Queen of Air and Darkness (The Dark Artifices #3)

by Cassandra Clare

  There were werewolves from all over the world: Luke Garroway, scruffy and bearded in his flannel jacket, Clary’s mother, Jocelyn, at his side. Werewolves in kilts and hanboks and qipaos. Maia Roberts and Bat Velasquez—Emma felt a pang, thinking of the other version of them in Thule: still together, still hand in hand.

  There were warlocks, too, more than Emma had ever seen in one place. Catarina Loss, blue-skinned and white-haired: She marched in with Tessa and Jem, wearing nurse’s scrubs, and looked around her thoughtfully. Her eyes lit on Kit, and she gazed at him with a quiet recognition that he, absorbed in talking to Ty, didn’t notice.

  Hypatia Vex, with her bronze hair and dark skin, regal and curious. Warlocks with bat’s wings, with hooves and gills and rainbow eyes, with delicate antennae and curving stag’s horns. A bat-faced woman who went up to Cristina and began muttering in Spanish. A dark-skinned warlock with a white mark on his cheek in the shape of a spiderweb.

  And there were Shadowhunters. Emma had seen many Shadowhunters gathered together before—she’d been to quite a few Council meetings—but it was gratifying to see how many had answered Julian’s call. He stood at the front of the room, where the Blackthorns and their friends had hastily assembled a long table. A rolled-up banner hung on the wall behind it. Julian leaned calmly against the table, but Emma could sense the tension running through him like electrical lines as the Shadowhunters began to file into the Sanctuary.

  Julie Beauvale and Beatriz Mendoza, their parabatai runes glimmering on their forearms. Marisol Garza, wearing white in memory of Jon Cartwright. Magnus and Alec had just arrived with Maryse and their kids, and were standing by the door opposite Aline and Helen, greeting the Downworlders while the two women greeted the Shadowhunters. Kadir Safar of the New York Conclave gave Diana a somber nod before going to speak with Maryse, who was dandling little blue Max on her lap while Rafe ran around them both in circles.

  The Romeros had come from Argentina, the Pederosos from Brazil, the Keos from Cambodia, and the Rosewains from Northern England. A dark-haired, petite woman darted over to Cristina and hugged her tightly. Cristina’s mom! Emma had an urge to bow in acknowledgment of the woman who had named Perfect Diego.

  “It’s cool to see the Alliance in action,” said Mark, who had been helping the others set up rows of chairs. He had put on a somber dark suit jacket in an attempt to look more serious. Like the careful arrangement of the food at the meeting the other day, the small gesture made Emma’s heart spark with tenderness. There were many ways to serve your family, she thought. Julian’s way was in large and passionate gestures; Mark’s were smaller and quieter, but meaningful just the same. “Alec seems to know every Downworlder in the place.”

  It was true—Alec was greeting a werewolf girl who spoke in excitable French and asked him something about Rafael; a tall, dark-haired vampire wearing a T-shirt with Chinese characters on it slapped him on the back, and Lily and Maia darted over to confer with him in low voices.

  Mark suddenly straightened up. Emma followed his gaze and saw that several faeries had come into the room. She laid her hand on Mark’s arm, wondering if he remembered the last time he had been in this Sanctuary, when the Wild Hunt had returned him to his family.

  Kieran had turned around—he had been speaking with Julian in a low voice—and was staring as well: Gwyn had come in, of course, which everyone expected, but following him were several others. Among the dryads and pixies and nixies Emma recognized several piskies, the Fair Folk she and Julian had encountered in Cornwall. Behind them came a tall phouka in a JUSTICE FOR KAELIE T-shirt, and after him, a woman in a long green cloak, her face hidden but a bit of white-blond hair escaping nonetheless.

  Emma turned to Mark. “It’s Nene.”

  “I must speak with her.” Mark gave Emma’s shoulder a pat and vanished across the room to greet his aunt. Emma caught sight of both Kieran and Cristina watching him, though Cristina had been firmly captured by her mother and clearly wasn’t going anywhere.

