Clockwork Princess

E

PILOGUE

I say the tomb which on the dead is shut

Opens the Heavenly hall;

And what we here for the end of all things put

Is the first step of all.

—Victor Hugo, “At Villequier”

London, Blackfriars Bridge, 2008.

The wind was sharp, blowing grit and stray rubbish—crisps packets, stray pages of newspaper, old receipts—along the pavement as Tessa, glancing quickly from side to side to check for traffic, dashed across Blackfriars Bridge.

To any onlooker she would have looked like an ordinary girl in her late teens or early twenties: jeans tucked into boots, a blue cashmere top she’d gotten for half off during the January sales, and long brown hair, curling just a bit in the damp weather, tumbling haphazardly down her back. If they were particularly sharp-eyed about fashion, they would have assumed the paisley Liberty-print scarf she wore was a knockoff instead of a hundred-year-old original, and that the bracelet around her wrist was vintage, rather than a gift that had been given to her by her husband on their thirtieth wedding anniversary.

Tessa’s steps slowed as she reached one of the stone recesses in the wall of the bridge. Cement benches had been built into them now, so that you could sit and look at the gray-green water below sloshing up against the bridge pilings, or at Saint Paul’s in the distance. The city was alive with noise—the sounds of traffic: honking horns, the rumble of double-decker buses; the ringing of dozens of mobiles; the chatter of pedestrians; the faint sounds of music leaking from white iPod earbuds.

Tessa sat down on the bench, pulling her legs up under her. The atmosphere was shockingly clean and clear—the smoke and pollution that had rendered the air yellow and black when she had been a girl here were gone, and the sky was the color of a blue-gray marble. The eyesore that had been the Dover and Chatham railway bridge was gone too; only the pilings were still sticking up out of the water as an odd reminder of what had once been. Yellow buoys bobbed in the water now, and tourist boats chugged by, the amplified voices of tour guides blaring from their speakers. Buses as red as candy hearts sped by along the bridge, sending dead leaves fluttering to the curb.

She glanced down at the watch on her wrist. Five minutes to noon. She was a little early, but then she always was for this, their yearly meeting. It gave her a chance to think—to think and to remember, and there was no place better for doing either than here, on Blackfriars Bridge, the first place they had ever really talked.

Beside the watch was the pearl bracelet she always wore. She never took it off. Will had given it to her when they had been married thirty years, smiling as he’d fastened it on. He had had gray in his hair then, she knew, though she had never really seen it. As if her love had given him his own shape-shifting ability, no matter how much time had passed, when she looked at him, she saw always the wild, black-haired boy she had fallen in love with.

It still seemed incredible to her sometimes that they had managed to grow old together, herself and Will Herondale, whom Gabriel Lightwood had once said would not live to be older than nineteen. They had been good friends with the Lightwoods too, through all those years. Of course Will could hardly not be friends with the man who was married to his sister. Both Cecily and Gabriel had seen Will on the day he died, as had Sophie, though Gideon had himself passed away several years before.

Tessa remembered that day clearly, the day the Silent Brothers had said there was nothing more they could do to keep Will alive. He had been unable to leave their bed by then. Tessa had squared her shoulders and gone to give the news to their family and friends, trying to be as calm for them as she could, though her heart had felt as if it were being ripped out of her body.

It had been June, the bright hot summer of 1937, and with the curtains thrown back the bedroom had been full of sunlight, sunlight and her and Will’s children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews—Cecy’s blue-eyed boys, tall and handsome, and Gideon and Sophie’s two girls—and those who were as close as family: Charlotte, white-haired and upright, and the Fairchild sons and daughters with their curling red hair like Henry’s had once been.

All day Tessa had sat on the bed with Will beside her, leaning on her shoulder. The sight might have been strange to others, a young woman lovingly cradling a man who looked old enough to be her grandfather, her hands looped through his, but to their family it was only familiar—it was only Tessa and Will. And because it was Tessa and Will, the others came and went all day, as Shadowhunters did at a deathbed, telling stories of Will’s life and all the things he and Tessa had done through their long years together.

