The scene that
takes place during pages 170-174 of City of Ashes, in the chapter The Seelie
Court, here from Jace’s point of view. I even gave it a name—“Because It Is
Bitter.” Because boy, is Jace bitter here.
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
—Stephen Crane
—Stephen Crane
“I know that I will not leave my
sister here in your Court,” said Jace, “and since there is nothing to be
learned from either her or myself, perhaps you could do us the favor of
releasing her?”
The Queen smiled. It was a
beautiful, terrible smile. The Queen was a lovely woman; she had that inhuman
loveliness that faeries did, that was more like the loveliness of hard crystal
than the beauty of a human. The Queen did not look any particular age: she
could have been sixteen or forty-five. Jace supposed there were those who would
have found her attractive—people had died for love of the Queen—but she gave
him a cold feeling in his chest, as if he’d swallowed ice water too fast. “What
if I told you she could be freed by a kiss?”
It was Clary who replied,
bewildered: “You want Jace to kiss you?”
As the Queen and Court laughed, the
icy feeling in Jace’s chest intensified. Clary didn’t understand faeries, he
thought. He’d tried to explain, but there was no explaining, not really.
Whatever the Queen wanted from them, it wasn’t a kiss from him; she could have
demanded that without all this show and nonsense. What she wanted was to see
them pinned and struggling like butterflies. It was something immortality did
to you, he’d often thought: dulled your senses, your emotions; the sharp,
uncontrollable, pitiable responses of human beings were to faeries like
fresh blood to a vampire. Something living. Something they didn’t have
themselves.
“Despite his charms,” the Queen
said, flicking a glance toward Jace—her eyes were green, like Clary’s, but not
like Clary’s at all—“that kiss will not free the girl.”
“I could kiss Meliorn,” suggested
Isabelle, shrugging.
The Queen shook her head slowly. “Nor
that. Nor any one of my Court.”
Isabelle threw up her hands; Jace
wanted to ask her what she’d expected—kissing Meliorn wouldn’t have bothered
her, so obviously the Queen wouldn’t care about it. He supposed it had been
nice of her to offer, but Iz, at least, ought to know better. She’d had
dealings with faeries before.
Maybe it wasn’t just knowing the way
the Fair Folk thought, Jace wondered. Maybe it was knowing how people who
enjoyed cruelty for the sake of cruelty thought. Isabelle was thoughtless, and
sometimes vain, but she wasn’t cruel. She tossed her dark hair back and
scowled. “I’m not kissing any of you,” she said firmly. “Just so it’s official.”
“That hardly seems necessary,” said
Simon, stepped forward. “If a kiss is all . . .”
He took a step toward Clary, who
didn’t move away. The ice in Jace’s chest turned into liquid fire; he clenched
his hands at his sides as Simon took Clary gently by the arms and looked down
into her face. She rested her hands on Simon’s waist, as if she’d done it a
million times before. Maybe she had, for all he knew. He knew Simon loved her;
he’d known it since he’d seen them together in that stupid coffee shop, the
other boy practically choking on getting the words “I love you” out of his
mouth while Clary looked around the room, restlessly alive, her green eyes
darting everywhere. She’s not interested in you, mundane boy, he’d
thought with satisfaction. Get lost. And then been surprised he’d
thought it. What difference did it make to him what this girl he barely knew
thought?
That seemed like a lifetime ago. She
wasn’t some girl he barely knew anymore: she was Clary. She was the one thing
in his life that mattered more than anything else, and watching Simon put his
hands on her, wherever he wanted to, made him feel at once sick and faint and
murderously angry. The urge to stalk up and rip the two of them apart was so
strong he could barely breathe.
Clary glanced back at him, her red
hair slipping over her shoulder. She looked concerned, which was bad enough. He
couldn’t stand the thought that she might feel sorry for him. He looked away
fast, and caught the eye of the Seelie Queen, glimmering with delight: now this
was what she was after. Their pain, their agony.
“No,” said the Queen, to Simon, in a
voice like the soft slice of a knife. “That is not what I want either.”
