Clockwork Princess

cards out of the house, as my father … had a weakness for them.” She looked up at Gabriel. “You know, in some ways we are the same. Our brothers left and we were alone without brother or sister, with a father who was deteriorating. Mine went a bit mad for a while after Will left and Ella died. It took him years to recover himself, and in the meantime we lost our home. Just as you lost Chiswick.”
    “Chiswick was taken from us,” said Gabriel with an acidic flash of bitterness. “And to be quite honest, I am both sorry and not. My memories of the place—” He shuddered. “My father locked himself in his study a fortnight before I came here for help. I should have come earlier, but I was too proud. I did not want to admit that I had been wrong about Father. For that two weeks I barely slept. I banged on the door of the study and begged my father to come out, to speak to me, but I heard only inhuman noises. I turned the lock on my door at night and in the morning there would be blood on the stairs. I told myself the servants had fled. I knew better. So no, we are not the same, Cecily, because you
left
. You were brave. I stayed until there was no choice but to leave. I stayed even though I knew it was wrong.”
    “You are a Lightwood,” Cecily said. “You stayed because you were loyal to your family name. It is not cowardice.”
    “Wasn’t it? Is loyalty still a commendable quality when it is misdirected?”
    Cecily opened her mouth, and then closed it again. Gabriel was looking at her, his eyes shining in the moonlight. He seemed genuinely desperate to hear her answer. She wondered if he had anyone else to talk to. She could see how it might be terrifying to take one’s moral qualms to Gideon; he seemed so staunch, as if he had never questioned himself in his life and would not understand those who did.
    “I think,” she said, choosing her words with care, “that any good impulse can be twisted into something evil. Look at the Magister. He does what he does because he hates the Shadowhunters, out of loyalty to his parents, who cared for him, and who were killed. It is not beyond the realm of understanding. And yet nothing excuses the result. I think when we make choices—for each choice is individual of the choices we have made before—we must examine not only our reasons for making them but what result they will have, and whether good people will be hurt by our decisions.”
    There was a pause. Then, “You are very wise, Cecily Herondale,” he said.
    “Do not regret too much the choices you have made in the past, Gabriel,” she said, aware that she was using his Christian name, but not able to help it. “Only make the right ones in future. We are ever capable of change and ever capable of being our better selves.”
    “That,” said Gabriel, “would not be the self my father wanted me to be, and despite everything, I find myself reluctant to dismiss the hope of his approval.”
    Cecily sighed. “We can do our best, Gabriel. I tried to be the child my parents wanted, the lady they wished me to be. I left to bring Will back to them because I thought it was the right thing to do. I knew they were grieved he had chosen a different path—and it is the right one for him, for all that he came to it strangely. It is
his
path. Do not choose the path your father would have chosen or the path your brother would choose. Be the Shadowhunter you want to be.”
    He sounded very young when he replied. “How do you know that I will make the right choice?”
    Outside the window horses’ hooves sounded on the flagstones of the courtyard. The Silent Brothers, leaving.
Jem
, Cecily thought, with a pang in her heart. Her brother had always looked to him as a kind of North Star, a compass that would ever point him toward the right decision. She had never quite thought of her brother as lucky before, and certainly would not have expected to do so today, and yet—and yet in a way he had been. To always have someone to turn to like that, and not to worry constantly that one was looking to the wrong stars.
    She tried to make her voice as firm and strong as it could be, for herself as much as for the boy at the window. “Perhaps, Gabriel Lightwood, I have faith in you.”

14
P ARABATAI
    Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken’d from the dream of life;
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s