Clockwork Princess

so many times, and had yet to arrive at any satisfactory version. Perhaps she should not be attempting it now, she thought, not when she had been trying to calm her nerves since they had returned to the Institute. Everyone had been swarming about Jem, and Will, after roughly checking her for injuries in the garden, had barely spoken to her again. Henry had gone running for Charlotte, Gideon had drawn Gabriel aside, and Cecily had found herself climbing the Institute stairs alone.
    She had slipped into her bedroom, not bothering to divest herself of her gear, and curled up on the soft four-poster bed. As she’d lain among the shadows, hearing the faint sounds of London passing by outside, her heart had clenched with sudden, painful homesickness. She’d thought of the green hills of Wales, and of her mother and father, and had bolted out of the bed as if she had been pushed, stumbling to the desk and taking up pen and paper, the ink staining her fingers in her haste. And yet the right words would not come. She felt as if she bled her regret and her loneliness from her very pores, and yet she could not shape those feelings into any sentiment she could imagine her parents could bear reading.
    At that moment there was a knock on the door. Cecily reached for a book she had left resting on the desk, propped it up as if she had been reading, and called: “Come in.”
    The door swung open; it was Tessa, standing hesitantly in the doorway. She was no longer wearing her destroyed wedding dress but a simple gown of blue muslin with her two necklaces glittering at her throat: the clockwork angel and the jade pendant that had been her bridal gift from Jem. Cecily looked at Tessa curiously. Though the two girls were friendly, they were not close. Tessa had a certain wariness around her that Cecily suspected the source of without ever being able to prove it; on top of that there was something fey and strange about her. Cecily knew she could shape-shift, could transform herself into the likeness of any person, and Cecily could not rid herself of the sense that it was unnatural. How could you know someone’s true face if they could change it as easily as someone else might change a gown?
    “Yes?” Cecily said. “Miss Gray?”
    “Please call me Tessa,” said the other girl, shutting the door behind her. It was not the first time she had asked Cecily to call her by her given name, but habit and perversity kept Cecily from doing it. “I came to see if you were all right and if you needed anything.”
    “Ah.” Cecily felt a slight pang of disappointment. “I am quite all right.”
    Tessa moved forward slightly. “Is that
Great Expectations
?”
    “Yes.” Cecily did not say that she had seen Will reading it, and had picked it up to try to gain insight into what he was thinking. So far she was woefully lost. Pip was morbid, and Estella so awful that Cecily wanted to shake her.
    “‘Estella,’” Tessa said softly. “‘To the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil.’”
    “So you memorize passages of books, just like Will? Or is this a favorite?”
    “I don’t have Will’s memory,” said Tessa, coming forward slightly. “Or his
mnemosyne
rune. But I do love that book.” Her gray eyes searched Cecily’s face. “Why are you still in your gear?”
    “I was thinking of going up to the training room,” Cecily said. “I find I can think well there, and it isn’t as if anyone minds one way or the other what I do.”
    “More training? Cecily, you’ve just been in a battle!” Tessa protested. “I know it can sometimes take more than one application of runes to entirely heal— Before you start training again, I should call someone to you: Charlotte, or—”
    “Or Will?” Cecily snapped. “If either of them cared, they would have come already.”
    Tessa paused by the bedside. “You cannot think Will doesn’t care about you.”
    “He isn’t here, is he?”
    “He sent me,” Tessa said, “because he is with Jem,” as if that explained everything. Cecily supposed that in a way it did. She knew that Will and Jem were close friends, but also that it was more than that. She had read of
parabatai
in the
Codex
, and knew that the bond was one that did not exist among mundanes, something closer than brothers and better than blood. “Jem is his
parabatai
. He has made a vow to be there in times like this.”
    “He would be there,