Chapter 27
Font Size:
A
A+
A++
ry made a little noise, a pained exhtion of breath,
but Magnus went on remorselessly.
“I told her that crippling that part of your mind might
leave you damaged, possibly insane. She didn’t cry. She
wasn’t the sort of woman who weeps easily, your
mother. She asked me if there was another way, and I
told her you could be made to forget those parts of the
Shadow World that you could see, even as you saw
them. The only caveat was that she’d have toe to
me every two years as the results of the spell began to
fade.”
“And did she?” asked ry.
Magnus nodded. “I’ve seen you every two years since
that first time—I’ve watched you grow up. You’re the
only child I have ever watched grow up that way, you
know. In my business one isn’t generally that wee
around human children.”
“So you recognized ry when we walked in,” Jace
said. “You must have.”
“Of course I did.” Magnus sounded exasperated. “And it
was a shock, too. But what would you have done? She
didn’t know me. She wasn’t supposed to know me. Just
the fact that she was here meant the spell had started to
fade—and in fact, we were due for another visit about a
month ago. I even came by your house when I got back
from Tanzania, but Jocelyn said that you two had had a
fight and you’d run off. She said she’d call on me when
you came back, but”—an elegant shrug—“she never
did.”
A cold wash of memory prickled ry’s skin. She
remembered standing in the foyer next to Simon,
straining to remember something that danced just at the
edge of her vision … I thought I saw Dorothea’s cat, but
it was just a trick of the light.
But Dorothea didn’t have a cat. “You were there, that
day,” ry said. “I saw youing out of Dorothea’s
apartment. I remember your eyes.”
Magnus looked as if he might purr. “I’m memorable, it’s
true,” he gloated. Then he shook his head. “You
shouldn’t remember me,” he said. “I threw up a mour
as hard as a wall as soon as I saw you. You should
have run right into it face-first—psychically speaking.”
If you run into a psychic wall face-first, do you wind up
with psychic bruises? ry said, “If you take the spell
off me, will I be able to remember all the things I’ve
forgotten? All the memories you stole?”
“I can’t take it off you.” Magnus looked ufortable.
“What?” Jace sounded furious. “Why not? The ve
requires you—”
Magnus looked at him coldly. “I don’t like being told what
to do, little Shadowhunter.”
ry could see how much Jace disliked being referred
to as “little,” but before he could snap out a reply, Alec
spoke. His voice was soft, thoughtful. “Don’t you know
how to reverse it?” he asked. “The spell, I mean.”
Magnus sighed. “Undoing a spell is a great deal more
difficult than creating it in the first ce. The intricacy of
this one, the care I put into weaving it—if I made even
the smallest mistake in unraveling it, her mind could be
damaged forever. Besides,” he added, “it’s already
begun to fade. The effects will vanish over time on their
own.”
ry looked at him sharply. “Will I get all my memories
back then? Whatever was taken out of my head?”
“I don’t know. They mighte back all at once, or in
stages. Or you might never remember what you’ve
forgotten over the years. What your mother asked me to
do was unique, in my experience. I’ve no idea what will
happen.”
“But I don’t want to wait.” ry folded her hands tightly
in herp, her fingers mped together so hard that the
tips turned white. “All my life I’ve felt like there was
something wrong with me. Something missing or
damaged. Now I know—”
“I didn’t damage you.” It was Magnus’s turn to interrupt,
his lips curled back angrily to show sharp white teeth.
“Every teenager in the world feels like that, feels broken
or out of ce, different somehow, royalty mistakenly
born into a family of peasants. The difference in your
case is that it’s true. You are different. Maybe not better
—but different. And it’s no pic being different. You
want to know what it’s like when your parents are good
churchgoing folk and you happen to be born with the
devil’s mark?” He pointed at his eyes, fingers syed.
“When your father flinches at the sight of you and your
mother hangs herself in the barn, driven mad by what
she’s done? When I was ten, my father tried to drown
me in the creek. Ished out at him with everything I
had—burned him where he stood. I went to the fathers
of the church eventually, for sanctuary. They hid me.
