The following belongs to Cassandra Clare’s Clockwork Prince.
“Gideon and Gabriel,” said Tessa. “They’re really quite good-looking, not hideous at all.”
“I spoke,” said Will in sepulchral tones, “of the pitch-black inner depths of their souls.”
Tessa snorted. “And what color do you suppose the inner depths of your soul are, Will Herondale?”
“Mauve,” said Will.
—
“Perhaps we could say she’s a mad maiden aunt who insists on chaperoning us everywhere.”
“My aunt or yours?” Jem inquired.
“Yes, she doesn’t really look like either of us, does she? Perhaps she’s a girl who’s fallen madly in love with me and persists on following me wherever I go.”
“My talent is shape-shifting, Will, not acting,” said Tessa, and at that, Jem laughed out loud. Will glared at him.
—
His beard was long and white, his eyes crested with thick white eyebrows. He reached out and laid a hand on Will’s shoulder. “Nephilim?” He said, his voice gruff and thickly accented. “Is it you?”
“Dear God,” said Will, putting his hand over his heart in a theatrical gesture. “It’s the Ancient Mariner who stoppeth one of three.”
“Ah’m ‘here at t’bequest of Aloysius Starkweather. Art t’lads he wants or not? Ah’ve not got all night to stand about.”
”Important appointment with an albatross?” Will inquired. “Don’t let us keep you.”
“What my mad friend means to say,” said Jem, “is that we are indeed Shadowhunters of the London Institute. Charlotte Branwell sent us. And you are...?”
—
“Young Herondale, are you?” he barked as Will stepped forward to introduce himself. “Half-mundane, half-Welsh, and the worst traits of both, I’ve heard.”
Will smiled politely. “Diolch.” (Diolch means thanks in Welsh)
—
“What is this?” he went on now, spearing an unfortunate object on a fork and raising it to eye level. “This...this...thing?”
“A parsnip?” Jem suggested.
“A parsnip planted in Satan’s own garden,” said Will. He glanced about. “I don’t suppose there’s a dog I could feed it to.”
“There don’t seem to be any pets about,” Jem—who loved all animals, even the inglorious and ill-tempered Church—observed.
“Probably all poisoned by parsnips,” said Will.
—
“Stand up straight,” Gabriel was saying to Tessa meanwhile, impatiently. “No, straight. Like this.” He demonstrated. She wanted to snap at him that she, unlike him, had not had a lifetime of being taught how to stand and move; that Shadowhunters were natural acrobats, and she was nothing of the sort.
“Hmph,” she said. “I’d like to see you learn how to manage sitting and standing up straight in stays and petticoats and a dress with a foot’s worth of train!”
“So would I,” said Gideon from across the room.
—
“You’re the shape-changer, aren’t you?” he said. “Magnus Bane told me about you. No mark on you at all, they say.”
Tessa swallowed and looked him straight in the eye. They were discordantly human eyes, ordinary in his extraordinary face. “No. No mark.”
He grinned around his fork. “I do suppose they’ve looked everywhere?”
“I’m sure Will’s tried,” said Jessamine in a bored tone. Tessa’s silverware clattered to her plate.
Jessamine, who had been mashing her peas with the side of her knife, looked up when Charlotte let out an aghast, “Jessamine!”
Jessamine shrugged. “Well, he’s like that.”
—
Jem would think she had utterly lost control of herself. No wonder he couldn’t face her at breakfast. She could barely face herself in the mirror.
“Did you hear me?” Will said again, clearly disappointed at the reception of his announcement. “I said I went to an opium den last night.”
Charlotte looked up from her toast. Slowly folded her newspaper, set it on the table beside her, and pushed her reading glasses down her upturned nose. “No,” she said. “That undoubtedly glorious aspect of your recent activities was unknown to us, in fact.”
“So is that where you’ve been all this time?” Jessamine asked listlessly, taking a sugar cube from the bowl and biting into it. “Are you quite a hopeless addict now? They say it takes only one or two doses.”
