“And I love you,” Kieran said. “You are all that exists on the earth and under the sky that I do love.”
Mark looked into Kieran’s eyes, the silver and the black, and he saw in them, as he always had, the night sky. And he felt that treacherous pull under his rib cage, the one that said that the clouds could be his road. That he need never worry about human concerns: money and shelter and rules and laws. He could ride through the skies over glaciers, through the treetops of forests no human being knew existed. He could sleep in the ruins of cities lost for centuries. His shelter could be a single blanket. He could lie in Kieran’s arms and count the stars.
But he had always given the stars his brothers’ and sisters’ names. There was beauty in the idea of freedom, but it was an illusion. Every human heart was chained by love.
Mark drew his elf-bolt necklace up over his head. He reached out and took Kieran’s hand, turning it over so it was palm up, and dropped the necklace into it.
“I will draw no more bows for the Wild Hunt,” he said. “Keep this and perhaps remember me.”
Kieran’s hand tightened on the arrowhead, his knuckles whitening. “The stars will go out before I forget you, Mark Blackthorn.”
Lightly, Mark touched Kieran’s cheek. The faerie prince’s eyes were wide and tearless. But in them Mark could see a great wilderness of loneliness. A thousand dark nights spent riding with no home to arrive at. “I do not forgive you,” he said. “But you came to help us, at the end. I do not know what would have happened if you hadn’t. So if you need me—if it is a true need—send for me and I will come.”
Kieran half-closed his eyes. “Mark—”
But Mark had already turned away. Kieran stood and watched him go, and though he did not move or speak, at the edge of the bluff Windspear reared up and cried out, his hooves pawing at the sky.
Julian’s window looked out over the desert. At any point during the past five years he could have switched out for Mark’s room, which had a view of the ocean, but it would have felt like giving up on the idea that Mark would ever come back. And besides, his was the only room with a window seat, lined with now slightly threadbare cushions. He and Emma had spent hours there together, reading and drawing, the sun through the glass turning her pale hair to fire.
He was sitting there now, the window cranked open to carry away the scents that still seemed to hang over him, even after a shower: blood and wet stone, seawater and dark magic.
Everything ended eventually, he thought. Even the strangest night of his life. Clary had taken him and Emma aside after Anselm had been captured, hugged them, reminded them that they could always call. He knew Clary was, in her quiet way, trying to tell him, tell both of them, that it was all right to lay their burdens on her.
He knew he never would.
His phone trilled. He glanced down at the screen: It was Emma. She’d sent him a photo. No words, just the picture of her closet: the door open, the photographs and maps and string and notes spilling out.
He threw on jeans and a T-shirt and headed down the hall. The Insitute was dead silent, wrapped in sleep, the only sound the desert wind outside, soughing against glass and stone.
Emma was in her room, sitting up against the footboard of her bed, her phone on the floor beside her. She was wearing a nightgown, long with thin straps, pale white in the fading moonlight.
“Julian,” she said, knowing he was there without looking up. “You were awake, right? I had a feeling you were awake.”
She stood up, still looking at her closet.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “I spent such a long time collecting everything that seemed like evidence, making guesses, thinking about this and nothing but this. This was my big secret, the heart of everything I did.” She looked toward him. “Now it’s just a closet full of junk.”
“I can’t tell you what you should do with all that,” he said. “But I can tell you, you don’t need to think about it now.”
Her hair was down, like spun light around her shoulders, tickling her face with the ends of curls, and he dug his fingers into his palms to keep himself from pulling her against him so he could bury his face and hands in it.
He looked instead at the healing cuts on her arms and hands, the fading red of her burned wrist, the evidence that tonight had not been easy.
Nothing they did ever was.
“Mark’s staying,” she said. “Right? There’s nothing the Clave can do to take him away now?”
Mark. Her first thought is about Mark. Julian pushed the thought down, away: It was unworthy, ridiculous. They weren’t twelve anymore.