  Emma glanced over at Julian again. He had moved behind the table and was standing with his arms at his sides. Helen and Aline had joined him behind the table as well. The rest of the family was clustered in a group of chairs at the left of the room, Kit and Ty together, Dru with her hand on Tavvy’s shoulder, turning around to squint at a figure who’d just come into the Sanctuary.

  It was Cameron. He was alone, slouching a little as if he hoped no one would see him, though his bright red hair was like a beacon. Emma couldn’t help herself; she darted over to him.

  He looked surprised as she bore down on him and caught his hands in hers. “Thank you for coming, Cameron,” she said. “Thank you for everything.”

  “The rest of my family doesn’t know,” he said. “They’re pretty much—”

  “On the Cohort’s side, I know,” said Emma. “But you’re different. You’re a good guy. I know that for sure now, and I’m sorry if I ever hurt you in the past.”

  Cameron looked even more alarmed. “I don’t think we should get back together,” he said.

  “Oh, definitely not,” said Emma. “I’m just glad you’re okay.” She glanced over at Julian, who was waving and giving Cameron a thumbs-up from behind the table. Looking terrified, Cameron bolted for the safety of the seats.

  Someday maybe she’d tell him about Thule.

  Maybe.

  She waved to Simon and Isabelle as they came in, holding hands. Isabelle made an immediate beeline for her mother and Max.

  Simon regarded Kieran with a look of surprised recognition before crossing the room to talk to Vivianne Penhallow, the dean of Shadowhunter Academy. Sometimes Emma wondered if Simon had enjoyed his time at the Academy. She wondered if she would like it there. But there was no point thinking about the future now.

  She glanced over at Julian. The wide doors were still open and a breeze was passing through, and for a moment Emma saw Livvy—not as she had been in Thule, but the Livvy of this world—like a vision or a hallucination, standing behind Julian, her hand on his shoulder, her ethereal hair rising in the wind.

  Emma closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, Julian was alone. As if he could feel her gaze, Julian glanced at Emma. He looked incredibly young to her for a moment, as if he were still the twelve-year-old boy who had hiked a mile back and forth every week from the highway, dragging heavy bags, to make sure his brothers and sisters had groceries.

  If only you had told me, she thought. If only I had known when you needed help.

  She couldn’t be Julian’s parabatai, or his partner, now. She couldn’t smile at him as Clary smiled at Jace, or put a reassuring hand against his back the way Alec did to Magnus, or take his hand as Aline had taken Helen’s.

  But she could be his ally. She could stand with the others at the front of the room and face the crowd, at least. She began to cross the room toward the table.

  * * *

  Mark reached Nene at the same time that Helen did. Their aunt seemed agitated, her long pale fingers working at the emerald material of her cloak. Her eyes darted between them as they approached, and she gave a small, stiff nod. “Miach,” she said. “Alessa. It is good to see you well.”

  “Aunt Nene,” Helen said. “It is good of you to come, and—is everything all right?”

  “I was ordered to remain at Court after the Queen returned from Unseelie,” said Nene. “She has been furious and untrusting since that time. For me to be here, I disobeyed a direct order of my monarch’s.” She sighed. “It is possible I can never return to the Court.”

  “Nene.” Helen looked horrified. “You didn’t have to come.”

  “I wished to,” Nene said. “I have lived in fear of the Queen all my life. I lived in fear of what I wished for—to depart the Court and live as one of the wild fey. But you, my niece and nephew—you live between worlds, and you are not afraid.”

  She smiled at them, and Mark wanted to point out that he was afraid half the time. He didn’t.

  “I will do what
I can to help you here,” she said. “Your cause is righteous. It is time for the Cold Peace to come to an end.”

  Mark, who hadn’t realized Julian had been promising an end to the Cold Peace, made a slight choking noise.

  “Adaon,” he said. “I know Helen wrote to you of him. He saved our lives—”

  “I wished to bring you the news myself. Adaon is well,” said Nene. “He has become something of a favorite of the Seelie Queen and has risen quickly in the Court.”

  Mark blinked. He hadn’t been expecting this. “A favorite of the Seelie Queen?”

  “I think Mark wants to know if he’s the Seelie Queen’s lover,” said Helen, with her usual bluntness.

