Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Something white gleamed among the ashes in the fireplace grate. She could recognize her father’s neat copperplate handwriting on a stack of charred paper. She leaned closer—whatever kind of notes had her father felt he needed to destroy before he left London?

She took the papers out of the fireplace, flicked the ash from them, and began to read. As she did, she felt a piercing dryness in her throat, as if she were near choking.

Scribbled across the top of the first page were the words Herondale/Lightwood.

It was an obvious transgression to read further, but the name Lightwood burned its letters into her eyes; she could not turn aside from it. If there was some sort of trouble facing Anna’s family, how could she refuse to know it?

The pages were labeled with years: 1896, 1892, 1900. She flipped through the sheets and felt a cold finger creep up the back of her neck.

In her father’s hand were not accounts of money spent or earned, but descriptions of events. Events involving Herondales and Lightwoods.

No, not events. Mistakes. Errors. Sins. It was a record of any doing of the Herondales and Lightwoods that had caused what her father considered problems; anything that could be characterized as irresponsible or ill-considered was noted here.

12/3/01: G2.L absent from Council meeting without explanation. CF angry.

6/9/98: WW in Waterloo say WH/TH refused meeting, causing them to disrupt Market.

8/1/95: Head of Oslo Institute refuses to meet with TH, citing her Heritage.



Ariadne felt sick. Most of the deeds noted seemed petty, small, or hearsay; the report that the head of the Oslo Institute would not meet with Tessa Herondale, one of the kindest ladies Ariadne had ever known, was revolting. The head of the Oslo Institute should have been reprimanded; instead, the event was recorded here as if it had been the Herondales’ fault.

What was this? What was her father thinking?

At the bottom of the stack was something else. A sheet of creamy-white stationery. Not notes, but a letter. Ariadne lifted the missive away from the rest of the stack, her eyes scanning the lines in disbelief.

“Ariadne?”

Quickly, Ariadne shoved the letter into the bodice of her dress, before rising to face her mother. Standing in the doorway, Flora was frowning, her eyes narrowed. When she spoke, it was with none of the warmth she’d had in their conversation downstairs. “Ariadne—what are you doing?”





2 GREY SEA




Grey rocks, and greyer sea,

And surf along the shore—

And in my heart a name

My lips shall speak no more.

—Charles G. D. Roberts, “Grey Rocks, and Greyer Sea”



When Lucie woke up at last, it was to the sound of waves and a bright, wintry sunlight as sharp as the sheer edge of glass. She sat upright so quickly her head spun. She was determined not to go back to sleep again, not to fall unconscious, not to return to that dark, empty place full of voices and noise.

She threw off the striped afghan she’d been sleeping under and swung her legs out of bed. Her first try at standing was unsuccessful; her legs buckled, and she tumbled back onto the bed. The second time she used one of the bedposts to pull herself upright. This worked slightly better, and for a few moments she swayed back and forth like an old sea captain unused to land.

Other than the bed, a simple wrought-iron frame painted eggshell white to match the walls, there was little furniture in her small room. There was a fireplace in whose grate embers crackled and smoldered with a faint purple tinge, and a vanity table of unfinished wood, carved all over with mermaids and sea serpents. Her own traveling trunk sat reassuringly at the foot of the bed.

Eventually, her legs fizzing with pins and needles, she made her way to the window, set into an alcove in the wall, and looked outside. The view was a symphony of white and deep green, black and palest blue. Malcolm’s house seemed to be perched halfway up a rocky cliff, above a pretty little fishing village. Below the house was a narrow inlet where the ocean sloshed into the harbor and small fishing boats rocked gently in the tide. The sky was a clear porcelain blue, though it had obviously snowed recently, judging from the sugary dusting of white on the village’s pitched roofs. Coal smoke from chimneys sent black threads up into the sky, and waves crashed against the cliff below, foaming white and pine green.

It was lovely—stark and lovely, and the expanse of the sea gave Lucie an odd, hollow feeling inside. London seemed a million miles away, as did the people in it: Cordelia and James, her mother and father. What must they be thinking now? Where in Cornwall did they imagine she was? Probably not here, gazing at an ocean that stretched all the way to the coast of France.

To distract herself, she wiggled her toes experimentally. At least the pins and needles were gone. The rough wood planks of the floor had been worn down over years so they felt as smooth against her bare feet as if they had been newly polished. She slid across them to the vanity table, where washbasin and cloth awaited her. She nearly groaned when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her hair was matted and flyaway, her traveling dress crushed and wrinkled, and one of the buttons on a pillow had left a penny-sized dent in her cheek.

She’d have to beg Malcolm for a bath later, she thought. He was a warlock; surely he could produce hot water. For the moment, she did her best with the washbasin and a cake of Pears soap before she peeled off her wreck of a dress, tossed it into a corner, and flung open her trunk. She sat staring for a moment at the contents—had she really packed a bathing costume? The thought of swimming in the ice-green waters of the Polperro harbor was terrifying. After moving aside her axe and gear jacket, she selected a dark blue wool dress with embroidery around the cuffs, and set to work making herself look presentable with hairpins. She had a moment of panic when she realized her gold locket was not around her neck, but a minute’s hasty searching turned it up on the nightstand beside her bed.

Jesse put it there, she thought. She could not have said how she knew that, but she was sure of it.

She was suddenly desperate to see him. Kicking her feet into low boots, she slipped out of the room into the corridor.

Malcolm’s house was significantly larger than she had thought; her bedroom turned out to be one of six on this level, and the stairs at its end—carved in the same manner as the vanity table—led to a high-ceilinged open parlor suitable for a manor. There was obviously no room for both the high ceiling and the bedrooms above, a disorienting effect; Malcolm must have enspelled the house to be as large as he liked on the inside.

There was no indication of anyone else being home, but there was a steady rhythmic thump coming from somewhere outside. After a moment of searching, Lucie located the front door and stepped outside.

The bright sunlight had been deceptive. It was cold. The wind sheared across the rocky cliffs like a knife’s edge, cutting through the wool of her dress. She wrapped her arms around herself with a shiver and turned in a quick circle, taking everything in. She had been right about the house—from outside, it seemed very small indeed, a cottage that could have fit three rooms or so. Its windows appeared boarded up, though she knew they weren’t, and its whitewash was peeling, roughed away by the salt air.

The frostbitten seagrass crunched under her shoes as she followed the thump, thump sound around the side of the house. And stopped in her tracks.

It was Jesse. He stood with an axe in his hands, next to a pile of firewood he’d been splitting. Lucie’s hands shook, and not just with the cold. He was alive. The force of it had never hit her so hard before. She had never seen him like this—never seen the wind lift his black hair, or seen the flush of exertion on his cheeks. Never seen his breath puff out in white clouds as he exhaled. Never seen him breathe at all; he had always been in the world but not part of it, untouched by heat or cold or atmosphere, and here he was breathing and living, his shadow stretching out behind him across the rocky ground.

She could not stand it a moment longer. She ran to him. He had time only to look up in surprise and drop the axe before she had thrown her arms around his neck.

He caught her against him, gripping her tight, fingers digging into the soft fabric of her dress. He nuzzled his face down into her hair, breathing her name, “Lucie, Lucie,” and his body was warm against hers. For the first time she experienced the scent of him: wool, sweat, skin, woodsmoke, the air just before a storm. For the first time, she felt his heart beating against hers.