“I know.” Julian’s hands were shaking. “I already went through it in Thule. I can—do it again.”
“It made you sick in Thule,” Emma said. “On the beach.”
Julian looked at her. And Emma’s heart leaped: In that look was everything, all of her Julian, her parabatai and best friend and first love. In it was the shining connection that had always bound them.
He smiled. A careful smile, thoughtful. In it she saw a thousand memories: of childhood and sunshine, playing in the water as it rushed up and down the beach, of Julian always saving the best and biggest seashells for her. Carefully holding her hand in his when she’d cut it on a piece of glass and was too young for an iratze. He’d cried when they stitched it up, because he knew she didn’t want to even though the pain was awful. He’d asked her for a lock of her hair when they both turned twelve, because he wanted to learn to paint the color. She remembered sitting on the beach with him when they were sixteen; the strap of her swimsuit had fallen down and she recalled the sharp hitch of his breath, the way he’d looked away quickly.
How had she not known? she thought. How he felt. How she felt herself. The way they looked at each other wasn’t the way Alec looked at Jace, or Clary at Simon.
“Emma,” Julian whispered. “Your Marks . . .”
She shook her head, tears bitter in the back of her throat. It’s done.
The look on his face broke her heart. He knew there was no point arguing that he should be the one to have his Marks stripped instead, Emma thought. He could read her again, just like she could read him.
“Julian,” Magnus said. “Give me your arm. The left one.”
Julian tore his gaze away from Emma’s and offered his scarred arm to Magnus.
Magnus ran his blue-sparking fingers with surprising gentleness along Julian’s forearm, and the incised letters, one by one, faded and disappeared. When he was done, he released Julian and looked between him and Emma. “I’ll give you a small piece of good news,” he said. “You weren’t parabatai when you were in Thule. That was an injury to your bond that’s healing. So you have a small cushion of time during which the bond will be weaker.”
Thank the Angel. “How long?” Emma said.
“That depends on you. Love is powerful, and the more you’re together, and let yourself feel what you do, the stronger it’ll be. You need to stay away from each other. To not touch each other. Not speak to each other. Try not to even think about each other.” He waved his arms like an octopus. “If you find yourselves thinking fondly of each other, for God’s sake stop yourselves right away.”
They both stared at him.
“We can’t do that forever,” Emma said.
“I know. But hopefully, when the Cohort is gone, we’ll have a new Inquisitor who can gift you with exile. And hopefully it’ll happen soon.”
“Exile is a pretty bitter gift,” Julian said.
Magnus’s smile was full of sorrow. “Many gifts are.”
* * *
It wasn’t hard to find Kieran. He hadn’t gone very far; he was standing in the hallway near one of the windows that looked out over the hills. He had his palm pressed flat against the glass, as if he could touch the sand and desert flowers through the barrier.
“Kieran,” Mark said, stopping before he reached him. Cristina stopped too; there was something remote in Kieran’s expression, something distant. The awkwardness that had been between all of them since the night before was still there too, forbidding simple gestures of comfort.
“I fear my people will be murdered and my country will be destroyed,” Kieran said. “That all the beauty and magic of Faerie will be dissolved and forgotten.”
“Faeries are strong and magical and wise,” said Cristina. “They have lived through all the ages of mortals. These—these culeros cannot wipe them out.”
“I will not forget the beauty of Faerie and neither will you,” said Mark. “But it will not come to that.”
Kieran turned to look at them with unseeing eyes. “We need a good King. We need to find Adaon. He must take the throne from Oban and end this madness.”
“If you want to find Adaon, we will find him. Helen knows how to reach Nene. She can ask Nene to find him in the Seelie Court,” said Cristina.
“I did not want to presume she would do that for me,” Kieran said.
“She knows how dear you are to me,” said Mark, and Cristina nodded in agreement. Helen, part-faerie herself, would surely understand.
But Kieran only half-closed his eyes, as if in pain. “I thank you. Both of you.”
“There is no need to be so formal—” Cristina began.
“There is every need,” Kieran said. “What we had last night—I was happy in those moments, and I know now we will not ever have it again. I will lose one of you and possibly I will lose both of you. In fact, it seems the most likely outcome.”
