Chapter 2: Grey Sea

2GREY SEA

Grey rocks, and greyer sea,

And surf along the shore—

And in my heart a name

My lips shall speak no more.

—Charles G. D. Roberts, “Grey Rocks, and Greyer Sea”

When Lucie woke up atlast, it was to the sound of waves and a bright, wintry sunlight as sharp as the sheer edge of glass. She sat upright so quickly her head spun. She was determined not to go back to sleep again, not to fall unconscious, not to return to that dark, empty place full of voices and noise.

She threw off the striped afghan she’d been sleeping under and swung her legs out of bed. Her first try at standing was unsuccessful; her legs buckled, and she tumbled back onto the bed. The second time she used one of the bedposts to pull herself upright. This worked slightly better, and for a few moments she swayed back and forth like an old sea captain unused to land.

Other than the bed, a simple wrought-iron frame painted eggshell white to match the walls, there was little furniture in her small room. There was a fireplace in whose grate embers crackled and smoldered with a faint purple tinge, and a vanity table of unfinished wood, carved all over with mermaids and sea serpents. Her own traveling trunk sat reassuringly at the foot of the bed.

Eventually, her legs fizzing with pins and needles, she made her way to the window, set into an alcove in the wall, and looked outside. The view was a symphony of white and deep green, black and palest blue. Malcolm’s house seemed to be perched halfway up a rocky cliff, above a pretty little fishing village. Below the house was a narrow inlet where the ocean sloshed into the harbor and small fishing boats rocked gently in the tide. The sky was a clear porcelain blue, though it had obviously snowed recently, judging from the sugary dusting of white on the village’s pitched roofs. Coal smoke from chimneys sent black threads up into the sky, and waves crashed against the cliff below, foaming white and pine green.

It was lovely—stark and lovely, and the expanse of the sea gave Lucie an odd, hollow feeling inside. London seemed a million miles away, as did the people in it: Cordelia and James, her mother and father. What must they be thinking now? Where in Cornwall did they imagine she was? Probably not here, gazing at an ocean that stretched all the way to the coast of France.

To distract herself, she wiggled her toes experimentally. At least the pins and needles were gone. The rough wood planks of the floor had been worn down over years so they felt as smooth against her bare feet as if they had been newly polished. She slid across them to the vanity table, where washbasin and cloth awaited her. She nearly groaned when she caught sight of herself in the mirror. Her hair was matted and flyaway, her traveling dress crushed and wrinkled, and one of the buttons on a pillow had left a penny-sized dent in her cheek.

She’d have to beg Malcolm for a bath later, she thought. He was a warlock; surely he could produce hot water. For the moment, she did her best with the washbasin and a cake of Pears soap before she peeled off her wreck of a dress, tossed it into a corner, and flung open her trunk. She sat staring for a moment at the contents—had she really packed a bathing costume? The thought of swimming in the ice-green waters of the Polperro harbor was terrifying. After moving aside her axe and gear jacket, she selected a dark blue wool dress with embroidery around the cuffs, and set to work making herself look presentable with hairpins. She had a moment of panic when she realized her gold locket was not around her neck, but a minute’s hasty searching turned it up on the nightstand beside her bed.

Jesse put it there,she thought. She could not have said how she knew that, but she was sure of it.

She was suddenly desperate to see him. Kicking her feet into low boots, she slipped out of the room into the corridor.

Malcolm’s house was significantly larger than she had thought; her bedroom turned out to be one of six on this level, and the stairs at its end—carved in the same manner as the vanity table—led to a high-ceilinged open parlor suitable for a manor. There was obviously no room for both the high ceiling and the bedrooms above, a disorienting effect; Malcolm must have enspelled the house to be as large as he liked on the inside.

There was no indication of anyone else being home, but there was a steady rhythmic thump coming from somewhere outside. After a moment of searching, Lucie located the front door and stepped outside.

The bright sunlight had been deceptive. It was cold. The wind sheared across the rocky cliffs like a knife’s edge, cutting through the wool of her dress. She wrapped her arms around herself with a shiver and turned in a quick circle, taking everything in. She had been right about the house—from outside, it seemed very small indeed, a cottage that could have fit three rooms or so. Its windows appeared boarded up, though she knew they weren’t, and its whitewash was peeling, roughed away by the salt air.

The frostbitten seagrass crunched under her shoes as she followed the thump, thump sound around the side of the house. And stopped in her tracks.

