Cristina sat back, her nose and eyes pink. “But where did you go? And why did you keep calling me the Rose of Mexico?” She wrinkled up her forehead in puzzlement.
Emma made a noise that was half laugh, half gasp. “I have a lot to tell you,” she said. “But first, I just have to know”—she caught Cristina’s hand—“is everyone alive? Julian, all the others—”
“Of course!” Cristina looked horrified. “Everyone’s alive. Everyone.”
Emma squeezed Cristina’s hand and let go. “What has the blight done to Magnus? Are we too late?”
“It’s odd that you should ask. Alec and Magnus arrived here yesterday.” Cristina hesitated. “Magnus isn’t doing well at all. He’s very ill. We’ve been in contact with the Spiral Labyrinth—”
“But they still think it’s the ley lines.” Emma started to swing her legs out of the bed. A wave of dizziness swamped her, and she braced herself against the pillows, breathing hard.
“No, no, they don’t. I realized it was the blight in Faerie. Emma, don’t try to get up—”
“What about Diana?” Emma demanded. “She was in Idris—”
“She isn’t anymore.” Cristina looked grim. “That’s another long story. But she’s fine.”
“Emma!” The door burst open and Helen flew in, all disarrayed fair hair and anxious eyes. She flew to hug Emma, and Emma felt another wave of dizziness go over her: She thought of Thule, and how Helen had been separated from her family forever there. She would never forgive the Clave for exiling Helen to Wrangel Island, but at least she was back. At least this was a world where it was possible to be lost and then return.
Helen hugged Emma until she waved her arms to indicate that she needed oxygen. Cristina fussed as Emma once against tried to get up and succeeded in propping herself against the pillows just as Aline, Dru, Tavvy, Jace, and Clary crowded in.
“Emma!” Tavvy exclaimed, having no time for sickroom protocols, and jumped up onto the bed. Emma hugged him gently and ruffled his hair while the others gathered around; she heard Jace ask Cristina if Emma had been talking and whether she seemed coherent.
“You shaved,” she said, pointing at him. “It’s a big improvement.”
There was a scrum of hugging and exclaiming; Clary came last and smiled down at Emma the same way she’d once smiled at her outside the Council Hall, the first time they’d ever met, when Clary had helped dispel the fears of a terrified child.
“I knew you’d be all right,” Clary said, her voice pitched so low only Emma could hear her.
There was a knock on the door, which barely opened into the crowded room. Emma felt a flare like a match tip against her left arm, and realized with a shock of joy what it was, just as Julian stepped into the room, leaning on Mark’s shoulder.
Her parabatai rune. It felt like forever since it had sparked with life. Her eyes met Julian’s and for a moment she was unaware of anything else: just that Julian was there, that he was all right, that there were bandages on his left arm and visible under his T-shirt but it didn’t matter, he was alive.
“He just woke up about an hour ago,” Mark said as the others beamed at Julian. “He’s been asking for you, Emma.”
Aline clapped her hands together. “Okay, now that we’ve gotten the hugging and stuff out of the way, where were you two?” She indicated Emma and Julian with an accusatory wave of her hand. “Do you know how terrified we were when Mark and Cristina and the others suddenly appeared and you weren’t with them, and then you suddenly popped out of nowhere all beaten up and wearing strange clothes?” She gestured to Emma’s night table, where her Thule clothes lay neatly folded.
“I . . . ,” Emma began, and broke off as Aline marched out of the room. “Is she mad?”
“Worried,” Helen said diplomatically. “We all were. Emma, you had a broken collarbone, and Julian had broken ribs. They should be better now—it’s been three days.” The exhaustion and worry of those three days told in the dark circles beneath her eyes.
“And you were incoherent,” said Jace. “Julian was out cold at first, but you kept shouting about demons and black skies and a dead sun. Like you’d been to Edom.” Jace’s eyes were narrowed. He wasn’t far off, Emma thought; Jace could be silly when he felt like it, but he was smart.
Aline stomped back into the room. She had quite a stomp for a woman who was built along delicate lines. “Also, what is this?” she demanded, holding up the Mortal Sword.
Tavvy made a delighted noise. “I know that one! It’s the Mortal Sword!”
