save your parents, you will save them, your makeshift family?”

Emma looked at the Queen for a long moment before she spoke. “You bet your ass it is,” she said.

Without another glance at the ruler of the Seelie Court, Emma stalked off toward the horses of the Hunt.

*

Julian had never much liked horses, though he’d learned to ride them, as most Shadowhunters did. In Idris, where cars didn’t work, they were still the main form of transportation. He’d learned on a crabby pony that kept blowing out its sides and darting under low-hanging branches, trying to knock him off.

The horse Gwyn had given him had a dark look in its ghastly green eyes that didn’t bode much better. Julian had braced himself for a lurching plunge upward, but when Gwyn gave the order, the horse simply glided up into the air like a toy lifted on a string.

Julian gasped out loud with the shock of it. He found his hands plunging into the horse’s mane, gripping hard, as the others shot up into the air around him—Cristina, Gwyn, Emma, Mark and Kieran. For a moment they hovered, shadows under the moonlight.

Then the horses shot forward. The sky blurred above them, the stars turning to streaks of shimmering, multicolored paint. Julian realized that he was grinning—truly grinning, the way he rarely had since he was a child. He couldn’t help it. Buried in everyone’s soul, he thought as they spun forward through the night, must be the yearning desire to fly.

And not the way mundanes did, trapped inside a metal tube. Like this, exploding up through clouds as soft as down, the wind caressing your skin. He glanced over at Emma. She was leaning down over her horse’s mane, long legs curved around its sides, her brilliant hair flying like a banner. Behind her rode Cristina, who had her hands in the air and was shrieking with happiness. “Emma!” she shouted. “Emma, look, no hands!”

Emma glanced back and laughed aloud. Mark, who rode Windspear with an air of familiarity, Kieran clinging to his belt with one hand, was not as amused. “Use your hands!” he yelled. “Cristina! It’s not a roller coaster!”

“Nephilim are insane!” shouted Kieran, pushing his wildly blowing hair out of his face.

Cristina just laughed, and Emma looked at her with a wide smile, her eyes glowing like the stars overhead, which had turned to the silver-white stars of the mundane world.

Shadows loomed up in front of them, white and black and blue. The cliffs of Dover, Julian thought, and felt an ache inside that it might be over so quickly. He turned his head and looked at his brother. Mark sat astride Windspear as if he’d been born on a horse’s back. The wind tore his pale hair, revealing his sharply pointed ears. He was smiling too, a calm and secret smile, the smile of someone doing what they loved.

Far below them the world spun by, a patchwork of silver-black fields, shadowy hills, and luminous, winding rivers. It was beautiful, but Julian could not take his eyes off his brother. So this is the Wild Hunt, he thought. This freedom, this expanse, this ferocity of joy. For the first time, he understood how and why Mark’s choice to stay with his family might not have been an easy one. For the first time he thought in wonder of how much his brother must love him after all, to have given up the sky for his sake.





PART TWO


Thule





15


FRIENDS LONG GIVEN


Kit had never thought he’d set foot in one Shadowhunter Institute. Now he had eaten and slept in two. If this kept up, it was going to become a habit.

The London Institute was exactly the way he would have imagined it, if he’d ever been asked to imagine it, which he admittedly hadn’t. Housed in a massive old stone church, it lacked the glossy modernity of its Los Angeles counterpart. It looked as if it hadn’t been renovated for eighty years—the rooms were painted in Edwardian pastels, which had faded over the decades into soft and muddied colors. The hot water was irregular, the beds were lumpy, and dust limned the surfaces of most of the furniture.

It sounded, from bits and snatches Kit had overheard, as if the London Institute had once had many more people in it. It had been attacked by Sebastian Morgenstern during the Dark War, and most of the former inhabitants had never returned.

The head of the Institute looked nearly as ancient as the building. Her name was Evelyn Highsmith. Kit got the sense that the Highsmiths were a big deal in Shadowhunter society, though not as big a deal as the Herondales. Evelyn was a tall, imperious, white-haired woman in her eighties who wore long 1940s-style dresses, carried a silver-headed walking stick, and sometimes talked to people who weren’t there.

Only one other person seemed to live in the Institute: Evelyn’s maid, Bridget, who was just as ancient as her mistress. She had bright dyed-red hair and a thousand fine wrinkles. She was always popping up in unexpected places, which was inconvenient for Kit, who was once again on the lookout for anything he might steal. It wasn’t a quest that was going well—most of what appeared valuable was furniture, and he couldn’t imagine how he was supposed to creep away from the Institute carrying a sideboard. The weapons were carefully locked away, he didn’t know how to sell candlesticks on the street, and though there were valuable first editions of books in the enormous library, most of them had been scribbled in by some idiot named Will H.

The dining room door opened and Diana came in. She was favoring one arm: Kit had found out that some Shadowhunter injuries, especially those that involved demon poison or ichor, healed slowly despite runes.