It was Jesse. He stood with an axe in his hands, next to a pile of firewood he’d been splitting. Lucie’s hands shook, and not just with the cold. He was alive. The force of it had never hit her so hard before. She had never seen him like this—never seen the wind lift his black hair, or seen the flush of exertion on his cheeks. Never seen his breath puff out in white clouds as he exhaled. Never seen him breathe at all; he had always been in the world but not part of it, untouched by heat or cold or atmosphere, and here he was breathing and living, his shadow stretching out behind him across the rocky ground.

She could not stand it a moment longer. She ran to him. He had time only to look up in surprise and drop the axe before she had thrown her arms around his neck.

He caught her against him, gripping her tight, fingers digging into the soft fabric of her dress. He nuzzled his face down into her hair, breathing her name, “Lucie, Lucie,” and his body was warm against hers. For the first time she experienced the scent of him: wool, sweat, skin, woodsmoke, the air just before a storm. For the first time, she felt his heart beating against hers.

At last they drew apart. He kept his arms around her, smiling down into her face. There was a little hesitance in his expression, as if he were unsure what she thought of this new, real, and living Jesse. Silly boy, she thought; he ought to be able to read it all in her face. But maybe it was better if he couldn’t?

“Awake at last,” he said. His voice was—well, it was his voice, she knew his voice. But it was so much more physical, more present, than she’d heard it before. And she could feel the vibration in his chest as he spoke. She wondered if she would ever get used to all these new details.

“How long was I asleep?”

“A few days. Nothing much has happened; mostly we’ve just been waiting for you to wake up.” He frowned. “Malcolm said you would be all right eventually, and I thought—” He flinched and held up his right hand. She winced to see the torn red skin. But Jesse seemed delighted. “Blisters,” he said happily. “I’ve got blisters.”

“Rotten luck,” Lucie said sympathetically.

“Not at all. Do you know how long it’s been since I had a blister? A scraped knee? A missing tooth?”

“I hope you don’t knock out all your teeth in your new delight at being alive,” said Lucie. “I don’t think I could lo—like you as well as I do if you were toothless.”

Oh, dear. She had almost said love. At least Jesse seemed too enchanted with his new injuries to have noticed.

“How shallow,” Jesse said, winding a strand of her hair around his finger. “I should like you just as well if you were bald and shriveled like a desiccated acorn.”

Lucie experienced a terrible desire to giggle. She forced herself to scowl ferociously instead. “Honestly, what on earth have you been doing out here chopping wood, anyway? Can’t Malcolm magic up some wood if it’s needed? Where is Malcolm, by the by?”

“Went down into the village,” Jesse said. “Ostensibly to buy supplies. I think he likes the walking; otherwise he’d probably just magic up food, like you said. Most days he’s gone all afternoon.”

“Most days?” Lucie said. “You said a few days—how long has it been?”

“This is the fifth day we’ve been here. Malcolm used his magic to determine that you were safe and only needed natural rest. A great deal of it.”

“Oh.” Lucie stepped back, alarmed. “My family will be coming after us, surely—they’ll want to know everything—they’ll be furious with me—and Malcolm—we must make a plan—”

Jesse frowned again. “They won’t have an easy time finding us. The house has been very heavily warded against Tracking and, I suppose, most everything else.”

Lucie was about to explain that she knew her parents, and they were not going to let something like impenetrable wards stop them from ferreting out where she was, but before she could, Malcolm came around the corner, walking stick in hand, his boots crunching on the frozen ground. He was wearing the white traveling coat he’d had on when she last saw him, in the Institute Sanctuary. He had been angry then; frightened, she thought, of what she’d done. Now he only looked tired, and more disheveled than she’d expected.

“I told you she’d be fine,” he said to Jesse. He glanced at the firewood. “Excellent work,” he added. “You’ll be feeling stronger every day if you keep that up.”

So the task of splitting firewood was more about Jesse’s health than anything else. It made sense. Preserved or not, his body had surely been weakened by seven years of being dead. Of course, Belial had possessed Jesse, used his body as a puppet, driving him to walk miles all over London, to—

But she didn’t want to think about that. That had been in the past, when Jesse did not really inhabit his body. All that was changed now.

Jesse examined the pile of unsplit logs behind him. “Another half hour at most, I think, and I’ll be done.”

