“Only if he wants to be,” said Nene cheerfully.
Kieran looked puzzled. Mark put his face in his hands.
* * *
“Emma!”
Halfway to the table, Emma turned and found Jem approaching her, a shy smile on his face. She had seen him come in earlier, with Tessa, who was now seated beside Catarina Loss. She blinked at him as he reached her; it felt like centuries since she’d seen him, the awful day of Livvy’s funeral.
“Emma.” Jem took her hands in his. “Are you all right?”
He sees how tired I look, she thought. My puffy eyes, rumpled clothes, who knows what else. She tried to smile. “I’m really glad to see you, Jem.”
The light from the chandelier illuminated the scars on his cheekbones. “That’s not really an answer to my question,” he said. “Tessa told me about Thule. You have been on quite a journey.”
“I guess we all have,” she said in a low voice. “It was awful—but we’re back now.”
He squeezed her hands and released them. “I wanted to thank you,” he said. “For all the help you and your friends have rendered us in curing the warlock illness. You have been a better friend to me than I have been to you, mèi mei.”
“No—you’ve helped me so many times,” Emma protested. She hesitated. “Actually, there is a question I want to ask you.”
Jem put his hands in his pockets. “Of course, what is it?”
“Do you know how to strip a Shadowhunter’s Marks?” Emma said.
Jem looked stunned. “What?” He glanced around the room as if to make sure no one was looking at them; most people had taken their seats and were thankfully looking toward the front of the room expectantly. “Emma, why would you ask me about something so awful?”
She thought quickly. “Well—the Cohort. Maybe the way to remove them from power is not—not to hurt them, but to make them not Shadowhunters anymore. And you were a Silent Brother, so you could do it, or . . .”
Her voice trailed off at the horrified look on his face.
“Emma, not every decision rests on your shoulders. The Clave will be restored, and they will deal with the Cohort.” Jem’s voice gentled. “I know you are worried. But as a Silent Brother, I have been part of the ceremony of stripping the Marks from a Shadowhunter before. It is something so horrible that I would never repeat it. I would never do it. Not under any circumstances.”
Emma felt as if she were choking. “Of course. I’m sorry I brought it up.”
“It’s all right.” There was so much understanding in his voice, it broke her heart. “I know you are afraid, Emma. We all are.”
She looked after him as he walked away. Despair was making it hard for her to breathe. I am afraid, she thought. But not of the Cohort.
Of myself.
Emma took her place behind the table at the front of the room; Mark had also joined the small group, and she stood beside him, some distance from Julian. The doors had been closed and the torches lit, and row after row of faces stared back at them from the lines of chairs set up in the middle of the room. They had run out of chairs, in fact, and quite a few Downworlders and Shadowhunters were leaning against the walls, watching.
“Thank you all for responding to my summons,” Julian said. Emma could feel his nerves, his tension, speeding the pace of her own blood through her veins. But he showed none of it. There was an easy command in his voice, the room falling silent as he spoke without him needing to shout. “I won’t drag out any explanations or introductions. You know who I am. You know my sister and brother; you know Aline Penhallow and Emma Carstairs. You know that Aline’s mother, our Consul, has been illegally taken into custody. You know that Horace Dearborn has seized power in Idris—”
“He was voted in,” said Kwasi Bediako, the warlock Emma had noticed before with the white spider mark on his face; Cristina had whispered to her that Bediako was the High Warlock of Accra. “We cannot pretend otherwise.”
“No one voted for him to throw my mother in jail,” said Aline. “No one voted for him to remove the Consul from power so he could be in charge.”
“There are others in jail, as well,” said Cristina’s mother. Cristina, sitting beside her, turned bright red. “Diego Rocio Rosales has been jailed! For nothing!”
Kieran glanced at her, a small smile at the corner of his mouth.
“As has my cousin Divya,” said Anush Joshi, a young man with a jagged black haircut and an anxious face. “What do you plan to do about it? Intercede with the Council?”
Julian glanced briefly down at his hands, as if gathering himself. “Everyone—all of us here—have always accepted a certain amount of prejudice from the Clave as normal, through choice or necessity.”
The room was quiet. No one disagreed, but there were many eyes cast down, as if in shame.
“Now the Cohort has changed what we thought of as normal,” Julian said. “Never before have Downworlders been driven from Idris. Never before have Shadowhunters jailed other Shadowhunters without even the pretense of a trial.”
“Why do we care what Shadowhunters do to each other?” demanded the phouka in the Kaelie T-shirt.
“Because that’s step one, and what they do to Downworlders will be worse,” Emma said, surprising herself; she hadn’t meant to speak, only to stand by Julian. “They’ve already registered many of you.”
“So you’re saying we need to fight them?” said Gwyn in his rumbling voice. “This is a call to arms?”
Julie Beauvale rose to her feet. “They may not be a good Clave, but they are still Shadowhunters. There are a lot of people who follow the Cohort who are scared. I don’t want to hurt those people, and their fear is real, especially now that Jace and Clary are dead. They were our heroes, and I knew them—”
“Julie,” Beatriz hissed. “Sit down.”
“Jace and I were personally very close,” Julie went on. “I wouldn’t hesitate to call him my best friend, and I—”
“Julie.” Beatriz took Julie by the tail of her shirt and hauled her back into her seat. She cleared her throat. “I think that what Julie meant is that you’re saying the Cohort wants to destroy the government, but I’m guessing, given all the secrecy, that you also want to destroy t
he government, and I . . . don’t know how we do that without hurting innocent people.”
There was a hum of conversation. In the shadows, Emma saw them—she didn’t know when they’d come in, but a single Iron Sister and a single Silent Brother stood motionless against the far wall, their faces in shadow.
A slight chill went through her. She knew the Iron Sisters were against the Cohort. She didn’t know about the Silent Brothers. They both seemed like emissaries of the Law, standing there in their silence.
“We’re not suggesting destroying the government,” Julian said. “We’re saying it’s being destroyed right now, already, from within. The Clave was built to give all Shadowhunters a voice. If we are all voiceless, then it is not our government. The Law was enacted to protect us and to allow us to protect others. When Laws are bent and broken to put the innocent in danger, then it is not our Law. Valentine wanted to rule the Clave. Sebastian wanted to burn it down. We only want to return our rightful Consul to power, and to allow the government of Shadowhunters to be what it should be—not a tyranny, but a representation of who we are and what we want.”
“Those are some pretty words,” said the French werewolf who’d been talking to Alec earlier. “But Jace and Clary were beloved of your people. They will want a war against those who harmed them.”
“Yes,” said Julian. “I’m counting on that.”
There was no gesture, no signal that Emma could see, but the doors of the Sanctuary opened and Jace and Clary walked in, as if on cue.
At first there was no reaction from the crowd. The light from the torches was bright, and neither of the two were in gear: Jace wore jeans and Clary a plain blue dress. As they passed through the crowd, people blinked at them until finally Lily Chen, looking annoyed, stood up and said, in a loud, bored voice, “I cannot believe my own eyes. Isn’t that Jace Herondale and Clary Fairchild, back from THE DEAD?”
The reaction that ripped through the crowd was electric. Clary looked over with some alarm as the roar grew; Jace just smirked as the two of them joined Emma and the others behind the long table. Lily had resumed her seat and was examining her nails.