Clockwork Princess

me through the wall, but neither can I reach you. Not without dissolving the spell itself, and that would take time.” He paused. “I wished for you to feel safer.”
    “If you wished me to be safe, you would have left me at the Institute.” Tessa’s tone was bone-chillingly cold.
    Mortmain said nothing to that, only cocked his head and squinted at her, like a sailor squinting at the horizon. “My condolences on the death of your brother. I never meant for that to happen.”
    Tessa felt her mouth twist into a terrible shape. It had been two months since Nate had died in her arms, but she had not forgotten, or forgiven. “I don’t want your pity. Or your good wishes. You made him a tool of yours, and then he died. It was your fault, as surely as if you had shot him in the street.”
    “I suppose it would avail little to point out that he was the one who sought me out.”
    “He was just a
boy
,” Tessa said. She wanted to sink to her knees, wanted to pound against the invisible barrier with her fists, but she held herself upright and cold. “He was not even twenty.”
    Mortmain slid his hands into his pockets. “Do you know what it was like for me, when I was a boy?” he said, in as calm a tone as if he had been seated beside her at a dinner party and forced to make conversation.
    Tessa thought of the images she had seen in Aloysius Starkweather’s mind.
    The man was tall, broad-shouldered—and as green-skinned as a lizard. His hair was black. The child he held by the hand, by contrast, seemed as normal as a child could be—small, chubby-fisted, pink-skinned
.
    Tessa knew the man’s name, because Starkweather knew it
.
    John Shade
.
    Shade hoisted the child up onto his shoulders as through the door of the house spilled a number of odd-looking metal creatures, like a child’s jointed dolls, but human-size, and with skin made of shining metal. The creatures were featureless. Though, oddly, they wore clothes—the rough workman’s coveralls of a Yorkshire farmer on some, and on others plain muslin dresses. The automatons joined hands and began to sway as if they were at a country dance. The child laughed and clapped his hands
.
    “Look well on this, my son,” said the green-skinned man, “for one day I shall rule a clockwork kingdom of such beings, and you shall be its prince.”
    “I know your adoptive parents were warlocks,” she said. “I know that they cared for you. I know that your father invented the clockwork creatures with which you are so enamored.”
    “And you know what happened to them.”
    —a room torn apart, cogs and cams and gears and ripped metal everywhere, fluid leaking as black as blood, and the green-skinned man and blue-haired woman lying dead among the ruins—
    Tessa looked away.
    “Let me tell you about my childhood,” Mortmain said. “Adoptive parents, you call them, but they were as much my parents as any amount of blood could make them. They raised me up with care and love, just as yours did you.” He gestured toward the fireplace, and Tessa realized with a dull shock that the portraits that hung on either side were portraits of her own parents: her fair-haired mother, and her thoughtful-looking father with his brown eyes and tie askew. “And then they were killed by Shadowhunters. My father wanted to create these beautiful automatons, these
clockwork creatures
, as you call them. They would be the greatest machines ever invented, he dreamed, and they would protect Downworlders against the Shadowhunters who routinely murdered and stole from them. You saw the spoils in Starkweather’s Institute.” He spat the last words. “You saw pieces of my parents. He kept my mother’s blood in a jar.”
    And the remains of warlocks. Mummified taloned hands, like Mrs. Black’s. A stripped skull, utterly de-fleshed, human-looking save that it had tusks instead of teeth. Vials of sludgy-looking blood
.
    Tessa swallowed.
My mother’s blood in a jar
. She could not say she did not understand his rage. And yet—she thought of Jem, his parents dying in front of him, his own life destroyed, and yet he had never sought revenge. “Yes, that was horrible,” Tessa said. “But it does not excuse the things you’ve done.”
    A flicker of something deep in his eyes: rage, quickly tamped down. “Let me tell you what I’ve done,” he said. “I have created an army. An army that, once the final piece of the puzzle is in place, will be invincible.”
    “And the final piece of