Malcolm nodded and turned to Lucie. There was an odd blankness to the way he looked at her, Lucie thought, and felt a stir of unease. “Miss Herondale,” he said. “May I speak to you in the house?”

---

“Now, I’ve prepared this sheet with a solution of hartshorn,” Christopher was saying, “and when the flame is applied via a standard combustion rune—Thomas, are you paying attention?”

“All ears,” said Thomas. “Absolutely countless ears.”

They were downstairs at the Fairchilds’ house, in Henry’s laboratory. Christopher had asked Thomas to help him with a new project, and Thomas had leaped at the opportunity for something to distract him.

Christopher pushed his spectacles up his nose. “I see that you’re not sure the application of fire will be necessary,” he said. “But I keep a close eye on the mundanes’ developments in the area of science, you know. They have recently been working on ways of sending messages from one person to another, at a great distance, first through lengths of metal wire, and more recently through the air itself.”

“What’s that got to do with you setting fire to things?” said Thomas—in his opinion, very politely.

“Well, to put it plainly, mundanes have used heat to create most of their technology—electricity, the telegraph—and we Shadowhunters can’t fall behind the mundanes in what we can do, Thomas. It will hardly do if their devices give them powers we can’t match. In this case, they can send messages at a distance, and well—we can’t. But if I can use runes—see, I singe the edge of the parchment here with a flame, and fold it over, and Mark it with a Communication rune here, and an Accuracy rune here and here…”

From upstairs, the doorbell chimed. Christopher ignored it, and for a moment Thomas wondered if he should answer it himself. But at a second and third chime, Christopher sighed, put down his stele, and headed for the stairs.

Overhead, Thomas heard the front door open. It wasn’t his intention to eavesdrop, but when Christopher’s voice drifted down to him, saying, “Oh, hullo, Alastair, you must be here to see Charles. I think he’s upstairs in his study,” he felt his stomach swoop inside him like a bird diving for a fish. (Then he wished he’d come up with a better mental analogy, but one either had a poetic turn of mind, like James, or one didn’t.)

Alastair’s reply was too low for him to hear. Christopher coughed and said, “Oh, just down in the lab, you know. I’ve got quite the new exciting project—”

Alastair interrupted him to say something. Thomas wondered if Christopher would mention that Thomas was there. But he did not; he only said, “Matthew’s still in Paris, as far as we know. Yes, I’m sure Charles wouldn’t mind a visit.…”

The bird in Thomas’s stomach flopped over dead. He leaned his elbows on Christopher’s worktable, trying to breathe through it all. He knew he shouldn’t be surprised. Alastair had made it clear, the last time they saw each other, that there could be nothing between them. And the main reason for that was the hostility between Alastair and Thomas’s friends, the Merry Thieves—who disliked Alastair for very good reason.

Thomas had woken up the next morning with a clear thought in his mind: It’s time—it’s past time—for me to tell my friends about my feelings for Alastair. Perhaps Alastair is right and it is impossible—but it will definitely remain impossible if I never try.

He had meant to do it. He had gotten out of bed absolutely determined to do it.

But then he learned that Matthew and James had both left London in the night, and so his plan had to be delayed. And in fact, not just Matthew and James were gone. Cordelia and Matthew, it seemed, had gone to Paris, while James had gone off with Will to look for Lucie, who had, it seemed, taken it into her head to visit Malcolm Fade at his cottage in Cornwall. Christopher seemed to accept this tale without question; Thomas did not, and he knew Anna didn’t either, but Anna had been firm in her refusal to discuss it. One gossips about one’s acquaintance, not one’s friends, was all she would say. Anna herself looked pale and tired, though perhaps she’d gone back to having a different girl in her room every night. Thomas rather missed Ariadne and he suspected Anna did too, but the one time he’d brought her up, Anna had almost slung a teacup at his head.

Thomas had considered these last few days telling Christopher of his feelings, but while Christopher would be kind about it, he would feel awkward about knowing something James and Matthew didn’t, and it was James and Matthew who truly disliked—hated, even—Alastair in the first place.

And then there was the issue of Charles. Charles had been Alastair’s first great love, though it had ended badly. He had been wounded in an encounter with Belial, and though he was convalescing, Alastair seemed to feel he owed him support and looking after. While Thomas could understand this from a purely moral standpoint, he was tormented by the thought of Alastair mopping Charles’s feverish brow and feeding him grapes. It was all too easy to imagine Charles laying a hand on Alastair’s cheek and murmuring his gratitude while staring deeply into Alastair’s gorgeous dark eyes with their long, thick lashes—

Christopher returned from upstairs, nearly causing Thomas to leap out of his chair. Christopher, thankfully, seemed blissfully unaware of Thomas’s inner turmoil, and immediately went back to the workbench. “All right,” he said, turning toward Thomas with a stele in hand, “let’s try again, shall we?”