The children had spoken fondly of the way he had always loved their mother, fiercely and devotedly, the way he had never had eyes for anyone else, and how their parents had set the model for the sort of love they hoped to find in their own lives. They spoke of his regard for books, and how he had taught them all to love them too, to respect the printed page and cherish the stories that those pages held. They spoke of the way he still cursed in Welsh when he dropped something, though he rarely used the language otherwise, and of the fact that though his prose was excellent—he had written several histories of the Shadowhunters when he’d retired that had been very well respected—his poetry had always been awful, though that had never stopped him from reciting it.

Their oldest child, James, had spoken laughingly about Will’s unrelenting fear of ducks and his continual battle to keep them out of the pond at the family home in Yorkshire.

Their grandchildren had reminded him of the song about demon pox he had taught them—when they were much too young, Tessa had always thought—and that they had all memorized. They sang it all together and out of tune, scandalizing Sophie.

With tears running down her face, Cecily had reminded him of the moment at her wedding to Gabriel when he had delivered a beautiful speech praising the groom, at the end of which he had announced, “Dear God, I thought she was marrying Gideon. I take it all back,” thus vexing not only Cecily and Gabriel but Sophie as well—and Will, though too tired to laugh, had smiled at his sister and squeezed her hand.

They had all laughed about his habit of taking Tessa on romantic “holidays” to places from Gothic novels, including the hideous moor where someone had died, a drafty castle with a ghost in it, and of course the square in Paris in which he had decided Sydney Carton had been guillotined, where Will had horrified passersby by shouting “I can see the blood on the cobblestones!” in French.

At the end of the day, as the sky had darkened, the family had come around Will’s bed and kissed him each in turn and left one by one, until Will and Tessa were alone together. Tessa had lain down beside him and slid her arm beneath his head, and put her head on his chest, listening to the ever-weakening beat of his heart. And in the shadows they’d whispered, reminding each other of the stories only they knew. Of the girl who had hit over the head with a water jug the boy who had come to rescue her, and how he had fallen in love with her in that instant. Of a ballroom and a balcony and the moon sailing like a ship untethered through the sky. Of the flutter of the wings of a clockwork angel. Of holy water and blood.

Near midnight the door had opened and Jem had come in. Tessa supposed she should have thought of him as Brother Zachariah by then, but neither Will nor Tessa had ever called him that. He had come in like a shadow in his white robes, and Tessa had taken a deep breath when she had seen him, for she had known that this was what Will had been waiting for, and that the hour was now.

He did not come to Will at once, but crossed the room to a rosewood box that sat upon the top of the dresser. They had always kept Jem’s violin for him, as Will had promised. It was kept clean and in order, and the hinges of the box did not creak as Jem opened it and lifted the instrument out. They watched as he rosined the bow with his familiar slim fingers, his pale wrists disappearing down into the paler material of the Brothers’ parchment robes.

He lifted the violin to his shoulder then, and raised the bow. And he played.

Zhi yin. Jem had told her once that it meant understanding music, and also a bond that went deeper than friendship. Jem played, and he played the years of Will’s life as he had seen them. He played two little boys in a training room, one showing the other how to throw knives, and he played the ritual of parabatai: the fire and the vows and the burning runes. He played two young men running through the streets of London in the dark, stopping to lean up against a wall and laugh together. He played the day in the library when he and Will had jested with Tessa about ducks, and he played the train to Yorkshire on which Jem had said that parabatai were meant to love each other as they loved their own souls. He played that love, and he played their love for Tessa, and hers for them, and he played Will saying, In your eyes I have always found grace. He played the too few times he had seen them since he had joined the Brotherhood—the brief meetings at the Institute; the time when Will had been bitten by a Shax demon and nearly died, and Jem had come from the Silent City and sat with him all night, risking discovery and punishment. And he played the birth of their first son, and the protection ceremony that had been carried out on the child in the Silent City. Will would have no other Silent Brother but Jem perform it. And Jem played the way he had covered his scarred face with his hands and turned away when he’d found out the child’s name was James.

