Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

“You see?” said Matthew, waving an arm expansively at the view before them—the wide Parisian boulevard, the colorful awnings of shops, the cafés where women in splendid hats and men in extraordinarily striped trousers warmed themselves with cups of thick hot chocolate. “I promised you would have a good time.”


Had she been having a good time? Cordelia wondered. Perhaps she had. So far, she’d been mostly able to keep her mind off the ways she’d horrifically failed everyone she cared about. And that, after all, was the very purpose of the journey. Once you had lost everything, she reasoned, there was no reason not to embrace whatever small happinesses you could. Wasn’t that, after all, Matthew’s philosophy? Wasn’t that why she had come here with him?

A woman seated at a nearby café, wearing a hat laden with ostrich plumes and silk roses, glanced from Matthew to Cordelia and smiled—approving, Cordelia assumed, of young love. Months ago, Cordelia would have blushed; now she simply smiled. What did it matter if people thought the wrong things about her? Any girl would be happy to have Matthew as a suitor, so let passersby imagine whatever they wanted. That was how Matthew managed things, after all—not caring at all what others thought, simply being himself, and it was astonishing how it allowed him to move easily through the world.

Without him, she doubted she could have managed the journey to Paris in the state she’d been in. He’d gotten them—sleep-deprived, yawning—from the train station to Le Meurice, where he’d been all smiles, sunny and joking with the bellman. One would have thought he’d rested in a featherbed that night.

They’d slept into the afternoon, that first night (in the two separate bedrooms of Matthew’s suite, which shared a common living room), and she’d dreamt that she’d poured out all her sins to the Meurice desk clerk. You see, my mother is about to have a baby, and I might not be there when she does because I am too busy gallivanting with my husband’s best friend. I used to carry the mythical sword Cortana—perhaps you know of it from La Chanson de Roland? Yes, well, I turned out to be unworthy of wielding it and gave it to my brother, which also, by the way, puts him in potentially mortal peril from not one but two very powerful demons. I was supposed to become my closest friend’s parabatai, but now that can never happen. And I allowed myself to think that the man I love might have loved me, and not Grace Blackthorn, though he was always direct and honest about his love for her.

When she’d finished, she looked up and saw that the clerk had Lilith’s face, his eyes each a tangle of writhing black snakes.

You’ve done well by me, at least, dearie, Lilith said, and Cordelia had woken up with a scream that echoed in her head for minutes after.

When she woke again later to the sound of a maid throwing the curtains back, she had gazed out in wonder on the bright day, the roofs of Paris marching away to the horizon like obedient soldiers. In the distance, the Eiffel Tower, rising defiant against a storm-blue sky. And in the next room, Matthew, waiting for her to join him in an adventure.

For the next two days, they had eaten together—once at the gorgeous Le Train Bleu inside the Gare de Lyon, which had amazed Cordelia: so pretty, like dining inside a cut sapphire!—and walked together in the parks, and shopped together: shirts and suits for Matthew at Charvet, where Baudelaire and Verlaine had bought their clothes, and dresses and shoes and a coat for Cordelia. She had stopped short of allowing Matthew to buy her hats. Surely, she told him, there must be some limits. He suggested that the limit should be umbrellas, which were essential to a proper outfit and doubled as a useful weapon. She’d giggled, and wondered then at how nice it was to laugh.

Perhaps most surprising, Matthew had more than kept to his promise: he consumed not a drop of alcohol. He even withstood the disapproving frowns of waiters when he declined wine at their meals. Based on her experience of her father’s drinking, Cordelia had expected him to be sick with the lack of it, but to the contrary, he had been clear-eyed and energetic, dragging her all over central Paris to the sites, the museums, the monuments, the gardens. It all felt very mature and worldly, which was surely the point.

Now she looked at Matthew and thought, He looks happy. Honestly, plainly happy. And if this trip to Paris might not be her salvation, she could at least make sure it was his.

He took her arm to guide her past a broken bit of pavement. Cordelia thought of the woman at the café, how she had smiled at them, thinking them a couple in love. If only she knew that Matthew hadn’t so much as tried to kiss Cordelia once. He had been the model of a restrained gentleman. Once or twice, as they bid each other good night in the hotel suite, she had thought she caught a look in his eyes, but perhaps she was imagining it? She wasn’t entirely sure what she had expected, nor was she sure how she felt about—well, anything.

“I am having a good time,” she said now, and meant it. She knew she was happier here than she would have been in London, where she would have retreated to her family home in Cornwall Gardens. Alastair would have tried to be kind, and her mother would have been shocked and grieving, and the weight of trying to bear up under it all would have made her want to die.

This was better. She’d sent a quick note home to her family from the hotel’s telegraph service, letting them know she was shopping for her spring wardrobe in Paris, chaperoned by Matthew. She suspected they would find this odd, but at least, one hoped, not alarming.

“I’m just curious,” she added as they approached the hotel, with its massive facade, all wrought-iron balconies and lights shining from its windows, casting their glow over the wintry streets. “You mentioned that I would shine at a cabaret? What cabaret, and when are we going?”

“As a matter of fact, tonight,” Matthew said, opening the hotel door for her. “We will be journeying to the heart of Hell together. Are you worried?”

“Not at all. I am only glad I chose a red dress. It will be thematic.”

Matthew laughed, but Cordelia couldn’t help but wonder: journeying into the heart of Hell together? What on earth did he mean?



* * *



They did not find Lucie the next day.

The snow had not stuck, and the roads at least were clear. Balios and Xanthos trudged along between bare walls of hedges, their breath puffing white in the air. They came to Lostwithiel, a small village inland, in the middle of the day, and Magnus headed into a public house called the Wolf’s Bane to make inquiries. He came out shaking his head, and though they made their way regardless to the address he’d been given earlier, it turned out to be an abandoned farmhouse, the old roof falling in on itself.

“There is another possibility,” Magnus said, clambering back into the carriage. Flakes of fine snow, which had likely flurried off the remains of the roof, were caught in his black eyebrows. “Sometime last century, a mysterious gentleman from London purchased an old ruined chapel on Peak Rock, in a fishing village called Polperro. He restored the place but rarely leaves it. Local Downworld gossip is he’s a warlock—apparently purple flames sometimes leak from the chimney at night.”

“I thought a warlock was supposed to live here,” Will said, indicating the burned-out farmhouse.

“Not all rumors are true, Herondale, but they all must be investigated,” said Magnus serenely. “We ought to be able to get to Polperro in a few hours, anyway.”

James sighed inwardly. More hours, more waiting. More worrying—about Lucie, about Matthew and Daisy. About his dream.

They wake.

“I shall amuse you with a tale, then,” said Will. “The tale of my hellride with Balios from London to Cadair Idris, in Wales. Your mother, James, was missing—kidnapped by the miscreant Mortmain. I leaped into Balios’s saddle. ‘If ever you loved me, Balios,’ I cried, ‘let your feet now be swift, and carry me to my dear Tessa before harm befalls her.’ It was a stormy night, though the storm that raged inside my breast was fiercer still—”

“I can’t believe you haven’t heard this story before, James,” said Magnus mildly. The two of them were sharing one side of the carriage, as it had become quickly apparent on the first day of their journey that Will needed the entire other side for dramatic gesturing.

It was very strange to have heard tales of Magnus all James’s life, and now to be traveling in close quarters with him. What he’d learned in their days of travel was that despite his elaborate costumes and theatrical airs, which had alarmed several innkeepers, Magnus was surprisingly calm and practical.

“I haven’t,” said James. “Not since last Thursday.”