Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

She had hurt James with the truth, Grace thought, and hurt Jesse perhaps more. But Cordelia—she clung to the thought that in telling Cordelia the truth, she had helped her. That perhaps, after this, Cordelia would be happier.

James loves you, she had told Cordelia. He loves you with a force that cannot be turned aside, or broken, or made small or insignificant. For these past years Belial struggled against that force, and in the end he lost. And Belial is a power that can move the stars.

There was something very pleasant about giving people good news, Grace thought. She would very much like to have that feeling again. Specifically, she would like to give Christopher good news about his message experiments. She could imagine his face lighting up, his eyes sparkling behind his spectacles—

“Gracie.” A giggle. One so familiar that it sent an arrow of terror through Grace. Her hands released their grip on Christopher’s papers; they fluttered to the floor. “Oh, my dear Grace.”

Grace turned, slowly. All the blood in her body seemed to have turned solid in her veins; she could barely breathe. There, at the barred door of her cell, stood her mother.

Her hair had lost every last bit of its color. It was bone-white, straggling about her face like a corpse’s hair. Her dress was filthy, matted with blood at the shoulder. She was grinning a shark’s grin, her mouth like a bloody slash.

“My little daughter,” she said. “Shall I come in?”

She put a hand to the cell door, and it swung open; Grace cringed back against the headboard of her bed as Tatiana drifted into the little space where she had been safe. But no space was safe from her mother, Grace thought. She had told Zachariah. He had not believed her.

Tatiana looked down at her. “It is astonishing,” she said, “how thoroughly you have failed me.”

Grace felt her lips pull back from her teeth. “Good,” she said, to her own surprise; the word came out savagely. “Leave me alone. I am no use to you now. They know my power. I can no longer be your tool—”

“Oh, do shut up,” said Tatiana mildly, and turned to snap her fingers. “Come along, then,” she said to someone in the hall. “We might as well be quick about it.”

To Grace’s astonishment, a Silent Brother stepped into the room. She did not recognize him as one she’d seen before, even among the group that gathered in the room of the Speaking Stars. He was tall and bony, with scar-like runes, and his face seemed to strain against the threads that closed his mouth and eyes. The hem of his white robe was caked with what looked like soot or ash.

Help me, Grace thought. This woman is your prisoner. Take her away from me.

But if the Silent Brother heard her, he gave no sign of it. He stood impassively as Tatiana took a step toward her daughter, then another. “I gave you a great gift, Grace,” she said. “I took you in when no one else would have you. And I gave you power, power with which you could attain anything on this earth you wanted. It was one of my most shameful mistakes, one I aim to rectify.”

Grace took a step back. “I am your daughter,” she said, with what voice she could muster. “I am more than just your instrument. I have feelings of my own, thoughts of my own. Things I wish to do. Things I wish to be.”

Tatiana chuckled. “Oh, the naivete of youth. Yes, we all have those at some point, my dear. And then the truths of life come and crush them beneath their wheels.”

“And so you ally with a Prince of Hell?” said Grace.

“You owe that prince everything you have,” her mother spat. “The power you have squandered. Your place in London society, which you have also squandered. You were never worthy of the gifts you were given,” Tatiana went on. “I should never have invested so much effort into you.”

“I wish you had not,” Grace said. “I wish I had been left alone. I would have grown up in an Institute, and my guardians might not have loved me, but they would not have done to me what you have done to me.”

“What I have done to you?” Tatiana echoed in astonishment. “Given you opportunities you could never have had otherwise? The ability to have anyone or anything you wanted, by giving a single command? Why can you not be more like Jesse? He is loyal in his heart. Recognizing that Herondale witch’s connection to our benefactor, becoming her confidant, guiding her toward effecting his resurrection—”

“That’s what you think?” After all this time, it seemed, Grace’s mother could still shock her. “My God. You do not understand Jesse at all.”

“Listen to you. Calling upon God,” said Tatiana, with derision. “God has no use for you, child. Heaven will not help you. And you will learn the price of spurning Hell.”

Grace twisted around to look at the motionless Silent Brother who stood beside Tatiana. Her power was still there, though it felt like years since she had used it. She did not want to use it now, and yet what other choice did she have? “I command you to take hold of my mother,” she said, her voice echoing off the cell walls. “I command you to remove her. To take her back to her cell—”

The Silent Brother did not move, as Tatiana laughed out loud. “Grace, you fool. Your power only affects the minds of men, and this one here is not a man. He is not even a Silent Brother.”

Not even a Silent Brother? What does that mean?

“And now you wish you could use it, don’t you? The gift you spurned,” Tatiana hissed. “But it is too late. You have proven yourself unworthy of it, over and over.” She turned to the Silent Brother who was not a Silent Brother. “Take it from her. Now.”

The Silent Brother’s eyes opened. Not like human eyes—they ripped open, leaving dangling threads where they had once been sewn shut. From between his lids shone a terrible light, a light that burned pale green like acid.

He moved toward Grace. Soundless, fast, almost crouching, he came at her, and noise exploded inside her head. It was like the Silent Brothers’ unspeaking communication, yet it barely sounded like human speech at all—it was a grinding, scratching roar, as though someone were scraping at the inside of her skull with a fork.

Grace began to scream. She found she could not stop screaming, over and over. But nobody came.





24 FIRE FALLS ASUNDER




The fire falls asunder, all is changed,

I am no more a child, and what I see

Is not a fairy tale, but life, my life.

—Amy Lowell, “A Fairy Tale”



Alastair did, in fact, get in touch with Cordelia, even sooner than she had imagined, through the straightforward mechanism of showing up at the Institute.

Will and Tessa had departed through the Portal in the crypt, and the general mood was downcast when the downstairs bell rang. Lucie had been the one to open the front door; she immediately went and got Cordelia, who found her brother in the entryway, stamping snow off his boots. He was carrying a small traveling trunk and wearing a long-suffering expression. “There’s a storm brewing,” he said, and indeed, Cordelia could see through the open front door that the sky had darkened, thunderclouds like great colliding blocks of smoke roiling across its surface. “This situation,” he said, “is utterly ridiculous.”

“I don’t disagree,” Cordelia said, closing the front door and turning to eye Alastair’s trunk, “but—have you come to stay?”

He stopped in the act of removing his coat. “M?m?n told me to stop pacing and join you here. Do you think—they won’t let me?” he said, with a sudden hesitation. “I suppose I should have asked—”

“Alastair, joon,” Cordelia said. “If you want to stay, you will stay. This is the Institute; they cannot turn you away, and I would not let them. It is only that…”

“That they’ve made Charles temporary Institute head?” Alastair said. “I know.” He glanced around, as if to make sure no one else was nearby to overhear him. “It’s why I came. I can’t leave Thomas alone in close quarters with Charles. There’s no telling how unpleasant Charles will decide to be to him, and Thomas is too good-natured to—” He stopped and glared. “Cease looking at me like that.”

“You should talk to Thomas—”

“Mikoshamet,” Alastair said, making a fearsome face that would have terrified Cordelia if she were still seven. “Where is everyone, then?”

“Gathering in the library,” Cordelia said. “James has something to tell everyone. Come—I’ll show you where the rooms are, and you can join me and the others once you’re settled in.”



* * *



“You don’t mind, do you?” Cordelia said, her hand on James’s shoulder. “If Alastair’s there?”