Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices 3)

"I do not think I will go to Idris, or to an Institute anywhere," he said, after a pause so long that she felt as if her knees might give way under her if he did not speak. "I don't know how to live in the world as a Shadowhunter without Will. I don't think I even want to. I am still a parabatai, but my other half is gone. If I were to go to some Institute and ask them to take me in, I would never forget that. I would never feel whole."

"Then what--"

"That depends on you."

"On me?" A sort of terror gripped her. She knew what she wanted him to say, but it seemed impossible. In all the time she had seen him, since he had become a Silent Brother, he had seemed remote. Not unkind or unfeeling, but as if there were a layer of glass between him and the world. She remembered the boy she had known, who'd given his love as freely as breathing, but that was not the man she had met only once each year for more than a century. She knew how much the time between then and now had changed her. How much more must it have changed him? She did not know what he wanted from his new life or, more immediately, from her. She wanted to tell him whatever he wanted to hear, wanted to catch at him and hold him, to seize his hands and reassure herself of their shape--but she did not dare. Not without knowing what he wanted from her. It had been so many years. How could she presume he still felt as he once had?

"I--" He looked down at his slender hands, gripping the concrete of the bridge. "For a hundred and thirty years every hour of my life has been scheduled. I thought often of what I would do if I were free, if there were ever a cure found. I thought I would bolt immediately, like a bird released from a cage. I had not imagined I would emerge and find the world so changed, so desperate. Subsumed in fire and blood. I wished to survive it, but for only one reason. I wished ..."

"What did you wish for?"

He did not reply. Instead he reached over to touch her pearl bracelet with light fingers. "This is your thirtieth-anniversary bracelet," he said. "You still wear it."

Tessa swallowed. Her skin was prickling, her pulse racing. She realized she hadn't felt this, this particular brand of excited nervousness, in so many years that she had nearly forgotten it. "Yes."

"Since Will, have you never loved anyone else?"

"Don't you know the answer to that?"

"I don't mean the way you love your children, or the way you love your friends. Tessa, you know what I'm asking."

"I don't," she said. "I think I need you to tell me."

"We were once going to be married," he said. "And I have loved you all this time--a century and a half. And I know that you loved Will. I saw you together over the years. And I know that that love was so great that it must have made other loves, even the one we had when we were both so young, seem small and unimportant. You had a whole lifetime of love with him, Tessa. So many years. Children. Memories I cannot hope to--"

He broke off with a violent start.

"No," he said, and let her wrist fall. "I can't do it. I was a fool to think-- Tessa, forgive me," he said, and drew away from her, plunging into the throng of people surging across the bridge.

Tessa stood for a moment in shock; it was just a moment, but it was enough time for him to vanish into the crowd. She put out a hand to steady herself. The stone of the bridge was cold under her fingers--cold, just as it had been that night when they had first come to this place, where they had first talked. He had been the first person she had ever voiced her deepest fear to: that her power made her something other, something that was not human. You are human, he had said. In all the ways that matter.

She remembered him, remembered the lovely dying boy who had taken the time to comfort a frightened girl he did not know, and had not voiced a word of his own fear. Of course he had left his fingerprints on her heart. How could it be otherwise?

She remembered the time he had offered her his mother's jade pendant, held out in his shaking hand. She remembered kisses in a carriage. She remembered walking into his room, spilled full with moonlight, and the silver boy standing in front of the window, wringing music more beautiful than desire out of the violin in his hands.

Will, he had said. Is it you, Will?

Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem's violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.

Jem was mortal now. He would grow old like Will, and like Will he would die, and she did not know if she could bear it again.

And yet.

Most people are lucky to have even one great love in their life. You have found two.

Suddenly her feet were moving, almost without her volition. She was darting into the crowd, pushing past strangers, gasping out apologies as she nearly tripped over the feet of passersby or knocked into them with her elbows. She didn't care. She was running flat out across the bridge, skidding to a halt at the very end of it, where a series of narrow stone steps led down to the water of the Thames.

She took them two at a time, almost slipping on the damp stone. At the bottom of the steps was a small cement dock, ringed around with a metal railing. The river was high and splashed up between the gaps in the metal, filling the small space with the smell of silt and river water.

Jem stood at the railing, looking out at the water. His hands were jammed tightly into his pockets, his shoulders hunched as if against a strong wind. He was staring ahead almost blindly, and with such fixed intent that he didn't seem to hear her as she came up behind him. She caught at his sleeve, swinging him around to face her.

"What," she said breathlessly. "What were you trying to ask me, Jem?"

His eyes widened. His cheeks were flushed, whether from running or the cold air, she wasn't sure. He looked at her as if she were some bizarre plant that had sprung up on the spot, astonishing him. "Tessa--you followed me?"

"Of course I followed you. You ran off in the middle of a sentence!"

"It wasn't a very good sentence." He looked down at the ground, and then up at her again, a smile, as familiar as her own memories, tugging at the corner of his mouth. It came back to her then, a memory lost but not forgotten: Jem's smile had always been like sunlight. "I never was the one who was good with words," he said. "If I had my violin, I would be able to play you what I wanted to say."

"Just try."

"I don't--I'm not sure I can. I had six or seven speeches prepared, and I was running through all of them, I think."

His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans. Tessa reached out and took him gently by the wrists. "Well, I am good with words," she said. "So let me ask you, then."

He drew his hands from his pockets and let her wrap her fingers around his wrists. They stood, Jem looking at her from under his dark hair--it had blown across his face in the wind off the river. There was still a single streak of silver in it, startling against the black.

"You asked me if I have loved anyone but Will," she said. "And the answer is yes. I have loved you. I always have, and I always will."

She heard his sharp intake

of breath. There was a pulse pounding in his throat, visible under the pale skin still laced with the fading white lines of the Brotherhood's runes.

"They say you cannot love two people equally at once," she said. "And perhaps for others that is so. But you and Will--you are not like two ordinary people, two people who might have been jealous of each other, or who would have imagined my love for one of them diminished by my love of the other. You merged your souls when you were both children. I could not have loved Will so much if I had not loved you as well. And I could not love you as I do if I had not loved Will as I did."

Her fingers ringed his wrists lightly, just below the cuffs of his jumper. To touch him like this--it was so strange, and yet it made her want to touch him more. She had almost forgotten how much she missed the touch of someone she loved.

She forced herself to release her hold on him, though, and reached her hand into the collar of her shirt. Carefully she took hold of the chain around her throat and lifted it so that he could see, dangling from it, the jade pendant he had given her so long ago. The inscription on the back still gleamed as if new: