Pale Kings and Princes Page 5

  Helen sighed. "Isabelle told me what you said about the fey, Simon. About how you think it's wrong to discriminate against them. That faeries can be good, just as much as anyone else."

  He didn't understand where she was going with this, but he wasn't sorry to have the chance to confirm it. "She was right, I do think that."

  "Isabelle believes that too, you know," Helen said. "She's been doing her best to convince me."

  "What do you mean?" Simon asked, confused. "Why would you need convincing."

  Helen kneaded her fingers together. "You know, I didn't want to come here to tell a bunch of kids the story of my mother and father--I didn't do that voluntarily. But I also didn't make it up. That's what happened. That's who my mother was, and that's what half of me is."

  "No, Helen, that's not--"

  "Do you know the poem 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'?"

  Simon shook his head. The only poetry he knew was by Dr. Seuss or Bob Dylan.

  "It's Keats," she said, and recited a few stanzas for him by memory.

  She took me to her elfin grot,

  And there she wept, and sigh'd fill sore,

  And there I shut her wild wild eyes

  With kisses four.

  And there she lulled me asleep,

  And there I dream'd--Ah! woe betide!

  The latest dream I ever dream'd

  On the cold hill's side.

  I saw pale kings and princes too,

  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

  They cried--"La Belle Dame sans Merci

  Hath thee in thrall!"

  "Keats wrote about faeries?" Simon asked. If they'd covered this in English class, he might have paid closer attention.

  "My father used to recite that poem all the time," Helen said. "It was his way of telling me and Mark the story of where we came from."

  "He recited you a poem about an evil faerie queen luring men to their deaths as a way of telling you about your mother? Repeatedly?" Simon asked, incredulous. "No offense, but that's kind of . . . harsh."

  "My father loved us despite where we came from," Helen said in the way of someone trying to convince herself. "But it always felt like he kept some part of himself in reserve. Like he was waiting to see her in me. It was different with Mark, because Mark was a boy. But girls take after their mothers, right?"

  "I'm not really sure that's scientifically accurate logic," Simon said.

  "That's what Mark said. He always told me the faeries had no claim on us or our nature. And I tried to believe him, but then, after he was taken . . . after the Inquisitor told me the story of my birth mother . . . I wonder . . ." Helen was looking past Simon, past the walls of her domestic prison cell, lost in her own fears. "What if I'm luring Aline to that cold hill's side? What if that need to destroy, to use love as a weapon, is just hibernating in me somewhere, and I don't even know it? A gift from my mother."

  "Look, I don't know anything about faeries," Simon said. "Not really. I don't know what the deal was with your mother, or what it means for you to be half one thing and half another. But I know your blood doesn't define you. What defines you is the choices you make. If I've learned anything this year, it's that. And I also know that loving someone--even when it's scary, even when there are consequences--is never the wrong thing to do. Loving someone is the opposite of hurting her."

  Helen smiled at him, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. "For both our sakes, Simon, I really hope that you're right."

  In the Land under the Hill, in the Time Before . . .

  Once upon a time, there was a beautiful lady of the Seelie Court who lost her heart to the son of an angel.

  Once upon a time, there were two boys come to the land of Faerie, brothers noble and bold. One brother caught a glimpse of the fair lady and, thunderstruck by her beauty, pledged himself to her. Pledged himself to stay. This was the boy Andrew. His brother, the boy Arthur, would not leave his side.

  And so the boys stayed beneath the hill, and Andrew loved the lady, and Arthur despised her.

  And so the lady kept her boy close to her side, kept this beautiful creature who swore his fealty to her, and when her sister lay claim to the other, the lady let him be taken away, for he was nothing.

  She gave Andrew a silver chain to wear around his neck, a token of her love, and she taught him the ways of the Fair Folk. She danced with him in revels beneath starry skies. She fed him moonshine and showed him how to give way to the wild.