  “Oh, most likely. It’s quite surprising,” said Nene. “Fergus is much put out, as he was the favorite once.”

  “Greetings, Nene,” said Kieran, striding up to them. He had changed out of his jeans and looked every bit the faerie prince, as Mark had first seen him, in creamy linen and fawn breeches. His hair was a dark, night-ocean blue. “It is good to see you well. How is Adaon my brother? Not too much under the thumb of the Queen?”

  “Only if he wants to be,” said Nene cheerfully.

  Kieran looked puzzled. Mark put his face in his hands.

  * * *

  “Emma!”

  Halfway to the table, Emma turned and found Jem approaching her, a shy smile on his face. She had seen him come in earlier, with Tessa, who was now seated beside Catarina Loss. She blinked at him as he reached her; it felt like centuries since she’d seen him, the awful day of Livvy’s funeral.

  “Emma.” Jem took her hands in his. “Are you all right?”

  He sees how tired I look, she thought. My puffy eyes, rumpled clothes, who knows what else. She tried to smile. “I’m really glad to see you, Jem.”

  The light from the chandelier illuminated the scars on his cheekbones. “That’s not really an answer to my question,” he said. “Tessa told me about Thule. You have been on quite a journey.”

  “I guess we all have,” she said in a low voice. “It was awful—but we’re back now.”

  He squeezed her hands and released them. “I wanted to thank you,” he said. “For all the help you and your friends have rendered us in curing the warlock illness. You have been a better friend to me than I have been to you, mèi mei.”

  “No—you’ve helped me so many times,” Emma protested. She hesitated. “Actually, there is a question I want to ask you.”

  Jem put his hands in his pockets. “Of course, what is it?”

  “Do you know how to strip a Shadowhunter’s Marks?” Emma said.

  Jem looked stunned. “What?” He glanced around the room as if to make sure no one was looking at them; most people had taken their seats and were thankfully looking toward the front of the room expectantly. “Emma, why would you ask me about something so awful?”

  She thought quickly. “Well—the Cohort. Maybe the way to remove them from power is not—not to hurt them, but to make them not Shadowhunters anymore. And you were a Silent Brother, so you could do it, or . . .”

  Her voice trailed off at the horrified look on his face.

  “Emma, not every decision rests on your shoulders. The Clave will be restored, and they will deal with the Cohort.” Jem’s voice gentled. “I know you are worried. But as a Silent Brother, I have been part of the ceremony of stripping the Marks from a Shadowhunter before. It is something so horrible that I would never repeat it. I would never do it. Not under any circumstances.”

  Emma felt as if she were choking. “Of course. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  “It’s all right.” There was so much understanding in his voice, it broke her heart. “I know you are afraid, Emma. We all are.”

  She looked after him as he walked away. Despair was making it hard for her to breathe. I am afraid, she thought. But not of the Cohort.

  Of myself.

  Emma took her place behind the table at the front of the room; Mark had also joined the small group, and she stood beside him, some distance from Julian. The doors had been closed and the torches lit, and row after row of faces stared back at them from the lines of chairs set up in the middle of the room. They had run out of chairs, in fact, and quite a few Downworlders and Shadowhunters were leaning against the walls, watching.

  “Thank you all for responding to my summons,” Julian said. Emma could feel his nerves, his tension, speeding the pace of her own blood through her veins. But he showed none of it. There was an easy command in his voice, the room falling silent as he spoke without him needing to shout. “I won’t drag out any explanations or introductions. You know who I am. You know my sister and brother; you know Aline Penhallow and Emma Carstairs. You know that Aline’s mother, our Consul, has been illegally taken into custody. You know that Horace Dearborn has seized power in Idris—”

  “He was voted in,” said Kwasi Bediako, the warlock Emma had noticed before with the white spider mark on his face; Cristina had whispered to her that Bediako was the High Warlock of Accra. “We cannot pretend otherwise.”

  “No one voted for him to throw my mother in jail,” said Aline. “No one voted for him to remove the Consul from power so he could be in charge.”

  “There are others in jail, as well,” said Cristina’s mother. Cristina, sitting beside her, turned bright red. “Diego Rocio Rosales has been jailed! For nothing!”