He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he’d set the violin back in its box, Will’s eyes were closed, but Tessa’s were full of tears. Jem set down his bow, and came toward the bed, drawing back his hood, so she could see his closed eyes and his scarred face. And he had sat down beside them on the bed, and taken Will’s hand, the one that Tessa was not holding, and both Will and Tessa had heard Jem’s voice in their minds.

I take your hand, brother, so that you may go in peace.

Will had opened the blue eyes that had never lost their color over all the passing years, and looked at Jem and then Tessa, and smiled, and died, with Tessa’s head on his shoulder and his hand in Jem’s.

It never had stopped hurting, remembering when Will had died. After he was gone, Tessa had fled. Her children were grown, had children of their own; she told herself they did not need her and hid in the back of her mind the thought that haunted her: She could not bear to remain and watch them grow older than she was. It had been one thing to survive the death of her husband. To survive the death of her children—she could not sit by and watch it. It would happen, must happen, but she would not be there.

And besides, there was something Will had asked her to do.

The road that led from Shrewsbury to Welshpool was no longer as it had been when Will had ridden across it in a mad, heedless dash to save her from Mortmain. Will had left instructions, details, descriptions of towns, of a certain spreading oak tree. She had puttered up and down the road several times in her Morris Minor before she’d found it: the tree, just as he had drawn it in the journal he had given her, his hand shaking a little but his memory clear.

The dagger was there among the roots of the trees, which had grown around the hilt. She had had to cut some of them away, and dig at the dirt and rocks with a trowel, before she could free it. Jem’s blade, stained dark now with weather and the passage of time.

She had brought it to Jem that year on the bridge. It was 1937 and the Blitz had not yet come to level the buildings around Saint Paul’s, to strafe the sky with fire and burn the walls of the city Tessa loved. Still, there was a shadow over the world, the hint of a coming darkness.

“They kill each other and kill each other, and we can do nothing,” Tessa had said, her hands on the worn stone of the bridge parapet. She was thinking of the Great War, of the spendthrift waste of life. Not a Shadowhunter war, but out of blood and war were demons born, and it was the responsibility of the Nephilim to keep demons from wreaking even greater destruction.

We cannot save them from themselves, Jem had replied. He wore his hood up, but the wind blew it back, showing her the edge of his scarred cheek.

“There is something coming. A horror Mortmain could only have imagined. I feel it in my bones.”

No one can rid the world of all evil, Tessa.

And when she drew his dagger, wrapped in silk, though still dirty and stained with earth and Will’s blood, from the pocket of her coat and gave it to him, he bent his head and held it to him, hunching his shoulders over it, as if protecting a wound to his heart.

“Will wanted you to see it,” she said. “I know you cannot take it with you.”

Keep it for me. There may come a day.

She did not ask him what he meant, but she kept it. Kept it when she left England, the white cliffs of Dover retreating like clouds in the distance as she crossed the Channel. In Paris she found Magnus, who was living in a garret apartment and painting, an occupation for which he had no aptitude whatsoever. He let her sleep on a mattress by the window, and in the night, when she woke up screaming for Will, he came and put his arms around her, smelling of turpentine.

“The first one is always the hardest,” he said.

“The first?”

“The first one you love who dies,” he said. “It gets easier, after.”

When the war came to Paris, they went to New York together, and Magnus reintroduced her to the city she had been born in—a busy, bright, buzzing metropolis she barely recognized, where motorcars crowded the streets like ants, and trains whizzed by on elevated platforms. She did not see Jem that year, because the Luftwaffe was strafing London with fire and he had deemed it too dangerous to meet, but in the years after—

“Tessa?”

Her heart stopped.