  Some nights they heard Arthur's screams, and she told him it was an animal in pain, and pain was in an animal's nature.

  She did not lie, for she could not lie.

  Humans are animals.

  Pain is their nature.

  For seven years they lived in joy. She owned his heart, and he hers, and somewhere, beyond, Arthur screamed and screamed. Andrew didn't know; the lady didn't care; and so they were happy.

  Until the day one brother discovered the truth of the other.

  The lady thought her lover would go mad with the grief of it and the guilt. And so, because she loved the boy, she wove him a story of deceitful truths, the story he would want to believe. That he had been ensorcelled to love her; that he had never betrayed his brother; that he was only a slave; that these seven years of love had been a lie.

  The lady set the useless brother free and allowed him to believe he had freed himself.

  The lady subjected herself to the useless brother's attack and allowed him to believe he had killed her.

  The lady let her lover renounce her and run away.

  And the lady beheld the secret fruits of their union and kissed them and tried to love them. But they were only a piece of her boy. She wanted all of him or none of him.

  As she had given him his story, she gave him his children.

  She had nothing left to live for, then, and so lived no longer.

  This is the story she left behind, the story her lover will never know; this is the story her daughter will never know.

  This is how a faerie loves: with her whole body and soul. This is how a faerie loves: with destruction.

  I love you, she told him, night after night, for seven years. Faeries cannot lie, and he knew that.

  I love you, he told her, night after night, for seven years. Humans can lie, and so she let him believe he lied to her, and she let his brother and his children believe it, and she died hoping they would believe it forever.

  This is how a faerie loves: with a gift.

  A new cover will be revealed each month as the Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy continue!

  Continue the adventures of the Shadowhunters with Emma Carstairs and Julian Blackthorn in

  Lady Midnight

  The first book in Cassandra Clare's new series, The Dark Artifices.

  Emma took her witchlight out of her pocket and lit it--and almost screamed out loud. Jules's shirt was soaked with blood and worse, the healing runes she'd drawn had vanished from his skin. They weren't working.

  "Jules," she said. "I have to call the Silent Brothers. They can help you. I have to."

  His eyes screwed shut with pain. "You can't," he said. "You know we can't call the Silent Brothers. They report directly to the Clave."

  "So we'll lie to them. Say it was a routine demon patrol. I'm calling," she said, and reached for her phone.

  "No!" Julian said, forcefully enough to stop her. "Silent Brothers know when you're lying! They can see inside your head, Emma. They'll find out about the investigation. About Mark--"

  "You're not going to bleed to death in the backseat of a car for Mark!"

  "No," he said, looking at her. His eyes were eerily blue-green, the only bright color in the dark interior of the car. "You're going to fix me."

  Emma could feel it when Jules was hurt, like a splinter lodged under her skin. The physical pain didn't bother her; it was the terror, the only terror worse than her fear of the ocean. The fear of Jules being hurt, of him dying. She would give up anything, sustain any wound, t
o prevent those things from happening.

  "Okay," she said. Her voice sounded dry and thin to her own ears. "Okay." She took a deep breath. "Hang on."

  She unzipped her jacket, threw it aside. Shoved the console between the seats aside, put her witchlight on the floorboard. Then she reached for Jules. The next few seconds were a blur of Jules's blood on her hands and his harsh breathing as she pulled him partly upright, wedging him against the back door. He didn't make a sound as she moved him, but she could see him biting his lip, the blood on his mouth and chin, and she felt as if her bones were popping inside her skin.

  "Your gear," she said through gritted teeth. "I have to cut it off."

  He nodded, letting his head fall back. She drew a dagger from her belt, but the gear was too tough for the blade. She said a silent prayer and reached back for Cortana.

  Cortana went through the gear like a knife through melted butter. It fell away in pieces and Emma drew them free, then sliced down the front of his T-shirt and pulled it apart as if she were opening a jacket.

