Clockwork Princess

moments drawn out of real life, as if they were taking place in some other world. Even now she could barely believe that it had happened at all.
    “Tessa?” His voice was hesitant, his hands still outstretched. A part of her wanted to take them, to draw him down beside her and kiss him, to forget herself in Will as she had before. For he was as effective as any drug.
    And then she remembered Will’s own clouded eyes in the opium den, the dreams of happiness that crashed into ruins the moment the effects of the smoke wore away. No. Some things could be managed only by facing them. She took a breath, and looked up at Will.
    “I know what you would say,” she said. “You are thinking of what happened between us in Cadair Idris, because we thought Jem was dead, and that we, too, would die. You are an honorable man, Will, and you know what you must do now. You must offer me marriage.”
    Will, who had been very still, proved that he could still surprise her, and laughed. It was a soft laugh, and rueful. “I did not expect you to be so forthright, but I suppose I should have. I know my Tessa.”
    “I am your Tessa,” she said. “But, Will. I do not want you to speak now. Not of marriage, of lifelong promises—”
    He sat down on the edge of the bed. He was in training gear, the loose shirt pushed up around his elbows, the throat open, and she could see the healing scars of the battle on his skin, the white remembrance of healing runes. She could see the beginning of hurt, too, in his eyes. “You regret what happened between us?”
    “Can one regret a thing that, however unwise, was beautiful?” she said, and the hurt in his eyes softened into confusion.
    “Tessa. If you are afraid that I feel reluctant, obligated—”
    “No.” She put up her hands. “It is only that I feel your heart must be a tangle of grief and despair and relief and happiness and confusion, and I do not wish you to make pronouncements when you are so overwhelmed. And do not tell me you are not overwhelmed, for I can see it upon you, and I feel it myself. We are both overwhelmed, Will, and neither of us is in any fit state to make decisions.”
    For a moment he hesitated. His fingers hovered over his heart, where the
parabatai
rune had been, touching it lightly—she wondered if he was even aware he was doing it—and then he said, “Sometimes I fear you may be too wise, Tessa.”
    “Well,” she said. “One of us has to be.”
    “Is there nothing I can do?” he said. “I would rather not leave your side. Unless you wish me to.”
    Tessa let her gaze fall to the bedside table, where the books she had been reading before the automaton attack on the Institute—it felt like a thousand years ago—lay stacked. “You could read to me,” she said. “If you would not mind.”
    Will looked up at that and smiled. It was a raw, strange smile, but it was real, and it was Will. Tessa smiled back. “I do not mind,” he said. “Not at all.”
    Which was how, some quarter of an hour later, Will came to be sitting in an armchair, reading from
David Copperfield
, when Charlotte pushed the door of Tessa’s room gently open with her fingers and peered inside. She could not help but be anxious—Will had looked so desperate slumped on the floor of the training room, so very much alone, and she remembered the fear she had always harbored, that if Jem ever left them, he would take all the best of Will with him when he went. And Tessa, too, was still so fragile….
    Will’s soft voice filled the room, along with the muted glow of the light from the fire in the grate. Tessa was lying on her side, her brown hair spread over the pillow, watching Will, whose face was bent over the pages, with a look of tenderness in her eyes, a tenderness mirrored in the softness of Will’s voice as he read. It was a tenderness so intimate and so profound that Charlotte stepped away immediately, letting the door fall noiselessly shut behind her.
    Still, Will’s voice followed her down the corridor as she walked away, her heart a great deal lighter than it had been moments ago.
    “… and cannot watch over him, if that is not too bold a thing to say, as closely as I would. But if any fraud or treachery is practicing against him, I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world….”

24
T HE M EASURE OF L OVE
    The measure of love is to love without