“Yes, Si, you’re a real killer.”
“Feel this arm,” said Simon. “Rock hard! I don’t mean to brag, but it’s all bone. All bone.”
“Si,” said George. “I don’t need to feel it. I believe in you, because that’s what bros do. And I’m happy for your mysterious popularity with the ladies, because that’s how bros are. But seriously, watch out for Jon, because I think he’s going to shank you one of these days. He does not get your indefinable but undeniable allure. He’s got abs to the chin and he thought he had the ladies of the Academy locked down.”
Simon rode on, somewhat dazed.
He’d been thinking that Isabelle’s affection for him was a stunning and inexplicable occurrence, like a lightning strike. (Gorgeous and courageous lightning whom he was lucky to be struck by!) Given current evidence, however, he was starting to believe it was time to reevaluate.
He had been reliably informed that he’d dated Maia, the leader of the New York werewolf pack, though he’d received the impression that he had well and truly messed that one up. He’d heard rumors about a vampire queen who might have been interested. He’d even gathered, strange as it seemed, that there was a brief period of time when he and Clary had gone out. And now possibly Beatriz liked him.
“Seriously, George, tell me the truth,” said Simon. “Am I beautiful?”
George burst out laughing, his horse wheeling back a few easy paces in the sunlight.
And Julie shouted: “Faerie!” and pointed. Simon looked toward a hooded and cloaked figure with a basket of fruit over one arm, emerging as if innocently from the mist behind a tree.
“After it!” roared George, and his horse charged for the figure, Simon plunging after him.
Marisol, far ahead, shouted: “Trap!” and then gave a scream of pain.
Simon looked desperately toward the trees. The faerie, he saw, had reinforcements. They had been warned the Fair Folk were all more wary and desperate in the aftermath of the Cold Peace. They should have listened better and thought harder. They should have planned for this.
Simon, George, Julie, and Beatriz were all riding hard, but they were too far from her. Marisol was swaying in her saddle, blood pouring down her arm: elfshot.
“Marisol!” Jon Cartwright shouted. “Marisol, to me!”
She pulled the horse toward his. Jon stood on his horse and leaped onto hers, bow already in hand and firing arrows into the trees, standing on the horse’s back and thus shielding Marisol like a strange bow-shooting acrobat. Simon knew he’d never be able to do anything like that, ever, unless he Ascended.
Julie and Beatriz turned their horses toward the trees where the concealed faeries were firing.
“They have Marisol,” George panted. “We can still get the fruit seller.”
“No, George,” Simon began, but George had already wheeled his horse toward the hooded figure, now disappearing behind the tree and the mist.
There was a spear of sunlight shooting between the trunk and the branch of the tree, a dazzling white line between the crooked arc of tree limbs. It seemed to refract in Simon’s eyes, becoming broad and fair, like the path of moonlight on the sea. The hooded figure was slipping away, half-disappeared into the dazzle, and George’s horse was inches from danger, George’s hand reaching for the edge of the figure’s cloak, George heedless of the course he had placed himself upon.
“No, George!” Simon shouted. “We are not going to trespass into Faerie!”
He forced his own horse into George’s path, making George pull up, but he was so hell-bent on stopping George that he did not take into consideration his mount, now terrified and fleeing and urged to speed.
Until the white dazzling light filled Simon’s vision. He remembered suddenly the feeling of falling away into Faerie, soaked to the skin, in a pool filled with water: remembered Jace being kind to him, and how much he had resented that, how he’d thought: Don’t show me up any further, and his chest had burned with resentment.
Now he was tumbling into Faerie with the scream of a terrified horse in his ears, leaves blinding him and twigs scraping at his face and his arms. He tried to shield his eyes and found himself thrown on rock and bones, with darkness rushing at him. He would have been very grateful if Jace had been there.
Simon woke in Faerieland. His whole skull was throbbing, in the way your thumb did when you hit it with a hammer. He hoped nobody had hit his head with a hammer.
He woke in a gently swaying bed, slightly prickly under his cheek. He opened his eyes and saw that he was not exactly in a bed, but lying amid twigs and moss, scattered across a swaying surface constructed of wooden laths. There were strange stripes of darkness in front of his vision, obscuring his view of the vista beyond.
Faerieland almost looked like the moors in Devon, yet it was entirely different. The mists in the distance were faintly purple, like storm clouds clinging to the earth, and there was movement in the cloud suggesting odd and menacing shapes. The leaves on the trees were green and yellow and red like the trees of the mundane world, but they shone too brightly, like jewels, and when the wind rustled through them Simon could almost make out words, as if they were whispering together. This was nature run riot, alchemized into magic and strangeness.
And Simon was, he realized, in a cage. A big wooden cage. The stripes of darkness across his vision were his cage bars.
The thing that outraged him most was how familiar it felt. He remembered being trapped like this before. More than once.
“Shadowhunters, vampires, and now faeries, all longing to throw me in prison,” Simon said aloud. “Why exactly was I so anxious to get back all these memories? Why is it always me? Why am I always the chump in the cage?”
His own voice made his aching head hurt.
“You are in my cage now,” said a voice.
Simon sat up hastily, though it made his head throb fiercely and all of Faerieland reel drunkenly around him. He saw, on the other side of his cage, the hooded and cloaked figure whom George had tried so desperately to capture on the moors. Simon swallowed. He could not see the face beneath the hood.
There was a whirl in the air, like a shadow whipping over the sun. A new faerie dropped out of the clear blue sky, the leaves of the forest floor crunching under his bare feet. Sunlight washed his fair hair into radiance, and a long knife glittered in his hand.
The hooded and cloaked faerie dropped his hood and bowed his head in sudden deference. Unhooded, Simon saw, he had large ears, tinted purple, as if he had an eggplant stuck to each side of his face, and wisps of long white hair that curled over his eggplant ear like cloud.