Clockwork Princess

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