  Kieran glanced at her, a small smile at the corner of his mouth.

  “As has my cousin Divya,” said Anush Joshi, a young man with a jagged black haircut and an anxious face. “What do you plan to do about it? Intercede with the Council?”

  Julian glanced briefly down at his hands, as if gathering himself. “Everyone—all of us here—have always accepted a certain amount of prejudice from the Clave as normal, through choice or necessity.”

  The room was quiet. No one disagreed, but there were many eyes cast down, as if in shame.

  “Now the Cohort has changed what we thought of as normal,” Julian said. “Never before have Downworlders been driven from Idris. Never before have Shadowhunters jailed other Shadowhunters without even the pretense of a trial.”

  “Why do we care what Shadowhunters do to each other?” demanded the phouka in the Kaelie T-shirt.

  “Because that’s step one, and what they do to Downworlders will be worse,” Emma said, surprising herself; she hadn’t meant to speak, only to stand by Julian. “They’ve already registered many of you.”

  “So you’re saying we need to fight them?” said Gwyn in his rumbling voice. “This is a call to arms?”

  Julie Beauvale rose to her feet. “They may not be a good Clave, but they are still Shadowhunters. There are a lot of people who follow the Cohort who are scared. I don’t want to hurt those people, and their fear is real, especially now that Jace and Clary are dead. They were our heroes, and I knew them—”

  “Julie,” Beatriz hissed. “Sit down.”

  “Jace and I were personally very close,” Julie went on. “I wouldn’t hesitate to call him my best friend, and I—”

  “Julie.” Beatriz took Julie by the tail of her shirt and hauled her back into her seat. She cleared her throat. “I think that what Julie meant is that you’re saying the Cohort wants to destroy the government, but I’m guessing, given all the secrecy, that you also want to destroy the government, and I . . . don’t know how we do that without hurting innocent people.”

  There was a hum of conversation. In the shadows, Emma saw them—she didn’t know when they’d come in, but a single Iron Sister and a single Silent Brother stood motionless against the far wall, their faces in shadow.

  A slight chill went through her. She knew the Iron Sisters were against the Cohort. She didn’t know about the Silent Brothers. They both seemed like emissaries of the Law, standing there in their silence.

  “We’re not suggesting destroying the government,” Julian said. “We’re saying it’s being destroyed right now, already, from within. The Clave was built
to give all Shadowhunters a voice. If we are all voiceless, then it is not our government. The Law was enacted to protect us and to allow us to protect others. When Laws are bent and broken to put the innocent in danger, then it is not our Law. Valentine wanted to rule the Clave. Sebastian wanted to burn it down. We only want to return our rightful Consul to power, and to allow the government of Shadowhunters to be what it should be—not a tyranny, but a representation of who we are and what we want.”

  “Those are some pretty words,” said the French werewolf who’d been talking to Alec earlier. “But Jace and Clary were beloved of your people. They will want a war against those who harmed them.”

  “Yes,” said Julian. “I’m counting on that.”

  There was no gesture, no signal that Emma could see, but the doors of the Sanctuary opened and Jace and Clary walked in, as if on cue.

  At first there was no reaction from the crowd. The light from the torches was bright, and neither of the two were in gear: Jace wore jeans and Clary a plain blue dress. As they passed through the crowd, people blinked at them until finally Lily Chen, looking annoyed, stood up and said, in a loud, bored voice, “I cannot believe my own eyes. Isn’t that Jace Herondale and Clary Fairchild, back from THE DEAD?”

  The reaction that ripped through the crowd was electric. Clary looked over with some alarm as the roar grew; Jace just smirked as the two of them joined Emma and the others behind the long table. Lily had resumed her seat and was examining her nails.

  Julian was calling for people to be quiet, but his voice was drowned out by the noise. Feeling that this was an area in which she could excel, Emma jumped up onto the table and shouted. “EVERYONE,” she yelled. “EVERYONE SHUT UP.”

  The decibel level fell immediately. Emma could see Cristina giggling, her hand over her mouth. Beside her, Jace shot finger guns at Julie Beauvale, who had turned bright pink.

  “Good to see you, bestie,” he said.