A great wave of lurching dizziness passed over her, and for a moment she wondered if she were going mad, if after so many years the past and present had blended within her memories until she could no longer tell the difference. For the voice she heard was not the soft, silent voice-within-her-mind of Brother Zachariah. The voice that had echoed in her head once a year for the past one hundred and thirty years.

This was a voice that drew out memories stretched thin by years of recollection, like paper unfolded and refolded too many times. A voice that brought back, like a wave, the memory of another time on this bridge, a night so long ago, everything black and silver and the river rushing away under her feet …

Her heart was pounding so hard, she felt as if it might break through her rib cage. Slowly she turned, away from the balustrade. And stared.

He stood on the pavement in front of her, smiling shyly, hands in the pockets of a pair of very modern jeans. He wore a blue cotton jumper pushed up to the elbows. Faint white scars decorated his forearms like lacework. She could see the shape of the rune of Quietude, which had been so black and strong against his skin, faded now to a faint imprint of silver.

“Jem?” she whispered, realizing why she had not seen him when she’d been searching the crowd for him. She had been looking for Brother Zachariah, wrapped in his parchment-white robe, moving, unseen, through the throng of Londoners. But this was not Brother Zachariah.

This was Jem.

She couldn’t tear her gaze away from him. She had always thought Jem was beautiful. He was no less beautiful to her now. Once he had had silver-white hair and eyes like gray skies. This Jem had raven-black hair, curling slightly in the humid air, and dark brown eyes with glints of gold in the irises. Once his skin had been pale; now it had a flush of color to it. Where his face had been unmarked before he’d become a Silent Brother, there were two dark scars, the first runes of the Brotherhood, standing out starkly and blackly at the arch of each cheekbone.

Where the collar of his jumper dipped slightly, she could see the delicate shape of the parabatai rune that had once tied him to Will. That might tie them still, if one imagined souls could be tied even over the divide of death.

“Jem,” she breathed again. At first glance he looked perhaps nineteen years old, or twenty, a bit older than he had been when he had become a Silent Brother. When she looked more deeply, she saw a man—the long years of pain and wisdom at the backs of his eyes; even the way he moved spoke of the care of quiet sacrifice. “You are”—her voice rose with wild hope—“this is permanent? You are not bound to the Silent Brothers anymore?”

“No,” he said. There was a rapid hitch in his breath; he was looking at her as if he had no idea how she would react to his sudden appearance. “I am not.”

“The cure—you found it?”

“I did not find it myself,” he said slowly. “But—it was found.”

“I saw Magnus in Alicante only a few months ago. We spoke of you. He never said …”

“He didn’t know,” Jem said. “It has been a hard year, a dark year, for Shadowhunters. But out of the blood and the fire, the loss and the sorrow, there have been born some great new changes.” He held out his arms, self-deprecatingly, and with a little amazement in his voice, as he said: “I myself am changed.”

“How—”

“I will tell you the story of it. Another story of Lightwoods and Herondales and Fairchilds. But it will take more than an hour in the telling, and you must be cold.” He moved forward as if to touch her shoulder, then seemed to remember himself, and let his hand fall.

“I—” Words had deserted her. She was still feeling the shock of seeing him like this, bone-deep. Yes, she had seen him every year, here in this place, on this bridge. But it was not until this moment that she realized how much she had been seeing a Jem transmuted. But this—this was like falling into her own past, all the last century erased, and she felt dizzy and elated and terrified with it. “But—after today? Where will you go? To Idris?”

He looked, for a moment, honestly bewildered—and despite how old she knew him to be, so young. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never had a lifetime to plan for before.”

“Then … to another Institute?” Don’t go, Tessa wanted to say. Stay. Please.

“I do not think I will go to Idris, or to an Institute anywhere,” he said, after a pause so long that she felt as if her knees might give way under her if he did not speak. “I don’t know how to live in the world as a Shadowhunter without Will. I don’t think I even want to. I am still a parabatai, but my other half is gone. If I were to go to some Institute and ask them to take me in, I would never forget that. I would never feel whole.”

