Chain of Gold (16 page)

James was just over the scalding fever, reunited with his family in the bright meadows and cool forests of Idris. And yet he felt uneasy as he opened the windows in his bedroom at Herondale Manor, bringing fresh air to the room for the first time in months. Perhaps it was how quickly one traveled, through Portals. He had only just been waving goodbye to Cordelia and her parents, and feeling about Cordelia in a manner that he could not possibly put into words, it was so excellent and strange and perplexing. He could have used several days at sea, or aboard a train, to gaze out at the landscape and feel complicated things. Instead, ten minutes after being at Cirenworth, he was pulling protective sheets off furniture and lighting witchlights, and his father was loudly proclaiming the healing quality of the Idris air.

James was unpacking his things when his mother came into the bedroom, sorting through correspondence. She held out a small envelope. “One for you,” she said, and left him in privacy with the letter.

James didn't recognize the handwriting. It was in a refined femi
nine hand. He briefly thought,
But I don't know anybody in Idris to send me a letter,
and then realized:
Grace
.

He sat on the bed to read it. All it said was,
Meet me at our Place. Tomorrow, dusk. Yrs, GB
.

He felt a bit guilty; he had not thought of Grace in a time. He wondered if she had done anything this past year and, with a start, realized it was plausible that she had gone nowhere and talked to nobody. Tatiana Blackthorn was notorious for avoiding all Shadowhunter society, and especially with the Herondales not in residence, she had very few neighbors, and those some distance away.

By the Angel,
he thought.
Am I Grace's only friend?

“I have no one else, no,” Grace said.

They sat together on the forest floor, James leaning against a high looping oak root and Grace upon a stone. Grace's look of sorrow turned quickly back to her usual calm composure.

“I have no news to report since our last meeting, I fear,” she said. “But you look as though you have battled against something. More than tired.”

“Oh!” said James. “Well, that is one thing that has happened to me since I last saw you. I'm just getting over scalding fever, I'm afraid.”

Grace mock-flinched away, then laughed. “No, I've had it, don't worry. My poor James! I do hope you weren't lonely.”

“I was lucky there,” said James. He felt a slight twinge in the pit of his stomach, for no reason he understood. “Cordelia and her mother had both had it, so they could stay. They took good care of me. Cordelia especially. It really made the situation much more tolerable. Much less bad. Than it could have been. If she had not been there.”

Even James understood that he was rambling a bit. Grace only nodded.

The next day James woke late, to find his parents already out and his sister perched on one of the overstuffed armchairs in the parlor, scribbling furiously into a notebook.

“Do you want to do something?” he asked Lucie.

Without looking up, she said, “I
am
doing something. I'm writing.”

“What are you writing about?”

“Well, if you don't leave me alone, I'll write about
you
.”

So, with nothing else to do, he walked to Blackthorn Manor.

The manor looked, to his eyes, identical to how it had appeared the first time he'd gone there a year ago, to cut the briars from the gates. The house itself was closed and silent, like a giant bat curled into itself to sleep through the day, until the darkness gave it leave to unfurl its wings again. If anything, the briars were longer than they had been when he first began his work last year, the thorns more numerous, longer and sharper. The first half of the motto above the gates was obscured, and all that could be read now was
LEX NULLA
.

He walked the perimeter, around the stone wall, through the uncut underbrush. He felt silly. He hadn't brought a book or a sword or anything to do. When he came again to the front gates, though, Grace was waiting behind them.

“I could see you through my bedroom window,” Grace said, without preamble. “You looked lost.”

“Good morning,” James said, and Grace smiled at his manners. “Do you think your mother would want me to trim the briars up again?”

An awkward silence fell. Then Grace said, “I cannot imagine that my mother would
mind
if the vines were to be cleaned up. If I fetched you shears, and you cut them back from the gates, I would keep you company.”

“That seems a fine bargain,” said James with a grin.

“I cannot promise to make enough idle conversation to fill the time, of course,” Grace added. “I could read to you, if you like.”

“No! No, thank you,” he said quickly. Grace looked surprised, so James added, “I would rather hear about your life.”

“My life is this house,” she said.

“Then,” he said, “tell me about the house.”

So she did. James never told his parents where he was going. He would simply leave the house in the afternoon, trim the vines and overgrowth outside the walls of the manor, and talk with Grace for two hours or so, before growing tired and thirsty, begging Grace's pardon, and sauntering home.

Grace told him of the manor's grandeur and the layers of dust and neglect that had overtaken it: “Sometimes I feel I live in a giant cobweb, but my mother doesn't trust anyone to come and clean, and the place is too big for any two people to keep up.” She told him of the twisting thorns carved into the oak banister, the coat of arms above the mantel, the frightening metal statue lurking on the second floor. Her descriptions sounded dreadful to James, like the house was a carcass, once a beautiful living thing, rotting away.

The thought made him shiver, but when he returned home, the feeling faded; at night he still fell asleep to his memory of Cordelia's voice, low and steady in his ear.

Lucie announced she planned to read to James from her work in progress,
Secret Princess Lucie Is Rescued from Her Terrible Family
. James listened with a carefully arranged look of interest, even though he was subjected to endless tales of Cruel Prince James and his many awful deeds.

“I think that Cruel Prince James has been somewhat boxed in by his name,” James offered at one point. Lucie informed him that she wasn't looking for critique at this stage in the creative process.

“Secret Princess Lucie only wishes to be kind, but Cruel Prince James is driven to cruelty because he simply cannot stand to see Princess Lucie best him again and again, in every domain,” said Lucie.

“I'm going to go now,” said James.

Lucie closed the notebook and looked at James. “What's she like, Grace Blackthorn? You see her sometimes when you're over there cutting the briars, don't you?”

