His eyes locked with Emma’s, and the next words he spoke seemed to be directly to her.
“We loved each other enough, I thought. For it not to matter. Maybe he couldn’t show affection, but he could still be a good custodian of the Institute. Then as he came downstairs less and less, and the letters from other Institutes and calls from the Clave went unanswered, I started to realize there was more that was seriously wrong. It was soon after the Cold Peace, and territorial disputes were ripping the city apart, vamps and werewolves and warlocks going after what used to belong to faeries. We were besieged with calls, visits, demands we handle the problem. I’d go up to the attic, bring Arthur his food, beg him to deal with what needed to be done to keep the Clave from stepping in. Because I knew what would happen if they did. We’d no longer have a guardian, and then we’d no longer have a home. And then—”
He took a deep breath.
“They would have sent Emma to the new Academy in Idris. It was what they wanted to do in the first place. They would have sent the rest of us to London, probably. Tavvy was just a baby. They would have placed him with another family. Drusilla too. As for Ty—imagine what they would have done with Ty. The moment he didn’t act the way they thought he should, they would have shoved him into the ‘dregs’ program at the Academy. Separated him from Livvy. It would have killed them both.”
Julian paced restlessly up to the portrait of Jesse Blackthorn and stared into his ancestor’s green eyes. “So I begged Arthur to respond to the Clave, to do anything that would show that he was the head of the Institute. Letters were piling up. Urgent messages. We didn’t have weapons and he wouldn’t requisition them. We were running out of seraph blades. I came upstairs one night to ask him—” His voice cracked. “To ask him if he’d sign letters if I wrote them, about the territorial disputes, and I found him on the floor with a knife. He was cutting his skin open, he said, to let the evil out.”
He stared steadfastly at the portrait.
“I bandaged him up. But after that I talked to him, and I realized. Uncle Arthur’s reality is not our reality. He lives in a dreamworld where sometimes I’m Julian and sometimes I’m my father. He talks to people who aren’t there. Oh, there are times when he’s clear about who he is and where he is. But they come and go. There are bad periods where he doesn’t know any of us for weeks. Then times of clarity where you might imagine he was getting better. But he’ll never get better.”
“You’re saying he’s mad,” said Mark. “Madness” was the faerie word for it; it was a faerie punishment, in fact, the bringing down of madness, the shattering of someone’s mind. “Lunacy” was what Shadowhunters called it. Emma had a sense there were different words for it among mundanes—a faint sense she had from bits and pieces of movies she had seen, books she had read. That there was a less cruel and absolute way to think about those whose minds ran differently than most—whose thoughts gave them pain and fear. But the Clave was cruel and absolute. It was there in the words that described the code by which they lived. The Law is hard, but it is the Law.
“Lunatic, I guess the Clave would say,” said Julian with a bitter twist to his mouth. “It’s amazing that you’re still a Shadowhunter if you have a sickness of the body, but apparently not if you have a sickness of the mind. I knew even when I was twelve that if the Clave found out what kind of state Arthur was really in, they’d take the Institute. They’d break up our family and scatter us. And I would not let that happen.”
He looked from Mark to Emma, his eyes blazing.
“I had enough of my family taken from me during the war,” he said. “We all did. We’d lost so much. Mother, Father, Helen, Mark. They would have torn us apart until we were adults and by then we wouldn’t be a family anymore. They were my children. Livvy. Ty. Dru. Tavvy. I raised them. I became Uncle Arthur. I took the correspondence, I answered it. I did the requisitioning. I drew up the patrol schedules. I never let anyone know Arthur was sick. I said he was eccentric, a genius, hard at work in his attic. The truth was—” He looked away. “When I was younger I hated him. I never wanted him to come out of his attic, but sometimes he had to. The disputes over territory had to be handled in person. There were face-to-face meetings that couldn’t be avoided, and no one was going to hold their important summit with a twelve-year-old boy. So I went to Malcolm. He was able to create a drug that I could give to Uncle Arthur. It forced periods of clarity. They only lasted a few hours, and afterward Arthur would have headaches.”