Simon stepped away from Clary,
reluctantly. Relief pounded through Jace’s veins like blood, drowning out what
his friends were saying. For a moment all he cared about was that he wasn’t
going to have to watch Clary kiss Simon. Then Clary seemed to swim into focus:
she was very pale, and he couldn’t help wondering what she was thinking. Was
she disappointed not to be kissed by Simon? Relieved as he was? He thought of
Simon kissing her hand earlier than day and shoved the memory away viciously,
still staring at his sister. Look up, he thought. Look at me. If you
love me, you’ll look at me.
She crossed her arms over her chest,
the way she did when she was cold or upset. But she didn’t look up. The
conversation went on around them: who was going to kiss who, what was going to
happen. Hopeless rage rose up in Jace’s chest, and as usual, found its escape
in a sarcastic comment.
“Well, I’m not kissing the mundane,”
he said. “I’d rather stay down here and rot.”
“Forever?” said Simon. His eyes were
big and dark and serious. “Forever’s an awfully long time.”
Jace looked back at those eyes.
Simon was probably a good person, he thought. He loved Clary and he wanted to
take care of her and make her happy. He’d probably make a spectacular
boyfriend. Logically, Jace knew, it was exactly what he ought to want for his
sister. But he couldn’t look at Simon without wanting to kill someone. “I knew
it,” he said nastily. “You want to kiss me, don’t you?”
“Of course not. But if—”
“I guess it’s true what they say.
There are no straight men in the trenches.”
“That’s atheists, jackass.” Simon
was bright red. “There are no atheists in the trenches.”
It was the Queen who interrupted
them, leaning forward so that her white neck and breasts were displayed above
the neckline of her low-cut gown. “While this is all very amusing, the kiss
that will free the girl is the kiss that she most desires,” she said. “Only
that and nothing more.”
Simon went from red to white. If the
kiss that Clary most desired wasn’t Simon’s, then . . .the way she was looking
at Jace, from Jace to Clary, answered that.
Jace’s heart started to pound. He
met the Queen’s eyes with his own. “Why are you doing this?”
“I rather thought I was offering you
a boon,” she said. “Desire is not always lessened by disgust. Nor can it be
bestowed, like a favor, to those most deserving of it. And as my words bind my
magic, so you can know the truth. If she doesn’t desire your kiss, she won’t be
free.”
Jace felt blood flood into his face.
He was vaguely aware of Simon arguing that Jace and Clary were brother and
sister, that it wasn’t right, but he ignored him. The Seelie Queen was looking
at him, and her eyes were like the sea before a deadly storm, and he wanted to
say thank you. Thank you.
And that was the most dangerous
thing of all, he thought, as around him his companions argued about whether
Clary and Jace had to do this, or what any of them would be willing to do to
escape the Court. To allow the Queen to give you something you wanted—truly,
truly wanted—was to put yourself in her power. How had she looked at him and
known, he wondered? That this was what he thought about, wanted, woke from
dreams of, gasping and sweating? That when he thought, really thought,
about the fact that he might never get to kiss Clary again, he wanted to die or
hurt or bleed so badly he’d go up to the attic and train alone for hours until
he was so exhausted he had no choice but to pass out, exhausted. He’d have
bruises in the morning, bruises and cuts and scraped skin and if he could have
named all his injuries they would have had the same name: Clary, Clary,
Clary.
Simon was still talking, saying
something, angry again. “You don’t have to do this, Clary, it’s a trick—”
“Not a trick,” said Jace. The calmness
in his own voice surprised him. “A test.” He looked at Clary. She was biting
her lip, her hand wound in a curl of her hair; the gestures so characteristic,
so very much a part of her, they shattered his heart. Simon was arguing with
Isabelle now as the Seelie Queen lounged back and watched them like a sleek,
amused cat.
Isabelle sounded exasperated. ‘Who
cares, anyway? It’s just a kiss.”
“That’s right,” Jace said.
Clary
looked up, then finally, and her wide green eyes rested on him. He moved toward
her, and as it always did, the rest of the world fell away until it was just
them, as if they stood on a spotlighted stage in an empty auditorium. He put
his hand on her shoulder, turning her to face him. She had stopped biting her
lip, and her cheeks were flushed, her eyes a brilliant green. He could feel the
tension in his own body, the effort of holding back, of not pulling her against
him and taking this once chance, however dangerous and stupid and unwise, and
kissing her the way he had thought he would never, in his life, be able to kiss
her again.
