“Don’t use me as an excuse,” Jesse snapped.
“I felt I had no choice.”
“But you did,” he said. “You had a choice.”
“I know that now.” She tried to look into his eyes, but he would not meet her gaze. “I wasn’t strong enough. I am trying to be strong enough now. That is why I’m here. And why I won’t leave. I told James the truth—”
“But you haven’t told anyone else. Lucie is unaware of this. And Cordelia—what you’ve done to their marriage, Grace—”
James hasn’t told her? Grace thought in surprise, but she was barely able to feel it. She was numb, as if a limb had been severed and she was in the first shock of the wound. “I can’t tell anyone,” she said. “I shouldn’t have told you. It’s a secret. The Silent Brothers wish to keep it hidden so they can use the information to deceive our mother as to what they know—”
“I don’t believe you,” Jesse said flatly. “You are trying to make me a party to your deception. I won’t have it.”
Grace shook her head wearily. “Ask James,” she said. “He will tell you just what I have. Talk to him before you speak with anyone else—he has a right—”
Jesse stood up, knocking over his chair. It clattered to the stone floor. “You are the last person,” he said, “to lecture me about James’s rights.” He snatched the witchlight torch off the wall. His eyes glittered in its light—surely those were not tears?
“I must go,” he said. “I feel sick.”
And without another word, he was gone, taking the light with him.
* * *
Thomas would have preferred going to Chiswick House to helping Christopher in the Institute library, fond as he was of Kit. He had a mad curiosity about the abandoned place that had once belonged to his family, of course, but also he felt that James and Matthew both needed his emotional support more than Christopher did. （Christopher seemed sanguine as always.） Though he did sometimes wonder if he were providing the strong, silent emotional support that he intended, or if he were merely staring fixedly at his friends in an alarming manner that they probably discussed when he was not there.
In the end, the deciding factor was—as it often seemed to be these days—Alastair. He had come straight over to Christopher after the Devil Tavern gathering and said, “I’ll help you in the library with research, if you like.”
Christopher’s eyebrows had gone up, but he’d only said, “You read Persian, don’t you?”
“And Sanskrit,” Alastair said. “Urdu, some Malay, Tamil, Greek, and a bit of Coptic. If that would be useful.”
Christopher looked as if someone had given him a box of kittens with bows on. “Wonderful,” he said. “We’ll meet in the library tomorrow morning.” His eyes darted over to Thomas, who tried to school his expression into complete blankness. “Thomas, are you still on for joining me, as well?”
And then Thomas could not say anything but yes; it was one thing to disappoint Christopher, another to make it seem as if he had changed his mind about assisting Christopher in the library simply because Alastair was going to be there.
Thomas was not someone who normally paid that much attention to his clothes. If they were not bizarre, and did not have holes or burns in them, he was happy. Yet he changed his jacket at least six times that morning before finding a dark olive one that brought out the green in his eyes. He brushed his sandy hair four or five different ways before coming downstairs to find Eugenia, alone in the breakfast room, buttering toast.
She eyed him. “You’re going out wearing that?” she said.
Thomas stared at her in horror. “What?”
She chuckled. “Nothing. You look fine, Tom. Go have fun with Alastair and Christopher.”
“You are a fiend,” he said to her. “A fiend from the deep.”
Thomas was running through various cutting remarks he could have made to Eugenia, had he thought of them at the time, when he arrived at the Institute and took the stairs two at a time to reach the library. It was immediately evident that he was the last to arrive; as he was making his way down the library’s central aisle of heavy oak study tables, he caught sight of Christopher down the stacks, where he had carefully arranged a pile of books as a stepstool so he could reach something else on a top shelf. He turned when he heard Thomas’s footsteps, nearly toppled off the stack, rescued himself with a heroic waving of arms, and jumped down to greet Thomas.
Alastair was somewhat farther into the room, sitting at one of the study tables, green lamp burning and a fearsome stack of leatherbound volumes next to him. Christopher led Thomas over to him.
“Lightwood,” Alastair said, nodding to Christopher, and then to Thomas, “Other Lightwood.”
“Well, that is going to be very confusing,” Christopher said, while Thomas fumed silently at being referred to as Other Lightwood. “But no matter. We are here to find out about paladins.”
“And more specifically,” Alastair said, “to help my sister stop being one.” He sighed. “I’ve been going through these,” he said, patting the stack of books on the table, a patchwork of volumes in languages familiar to Thomas—Greek, Latin, Spanish, Old English—and many that were not.
“You’re a braver man than I,” Christopher said. To Thomas’s quizzical expression he added, “Books of Deeds. The Shadowhunters used to record notable demon fights for their records. Extensively.”
“Or, more often,” Alastair said, “highly boring, completely ordinary demon fights engaged in by notable persons. Heads of Institutes, that sort of thing. And, long ago, paladins.”
“What have you found?” Christopher said.
“A fat lot of nothing,” Alastair said briskly. “All the paladins I’ve found stay paladins until they die in their beds.”
Thomas said, “I wouldn’t think Shadowhunter paladins would want to stop being paladins.”
Alastair grimaced. “It’s not only that. Do you think if a Shadowhunter stopped being the paladin of an angel—and the angel didn’t smite them dead—they’d stay a Shadowhunter? The Clave would surely strip their Marks and cast them out.”
“Because a Shadowhunter paladin is bound to an angel,” Thomas said. “So those vows are holy. To leave the angel’s service would be unholy.” Alastair nodded. “What if they violate their vows? Do something that makes the angel break the connection with them?”
“What are you getting at?” Alastair looked at him, dark eyes curious. They were a velvet-dark, a softer sort of shade than black. For a moment Thomas forgot what he was supposed to be saying, until Christopher poked him in the ribs.
“I mean,” said Thomas, “that if you’re the paladin of an angel, but you do terrible things—commit terrible sins—the angel might reject you. But what if Cordelia does lots of good deeds? Very good deeds, I mean. Feeds the sick, clothes the needy… washes the feet of beggars? I can tell from your faces that you don’t see much merit in the idea, but I think we should consider it.”