“Sending a message?” Thomas asked. He and Christopher had “sent off” dozens of messages by now, and while some of them had disappeared into thin air or raced up the chimney, none had ever gotten to their intended destination.

“Indeed,” Kit said, handing over a piece of paper and a pencil. “I just need you to write a message, while I test this reagent. It can be any sort of nonsense you like.”

Thomas sat down at the workbench and stared at the blank page. After a long moment, he wrote:

Dear Alastair, why are you so stupid and so frustrating, and why do I think about you all the time? Why do I have to think about you when I get up and when I go to sleep and when I brush my teeth and right now? Why did you kiss me in the Sanctuary if you didn’t want to be with me? Is it that you don’t want to tell anyone? It’s very annoying. —Thomas

“All right, then?” Christopher said. Thomas started and quickly folded the page into quarters, so its contents were hidden. He handed it over to Christopher with only a slight pang. He wished he could have shown the words to someone, but he knew it was impossible. It had felt good to write it all down, anyway, he thought, as Christopher lit a match and touched it to the edge of the page. Even if the message was, rather like Thomas’s relationship with Alastair, going nowhere in the end.

---

Considering the horror stories her mother had told her, Grace Blackthorn had expected the Silent City to be a sort of dungeon, where she would be chained to a wall and possibly tortured. Even before she reached the City entrance in Highgate, she had begun to think of what it would be like to be tried by the Mortal Sword. To stand on the Speaking Stars and feel the Silent Brothers’ judgment. How it would feel to be compelled—after so very many years of lying—to tell the truth. Would it be a relief? Or would it be a terrible agony?

She supposed it did not matter. She deserved the agony.

But she had not been clapped in irons, or anything of the sort. Two Silent Brothers had escorted her from James’s house in Curzon Street to the Silent City. The moment she had arrived (and it was indeed a dark, forbidding, shadowy sort of place), Brother Zachariah—who she knew to be Cordelia’s cousin, once James Carstairs—had come forward as if to take charge of her.

You must be exhausted.His voice in her mind was quiet, even kind. Let me show you to your chamber. Tomorrow will be early enough to discuss what has happened.

She had been stunned. Brother Zachariah was a figure that her mother had referred to, more than once, as a demonstration of the Herondales’ corrosive influence over the Nephilim. “His eyes aren’t even sewn shut,” she’d snap, not even looking at Grace. “Only special treatment for the ones that the Lightwoods and the Herondales favor. It’s obscene.”

But Brother Zachariah spoke to her with a gentle kindness. He had led her through the cold, stone-walled City to a small cell, which she had been imagining as a sort of torture chamber, where she would sleep on cold stone, perhaps bound with chains. In fact, while it wasn’t luxurious by any means—a windowless stone chamber with little privacy, as the large door was made up of narrowly spaced adamas bars—compared to Blackthorn Manor, it was downright homey, containing a fairly comfortable bed of wrought iron, a battered oak desk, a wooden shelf lined with books (none of any interest to her, but it was something). Witchlight stones had even been placed haphazardly around, as if an afterthought, and she recalled that the Silent Brothers did not need light to see.

The most uncanny element of the place was that it was impossible to tell when it was day or night. Zachariah had brought her a mantel clock, which helped, but she wasn’t fully confident that she was keeping track of which twelve o’clock was noon and which midnight. Not that it mattered, she supposed. Time stretched out here, and compressed like a spring, while she waited between the moments that the Silent Brothers wanted to speak with her.

When they did want to speak to her, it was bad. She could not pretend otherwise. Not that they harmed her, or tormented her, or even used the Mortal Sword upon her; they only questioned her, calmly but relentlessly. And still, it was not the questioning that was bad either. It was telling the truth.

Grace had begun to realize that she only really knew two ways to communicate with others. One was to wear a mask, and to lie and perform from behind that mask, as she had performed obedience to her mother, and love to James. The other was to be honest, which she had only ever really done with Jesse. Even then she had hidden from him the things she was ashamed of doing. Not hiding, she was finding, was a painful thing.