They say that pity’s a bitter thing, but it’s better than
hate. When I found out what I was really, only half a
human being, I hated myself. Anything’s better than
that.”
There was silence when Magnus was done speaking.
To ry’s surprise, it was Alec who broke it. “It wasn’t
your fault,” he said. “You can’t help how you’re born.”
Magnus’s expression was closed. “I’m over it,” he said.
“I think you get my point. Different isn’t better, rissa.
Your mother was trying to protect you. Don’t throw it
back in her face.”
ry’s hands rxed their grip on each other. “I don’t
care if I’m different,” she said. “I just want to be who I
really am.”
Magnus swore, in anguage she didn’t know. It
sounded like crackling mes. “All right. Listen. I can’t
undo what I’ve done, but I can give you something else.
A piece of what would have been yours if you’d been
raised a true child of the Nephilim.” He stalked across
the room to the bookcase and dragged down a heavy
volume bound in rotting green velvet. He flipped through
the pages, shedding dust and bits of ckened cloth.
The pages were thin, almost translucent eggshell
parchment, each marked with a stark ck rune.
Jace’s eyebrows went up. “Is that a copy of the Gray
Book?”
Magnus, feverishly flipping pages, said nothing.
“Hodge has one,” Alec observed. “He showed it to me
once.”
“It’s not gray,” ry feltpelled to point out. “It’s
green.”
“If there was such a thing as terminal literalism, you’d
have died in childhood,” said Jace, brushing dust off the
windowsill and eyeing it as if considering whether it was
clean enough to sit on. “Gray is short for ‘Gramarye.’ It
means ‘magic, hidden wisdom.’ In it is copied every
rune the Angel Raziel wrote in the original Book of the
Covenant. There aren’t many copies because each one
has to be specially made. Some of the runes are so
powerful they’d burn through regr pages.”
Alec looked impressed. “I didn’t know all that.”
Jace hopped up on the windowsill and swung his legs.
“Not all of us sleep through history lessons.”
“I do not—”
“Oh, yes you do, and drool on the desk besides.”
“Shut up,” said Magnus, but he said it quite mildly. He
hooked his finger between two pages of the book and
came over to ry, setting it carefully in herp. “Now,
when I open the book, I want you to study the page.
Look at it until you feel something change inside your
mind.”
“Will it hurt?” ry asked nervously.
“All knowledge hurts,” he replied, and stood up, letting
the book fall open in herp. ry stared down at the
clean white page with the ck rune Mark spilled across
it. It looked something like a winged spiral, until she
tilted her head, and then it seemed like a staff wound
around with vines. The mutable corners of the pattern
tickled her mind like feathers brushed against sensitive
skin. She felt the shivery flicker of reaction, making her
want to close her eyes, but she held them open until
they stung and blurred. She was about to blink when
she felt it: a click inside her head, like a key turning in a
lock.
The rune on the page seemed to spring into sharp
focus, and she thought, involuntarily, Remember. If the
rune were a word, it would have been that one, but
there was more meaning to it than any word she could
imagine. It was a child’s first memory of light falling
through crib bars, the recollected scent of rain and city
streets, the pain of unforgotten loss, the sting of
remembered humiliation, and the cruel forgetfulness of
old age, when the most ancient of memories stand out
with agonizingly clear precision and the nearest of
incidents are lost beyond recall.
With a little sigh she turned to the next page, and the
next, letting the images and sensations flow over her.
Sorrow. Thought. Strength. Protection. Grace—and then
cried out in reproachful surprise as Magnus snatched
the book off herp.
“That’s enough,” he said, sliding it back onto its shelf.
He dusted his hands off on his colorful pants, leaving
streaks of gray. “If you read all the runes at once, you’ll
give yourself a headache.”
“But—”
“Most Shadowhunter children grow up learning one rune
at a time over a period of years,” said Jace. “The Gray
Book contains runes even I don’t know.”
“Imagine that,” said Magnus.
Jace ignored him. “Magnus showed you the rune for
understanding and remembrance. It opens your mind up
to reading and recognizing the rest of the Marks.”
“It also may serve as a trigger to activate dormant
memories,” said Magnus. “They could return to you
more quickly than they would otherwise. It’s the best I
can do.”
ry looked down at herp. “I still don’t remember
anything about the Mortal Cup.”
