Lord of Shadows (The Dark Artifices, #2)

Emma raised her eyebrows. “The caves?”

The waitress laughed. “The old smugglers’ caves,” she said. “I guess you came in at high tide, didn’t you? Or you’d have seen them for sure.”

Emma and Julian exchanged a single look before scrambling to their feet. Heedless of the waitress’s startled protests, they spilled out into the street beside the inn.

She’d been right, of course: The tide had come down and the harbor looked very different now, the boats beached on rises of muddy sand. Behind the harbor rose a narrow spit of land shingled with gray rocks. It was easy to see why it was called Chapel Cliff. The spit was tipped with gray rocks, which twisted narrowly up into the air like the spires of a church cathedral.

The water had lowered enough so that a great deal of the cliff was revealed. The sea had been pounding against the rocks when they’d arrived; now it sloshed quietly in the harbor, retreating to reveal a small, sandy beach, and behind it, the dark openings of several cave mouths.

Above the caves, perched on the steep slope of the cliff, was a house. Emma had barely spared it a glance when they’d first arrived—it had simply been one of many small houses that dotted the side of the harbor across from the Warren, though she could see now that it was farther out along the spit of land than any of the others. In fact, it was quite distant from them, standing small and alone between the sea and the sky.

Its windows were boarded up; its whitewash had peeled away in gray strips. But if Emma looked with her Shadowhunter eyes, she could see more than an abandoned house: She could see white lace curtains in the windows, and new shingles on the roof.

There was a mailbox nailed to the fence. A name was painted onto the box, in sloppy white letters, barely visible from this distance. They certainly wouldn’t have been visible to a mundane, but Emma could see them.

FADE.





18


MEMORIES OF THE PAST


Jia Penhallow was seated behind the desk in the Consul’s office, illuminated by the rays of the sun over Alicante. The spires of the demon towers glittered outside the window: red, gold, and orange, like shards of bloody glass.

She had the same warmth in her face Diana remembered, but she looked as if much more time had passed since the Dark War than five years. There was white in her black hair, which was pinned up elegantly on top of her head.

“It’s good to see you, Diana,” she said, inclining her head toward the chair opposite her desk. “We’ve all been very curious about your mysterious news.”

“I imagine.” Diana sat down. “But I was hoping what I had to say would stay between the two of us.”

Jia didn’t look surprised. Not that she would show it if she was. “I see. I’d wondered if you’d come about the Los Angeles Institute head position. I assumed you’d want to take over now that Arthur Blackthorn is dead.” Her graceful hands fluttered as she shuffled and stacked papers, slotted pens into their holders. “It was very brave of him to approach the convergence alone. I was sorry to hear he was slain.”

Diana nodded. For reasons none of them knew, Arthur’s body had been found near the destroyed convergence site, covered in blood from his cut throat and in stains of ichor that Julian told her grimly were Malcolm’s blood. There was no reason to contradict the official assumption that he had waged a solo assault on the convergence and been killed by Malcolm’s demons.

At least Arthur would be remembered as brave, though it gave her a pang that he had been burned and buried without his nieces and nephews there to mourn him. That in fact, no one in the wider world would know he had sacrificed himself for his family. Livvy had said to her that she hoped they would be able to have a remembrance ceremony for him when they all went to Idris. Diana hoped so too.

Jia didn’t seem nonplussed by Diana’s silence. “Patrick remembers Arthur from when they were boys,” she said, “though I’m afraid I never knew him. How are the children coping?”

The children? How did you explain that the Blackthorns’ second father had been their older brother since he was twelve years old? That Julian and Emma and Mark weren’t children at all, really, having suffered enough for most adults’ entire lifetimes? That Arthur Blackthorn had never, really, run the Institute, and the whole idea that he needed to be replaced was like an elaborate and terrible joke?

“The children are devastated,” Diana said. “Their family has been fragmented, as you know. What they want is to return to Los Angeles, their home.”

“But they cannot return while there is no one to head the Institute. Which is why I thought you—”

“I don’t want it to be me,” Diana said. “I’m not here to ask for that job. But neither do I want it to go to Zara Dearborn and her father.”

“Really,” said Jia. Her tone was neutral but her eyes glittered with interest. “If not the Dearborns, and not you, then who?”

“If Helen Blackthorn was allowed to return—”

Jia sat up straight. “And run the Institute? You know the Council would never allow—”

“Then let Aline run the Institute,” said Diana. “Helen could simply remain in Los Angeles as her wife, and be with her family.”

Jia’s expression was calm, but her hands gripped the desk tightly. “Aline is my daughter. You think I don’t want to bring her home?”

“I’ve never known what you thought,” Diana said. It was true. She had no children, but if it had been her sister who had been exiled, she couldn’t imagine not fighting tooth and claw to have her released.

“When Helen was first exiled, and Aline chose to go with her, I thought about resigning as Consul,” said Jia, her hands still taut. “I knew I had no power to reverse the Clave’s decision. The Consul is not a tyrant who can impose her choices on the unwilling. Usually I would say that was a good thing. But I will tell you, for a long time, I wished I could be a tyrant.”

“Why not resign, then?”

“I didn’t trust who might come after me,” said Jia simply. “The Cold Peace was very popular. If the Consul who followed me wished to, they could separate Aline from Helen—and though I want my daughter home, I don’t want her heart broken. They could do worse, too. They could try Aline and Helen as traitors, turn Helen’s sentence of exile into one of death. Maybe Aline’s as well. Anything was possible.” Her gaze was dark and heavy. “I remain where I am to stand between my daughter and the Clave’s darker forces.”

“Then aren’t we on the same side?” Diana said. “Don’t we want the same thing?”

Jia gave a flat smile. “What separates us, Diana, is five years. Five years of my trying everything to get the Council to reconsider. Helen is their example. Their way of saying to the Fair Folk: Look, we take the Cold Peace so seriously we even punish our own. Every time the issue comes up for a vote, I am voted down.”

“But what if other circumstances presented themselves?”

“What other circumstances did you have in mind?”

Diana rolled her shoulders back, feeling the tension prickle along her spine. “Jace Herondale and Clary Fairchild were dispatched to Faerie for a mission,” she said. It was half a guess—while the two of them had been at the Institute, she had glimpsed the contents of their bags: Both had been packed with iron and salt.

“Yes,” said Jia. “We have received several messages since they left.”

“Then they’ve told you,” said Diana. “About the blight on the Unseelie King’s Lands.”

Jia sat arrested, one hand hovering over her desk. “No one knows what they told me but the Inquisitor and myself,” she said. “How do you know . . . ?”