“I didn’t realize you knew the old rhymes,” said Mark, glancing over with the first real interest he’d shown in her since his return.
“The whole family has always tried to learn everything they can about Faerie,” said Emma, sitting down beside him. “Ever since we came back from the Dark War, Diana has taught us, and even the little ones wanted to know about the Fair Folk. Because of you.”
“That must be a rather unpopular part of the Shadowhunter curriculum,” said Mark, “considering recent history.”
“It isn’t your fault, what the Clave thinks of faeries,” said Emma. “You’re a Shadowhunter, and you were never part of the betrayal.”
“I am a Shadowhunter,” Mark agreed. “But I am part Fair Folk, too, like my sister. My mother was the Lady Nerissa. She died after I was born, and with no one to raise us, Helen and I were given back to our father. My mother was gentry, though, one of the highest rank of the fey.”
“Did they treat you better in the Hunt because of her?”
Mark shook his head once. “I believe they think of my father as responsible for her death. For breaking her heart by leaving her. That did not dispose them well toward me.” He tucked a lock of pale hair behind his ear. “Nothing the Fair Folk did to my body or mind was as cruel as the moment I was told that the Clave would not be coming to find me. That they would send no rescue parties. Jace told me, when he saw me in Faerie, ‘show them what a Shadowhunter is made of.’ But what are Shadowhunters made of, if they desert their own?”
“The Council isn’t all Shadowhunters in the world,” said Emma. “A lot of Nephilim thought what was done to you was wrong. And Julian never stopped trying to get the Clave to change their minds.” She considered reaching to pat his arm, then thought better of it. There was still something a little feral about him; it would have been like reaching to pat a leopard. “You’ll see, now that you’re home.”
“Am I home?” asked Mark. He shook his head, like a dog shaking off water. “Perhaps I was unfair to my brother,” he said. “Perhaps I should not have lashed out. I feel like—like I am in a dream. It seems weeks ago they came to me at the Hunt and told me I was to go back to the world.”
“Did they tell you that you’d be coming home?”
“No,” he said. “They told me I had no choice but to leave the Hunt. That the King of the Unseelie Court had commanded it. They pulled me down from my horse and bound my hands. We rode for days. They gave me something to drink, something that made me hallucinate and imagine things that were not there.” He looked down at his hands. “It was so I would not be able to find my way back, but I wish they had not done it,” he said. “I wish I could have arrived here as I have been for years, a capable member of the Hunt. I would have liked my brothers and sisters to see me standing tall and proud, not fearful and crawling.”
“You do seem very different now,” Emma said. It was true. He seemed like someone who had woken up after a hundred years of sleep, shaking the dust of a century’s dreams from his feet. He had been terrified; now his hands were steady, his expression somber.
Suddenly he smiled wryly.
“When they ordered me to reveal myself in the Sanctuary, I thought it was another dream.”
“A good dream?” Emma said.
He hesitated, then shook his head. “In the early days of the Hunt, when I disobeyed, I was made to see dreams, horrors, visions of my family dying. I thought that was what I was meant to be seeing again. I was terrified—not for myself, but for Julian.”
“But now you know it’s not a dream. Seeing your family, your home—”
“Emma. Stop.” He squeezed his eyes shut as if in pain. “I can say this to you because you are not a Blackthorn. You do not have Blackthorn blood running through your veins. I have been in the land of Faerie for years and it is a place where mortal blood is turned to fire. It is a place of beauty and terror beyond what can be imagined here. I have ridden with the Wild Hunt. I have carved a clear path of freedom among the stars and outrun the wind. And now I am asked to walk upon the earth again.”
“You belong where you’re loved,” Emma said. It was something her father had said, something she had always believed. She belonged here because Jules loved her and the children loved her. “Were you loved in Faerie?”
A shadow seemed to come down over Mark’s eyes, like curtains closing in a dark room. “I meant to tell you. I am sorry about your parents.”
Emma waited for the familiar burn of sickening rage that the mention of her parents by anyone but Jules always brought on, but it didn’t come. There was something in the way he said it—something about the strange mixture of formal, faerie speech and sincere regret—that was oddly calming.
“And I’m sorry about your father,” she told him.