“It’s just a kiss,” he said, and
heard the roughness in his own voice, and wondered if she heard it, too.
Not that it mattered—there was no
way to hide it. It was too much. He had never wanted like this before.
There had always been girls. He had asked himself, in the dead of night,
staring at the blank walls of his room, what made Clary so different. She was
beautiful, but other girls were beautiful. She was smart, but there were other
smart girls. She understood him, laughed when he laughed, saw through the
defenses he put up to what was underneath. There was no Jace Wayland more real
than the one he saw in her eyes when she looked at him.
But still, maybe, he could find all
that somewhere else. People fell in love, and lost, and moved on. He didn’t
know why he couldn’t. He didn’t know why he didn’t even want to. All he knew
was that whatever he had to owe to Hell or Heaven for this chance, he was going
to make it count.
He reached down and took her hands,
winding his fingers with hers, and whispered in her ear. “You can close your
eyes and think of England, if you like,” he said.
Her eyes fluttered shut, her lashes
coppery lines against her pale, fragile skin. “I’ve never even been to England,”
she said, and the softness, the anxiety in her voice almost undid him. He had
never kissed a girl without knowing she wanted it too, usually more than he
did, and this was Clary, and he didn’t know what she wanted. He slid his hands
up hers, over the sleeves of her damply clinging shirt, to her shoulders. Her
eyes were still closed, but she shivered, and leaned into him—barely, but it
was permission enough.
His mouth came down on hers. And
that was it. All the self-control he’d exerted over the past weeks went, like
water crashing through a broken dam. Her arms came up around his neck and he
pulled her against him, and she was soft and pliant but surprisingly strong
like no one else he’d ever held. His hands flattened against her back, pressing
her against him, and she was up on the tips of her toes, kissing him as
fiercely as he was kissing her. He flicked his tongue along her lips, opening
her mouth under his, and she tasted salt and sweet like faerie water. He clung
to her more tightly, knotting his hands in her hair, trying to tell her, with
the press of his mouth on hers, all the things he could never say out loud: I
love you; I love you and I don’t care that you’re my sister; don’t be with him,
don’t want him, don’t go with him. Be with me. Want me. Stay with me.
I don’t know how to be without you.
His hands slid down to her waist,
and he was pulling her against him, lost in the sensations that spiraled
through his nerves and blood and bones, and he had no idea what he would have
done or said next, if it would have been something he could never have
pretended away or taken back, but he heard a soft hiss of laughter—the Faerie
Queen—in his ears, and it jolted him back to reality. He pulled away from Clary
before he it was too late, unlocking her hands from around his neck and
stepping back. It felt like cutting his own skin open, but he did it.
Clary was staring at him. Her lips
were parted, her hands still open. Her eyes were wide. Behind her, Isabelle was
gaping at them; Simon looked as if he was about to throw up.
She’s my sister, Jace thought.
My sister. But the words meant nothing. They might as well have been in a
foreign language. If there had ever been any hope that he could have come to
think of Clary as just his sister, this—what had just happened between them—had
exploded it into a thousand pieces like a meteorite blasting into the surface
of the earth. He tried to read Clary’s face—did she feel the same? She looked
as if she wanted nothing more than to turn around and run away. I know you felt
it, he said to her with his eyes, and it was half bitter triumph and half
pleading. I know you felt it, too. But there was no answer on her face;
she wrapped her arms around herself, the way she always did when she was upset,
and hugged herself as if she were cold. She glanced away from him.
Jace felt as if his heart was being
squeezed by a fist. He whirled on the Queen. “Was that good enough?” he
demanded. “Did that entertain you?”
The Queen gave him a look: special
and secretive and shared between the two of them. You warned her about us, the
look seemed to say. That we would hurt her, break her as you might break a
twig between your fingers. But you, who thought you could not be touched—you
are the one who has been broken. “We are quite entertained,” she said. “But
not, I think, so much as the both of you.”