“Is that what this is about?” Magnus sounded actually
astonished. “You’re after the Angel’s Cup? Look, I’ve
been through your memories. There was nothing in
them about the Mortal Instruments.”
“Mortal Instruments?” ry echoed, bewildered. “I
thought—”
“The Angel gave three items to the first Shadowhunters.
A cup, a sword, and a mirror. The Silent Brothers have
the Sword; the Cup and the Mirror were in Idris, at least
until Valentine came along.”
“Nobody knows where the Mirror is,” said Alec.
“Nobody’s known for ages.”
“It’s the Cup that concerns us,” said Jace. “Valentine’s
looking for it.”
“And you want to get to it before he does?” Magnus
asked, his eyebrows winging upward.
“I thought you said you didn’t know who Valentine was?”
ry pointed out.
“I lied,” Magnus admitted candidly. “I’m not one of the
fey, you know. I’m not required to be truthful. And only a
fool would get between Valentine and his revenge.”
“Is that what you think he’s after? Revenge?” said Jace.
“I would guess so. He suffered a grave defeat, and he
hardly seemed—seems—the type of man to suffer
defeat gracefully.”
Alec looked harder at Magnus. “Were you at the
Uprising?”
Magnus’s eyes locked with Alec’s. “I was. I killed a
number of your folk.”
“Circle members,” said Jace quickly. “Not ours—”
“If you insist on disavowing that which is ugly about
what you do,” said Magnus, still looking at Alec, “you will
never learn from your mistakes.”
Alec, plucking at the coverlet with one hand, flushed an
unhappy red. “You don’t seem surprised to hear that
Valentine’s still alive,” he said, avoiding Magnus’s gaze.
Magnus spread his hands wide. “Are you?”
Jace opened his mouth, then closed it again. He looked
actually baffled. Eventually, he said, “So you won’t help
us find the Mortal Cup?”
“I wouldn’t if I could,” said Magnus, “which, by the way, I
can’t. I’ve no idea where it is, and I don’t care to know.
Only a fool, as I said.”
Alec sat up straighter. “But without the Cup, we can’t—”
“Make more of you. I know,” said Magnus. “Perhaps not
everyone regards that as quite the disaster that you do.
Mind you,” he added, “if I had to choose between the
ve and Valentine, I would choose the ve. At least
they’re not actually sworn to wipe out my kind. But
nothing the ve has done has earned my unswerving
loyalty either. So no, I’ll sit this one out. Now if we’re
done here, I’d like to get back to my party before any of
the guests eat each other.”
Jace, who was clenching and unclenching his hands,
looked like he was about to say something furious, but
Alec, standing up, put a hand on his shoulder. ry
couldn’t quite tell in the dimness, but it looked as if Alec
was squeezing rather hard. “Is that likely?” he asked.
Magnus was looking at him with some amusement. “It’s
happened before.”
Jace muttered something to Alec, who let go. Detaching
himself, he came over to ry. “Are you all right?” he
asked in a low voice.
“I think so. I don’t feel any different …”
Magnus, standing by the door, snapped his fingers
impatiently. “Move it along, teenagers. The only person
who gets to canoodle in my bedroom is my magnificent
self.”
“Canoodle?” repeated ry, never having heard the
word before.
“Magnificent?” repeated Jace, who was just being nasty.
Magnus growled. The growl sounded like “Get out.”
They got, Magnus trailing behind them as he paused to
lock the bedroom door. The tenor of the party seemed
subtly different to ry. Perhaps it was just her slightly
altered vision: Everything seemed clearer, crystalline
edges sharply defined. She watched a group of
musicians take the small stage at the center of the
room. They wore flowing garments in deep colors of
gold, purple, and green, and their high voices were
sharp and ethereal.
“I hate faerie bands,” Magnus muttered as the
musicians segued into another haunting song, the
melody as delicate and translucent as rock crystal. “All
they ever y is mopey bads.”
Source:
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? byMaterial ? N?velDrama.Org.
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
? by
Articles you may like
?
?
?
?
? Ads by