“Then what—”

“That depends on you.”

“On me?” A sort of terror gripped her. She knew what she wanted him to say, but it seemed impossible. In all the time she had seen him, since he had become a Silent Brother, he had seemed remote. Not unkind or unfeeling, but as if there were a layer of glass between him and the world. She remembered the boy she had known, who’d given his love as freely as breathing, but that was not the man she had met only once each year for more than a century. She knew how much the time between then and now had changed her. How much more must it have changed him? She did not know what he wanted from his new life or, more immediately, from her. She wanted to tell him whatever he wanted to hear, wanted to catch at him and hold him, to seize his hands and reassure herself of their shape—but she did not dare. Not without knowing what he wanted from her. It had been so many years. How could she presume he still felt as he once had?

“I—” He looked down at his slender hands, gripping the concrete of the bridge. “For a hundred and thirty years every hour of my life has been scheduled. I thought often of what I would do if I were free, if there were ever a cure found. I thought I would bolt immediately, like a bird released from a cage. I had not imagined I would emerge and find the world so changed, so desperate. Subsumed in fire and blood. I wished to survive it, but for only one reason. I wished …”

“What did you wish for?”

He did not reply. Instead he reached over to touch her pearl bracelet with light fingers. “This is your thirtieth-anniversary bracelet,” he said. “You still wear it.”

Tessa swallowed. Her skin was prickling, her pulse racing. She realized she hadn’t felt this, this particular brand of excited nervousness, in so many years that she had nearly forgotten it. “Yes.”

“Since Will, have you never loved anyone else?”

“Don’t you know the answer to that?”

“I don’t mean the way you love your children, or the way you love your friends. Tessa, you know what I’m asking.”

“I don’t,” she said. “I think I need you to tell me.”

“We were once going to be married,” he said. “And I have loved you all this time—a century and a half. And I know that you loved Will. I saw you together over the years. And I know that that love was so great that it must have made other loves, even the one we had when we were both so young, seem small and unimportant. You had a whole lifetime of love with him, Tessa. So many years. Children. Memories I cannot hope to—”

He broke off with a violent start.

“No,” he said, and let her wrist fall. “I can’t do it. I was a fool to think— Tessa, forgive me,” he said, and drew away from her, plunging into the throng of people surging across the bridge.

Tessa stood for a moment in shock; it was just a moment, but it was enough time for him to vanish into the crowd. She put out a hand to steady herself. The stone of the bridge was cold under her fingers—cold, just as it had been that night when they had first come to this place, where they had first talked. He had been the first person she had ever voiced her deepest fear to: that her power made her something other, something that was not human. You are human, he had said. In all the ways that matter.

She remembered him, remembered the lovely dying boy who had taken the time to comfort a frightened girl he did not know, and had not voiced a word of his own fear. Of course he had left his fingerprints on her heart. How could it be otherwise?

She remembered the time he had offered her his mother’s jade pendant, held out in his shaking hand. She remembered kisses in a carriage. She remembered walking into his room, spilled full with moonlight, and the silver boy standing in front of the window, wringing music more beautiful than desire out of the violin in his hands.

Will, he had said. Is it you, Will?

Will. For a moment her heart hesitated. She remembered when Will had died, her agony, the long nights alone, reaching across the bed every morning when she woke up, for years expecting to find him there, and only slowly growing accustomed to the fact that that side of the bed would always be empty. The moments when she had found something funny and turned to share the joke with him, only to be shocked anew that he was not there. The worst moments, when, sitting alone at breakfast, she had realized that she had forgotten the precise blue of his eyes or the depth of his laugh; that, like the sound of Jem’s violin music, they had faded into the distance where memories are silent.

Jem was mortal now. He would grow old like Will, and like Will he would die, and she did not know if she could bear it again.

And yet.