  Emma had seen blood before, often, but this felt different. It was Julian's, and there seemed to be a lot of it. It was smeared up and down his chest and rib cage; she could see where the arrow had gone in and where the skin had torn where he'd yanked it out.

  "Why did you pull the arrow out?" she demanded, pulling her sweater over her head. She had a tank top on under it. She patted his chest and side with the sweater, absorbing as much of the blood as she could.

  Jules's breath was coming in hard pants. "Because when someone--shoots you with an arrow--" he gasped, "your immediate response is not--'Thanks for the arrow, I think I'll keep it for a while.'"

  "Good to know your sense of humor is intact."

  "Is it still bleeding?" Julian demanded. His eyes were shut.

  She dabbed at the cut with her sweater. The blood had slowed, but the cut looked puffy and swollen. The rest of him, though--it had been a while since she'd seen him with his shirt off. There was more muscle than she remembered. Lean muscle pulled tight over his ribs, his stomach flat and lightly ridged. Cameron was much more muscular, but Julian's spare lines were as elegant as a greyhound's. "You're too skinny," she said. "Too much coffee, not enough pancakes."

  "I hope they put that on my tombstone." He gasped as she shifted forward, and she realized abruptly that she was squarely in Julian's lap, her knees around his hips. It was a bizarrely intimate position.

  "I--am I hurting you?" she asked.

  He swallowed visibly. "It's fine. Try with the iratze again."

  "Fine," she said. "Grab the panic bar."

  "The what?" He opened his eyes and peered at her.

  "The plastic handle! Up there, above the window!" She pointed. "It's for holding on to when the car is going around curves."

  "Are you sure? I always thought it was for hanging things on. Like dry cleaning."

  "Julian, now is not the time to be pedantic. Grab the bar or I swear--"

  "All right!" He reached up, grabbed hold of it, and winced. "I'm ready."

  She nodded and set Cortana aside, reaching for her stele. Maybe her previous iratzes had been too fast, too sloppy. She'd always focused on the physical aspects of Shadowhunting, not the more mental and artistic ones: seeing through glamours, drawing runes.

  She set the tip of it to the skin of his shoulder and drew, carefully and slowly. She had to brace herself with her left hand against his shoulder. She tried to press as lightly as she could, but she could feel him tense under her fingers. The skin on his shoulder was smooth and hot under her touch, and she wanted to get closer to him, to put her hand over the wound on his side and heal it with the sheer force of her will. To touch her lips to the lines of pain beside his eyes and--

  Stop. She had finished the iratze. She sat back, her hand clamped around the stele. Julian sat up a little straighter, the ragged remnants of his shirt hanging off his shoulders. He took a deep breath, glancing down at himself--and the iratze faded back into his skin, like black ice melting, spreading, being absorbed by the sea.

  He looked up at Emma. She could see her own reflection in his eyes: she looked wrecked, panicked, with blood on her neck and her white tank top. "It hurts less," he said in a low voice.

  The wound on his side pulsed again; blood slid down the side of his rib cage, staining his leather belt and the waistband of his jeans. She put her hands on his bare skin, panic rising up inside her. His skin felt hot, too hot. Fever hot.

  "I have to call," she whispered. "I don't care if the whole world comes down around us, Jules, the most important thing is that you live."

  "Please," he said, desperation clear in his voice. "Whatever is happening, we'll fix it, because we're parabatai. We're forever. I said that to you once, do you remember?"

  She nodded warily, hand on the phone.

  "And the strength of a rune your parabatai gives you is special. Emma, you can do it. You can heal me. We're parabatai and that means the things we can do together are . . . extraordinary."

  There was blood on her jeans now, blood on her hands and her tank top, and he was still bleeding, the wound still open, an incongruous tear in the smooth skin all around it.

  "Try," Jules said in a dry whisper. "For me, try?"

  His voice went up on the question and in it she heard the voice of the boy he had been once, and she remembered him smaller, skinnier, younger, back pressed against one of the marble columns in the Hall of Accords in Alicante as his father advanced on him with his blade unsheathed.