He looked from Mark to Cristina. Neither of them moved or spoke. The moment stretched on and on; Cristina felt paralyzed. She longed to reach out to both of them, but perhaps they had already decided? Perhaps it truly was impossible, just as Kieran said. Surely he would know. And Mark looked agonized—surely he would not look like that if he did not have the same fears she did? And Kieran—
Kieran’s mouth set in a hard line. “Forgive me. I must go.”
Cristina watched him hurry away, vanishing into the shadows at the end of the corridor. Outside the window, she saw Alec and Magnus emerge from the back door of the Institute into the bright sunlight. Clary and Jace followed. It was clear they were bidding Magnus and Alec good-bye for now.
Mark leaned his back against the window. “I wish Kieran understood he would be a great King.”
The light through the window edged his pale hair with gilt. His eyes burned amber and sapphire. Her golden boy. Though Kieran’s silver darkness was just as beautiful, in its own way.
“We must talk in private, Mark,” Cristina said. “Meet me outside the Institute tonight.”
* * *
Emma and Julian left the library in silence, and made it back to her room in the same silence before Julian finally spoke.
“I should leave you here,” he said, gesturing at her door. He sounded as if his throat hurt—gruff and husky. His sleeve was still rolled up to the elbow, showing the healed skin of his forearm. She wanted to touch it—to touch him, to reassure herself he was back to himself. Her Julian again. “Will you be all right?”
How could I be all right? She reached for the knob blindly, couldn’t make herself turn it. The words Magnus had spoken whirled in her brain. Curse, Marks stripped, stay away from each other.
She turned around, pressing her back against the wood of the door. Looked at him for the first time since they’d been in the library. “Julian,” she whispered. “What do we do? We can’t live without talking to each other or even thinking about each other. It’s not possible.”
He didn’t move. She drank in the sight of him like an alcoholic promising themselves this was the last bottle. She had kept it together for what felt like so long by telling herself that when the spell was over, she’d have him back. Not as a romantic partner, even, but as Jules: her best friend, her parabatai.
But perhaps they had just exchanged one kind of cage for another.
She wondered if he thought the same. His face was no longer blank: It was alive with color, emotion; he looked stunned, as if he’d come up too quickly from a deep sea dive and the pain of the bends had just struck him.
He took her face in his hands. His palms curved against her cheeks: He held her with a light, gentle wonder that she associated with the reverent handling of precious and breakable objects.
Her knees went weak. Amazing, she thought; Julian under the spell could kiss her bare skin and she felt hollow inside. This Julian—her real Julian—touched her face lightly and she was swamped by a yearning so strong it was almost pain.
“We have to,” he said. “In Alicante, before I went to Magnus to ask him to p
ut the spell on me, it was because I knew—” He swallowed hard. “After we almost—on the bed—I felt my rune starting to burn.”
“That’s why you ran out of the room?”
“I could feel the curse.” He ducked his head. “My rune was burning. I could see flames under my skin.”
“You didn’t tell me that part.” Emma’s mind whirled; she remembered what Diana had said in Thule: Their runes began to burn like fire. As if they had fire in their veins instead of blood.
“This is the first time it mattered,” he said. She could see everything that had seemed invisible to her before: the bruise-dark shadows under his eyes, the lines of tension beside his mouth. “Before this, I had the spell on me, or we were in Thule and nothing could happen. We weren’t parabatai there.”
She caught at his left wrist. He flinched; it wasn’t pain, though. She knew that instinctively. It was the intensity of every touch; she felt it too, like the reverberation of a bell. “Are you sorry that Magnus took the spell off you?”
“No,” he said immediately. “I need to be at my best right now. I need to be able to help with what’s happening. The spell made me into a person I don’t want to be. A person I don’t like or even trust. And I can’t have someone I don’t trust around you—around the kids. You matter too much to me.”
She shivered, still holding his wrist. His palms were rough against her cheeks; he smelled of turpentine and soap. She felt as if she were dying; she had lost him, gained him back, was losing him again.
“Magnus told us we had a cushion of time. We just have to—to do what he says. Stay away from each other. It’s all we can do for now,” Julian said.
“I don’t want to stay away from you,” she whispered.