considering Sona’s eyes were light brown and Elias’s blue. “About Charles?”
She nodded.
“Well, come inside then, and shut the door,” he said, leaning back in his chair.
Cordelia did as requested. Alastair’s room was bigger than hers, furnished in dark gentleman’s colors: green walls, a muted Persian rug. Alastair had a collection of daggers, and he had brought quite a few of them with him from Cirenworth. They were the only beautiful things Cordelia remembered Alastair ever paying special attention to: one had a sheath of blue-and-white enamel, another was inlaid with golden designs of dragons, kylins, and birds. A pishqabz carved of a single piece of ivory hung above the washstand, near it a khanjar whose blade bore an inscription in Persian: I wanted so much to have a gleaming dagger, that each of my ribs became a dagger.
Cordelia settled herself in a blue armchair. Alastair turned a little to look at her; his fingers tapped out a rhythm on the newsprint. “What about Charles?” he said.
“I know he has become engaged again,” she said. “To Grace Blackthorn.”
Alastair’s restless hands stopped moving. “Yes,” he said. “Pity for your friend James.”
So he knows, Cordelia thought. Charles must have told him. “So—are you all right?” she asked.
Alastair’s black eyes were fathomless. “What do you mean?”
Cordelia couldn’t bear it any longer. “I heard you and Charles talking in the library,” she said. “I heard you say you loved him. I won’t tell anybody else, I promise. You know I always keep my word. It doesn’t make the least bit of difference to me, Alastair.”
Alastair was silent.
“I wouldn’t have said anything, but—for Charles to become engaged again, after he knew how unhappy you were about Ariadne—Alastair, I don’t want anyone to be cruel to you. I want you to be with someone who will make you happy.”
Alastair’s eyes glittered. “He’s not cruel. You don’t know him. He and Grace have an understanding. He explained it to me. Everything Charles does is so he and I can be together.” There was something mechanical about the words, as if they had been rehearsed.
“But you don’t wish to be someone’s secret,” said Cordelia. “You said—”
“How do you know what I said? How could you possibly have overheard us without going out of your way to do so? You were upstairs, we were downstairs—unless you followed me,” Alastair finished slowly. “You were eavesdropping. Why?”
“I was afraid,” Cordelia said, in a low voice. “I thought you were going to tell Charles—what I had made you promise not to say.”
“About that demon creature at the bridge?” he said incredulously. “About your little friends and their little schemes and secrets? I gave you my word.”
“I know,” she said, close to crying, “and I should have trusted you, Alastair. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to overhear such things. I know they’re private. I only wanted to tell you I loved you just the same. It makes no difference to me.”
She thought the reassurance might help, but instead Alastair’s mouth wrenched out of shape with sudden violence.
“Really,” he said coldly. “Well, it makes a difference to me to have a sister who is a sneak and a spy. Get out of my room, Cordelia. Now.”
* * *
“Jesse,” Lucie whispered. “Jesse, where are you?”
She sat on the floor by the cast-iron fireplace in the Institute drawing room. She had come home from the Devil Tavern once night had begun to fall in earnest. Both Thomas and Christopher had been distracted and preoccupied, anyway, and she wasn’t sure how much real Pyxis research was getting done. Christopher had had some kind of realization about the antidote he was working on and vanished into the steel-lined corner of the tavern room, where he had banged about trying to distill something in a retort.
But that wasn’t the real reason she had wanted to leave. Night had a new importance now. Night meant she could talk to Jesse.
“Jesse Blackthorn,” she said now, feeling a little ridiculous. “Please come here. I want to speak with you.”
She glanced about the room, as if Jesse might be hiding under a sofa. This was their family room, where the Herondales often gathered in the evenings. Tessa had kept some of the older decorations here—a gilt-framed mirror still hung over the fireplace—and the furniture was comfortably shabby, from the flowered armchairs by the fireplace to the big old desk, scarred with years of marks from the nibs of pens. The walls were papered in light damask, and well-thumbed books lined the walls.
Tessa would read