  And she remembered what Julian had done, then. Done to protect her, to protect all of them, because he always would do everything to protect them.

  She took her hand off the phone and gripped the stele, so tightly she felt it dig into her damp palm. "Look at me, Jules," she said in a low voice, and he met her eyes with his. She placed the stele against his skin, and for a moment she held still, just breathing, breathing and remembering.

  Julian. A presence in her life for as long as she could remember, splashing water at each other in the ocean, digging in the sand together, him putting his hand over hers and them marveling at the difference in the shape and length of their fingers. Julian singing, terribly and off-key, while he drove, his fingers in her hair carefully freeing a trapped leaf, his hands catching her in the training room when she fell, and fell, and fell. The first time after their parabatai ceremony when she'd smashed her hand into a wall in rage at not being able to get a sword maneuver right, and he'd come up to her, taken her still-shaking body in his arms and said, "Emma, Emma, don't hurt yourself. When you do, I feel it, too."

  Something in her chest seemed to split and crack; she marveled that it wasn't audible. Energy raced along her veins, and the stele jerked in her hand before it seemed to move on its own, tracing the graceful outline of a healing rune across Julian's chest. She heard him gasp, his eyes flying open. His hand slid down her back and he pressed her against him, his teeth gritted.

  "Don't stop," he said.

  Emma couldn't have stopped if she'd wanted to. The stele seemed to be moving of its own accord; she was blinded with memories, a kaleidoscope of them, all of them Julian. Sun in her eyes and Julian asleep on the beach in an old T-shirt and her not wanting to wake him, but he'd woken anyway when the sun went down and looked for her immediately, not smiling till his eyes found her and he knew she was there. Falling asleep talking and waking up with their hands interlocked; they'd been children in the dark together once but now they were something else, something intimate and powerful, something Emma felt she was touching only the very edge of as she finished the rune and the stele fell from her nerveless fingers.

  "Oh," she said softly. The rune seemed lit from within by a soft glow.

  About the Authors Cassandra Clare is the author of the #1 New York Times, USA TODAY, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly bestselling Mortal Instruments series and the Infernal Devices trilogy, and coauthor of the Bane Chronicles with Sarah Rees Brennan and Maureen Johnson.
She also wrote The Shadowhunter's Codex with her husband, Joshua Lewis. Her books have more than 36 million copies in print worldwide and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Cassandra lives in western Massachusetts. Visit her at CassandraClare.com. Learn more about the world of the Shadowhunters at Shadowhunters.com.

  Robin Wasserman's teen novels include the Seven Deadly Sins series, the Cold Awakening trilogy, Hacking Harvard, and The Book of Blood and Shadow. She is also the author of the middle grade series Chasing Yesterday. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Visit her at RobinWasserman.com or follow her on Twitter at @RobinWasserman.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  authors.simonandschuster.com/CassandraClare

  authors.simonandschuster.com/RobinWasserman

  Also by Cassandra Clare

  THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS

  City of Bones City of Ashes City of Glass City of Fallen Angels City of Lost Souls City of Heavenly Fire

  THE INFERNAL DEVICES

  Clockwork Angel Clockwork Prince Clockwork Princess The Shadowhunter's Codex With Joshua Lewis

  The Bane Chronicles With Sarah Rees Brennan and Maureen Johnson Preorder Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy Now Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy The Lost Herondale

  The Whitechapel Fiend Nothing but Shadows

  The Evil We Love

  Pale Kings and Princes Bitter of Tongue

  The Fiery Trial

  Born to Endless Night Angels Twice Descending

  Also by Cassandra Clare

  City of Bones

  * * *

  City of Ashes

  * * *

  City of Glass

  * * *

  City of Fallen Angels

  * * *

  City of Lost Souls

  * * *

  City of Heavenly Fire

  * * *

  Clockwork Angel

  * * *

  The Clockwork Prince