“I suppose.” James was caught off guard. “She's… sad. She's terribly lonely, I think. All she knows is her mother and their creepy house.”

“How awful for her.”

“Yes, it is awful. She is truly to be pitied.”

“Indeed,” said Lucie.

At their spot in the forest, James told Grace about the friends he'd made: Matthew (who Grace knew was the Consul's son), and Thomas and Christopher, who he referred to as “your cousins,” to no reaction from Grace. She only said, shyly, “I must say that I am a little glad that they are not here with you in Idris. Oh, I am sure you would be having a grander time if they were! But then we would not have all this time together, and I would miss it.”

James worried about Grace. It would not do for him to be her only friend; there was only so often he could see her. He thought of Cordelia's visit later in the summer and whether there would be any possibility that they could meet, given that his friendship with Grace must remain a secret.

Now Grace appeared to hesitate. “Would I offend you if I asked
what happened to you at Shadowhunter Academy? I have heard only rumors.”

James told her about his strange power of passing into shadow, it having been revealed before a good portion of the Academy, and his expulsion. “It is a hardly a secret,” he said, wondering why it felt like a great confession. “It is because of my mother being a sort of warlock. Everyone knows it, yet still they mutter and point.”

“It often seems to me,” she said, “that warlocks are great partners to us in fighting demons, and they are themselves partly demonic. I do not see why others must fuss so.”

“Shadowhunters don't like difference,” James said. “They always see evil in it. But here, I have told you a secret and now you must tell me one.”

Grace smiled. “I have no secrets.”

“Not true. Where do you come from, Grace Blackthorn? Do you remember your parents?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was eight when they—they were killed by demons. I would have been left by myself had it not been for Mama.”

That did explain why Grace had only a single rune, on her left hand. The Voyance rune was the first Mark Shadowhunters received when they were children. Tatiana had clearly not welcomed the idea of Grace continuing her Shadowhunter education further.

“You would have been taken in by an Institute,” said James. “Shadowhunters don't abandon their own.”

“I suppose,” said Grace, “but I wouldn't have had a family. And now I do. A mother, and a family name, and a home.” She did not look entirely happy about it. “I do wish I had been able to keep something of my parents', though.”

James was startled. “Do you truly possess nothing of theirs?”

“There is one thing,” she said. “My mother had a silver bracelet she wore. Mama says it is very valuable, and she keeps it in a box in
her study. She says she will let me wear it when I am older, but every year I ask, and every year I am not yet old enough.”

“Can you not retrieve it from its box?”

“The box is locked up tight,” she said. “My mother is fond of locks. All over the house I find drawers, cupboards, boxes that won't budge without the right keys.… I cannot imagine that Mama remembers what key goes to what lock. There are so many of each.” Her expression changed in a subtle way. “But enough of this sorrowful subject! I have heard from my mother that the Carstairs family will be visiting you later this summer. No doubt you will spend all your time with them, once they get here.”

“No,” James said, “I expect Cordelia will want to spend all her time with Lucie—they're to be
parabatai
someday. Of course, Lucie is also writing her book, so there may well be times when I really
should
spend time with Cordelia, as a good host. I mean, whatever she likes. Obviously, if she wanted to spend every day with me, that would be all right—”

He stopped, realizing that he had become entirely crazed sometime in the past ten seconds. Grace was being very polite about it. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “I did not mean to suggest—”

Grace laughed lightly. “Nonsense! I know you mean well, James. You're just in love with Cordelia.”

James was horrified. “I am fond of her, that is all. We are friends, as you and I are.”

“Oh?” Grace said. “And if she arrives here in Idris and tells you she has met the most
wonderful
man and they have had a whirlwind romance and now they are promised to each other? You would only congratulate her like you would any of your friends?”

“I would tell her she was too young to get married,” James said stiffly. The truth was that when he thought of Cordelia marrying someone else, it felt like being kicked in the heart. With a start, he realized that in his vague imaginings of the future
Cordelia had always been there, a steady, welcome presence, a warm light in the dark of the unknown.

“Cruel Prince James strode into the chamber, his cape flashing behind him and his terrible, terrible mustache askew with rage,” Lucie narrated the moment James walked through the door.

“Does it need be said twice that it's terrible?” James said.

“He required a hot beverage to soothe his throat, parched from barking out his wicked commands all day. Tea, he thought, yes, tea and
revenge
.”

“I'll just go put the kettle on,” James sighed.

“What a strange sort of friendship we have,” Grace said. They were back at Blackthorn Manor, James clipping away at the briars along the high stone wall, and Grace on the other side, ambling along with him. He caught glimpses of her every once in a while as they walked, through gaps in the stone. “It's a pity you can't turn into a shadow and come join me, on my side of the wall.”

James stopping clipping. “I hadn't thought of that.”
Maybe I could.
He put down the shears in the grass and looked at his hands. He did not know what to do. He thought hard of nothingness, of the gray of the shadow realm. With a start, he stumbled forward through the wall.

He recovered himself. He was still a shadow, though he was not in the shadow realm: he stood very clearly inside the garden walls of Blackthorn Manor. There was overgrown grass everywhere—and Grace, staring at him.

Can you come back?
she was mouthing, or possibly saying out loud, and James, with a huge effort, did. Back in his physical form, he clenched and unclenched his fists.

“That was amazing,” Grace said. “I imagine you'd get used to the feeling, if you practiced.”

Maybe.
“Do you think I could leave by the gate?”

Grace laughed. At the gate, as he departed, she reached for his arm. “Wait. James. I was thinking. If some night you find yourself unable to sleep, and you find yourself cast into shadow… Perhaps you could come here, and walk through the briars and into the house, and into Mama's study, and dip your shadowed hand through the top of the right box, and retrieve my bracelet for me.”