At that Julie Beauvale stood up and, without a word, walked out of the classroom.
Simon felt for her, or tried to. During the final hours of the Dark War, a faerie had murdered Julie’s sister right in front of her. But that wasn’t Helen’s fault. Helen was only half-faerie, and it wasn’t the half that counted.
Not that anyone in the Clave—or the classroom—seemed to believe it. The students buzzed, faerie slurs bouncing between them. At the front of the classroom, Helen stood very still, hands clasped behind her back.
“Oh, shut up,” Mayhew said loudly. Simon wondered, not for the first time, why the man had become a teacher when it seemed the only thing he loathed more than young people was the obligation to teach them. “I don’t expect any of you to respect this . . . person. But she’s here to offer you a cautionary tale. You will listen.”
Helen cleared her throat. “My father and his brother were once students here, just like you.” She spoke softly, with flat affect, as if she were talking about strangers. “And perhaps like you, they didn’t realize how dangerous the Fair Folk could be. Which almost destroyed them.”
It was my father, Andrew’s, second year at the Academy—Helen continued—and Arthur’s first. Normally, only second-years would be sent on a mission to the land of the fey, but everyone knew Arthur and Andrew fought best side by side. This was long before the Cold Peace, obviously, when the fey were bound by the Accords. But it didn’t stop them from breaking the rules where they thought they could get away with it. A Shadowhunter child had been taken. Ten students from the Academy, accompanied by one of their teachers, were sent to get her back.
The mission was a success—or would have been, if a clever faerie hadn’t snared my father’s hand in a berry thornbush. Without thinking, he sucked the blood from a small wound—and, with it, took in a bit of the juice.
Drinking something in Faerie bound him to the Queen’s whim, and the Queen bade him stay. Arthur insisted on staying with him—that’s how much the brothers cared for each other.
The Academy teacher quickly made a bargain with the Queen: Their imprisonment would last only one day.
The Academy teachers have, of course, always been rather clever. But the fey were more so. What passed as one day in the world lasted much longer in Faerie.
It lasted for years.
My father and my uncle had always been quiet, bookish boys. They served bravely on the battlefield, but they preferred the library. They weren’t prepared for what happened to them next.
What happened to them next was they encountered the Lady Nerissa, of the Seelie Court, the faerie who would become my mother, a faerie whose beauty was surpassed only by her cruelty.
My father never spoke to me of what happened to him at Nerissa’s hands, nor did my uncle. But upon their return, they both made full reports to the Inquisitor. I’ve been . . . invited to read these reports in full and relay the details to you.
The details are these: For seven long years Nerissa made of my father her plaything. She bound him to her, not with chains but with dark faerie magic. As her servants held him down, she latched a silver choker around his neck. It was enchanted. It made my father see her not as she was, a monster, but as a miracle. It deceived his eyes and his heart, and turned his hatred of his captor into love. Or, rather, the curdled faerie version of love. A claustrophobic worship. He would do anything for her. He did, over those seven years, do everything for her.
And then there was Arthur, his brother, younger than Andrew and young for his age. Kind, they say. Soft.
Lady Nerissa had no use for Arthur, except as a toy, a tool, something with which to torture my father and affirm his loyalty.
Nerissa forced my father to live all those years in love; she forced Arthur to live in pain.
Arthur was burned alive, many times over, as a faerie fire ate away his flesh and bone but would not kill.
Arthur was whipped, a chain of thorns slashing wounds in his back that would never heal.
Arthur was chained to the ground, cuffs binding his wrists and ankles as if he were a wild beast, and forced to watch his worst nightmares play out before his eyes, faerie glamours impersonating the people he loved most dying excruciating deaths before his eyes.
Arthur was left to believe his brother had abandoned him, had chosen faerie love over flesh and blood, and that was the worst torture of all.
Arthur was broken. It took only a year. The faeries spent the next six stomping and giggling over the rubble of his soul.
And yet.
Arthur was a Shadowhunter, and these should never be underestimated. One day, half-mad with pain and sorrow, he had a vision of his future, of thousands of days of agony, decades, centuries passing in Faerie as he aged into a wizened, broken creature, finally returned to his world to discover that only one day had passed. That everyone he knew was young and whole. That they would pray for his death, so they wouldn’t have to live with what had become of him. Faerie was a land beyond time; they could steal his entire life here—they could give him ten lifetimes of torture and pain—and still stay true to their word.
The terror of this fate was more powerful than pain, and it gave him the strength he needed to break free of his bonds. He was forced to fight against his own brother, who’d been enchanted into believing he should protect Lady Nerissa at all costs. Arthur knocked my father to the ground and used Lady Nerissa’s own dagger to slice her open from neck to sternum. With that same dagger, he cut the enchanted silver from my father’s throat. And together, both of them finally free, they escaped Faerie and returned to the world. Both of them still bearing their scars.
After they made their report to the Inquisitor, they left Idris, and left each other. These brothers, once as close as parabatai, couldn’t stand each other’s sight. Each was a reminder of what the other had endured and lost. Neither could forgive the other for where they had failed, and where they had succeeded.
Perhaps they would have reconciled, eventually.