Clockwork Princess

because there was no more, I felt my body begin to break, from the inside out. And I thought that I had nothing more to lose.” The intensity in Jem’s voice warmed it—was that a tone of humanity there, a crack in the armor of the Brotherhood? “I begged Charlotte to call the Silent Brothers and asked them to place the runes of the Brotherhood on me at the very last possible moment, the moment when the life was leaving my body. I knew that the runes might mean I died in agony. But it was the only chance.”
    “You said that you did not wish to become a Silent Brother. Did not wish to live forever …”
    He had taken a few steps across the room and was beside her vanity table. He reached down and lifted something metallic and glittering from a shallow jewelry dish. She realized with a shock of surprise that it was her clockwork angel.
    “It no longer ticks,” he said. She could not read his voice; it was distant, as smooth and cool as stone.
    “Its heart is gone. When I changed into the angel, I freed it from its clockwork prison. It no longer lives within. It no longer protects me.”
    His hand closed around the angel, the wings digging hard into the flesh of his palm. “I must tell you,” he said. “When I received Charlotte’s demand that I come here, it was against my wishes.”
    “You did not wish to see me?”
    “No. I did not want you to look at me as you are looking at me now.”
    “Jem—” She swallowed, tasting on her tongue the bitterness of the tisane he had given her. A whirl of memories, the darkness under Cadair Idris, the town on fire, Will’s arms around her—
Will
. But she had thought Jem was dead. “Jem,” she said again. “When I saw you alive, there below Cadair Idris, I thought it was a dream or a lie. I had thought you dead. It was the darkest moment of my life. Believe me, please believe me, that my soul rejoices to see you again when I thought that I never would. It’s just that …”
    He released his grip on the metal angel, and she saw the lines of blood on his hand, where the tips of the wings had cut him, scored across the runes on his palm. “I am strange to you. Not human.”
    “You will always be human to me,” she whispered. “But I cannot quite see my Jem in you now.”
    He closed his eyes. She was used to dark shadows on his lids, but they were gone now. “I had no choice. You were gone, and in my stead Will had gone after you. I did not fear death, but I feared deserting you both. This, then, was my only recourse. To live, to stand and fight.”
    A little color had come into his voice: There was passion there, under the cold detachment of the Silent Brothers.
    “But I knew what I would lose,” he said. “Once you understood my music. Now you look at me as though you do not know me at all. As though you never loved me.”
    Tessa slid out from beneath the coverlet and stood. It was a mistake. Her head swam suddenly, her knees buckling. She threw out a hand to catch at one of the posts of the bed, and found herself with a handful of Jem’s parchment robes instead. He had darted toward her with the graceful quiet tread of the Brothers that was like smoke unfurling, and his arms were around her now, holding her up.
    She went still in his arms. He was close, close enough that she should have been able to feel warmth coming off his body, but she did not. His usual scent of smoke and burned sugar was gone. There was only the faint scent of something dry and as cold as old stone, or paper. She could feel the muffled beat of his heart, see the pulse in his throat. She stared up at him in wonder, memorizing the lines and angles of his face, the scars on his cheekbones, the rough silk of his eyelashes, the bow of his mouth.
    “Tessa.” The word came out on a groan, as if she had hit him. There was the faintest trace of color in his cheeks, blood under snow. “Oh, God,” he said, and buried his face in the crook of her neck, where the curve of her shoulder began, his cheek against her hair. His palms were flat against her back, pressing her harder against him. She could feel him trembling.
    For a moment she was unmoored by the heady relief of it, the feeling of Jem under her hands. Perhaps you did not really believe in a thing until you could touch it. And here was Jem, who she had thought was dead, holding her, and breathing, and
alive
.
    “You feel the same,” she said. “And yet you look so different. You
are
different.”
    He broke away from her at