It hurt to stand before the Brothers and admit to all she had done. Yes, I forced James Herondale to believe himself in love with me. Yes, I used my demon-given power to ensnare Charles Fairchild. Yes, I plotted with my mother the destruction of the Herondales and Carstairs, the Lightwoods and Fairchilds. I believed her when she said they were our enemies.

The sessions exhausted her. At night, alone in her cell, she saw James’s face the last time he had looked at her, heard the loathing in his voice. I would throw you onto the street, but this power of yours is no better than a loaded gun in the hands of a selfish child. You cannot be allowed to continue to use it.

If the Silent Brothers intended to take her power—and they were welcome to it—they had shown no signs of it yet. She sensed they were studying her, studying her ability, in ways she herself did not understand.

All she had to comfort herself was the thought of Jesse. Jesse, who Lucie must surely have raised, with Malcolm’s help. They would all be in Cornwall by now. Would Jesse be all right? Would returning from the shadowy lands he had inhabited so long be a terrible shock for him? She wished she were there, to hold his hand through it, as he had helped her through so many terrible things.

She knew, of course, that it was entirely possible that they had failed to raise Jesse. Necromancy was near impossible. But his death had been so unfair, a terrible crime based on a poisonous lie. Surely if anyone deserved a second chance, Jesse did.

And he loved Grace as his sister, loved and cared for her in a way that nobody else did, and perhaps, she thought, nobody else ever would. Maybe the Nephilim would put her to death because of her power. Maybe she would rot in the Silent City forever. But if not, a living Jesse was the only way she could imagine any kind of future life for herself at all.

There was Christopher Lightwood, of course. Not that he loved her; he barely knew her. But he had seemed legitimately interested in her, in her thoughts, her opinions, her feelings. If things had been different, he could have been her friend. She had never had a friend. Only James, who surely hated her now that he knew what she had done to him, and Lucie, who would soon hate her as well, for the same reason. And really, she was just fooling herself if she thought Christopher would feel any differently. He was James’s friend, and loved him. He would be loyal, and despise her… she could not blame him.…

There was a sound, the telltale scrape of the room’s barred door opening. She sat up hastily on her narrow mattress, smoothing down her hair. Not that the Silent Brothers cared how she looked, but it was force of habit.

A shadowy figure regarded her from the doorway. Grace, Zachariah said. I fear the last round of questioning was too much.

It had been bad; Grace had nearly fainted when describing the night her mother had taken her to the dark forest, the sound of Belial’s voice in the shadows. But Grace did not like the idea of anyone being able to sense what she felt. She said, “Will it be much longer? Before my sentence is pronounced?”

You wish for punishment that badly?

“No,” Grace said. “I only wish the questioning to stop. But I am ready to accept my punishment. I deserve it.”

Yes, you have done wrong. But how old were you when your mother brought you to Brocelind Forest to receive your power? Eleven? Twelve?

“It doesn’t matter.”

It does,said Zachariah. I believe that the Clave failed you. You are a Shadowhunter, Grace, born to a Shadowhunter family, and abandoned to terrible circumstances. It is unfair to you that the Clave left you there for so long, without intervention or even investigation.

Grace could not bear his pity; it felt like tiny needle marks against her skin. “You should not be kind to me, or try to understand,” she snapped. “I used demonic power to enchant James and make him believe he was in love with me. I caused him terrible pain.”

Zachariah regarded her without speaking, his face eerily still.

Grace wanted to hit him. “Don’t you think I deserve punishment? Mustn’t there be a reckoning? A balancing of things? An eye for an eye?”

That is your mother’s thinking about the world. Not mine.

“But the other Silent Brothers. The Enclave. Everyone in London—they will want to see me punished.”

They do not know,said Brother Zachariah. For the first time, Grace saw a sort of hesitation in him. What you have done at your mother’s behest remains known only to us, and to James.

“But—why?” It made no sense; surely James would tell his friends, and soon enough everyone would know. “Why would you protect me?”

We seek to question your mother; the job of that will be easier if she believes you are still on her side, your powers still unknown to us.

Grace sat back on the bed. “You want answers from my mother because you believe I am the puppet, and she the puppet master, the puller of strings. But the true puppet master is Belial. She is obedient to him. When she acts, it is at his behest. He is the one to fear.”

There was a long silence. Then, a gentle voice inside her head. Are you afraid, Grace?

