Clockwork Princess

behind him. Will did not move from where he stood. He did not feel that he could. The sight of Jem in Cadair Idris had been a shock that had gone through his system like a terrible and wonderful incandescence—Jem was
alive
, but he was changed; he lived, but was lost.
    “But,” he said. “You are here to see Tessa.”
    Jem looked at him levelly. His eyes were gray-black, like slate shot through with streaks of obsidian. “And you did not think I would take the chance, whatever chance I could, to see you, too?”
    “I did not know. You left, after the battle, without a farewell.”
    Jem took a few steps forward, into the room. Will felt his spine tighten. There was something strange, something bone-deep and different about the way Jem moved now; this was not the Shadowhunter’s grace Will had trained himself over so many years to mimic, but something strange and alien and new.
    Jem must have seen something in Will’s expression, for he paused. “How could I say farewell,” he said, “to you?”
    Will let the knife fall from his hand. It stuck, point-down, in the wood of the floor. “As Shadowhunters do?
Ave atque vale
. And forever, brother, hail and farewell.”
    “But those are the words of death. Catullus spoke them over his brother’s grave, did he not?
Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias—
”
    Will knew the words.
Through many waters borne, brother, I am come to thy sad grave, that I may give these last gifts to the dead. Forever and ever, brother, hail. Forever and ever, farewell
. He stared. “You—memorized the poem in Latin? But you were always the one who would memorize music, not words—” He broke off with a short laugh. “Never mind. The rituals of the Brotherhood would have changed that.” He turned and paced a few steps away, then spun abruptly to face Jem. “Your violin is in the music room. I thought you might have taken it with you—you cared for it so.”
    “We can take nothing with us to the Silent City but our own bodies and minds,” said Jem. “I left the violin here for some future Shadowhunter who might wish to play it.”
    “Not for me, then.”
    “I would be honored if you would take it and care for it. But I left something else for you. In your room is my
yin fen
box. I thought that you might want it.”
    “That seems a cruel sort of gift,” Will said. “That I might be reminded …”
What took you away from me. What made you suffer. What I searched for and could not find. How I failed you
.
    “Will, no,” said Jem, who, as always, understood without Will having to explain. “It was not always a box that held my drugs. It was my mother’s. Kwan Yin is the goddess depicted on the front. It is said that when she died and reached the gates of paradise, she paused and heard the cries of anguish from the human world below and could not leave it. She remained to give aid to mortals, when they cannot aid themselves. She is the comfort of all suffering hearts.”
    “A box will not comfort me.”
    “Change is not loss, Will. Not always.”
    Will pushed his hands through his damp hair. “Oh, yes,” he said bitterly. “Perhaps in some other life, beyond this one, when we have passed beyond the river, or turned upon the Wheel, or whatever kind words you want to use to describe leaving this world, I shall find my friend again, my
parabatai
. But I have lost you
now
—now, when I need you more than I ever did!”
    Jem had moved across the room—like a flicker of shadow, the Silent Brother’s grace light upon him—and now stood beside the fire. The firelight illuminated his face, and Will could see that something seemed to shine through him: a sort of light that had not been there before. Jem had always shone, with fierce life and fiercer goodness, but this was something different. The light in Jem seemed to burn now; it was a distant light and a lonely one, like the light of a star. “You don’t need me, Will.”
    Will looked down at himself, at the knife at his feet, and remembered the knife he had buried at the base of the tree on the Shrewsbury-Welshpool road, stained with his blood and Jem’s. “All my life, since I came to the Institute, you were the mirror of my soul. I saw the good in me in you. In your eyes alone I found grace. When you are gone from me, who will see me like that?”
    There was a silence then. Jem stood as still as a statue. With his gaze Will searched for, and found,