“No, the Mortal Sword is broken,” Dru said. “That’s got to be something else.” She frowned. “What is it, Jules?”
“It’s the Mortal Sword,” Julian said. “But we have to keep its existence here an absolute secret.”
Another hubbub broke out. Someone pounded on the door; it turned out Kit and Ty were in the corridor. They’d been downstairs with Kieran, Alec, and Magnus and had just found out Emma was awake. Cristina scolded everyone in Spanish for making noise, and Jace wanted to hold the Mortal Sword, and Julian indicated to Mark that he could stand on his own, and Aline stuck her head into the hallway to say something to Ty and Kit, and Emma looked at Julian, who was looking directly back at her.
“All right, stop,” Emma said, throwing her hands up. “Give me and Julian a second alone to talk. Then we’ll tell you everything.” She frowned. “But not in my bedroom. It’s crowded and giving me privacy issues.”
“The library,” Clary said. “I’ll help set it up, and get you some food. You must be starving, even though we gave you a few of these.” She tapped the Nourishment rune on Emma’s arm. “Okay, come on, clear the room. . . .”
“Give Ty a hug for me,” Emma said to Tavvy as he hopped down. He looked dubious about the transference of hugs, but filed out with everyone else.
And then the room was quiet and empty except for Emma and Julian. She slid out of bed, and this time she managed to stand without dizziness. She felt the slight twinge of her rune and thought: It’s because Julian’s here, I’m drawing strength from him.
“Do you feel it?” she said, touching her left bicep. “The parabatai rune?”
“I don’t feel much,” he said, and Emma’s heart sank. She’d known it, really, from the moment he’d walked in, but she hadn’t realized how much hope she still had hanging on the idea that somehow, the spell might have been broken.
“Turn around,” she said dully. “I have to get dressed.”
Julian raised his eyebrows. “I have seen it all before, you know.”
“Which does not entitle you to further viewing privileges,” said Emma. “Turn. Around.”
Julian turned around. Emma fished into her closet for the least Thule-esque clothes she had and eventually fished out a flowered dress and vintage sandals. She changed, watching Julian as he watched the wall.
“So just to be clear, the spell is back,” she said once the dress was on. Quietly, she picked up the vest she’d worn in Thule, took Livvy’s letter, and transferred it to the pocket of her dress.
“Yes,” he said, and she felt the word like a needle in her heart. “I had some dreams, dreams with emotions in them, but by the time I woke up . . . they faded. I know that I felt, even how I felt, but I can’t feel it. It’s like knowing I had a wound, but I can’t remember what the pain was like.”
Emma kicked her feet into her sandals and twisted her hair up into a knot. She suspected she probably looked pallid and horrible, but did it matter? Julian was the only person she wanted to impress, and he didn’t care.
“Turn around,” she said, and he turned. He looked grimmer than she would have thought, as if the spell being unbroken was bitter to him, too. “So what are you going to do?”
“Come here,” he said, and she came close to him with a little reluctance as he began to unwind the bandages on his arm. It was hard not to remember the way he’d spoken to her in Thule, the way he’d placed each bit of himself, his hope and yearning and desire and fear, in her hands.
I’m not myself without you, Emma. Once you dissolve dye in water, you can’t take it back out. It’s like that. I can’t take you out of me. It means cutting out my heart, and I don’t like myself without my heart.
The bandages came free and he extended his forearm to her. She sucked in her breath. “Who did this?” she demanded.
“I did,” he said. “Before we left Thule.”
Across the skin of his inner arm, he had cut words: words that had healed now, into red-black scars.
YOU ARE IN THE CAGE.
“Do you know what this means?” he said. “Why I did this?”
Her heart felt like it was breaking into a thousand pieces. “I do,” she said. “Do you?”
Someone knocked on the door; Julian jumped back and began hurriedly rewrapping his arm.
“What’s up?” Emma called. “We’re almost ready.”
“I just wanted to tell you to come down,” Mark said. “We are all eager to hear your story, and I’ve made my famous doughnut sandwiches.”
“I’m not sure ‘Tavvy likes them’ is exactly what most people mean when they say ‘famous,’?” Emma said.
Julian, her Julian, would have laughed. This Julian just said, “We’d better go,” and walked past her to the door.