Isabelle glanced up and grinned at him. Alec efficiently unwound a bandage. Having got them started, Isabelle stepped back. Her parents would object if she accidentally turned their guest into a mummy.
“What’s going on?” said Robert Lightwood’s voice from the door. “Jonathan! You said you were not hurt.”
When Isabelle looked, she saw both her mom and dad standing at the threshold of the kitchen, arms folded and eyes narrowed. She imagined they would have objections to her and Alec playing doctor with the new kid. Strong objections.
“We were just patching Jonathan up,” Alec announced anxiously, ranging himself in front of Jonathan’s stool. “No big deal.”
“It was my fault I got hurt,” said Jonathan. “I know excuses are for incompetents. It won’t happen again.”
“It won’t?” asked her mother. “All warriors get wounded sometimes. Planning to run away and become a Silent Brother?”
Jonathan Wayland shrugged. “I applied to the Iron Sisters, but they sent me a hurtful and sexist refusal.”
Everyone laughed. Jonathan looked briefly startled again, then pleased, before he shut away his expressions as if slamming a lid down on a treasure chest. Isabelle’s mother was the one who went and attended to Jonathan’s wound, while her father stayed by the door.
“Jonathan?” Maryse remarked. “Does anyone ever call you anything else?”
“No,” said Jonathan. “My father used to tell a joke about having another Jonathan, if I wasn’t good enough.”
Isabelle did not think that was much of a joke.
“I always think that naming one of our kids Jonathan is like the mundanes calling kids Jebediah,” said Isabelle’s mother.
“John,” said her father. “Mundanes often call their kids John.”
“Do they?” asked Maryse, and shrugged. “I could have sworn it was Jebediah.”
“My middle name is Christopher,” said Jonathan. “You can—you can call me Christopher if you like.”
Maryse and Isabelle exchanged a speaking look. She and her mother had always been able to communicate like this. Isabelle thought it was because they were the only girls, and special to each other. She could not imagine her mother telling her anything she would not want to hear.
“We’re not going to rename you,” said Mom sadly.
Isabelle was not sure if her mother was sad that Jonathan thought they would do that, give him a different name as if he were a pet, or sad that he would have let them.
What Isabelle was sure about was that her mother was watching Jonathan in the same way she had watched Max when he was still learning to walk, and there would be no more discussion of a trial period. Jonathan was obviously here to stay.
“Maybe a nickname,” Maryse proposed. “What would you think of Jace?”
He was silent for a moment, observing Isabelle’s mother carefully from the corner of his eye. At last he offered her a smile, faint and cool as the light in early morning, but growing warm with hope.
Jonathan Wayland said: “I think Jace will work.”
As a boy was introduced to a family, and vampires slept cold but curled together in the hold of a ship, Brother Zachariah walked through a city not his own. The people hurrying by could not see him, but he saw the light in their eyes as if it had been made new. The blare of car horns and scream of tires from yellow cabs and the chatter of many voices in many tongues formed a long, living song. Brother Zachariah could not sing the song, but he could listen.
This was not the first time this had happened to him, seeing a trace of what had been in what was. The coloring was entirely different. The boy did not really have anything to do with Will. Jem knew that. Jem—for in the moments he remembered Will, he was always Jem—was used to seeing his lost and dearest Shadowhunter in a thousand Shadowhunter faces and gestures, the turn of a head or the note of a voice. Never the beloved head, never the long-silent voice, but sometimes, more and more rarely, something close.
Jem’s hand was firmly clasped around his staff. He had not paid attention to the carving beneath his palm like this for many a long, cold day.
This is a reminder of my faith. If there is any part of him that can be with me, and I believe there is, then he is at hand. Nothing can part us. He allowed himself a smile. His mouth could not open, but he could still smile. He could still speak to Will, though he could no longer hear any answer.
Life is not a boat, bearing us far away on a cruel, relentless tide from all we love. You are not lost to me on some forever distant shore. Life is a wheel.
From the river, he could hear mermaids. All the sparks of the city by morning were kindling a new fire. A new day was born.
If life is a wheel, it will bring you back to me. All I must do is keep faith.
Even when having a heart seemed hard past bearing, it was better than the alternative. Even when Brother Zachariah felt he was losing the struggle, losing everything he had been, there was hope.
Sometimes you seem very far away from me, my parabatai.
Light on water had not rivaled the boy’s blazing contradiction of a smile, somehow both indomitable and too easily hurt. He was a child going to a new home, as Will and the boy Zachariah had been had once traveled in lonely sorrow to the place where they would find each other. Jem hoped he would find happiness.
Jem smiled back at a boy long gone.
Sometimes, Will, he said. You seem very close.