Chain of Thorns (The Last Hours, #3)

Thomas had considered these last few days telling Christopher of his feelings, but while Christopher would be kind about it, he would feel awkward about knowing something James and Matthew didn’t, and it was James and Matthew who truly disliked—hated, even—Alastair in the first place.

And then there was the issue of Charles. Charles had been Alastair’s first great love, though it had ended badly. He had been wounded in an encounter with Belial, and though he was convalescing, Alastair seemed to feel he owed him support and looking after. While Thomas could understand this from a purely moral standpoint, he was tormented by the thought of Alastair mopping Charles’s feverish brow and feeding him grapes. It was all too easy to imagine Charles laying a hand on Alastair’s cheek and murmuring his gratitude while staring deeply into Alastair’s gorgeous dark eyes with their long, thick lashes—

Christopher returned from upstairs, nearly causing Thomas to leap out of his chair. Christopher, thankfully, seemed blissfully unaware of Thomas’s inner turmoil, and immediately went back to the workbench. “All right,” he said, turning toward Thomas with a stele in hand, “let’s try again, shall we?”

“Sending a message?” Thomas asked. He and Christopher had “sent off” dozens of messages by now, and while some of them had disappeared into thin air or raced up the chimney, none had ever gotten to their intended destination.

“Indeed,” Kit said, handing over a piece of paper and a pencil. “I just need you to write a message, while I test this reagent. It can be any sort of nonsense you like.”

Thomas sat down at the workbench and stared at the blank page. After a long moment, he wrote:

Dear Alastair, why are you so stupid and so frustrating, and why do I think about you all the time? Why do I have to think about you when I get up and when I go to sleep and when I brush my teeth and right now? Why did you kiss me in the Sanctuary if you didn’t want to be with me? Is it that you don’t want to tell anyone? It’s very annoying. —Thomas



“All right, then?” Christopher said. Thomas started and quickly folded the page into quarters, so its contents were hidden. He handed it over to Christopher with only a slight pang. He wished he could have shown the words to someone, but he knew it was impossible. It had felt good to write it all down, anyway, he thought, as Christopher lit a match and touched it to the edge of the page. Even if the message was, rather like Thomas’s relationship with Alastair, going nowhere in the end.



* * *



Considering the horror stories her mother had told her, Grace Blackthorn had expected the Silent City to be a sort of dungeon, where she would be chained to a wall and possibly tortured. Even before she reached the City entrance in Highgate, she had begun to think of what it would be like to be tried by the Mortal Sword. To stand on the Speaking Stars and feel the Silent Brothers’ judgment. How it would feel to be compelled—after so very many years of lying—to tell the truth. Would it be a relief? Or would it be a terrible agony?

She supposed it did not matter. She deserved the agony.

But she had not been clapped in irons, or anything of the sort. Two Silent Brothers had escorted her from James’s house in Curzon Street to the Silent City. The moment she had arrived (and it was indeed a dark, forbidding, shadowy sort of place), Brother Zachariah—who she knew to be Cordelia’s cousin, once James Carstairs—had come forward as if to take charge of her.

You must be exhausted. His voice in her mind was quiet, even kind. Let me show you to your chamber. Tomorrow will be early enough to discuss what has happened.

She had been stunned. Brother Zachariah was a figure that her mother had referred to, more than once, as a demonstration of the Herondales’ corrosive influence over the Nephilim. “His eyes aren’t even sewn shut,” she’d snap, not even looking at Grace. “Only special treatment for the ones that the Lightwoods and the Herondales favor. It’s obscene.”

But Brother Zachariah spoke to her with a gentle kindness. He had led her through the cold, stone-walled City to a small cell, which she had been imagining as a sort of torture chamber, where she would sleep on cold stone, perhaps bound with chains. In fact, while it wasn’t luxurious by any means—a windowless stone chamber with little privacy, as the large door was made up of narrowly spaced adamas bars—compared to Blackthorn Manor, it was downright homey, containing a fairly comfortable bed of wrought iron, a battered oak desk, a wooden shelf lined with books (none of any interest to her, but it was something). Witchlight stones had even been placed haphazardly around, as if an afterthought, and she recalled that the Silent Brothers did not need light to see.

The most uncanny element of the place was that it was impossible to tell when it was day or night. Zachariah had brought her a mantel clock, which helped, but she wasn’t fully confident that she was keeping track of which twelve o’clock was noon and which midnight. Not that it mattered, she supposed. Time stretched out here, and compressed like a spring, while she waited between the moments that the Silent Brothers wanted to speak with her.

When they did want to speak to her, it was bad. She could not pretend otherwise. Not that they harmed her, or tormented her, or even used the Mortal Sword upon her; they only questioned her, calmly but relentlessly. And still, it was not the questioning that was bad either. It was telling the truth.

Grace had begun to realize that she only really knew two ways to communicate with others. One was to wear a mask, and to lie and perform from behind that mask, as she had performed obedience to her mother, and love to James. The other was to be honest, which she had only ever really done with Jesse. Even then she had hidden from him the things she was ashamed of doing. Not hiding, she was finding, was a painful thing.

It hurt to stand before the Brothers and admit to all she had done. Yes, I forced James Herondale to believe himself in love with me. Yes, I used my demon-given power to ensnare Charles Fairchild. Yes, I plotted with my mother the destruction of the Herondales and Carstairs, the Lightwoods and Fairchilds. I believed her when she said they were our enemies.

The sessions exhausted her. At night, alone in her cell, she saw James’s face the last time he had looked at her, heard the loathing in his voice. I would throw you onto the street, but this power of yours is no better than a loaded gun in the hands of a selfish child. You cannot be allowed to continue to use it.

If the Silent Brothers intended to take her power—and they were welcome to it—they had shown no signs of it yet. She sensed they were studying her, studying her ability, in ways she herself did not understand.