She had turned out to be right. All four boys had been in the drawing room; Cordelia waited nervously in the hall with James as Matthew came out to meet them.
He emerged looking tousled, tired, and painfully sober. As if not drinking were like putting down protective armor. Only pride could armor him now—the pride that had kept him upright outside the Hell Ruelle, carefully cleaning his hands with a monogrammed handkerchief as if he had not just been sick in a gutter. Pride that kept his chin up, his eyes steady, as he looked from Cordelia to James and said, “It’s all right. I know what you’re going to say to me and there’s no need.”
Hurt flashed across James’s face, a sharp, shallow wound. Cordelia said, “It’s not all right, Matthew. None of this is the way we would want it to be. What Tatiana did—the effects of the bracelet didn’t just change James’s life. They changed mine. They changed yours. We’ve all made choices we wouldn’t have made, if we’d known the truth.”
“That may be true,” Matthew said. “But it doesn’t change where we are now.”
“It does,” said James. “You had every reason to believe I didn’t love Cordelia. You couldn’t possibly have known what I myself didn’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Matthew said, and there was a sharp blade in his voice. Cordelia felt a coldness in her chest. Matthew’s moods were mercurial. He could feel one way one moment, and another the next; still, she had never imagined a Matthew who did not think anything mattered.
“It does matter,” she said fiercely. “We love you. We know this is a terrible time for these revelations, for any of this—”
“Stop.” Matthew held his hands up. They shook slightly in the dim light of the hall. “As I listened to you, James, in the library, I could not help but think I have lived all this beside you. Noticing nothing and knowing nothing.”
“I explained,” James said. “The bracelet—”
“But I am your parabatai,” said Matthew, and Cordelia realized the blade in his voice was set against himself. “I was so much in my own misery that I never saw the truth. I knew it made little sense for you to love Grace. I know your heart, your sensibilities. There was nothing about her that would have won your affections in any sensible world, yet I let it pass by, dismissed it as a mystery of human behavior. The mistakes I made, the signs I missed—”
“Math,” James said, in despair. “None of this is your fault.”
But Matthew was shaking his head. “Don’t you see?” he said. “Cordelia told me already, at the party, that she loved you. And I thought, well, I can be disappointed, I can be angry, for some short time. I am allowed that. But now—how can I be either of those things? I cannot be disappointed that you have your life back, and your steadfast love. I cannot be angry when you have done nothing wrong. I cannot be angry at anyone but myself.”
And with that, he turned and walked back into the drawing room.
* * *
Christopher and Thomas pretended to play cards until Matthew returned to the room. At least Thomas was pretending. He wasn’t quite sure what Christopher was doing; he might have invented his own game without mentioning it to Thomas, and be contentedly playing along with its rules.
Alastair continued steadfastly reading his book, at least until Matthew stalked back into the room. Thomas’s heart sank—he guessed the conversation with James had not gone well. Matthew looked feverish: there was a high color in his cheeks, and his eyes were bright. “No more cards for me,” he announced. “I’m going to go confront Charles about being blackmailed.”
Alastair dropped his book with a thump. “I had a feeling you were going to do something like that.”
“So you didn’t just come in here to read a book about”—Matthew stared—“sixteenth-century warlock burnings? Ugh.”
“I did not,” said Alastair. “I chose it randomly from the shelves. What a pity so many books are filled with terrible things.”
“Why did you think I intended to confront my brother?”
Alastair began ticking off the reasons on his fingers. “Because Charles is here, because he’s shut himself up in the main office, because the other adults are gone, and because he can’t do a bolt since he’s supposed to look after the Institute.”
“Well, you are entirely—correct,” said Matthew, rather grudgingly. “You have outlined why it is an excellent plan.”
“Math,” said Thomas. “I’m not so sure it is—”
“I have outlined the positives,” interrupted Alastair. “There are also negatives. We are all stuck in this building with Charles, and he can make life unpleasant for us if you upset him, which you will.”
Matthew looked at all three of them in turn. It was a direct look, and also very sober, in both senses of the word. Not just serious—Thomas had seen Matthew serious many times, but there was something different about him now. As if he knew he were shouldering a burden of risk; as if he no longer believed consequences were something that happened to other people: not him, not his friends.
It jolted Thomas a little to realize that this Matthew, this newly considering person, was a different Matthew from the one he’d known for the past three years. Who have you been, he thought, and who are you becoming now?
“My brother is miserable,” Matthew said, “and when he is miserable, he makes life awful for other people. I want to tell him that I know, not only so that he’ll stop doing it, but also to take some of the burden away. For all our sakes.”
After a moment, Alastair nodded. “All right. I won’t stand in your way.”
“Well, thank goodness, as I was waiting desperately for your approval,” said Matthew, but there was no real malice in it.
In the end, it was decided Matthew would go, and Thomas would accompany him to keep the whole thing from descending into a family squabble. Charles had to understand that this was a serious matter, that not only Matthew knew about it, and that it could not be swept under the rug.
Thomas followed Matthew upstairs, dreading the awkwardness to come. Without knocking, Matthew burst open the double doors of Will’s office, where Charles appeared to be deep into a pile of ledger books on the desk.
He looked up blandly when they came in. “Thomas,” Charles said. “Matthew. Is anything the matter?”
“Charles,” Matthew said, with no further preamble, “you are being blackmailed to ensure your support of Bridgestock, and it must stop. You cannot fear Bridgestock so much that you are willing to sell out everyone who has ever cared for you. Even you cannot be so low.”
Charles sat back slowly in his chair. “I suppose I ought to expect this sort of fanciful accusation from you, Matthew,” he said. “But I’m surprised he got you to go along with it, Thomas.”
Thomas felt suddenly weary. Sick of the whole thing. He said, “He has proof, Charles.”
Something flickered in Charles’s eyes. “What sort of proof?”
“A letter Bridgestock wrote,” said Matthew.
“As usual,” Charles sighed, “you have jumped to a conclusion based on nothing but conjecture. May I ask how you came across such a note? Assuming you do have it, and it is from the Inquisitor—which is quite a wild accusation, by the way.”