“Not for myself,” she said. “I have already lost everything I had to lose. But for others, yes. I am very afraid indeed.”

---

Lucie followed Malcolm into the house and waited while the warlock divested himself of his traveling coat and walking stick in the entryway. He led her into the parlor she’d passed through earlier, with its high ceiling, and with a snap of his fingers set a roaring fire in the grate. It occurred to Lucie that not only could Malcolm acquire firewood without Jesse needing to chop it for him, he could probably keep fires going with no wood whatsoever.

Not that she minded watching Jesse chop wood. And he seemed to be enjoying it, so it was beneficial for the both of them.

Malcolm gestured her toward an overstuffed settee into which Lucie thought she might sink so far she would be unable to get up again. She perched on its arm. The room was quite cozy, actually: not at all what she would have associated with Malcolm Fade. Satinwood furniture, worn to a soft patina, upholstered with tapestry and velvet fabric—no effort had been made to match the pieces, though they all looked comfortable. A rug embroidered with pineapples covered the floor, and various portraits of people Lucie did not recognize hung upon the walls.

Malcolm remained standing, and Lucie assumed he would now lecture her about Jesse, or interrogate her regarding what she had done to him. Instead he said, “You might have noticed that although I have not been unconscious for several days after an act of unpracticed sorcery, I am looking somewhat the worse for wear.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Lucie said, though she had. “You look, er, quite polished and put-together.”

Malcolm waved this off. “I am not fishing for compliments. I mean to explain that these last days, while you have been sleeping off the effects of the magic you performed, I have been taking the opportunity of being back in Cornwall to continue my investigations into Annabel Blackthorn.”

Lucie felt a nervous fizzle in her stomach. Annabel Blackthorn. The woman Malcolm had loved, a hundred years ago, and who Malcolm had long believed had left him to join the Iron Sisters. In truth, her family had murdered her rather than allow her to marry a warlock. Lucie flinched, remembering the look on Malcolm’s face when Grace had told him the truth of Annabel’s fate.

Warlocks did not age, yet Malcolm seemed somehow older than he had a short time ago. The lines of strain about his mouth and eyes were pronounced. “I know that we agreed you would call up her spirit,” he said. “That you would allow me to speak to her again.”

It seemed odd to Lucie that warlocks could not, themselves, call up those dead who no longer haunted the world, but had passed into a place of peace. That the terrible power in her blood allowed her to do something even Magnus Bane, or Malcolm Fade, could not. But there it was—she had given Malcolm her word, though the hungry look in his eyes made her shiver a little.

“I did not know what would happen when you raised Jesse,” Malcolm said. “For him to have come back as he has—with breath and life, perfectly healthy, perfectly cognizant—is more miracle than magic.” He took a ragged breath. “Annabel’s death was no less unjust, no less monstrous, than what happened to Jesse. She deserves to live again no less than he. Of that I am certain.”

Lucie did not bring up the detail that Jesse’s body had been preserved by Belial in a strange half-living state, and Annabel’s surely hadn’t. Instead she said anxiously, “I gave you my word, Malcolm, that I would call up her spirit. Let you commune with her ghost. But no more than that. She cannot be… brought back. You know that.”

Malcolm seemed barely to hear this. He threw himself down into a nearby chair. “If indeed miracles are possible,” he said, “though I have never believed in them—I know of demons and angels, but have put my faith in science and magic only—”

He broke off, though it was too late for Lucie’s unease. It was vibrating at a high tempo now, like a plucked string. “Not every spirit wishes to return,” she whispered. “Some of the dead are at peace.”

“Annabel will not be at peace,” said Malcolm. His purple eyes looked like bruises in his pale face. “Not without me.”

“Mr. Fade—” Lucie’s voice shook.

For the first time, Malcolm seemed to notice her anxiety. He sat up straight, forcing a smile. “Lucie. I understand that you barely survived raising Jesse, and that you are significantly weakened. It will hardly do any of us any good if calling up Annabel sends you back into unconsciousness. We must wait for you to be stronger.” He gazed at the fire as though he could read something in the dance of its flames. “I have waited a hundred years. Time is not the same for me as it is for a mortal, especially one as young as you are. I will wait another hundred years, if I must.”

“Well,” said Lucie, trying to keep her voice light, “I hardly think I will need that long.”

“I will wait,” Malcolm said again, speaking perhaps more to himself than to her. “I will wait as long as it takes.”