“It wasn’t really an opium den,” Tessa protested before she could stop herself. “That is to say—they seemed to have more of a trade in magic powders and things like that.”
“So perhaps not an opium den precisely,” said Will, “but still a den. Of vice!” He added, punctuating this last bit by stabbing his finger into the air.
—
Will looked at Jem thoughtfully. “I seem to have woken up with what they call a Monday mouse,” he said, pointing at the bruised skin under his eye. “Any idea where I got it?”
“None.” Jem helped himself to some tea.
“Eggs,” said Henry dreamily, looking at his plate. “I do love eggs. I could eat them all day.”
—
“You might be surprised to know,” said Will, “that I saw something rather interesting in the opium den.”
“I’m sure you did,” said Charlotte with asperity.
“Was it an egg?” Henry inquired.
—
“Perhaps you should be there when I speak with him,” said Charlotte. “Nominally, you are the head of the Institute—”
“Oh, no,” said Henry with a look of horror.
—
“No, you’re still weighting the point too much—and what do you mean, you don’t like me?” Gabriel demanded, handing her another knife as if by reflex, but his expression was very surprised indeed.
“Well,” Tessa said, sighting along the line of the knife, “you behave as if you dislike me. In fact, you behave as if you dislike us all.”
“I don’t,” Gabriel said. “I just dislike him.” He pointed at Will.
“Dear me,” said Will, and he took another bite of his apple. “Is it because I’m better-looking than you?”
You can keep it a secret, but secrets have their own weight, and it can be a very heavy one.
The spoils of vice are a burdensome responsibility.
Sometimes, when I have to do something I don’t want to do, I pretend I’m a character from a book. It’s easier to know what they would do.
There was a time I thought I was a ferret, but that turned out to be the opium haze. Did you know it had that effect? Because I didn’t.
I’m going to get drunk when we get home. I think I’m going to have to.
Do reasons matter when there’s nothing that can be done to change things?
Many who have gazed upon me have compared the experience to gazing at the radiance of the sun.
When I mean morally deficient, I say, ‘Now, that’s something I would have done.’
With God on your side, what does luck matter?
Someone’s got to look after that cat.
Is this a game? We just blurt out whatever word comes next to mind? In that case mine’s ‘genuphobia’. It means an unreasonable fear of knees.”
I will probably be reborn as a slug that someone salts.
That cat bit me three times the other night.
I’ve never swum naked in the Thames, but I know I wouldn’t like it.
It means ‘I wish to get so drunk I no longer remember my own name,’ Quite useful.
I promise to charm the dickens out of him. I shall charm him with such force that when I am done, he will be left lying limply on the ground, trying to remember his own name.
For someone who so often seemed to burn very brightly, that light in him seemed exhausted now, as if he had been rolling a rock up a hill like Sisyphus.
Did you hear that, James? She just compared us to her aunt Harriet.
There’s always the dinner rolls. Though I warn you, they’re as hard as stones. You could use them to kill black beetles, if any beetles bother you in the middle of the night.
There once was a lass from New York | Who found herself hungry in York | But the bread was like rocks | The parsnips shaped like—
I would never let anyone touch a hair on your head. You know that, don’t you, Tess?
Bloody hell, it’s the Ancient Mariner again.
Jem is my great sin. Don’t talk to me about Jem.
I am poison. Poison to them. Poison to anyone who loves me.
They say that time heals all wounds, but that presumes the source of grief is finite.
I feel myself diminished, parts of me spiraling away into the darkness, that which is good and honest and true—
After all, it was never Darnay he quested, only Sydney, drunk and wrecked and dissipated. Sydney, who died for love.
I’ve no idea. I lost consciousness about then. I was having a lovely dream about a young woman who had mislaid nearly all her clothes...
How fortunate that I am a crack hand at knife throwing. Come along, it’ll drive Gideon and Gabriel mad if I watch the training, and I could do with a little madness this morning.
