Emma sped away on a quest to find Clary, with one last grin for Julian.
Only, Mark had been wrong. Art and Emma were clearly not all that occupied Julian’s thoughts. Simon watched as he held on to Tavvy and stooped over a small girl with a round beseeching face and a cloud of brown hair.
“I lost my flower crown and I can’t find it,” whispered the girl.
Julian smiled down at her. “That’s what happens when you lose things, Dru.”
“But if I’m not wearing a flower crown like Livvy, Helen will think I’m careless and I don’t mind my things and I don’t like her as much as Livvy does. Livvy still has her flower crown.”
The other girl in the group, taller than Dru and in that coltish stage where her arms and legs were thin as sticks and too long for the rest of her body, was indeed wearing a flower crown on her light brown hair. She was sticking close to the side of a boy who had headphones on in the midst of the chaos of the wedding, and winter-gray eyes fixed on some distant private sight.
Livvy would walk over hot coals and hissing serpents for Ty, Mark had said. Simon remembered the infinite tenderness with which Mark had said: my Ty.
“Helen knows you better than that,” Julian said.
“Yes, but . . .” Drusilla tugged at his sleeve so he would bend down and she could say, in an agonized whisper: “She’s been gone such a long time. Maybe she doesn’t remember . . . everything about me.”
Julian turned his face away, so none of his siblings could see his expression. Only Simon saw the flash of pain, and he knew he wasn’t meant to. He knew he wouldn’t have seen it, if he hadn’t seen Mark Blackthorn, if he hadn’t been paying attention.
“Dru, Helen has known you since you were born. She does remember everything.”
“But just in case,” said Drusilla. “She’s going away again really soon. I want her to think I’m good.”
“She knows you’re good,” Julian told her. “The best. But we’ll find your flower crown, all right?”
The younger kids did not know Helen in the same way Julian did, as a sibling who was there all the time. They could not rely on someone who was so far away.
Julian was their father, Simon thought with a dawning of horror. There was nobody else.
Even though the Blackthorns had family who wanted to be there for them, wanted it desperately. The Clave had ripped a family apart, and Simon did not know what effects that would have in the future or how the wounds the Clave had inflicted would heal.
He thought, again, as if he were still speaking to his friends at the Academy: We have to be better than this. Shadowhunters have to be better than this. We have to figure out what kind of Shadowhunters we want to be, and show them.
Maybe Mark had not known Julian as well as he thought. Or maybe Mark’s little brother, with no choice, had changed quietly and profoundly.
They all had to change. But Julian was so young.
“Hey,” said Simon. “Can I help?”
The two brothers did not look much alike, but Julian flushed and lifted his chin in the same way Mark had: as if no matter what, he was too proud to admit he might be hurting.
“No,” he said, and gave Simon a bright warm smile that was actually very convincing. “I’m fine. I have this.”
It seemed true, until Julian Blackthorn had gone out of Simon’s reach, and then Simon noticed again that Julian was carrying a kid who was too big for him to carry, with another kid holding on to his shirt. Simon could actually see how much there was on those thin young shoulders.
Simon did not fully understand the traditions of the Shadowhunter people.
There was a lot in the Law about whom you could and could not marry: If you married a mundane who did not Ascend, you got your Marks stripped and were out on your ear. You could marry a Downworlder in a mundane or a Downworlder ceremony, and you wouldn’t be out on your ear but everyone would be embarrassed, some people would act like your marriage did not count, and your terribly traditional Nephilim great-aunt Nerinda would start referring to you as the shame of the family. Plus with the Cold Peace functioning as it was, any Shadowhunter wanting to marry a faerie was probably out of luck.
But Helen Blackthorn was a Shadowhunter, by their own Law, no matter how many people might despise or distrust her for her faerie blood. And Shadowhunters had not actually built it into their precious Law that Shadowhunters could not marry someone of the same sex. Possibly this was just because it hadn’t occurred to anyone even as an option way back when.
So Helen and Aline actually could be married, in a full Shadowhunter ceremony, in the eyes of both their families and their world. Even if they were exiled again right afterward, they got this much.
In a Shadowhunter wedding, Simon had been told, you dressed in gold and placed the wedding rune over each other’s hearts and arms. There was a tradition a little like giving away the bride, for both parties in a marriage. The bride and groom (or in this case, the bride and bride) would each choose the most significant person to them from their family—sometimes a father, but sometimes a mother, or a parabatai or a sibling or chosen friend, or their own child or an elder who symbolized the whole family—and the chosen one, or suggenes, would give the bride or groom to their beloved, and welcome the beloved to their own family.
This was not always possible in Shadowhunter weddings, on account of sometimes your whole family and all your friends had been eaten by snake demons. You never knew with Shadowhunters. But Simon thought it was kind of beautiful that Jia Penhallow, Consul and most important member of the Clave, was standing as suggenes to give her daughter Aline to the tainted, scandalous Blackthorns, and to receive Helen into the bosom of her family.
Aline’d had some nerve suggesting it. Jia’d had some nerve agreeing to it. But Simon supposed that the Clave had already effectively exiled Jia’s daughter: What more could they do to her? And how better to politely spit in their eye than to say: Helen, the faerie girl you spat on and sent away, is now as good as the Consul’s daughter.
What is a Shadowhunter made of, if they desert their own, if they throw away a child’s heart like rubbish left on the side of the road?
Julian was the one standing to give Helen away. He stood in his gold-inscribed clothes, his sister on his arm, and his sea-in-the-sunlight eyes shone as if he was happy as any kid could be. As though he had not a care in the world.
Helen and Aline were both dressed in golden gowns, golden thread glittering like starlight in Aline’s black hair. They were both so happy, their faces outshone their gowns. They stood at the center of the ceremony, twin suns, and for a moment all the world seemed to spin and turn on them.
Helen and Aline drew the marriage runes over each other’s hearts with steady hands. When Aline drew Helen’s bright head down to her own for a kiss, there was applause all throughout the hall.