Clockwork Princess

request any persiflage about the woman’s milliner. I care neither about her manner of dress nor about your daily menu
.
    Pray write back to me a letter containing relevant information. I devoutly hope such a letter will also be one more befitting Shadowhunters and less Bedlamites
.
    In Raziel’s name
,
    Consul Wayland

8
T HAT F IRE OF F IRE
    You call it hope—that fire of fire!
It is but agony of desire
.
    —Edgar Allan Poe, “Tamerlane”
    Tessa sat at her vanity table methodically brushing out her hair. The air outside was cool but humid, seeming to trap the water of the Thames, scented with iron and city dirt. It was the sort of weather that made her normally thick, wavy hair tangle at the ends. Not that her mind was on her hair; it was simply a repetitive motion, the brushing, that allowed her to keep a sort of forcible calm.
    Over and over in her mind she saw Jem’s shock as Charlotte read out Mortmain’s letter, and Will’s burned hands, and the tiny bit of
yin fen
she had managed to gather up off the floor. She saw Cecily’s arms about Will, and Jem’s anguish as he apologized to Will,
I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry
.
    She hadn’t been able to bear it. They had been in agony, both of them, and she loved them both. Their pain had been because of her—
she
was what Mortmain wanted. She was the cause of Jem’s
yin fen
being gone, and Will’s misery. When she had whirled and run out of the room, it had been because she could not stand it any longer. How could three people who cared for one another so much cause one another so much pain?
    She set the hairbrush down and looked at herself in the mirror. She looked tired, with shadowed eyes, as Will had looked all day as he’d sat with her in the library and helped Charlotte with Benedict’s papers, translating some of the passages that were in Greek or Latin or Purgatic, his quill pen moving swiftly over paper, his dark head bent. It was odd to look at Will in the daylight and remember the boy who had held her as if she were a life raft in a storm on the steps of Woolsey’s house. Will’s daylight face was not untroubled, but it was not open or giving either. He had not been unfriendly or cold, but neither had he looked up, or smiled over the library table at her, or acknowledged in any way the events of the previous night.
    She had wanted to pull him aside and ask him if he had heard from Magnus, to say to him:
No one understands what you feel but me, and no one understands what I feel but you, so can we not feel together?
But if Magnus had contacted him, Will would have told her; he was honorable. They were all honorable. If they had not been, she thought, looking down at her hands, perhaps everything would not be so awful.
    It had been foolish to offer to go to Mortmain—she knew that now—but the thought had seized her as fiercely as a passion. She could
not
be the cause of all this unhappiness and not do something to alleviate it. If she gave herself up to Mortmain, Jem would live longer, and Jem and Will would have each other, and it would be as if she had never come to the Institute.
    But now, in the cold hours of the evening, she knew that nothing she could do would turn back the clock, or unmake the feelings that existed between them all. She felt hollow inside, as if a piece of her were missing, and yet she was paralyzed. Part of her wanted to run to Will, to see if his hands were healed and to tell him she understood. The rest of her wanted to flee across the hall to Jem’s room and beg him to forgive her. They had never been angry with each other before, and she did not know how to navigate a Jem who was furious. Would he want to end their engagement? Would he be disappointed in her? Somehow that thought was as hard to bear, that Jem might be disappointed in her.
    Skritch
. She looked up and around the room—a faint noise. Perhaps she had imagined it? She was tired; perhaps it was time to call for Sophie to help her with her dress, and then to retire to bed with a book. She was partway through
The Castle of Otranto
and finding it an excellent distraction.
    She had risen from her chair and gone to ring the servants’ bell when the noise came again, more determined. A
skritch, skritch
, against the door of her bedroom. With slight trepidation she crossed the room and flung the door open.
    Church crouched on the other side, his blue-gray fur ruffled, his expression furious. Around his neck was tied a bow of silver lace, and attached