Clockwork Princess

heart.”
    Her head turned slowly toward him, her lips parting as if she were about to speak. He leaned forward, heart leaping.
    “Jem?” she said.
    He froze, unmoving, his hand still wrapped about hers. Her eyes fluttered open—as gray as the sky before rain, as gray as the slate hills of Wales. The color of tears. She looked at him, through him, not seeing him at all.
    “Jem,” she said again. “Jem, I am so sorry. It is all my fault.”
    Will leaned forward again. He could not help himself. She was speaking, and comprehensibly, for the first time in days. Even if not to him.
    “It’s not your fault,” he said.
    She returned the pressure of his hand hotly; each of her individual fingers seemed to burn through his skin. “But it is,” she said. “It is because of me that Mortmain deprived you of your
yin fen
. It is because of me that all of you were in danger. I was meant to love you, and all I did was shorten your life.”
    Will took a ragged breath. The splinter of ice was back in his heart, and he felt as if he were breathing around it. And yet it was not jealousy, but a sorrow more profound and deeper than any he thought he had known before. He thought of Sydney Carton.
Think now and then that there is a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you
. Yes, he would have done that for Tessa—died to keep the ones she needed beside her—and so would Jem have done that for him or for Tessa, and so would Tessa, he thought, do that for both of them. It was a near incomprehensible tangle, the three of them, but there was one certainty, and that was that there was no lack of love between them.
    I am strong enough for this
, he told himself, lifting her hand gently. “Life is not just surviving,” he said. “There is also happiness. You know your James, Tessa. You know he would choose love over the span of his years.”
    But Tessa’s head only tossed fretfully on the pillow. “Where are you, James? I search for you in the darkness, but I cannot find you. You are my intended; we should be bound by ties that cannot sever. And yet when you were dying, I was not there. I have never said good-bye.”
    “What darkness? Tessa, where are you?” Will gripped her hand. “Give me a way to find you.”
    Tessa arched back on the bed suddenly, her hand clamping down on his. “I’m sorry!” she gasped. “Jem—I am so sorry—I have wronged you, wronged you horribly—”
    “Tessa!” Will bolted to his feet, but Tessa had already collapsed bonelessly onto the mattress, breathing hard.
    He could not help it. He cried out for Charlotte like a child who had woken from a nightmare, as he had never permitted himself to cry out when he truly was a child, waking in the then unfamiliar Institute and longing for comfort but knowing he must not take it.
    Charlotte came running through the Institute, as he had always known she would come running for him if he called. She arrived, breathless and frightened; she took one look at Tessa on the bed, and Will clasping her hand, and he saw the terror leave her face, replaced by a look of wordless sorrow. “Will …”
    Will gently detached his hand from Tessa’s, turning toward the door. “Charlotte,” he said. “I have never asked you to use your position as head of the Institute to help me before—”
    “My position cannot heal Tessa.”
    “It can. You must bring Jem here.”
    “I cannot demand that,” Charlotte said. “Jem has only just begun his term of service in the Silent City. New Initiates are not meant to leave at all for the first year—”
    “He came to the battle.”
    Charlotte pushed a stray curl from her face. Sometimes she looked very young, as she did now, though earlier, facing the Inquisitor in the drawing room, she had not. “That was Brother Enoch’s choice.”
    Certainty straightened Will’s spine. For so many years he had doubted the contents of his own heart. He did not doubt them now. “Tessa needs Jem,” he said. “I know the Law, I know he cannot come home, but—the Silent Brothers are meant to sever every bond that ties them to the mortal world before they join the Brotherhood. That is also the Law. The bond between Tessa and Jem was not severed. How is she to rejoin the mortal world, then, if she cannot even see Jem one last time?”
    Charlotte was silent for a space of time. There was a shadow over her face, one he could not define. Surely she would want this, for Jem, for Tessa, for both of them? “Very