Most people are lucky to have even one great love in their life. You have found two.

Suddenly her feet were moving, almost without her volition. She was darting into the crowd, pushing past strangers, gasping out apologies as she nearly tripped over the feet of passersby or knocked into them with her elbows. She didn’t care. She was running flat out across the bridge, skidding to a halt at the very end of it, where a series of narrow stone steps led down to the water of the Thames.

She took them two at a time, almost slipping on the damp stone. At the bottom of the steps was a small cement dock, ringed around with a metal railing. The river was high and splashed up between the gaps in the metal, filling the small space with the smell of silt and river water.

Jem stood at the railing, looking out at the water. His hands were jammed tightly into his pockets, his shoulders hunched as if against a strong wind. He was staring ahead almost blindly, and with such fixed intent that he didn’t seem to hear her as she came up behind him. She caught at his sleeve, swinging him around to face her.

“What,” she said breathlessly. “What were you trying to ask me, Jem?”

His eyes widened. His cheeks were flushed, whether from running or the cold air, she wasn’t sure. He looked at her as if she were some bizarre plant that had sprung up on the spot, astonishing him. “Tessa—you followed me?”

“Of course I followed you. You ran off in the middle of a sentence!”

“It wasn’t a very good sentence.” He looked down at the ground, and then up at her again, a smile, as familiar as her own memories, tugging at the corner of his mouth. It came back to her then, a memory lost but not forgotten: Jem’s smile had always been like sunlight. “I never was the one who was good with words,” he said. “If I had my violin, I would be able to play you what I wanted to say.”

“Just try.”

“I don’t—I’m not sure I can. I had six or seven speeches prepared, and I was running through all of them, I think.”

His hands were stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans. Tessa reached out and took him gently by the wrists. “Well, I am good with words,” she said. “So let me ask you, then.”

He drew his hands from his pockets and let her wrap her fingers around his wrists. They stood, Jem looking at her from under his dark hair—it had blown across his face in the wind off the river. There was still a single streak of silver in it, startling against the black.

“You asked me if I have loved anyone but Will,” she said. “And the answer is yes. I have loved you. I always have, and I always will.”

She heard his sharp intake of breath. There was a pulse pounding in his throat, visible under the pale skin still laced with the fading white lines of the Brotherhood’s runes.

“They say you cannot love two people equally at once,” she said. “And perhaps for others that is so. But you and Will—you are not like two ordinary people, two people who might have been jealous of each other, or who would have imagined my love for one of them diminished by my love of the other. You merged your souls when you were both children. I could not have loved Will so much if I had not loved you as well. And I could not love you as I do if I had not loved Will as I did.”

Her fingers ringed his wrists lightly, just below the cuffs of his jumper. To touch him like this—it was so strange, and yet it made her want to touch him more. She had almost forgotten how much she missed the touch of someone she loved.

She forced herself to release her hold on him, though, and reached her hand into the collar of her shirt. Carefully she took hold of the chain around her throat and lifted it so that he could see, dangling from it, the jade pendant he had given her so long ago. The inscription on the back still gleamed as if new:

When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze.

“You remember, that you left it with me?” she said. “I’ve never taken it off.”

He closed his eyes. His lashes lay against his cheeks, long and fine. “All these years,” he said, and his voice was a low whisper, and it was not the voice of the boy he had been once, but it was still a voice she loved. “All these years, you wore it? I never knew.”

“It seemed that it would only have been a burden on you, when you were a Silent Brother. I feared you might think that my wearing it meant I had some sort of expectation of you. An expectation you could not fulfill.”

He was silent for a long time. Tessa could hear the lap of the river, the traffic in the distance. It seemed to her she could hear the clouds move across the sky. Every nerve in her body screamed for him to speak, but she waited: waited as the expressions chased themselves across his face, and finally he spoke.

“To be a Silent Brother,” he said, “it is to see everything and nothing all at once. I could see the great map of life, spread out before me. I could see the currents of the world. And human life began to seem a sort of passion play, acted at a distance. When they took the runes from me, when the mantle of the Brotherhood was removed, it was as if I had awoken from a long dream, or as if a shield of glass around me had shattered. I felt everything, all at once, rushing in upon me. All the humanity the Brotherhood’s spells had taken from me. That I had so much humanity to return to me … That is because of you. If I had not had you, Tessa, if I had not had these yearly meetings as my anchor and my guide, I do not know if I could have come back.”

There was light in his dark eyes now, and her heart soared in her chest. She had only ever loved two men in her life, and she had never thought to see either of their faces again. “But you have,” she whispered. “And it is a miracle. And you remember what I once told you about miracles.”

He smiled again at that. “‘One does not question miracles, or complain that they are not constructed perfectly to one’s liking.’ I suppose that is true. I wish that I could have come back to you earlier. I wish I were the same boy I was when you loved me, once. I fear that the years have changed me into someone else.”

Tessa searched his face with her eyes. In the distance she could hear the sound of traffic passing, but here, by the river’s edge, she could almost imagine that she was a girl again, and the air full of fog and smoke, the rattling sound of the railway in the distance … “The years have changed me, too,” she said. “I have been a mother and a grandmother, and I have seen those I love die, and seen others be born. You speak of the currents of the world. I have seen them too. If I were still the same girl I was when you knew me first, I would not have been able to speak my heart as freely to you as I just have. I would not be able to ask you what I am about to ask you now.”

He brought his hand up and cupped her cheek. She could see the hope in his expression, slowly dawning. “And what is that?”

“Come with me,” she said. “Stay with me. Be with me. See everything with me. I have traveled the world and seen so much, but there is so much more, and no one I would rather see it with than you. I would go everywhere and anywhere with you, Jem Carstairs.”

His thumb slid along the arch of her cheekbone. She shivered. It had been so long since someone had looked at her like that, as if she were the world’s great marvel, and she knew she was looking at him like that too. “It seems unreal,” he said huskily. “I have loved you for so long. How can this be true?”

“It is one of the great truths of my life,” Tessa said. “Will you come with me? For I cannot wait to share the world with you, Jem. There is so much to see.”

She was not sure who reached for who first, only that a moment later she was in his arms and he was whispering “Yes, of course, yes,” against her hair. He sought her mouth tentatively—she could feel his gentle tension, the weight of so many years between their last kiss and this. She reached up, curling her hand around the back of his neck, drawing him down, whispering “Bie zhao ji.” Don’t worry, don’t worry. She kissed his cheek, the edge of his mouth, and finally his mouth, the pressure of his lips on hers intense and glorious, and Oh, the beat of his heart, the taste of his mouth, the rhythm of his breath. Her senses blurred with memory: how thin he had been once, the feeling of his shoulder blades as sharp as knives beneath the fine linen of the shirts he had once worn. Now she could feel strong, solid muscle when she held him, the thrum of life through his body where it pressed against hers, the soft cotton of his jumper gripped between her fingers.

Tessa was aware that above their small embankment people were still walking along Blackfriars Bridge, that the traffic was still passing, and that passersby were probably staring, but she didn’t care; after enough years you learned what was important and what wasn’t. And this was important: Jem, the speed and stutter of his heart, the grace of his gentle hands sliding to cup her face, his lips soft against hers as he traced the shape of her mouth with his. The warm solid definitive realness of him. For the first time in many long years she felt her heart open, and knew love as more than a memory.

No, the last thing she cared about was whether people were staring at the boy and girl kissing by the river, as London, its cities and towers and churches and bridges and streets, circled all about them like the memory of a dream. And if the Thames that ran beside them, sure and silver in the afternoon light, recalled a night long ago when the moon shone as brightly as a shilling on this same boy and girl, or if the stones of Blackfriars knew the tread of their feet and thought to themselves: At last, the wheel comes full circle, they kept their silence.