At last, he looked at her. “That’s the story, Cordelia. That’s my secret. You hate me now, and I can’t blame you. I can’t even ask you not to tell James. Do whatever you must. I will understand.”
Cordelia pushed her coverlet down. Matthew watched her with some apprehension—perhaps he thought she was going to throw him out of the house. Instead she reached out, nearly toppling over, and put her arms around him.
She heard him inhale sharply. He smelled of snow, of soap and wool. He was stiff as a board, but she held on, determined.
“Cordelia,” he said in a choked voice, at last, and put his head down on her shoulder.
She held him as close as she could, feeling his heartbeat against her chest. She held him the way she wished she could have asked James to hold her, that morning in the stone corridor outside the Ossuarium. She stroked the soft hair at the nape of his neck. “You never meant to harm anyone, though you did cause harm,” she said. “You must forgive yourself, Matthew.”
He made an incoherent noise, muffled against her shoulder. Cordelia couldn’t help thinking of Alastair. He could not have known, of course, what would come of his rumor-spreading—but neither could Matthew have known what the result of his truth potion would be. They were more alike, she thought, than either would want to admit.
“Matthew,” she said gently, “you must tell your mother. She will forgive you, and you will no longer carry this bitter weight alone.”
“I can’t,” Matthew whispered. “Now she grieves for one child. After that she would grieve for another, for she and my father would never forgive me.” He raised his head from her shoulder. “Thank you. For not hating me. I promise you, it makes a difference.”
Cordelia drew back, squeezing his hand.
“Now that you have heard what I have done,” said Matthew, “perhaps you will stop thinking you are not worthy of Cortana. For there is nothing you could have done to deserve such treatment, even from an inanimate object.” He smiled, though it was not Matthew’s usual sunshine smile, but something altogether more tense and strained.
“Then perhaps it is a flaw with the sword, as Alastair says, though—” She broke off, eyeing Matthew thoughtfully. “I have an idea. And it involves another secret. If I asked you to go somewhere with me—”
He smiled crookedly. “I would do anything for you, of course, my lady.”
“Don’t play about,” she said, waving off his theatrics. “James told me your new flat has a motorcar they let you use. And I have some distance I need to travel. Fetch me tomorrow morning, and we will go together.” Quickly, she told him what the faerie woman in the Hell Ruelle had said to her of Wayland the Smith. “If anyone can tell me what’s wrong with Cortana, he can. If he even exists, but—I have to do something. I must at least try to find him.”
“And you want me to take you?” Matthew looked both surprised and pleased.
“Of course I do,” Cordelia said. “You’re the only person I know who has a motorcar.”
* * *
Alastair stood in the parlor, staring blankly out the window at the house next door. He had been watching two little boys playing on the floor of their living room while their mother worked at her embroidery and their father read the newspaper. He could not help but hear his mother’s words as she’d wept, The child will never know his father.
Lucky child, he’d said to Cordelia, but under the flippancy, there was a hard, cold sorrow, a sorrow that felt like a blade of ice cutting through him. It was hard to breathe around the loss. It had been a long time since he had felt an uncomplicated love for his father, but there was no ease in knowing that. If anything, it made the blade of ice inside him twist harder with every breath, with every thought of the future. Never to see him again. Never to hear his voice, his footstep. Never to see him smile at the baby.
Pulling the curtains shut, Alastair told himself the baby would have everything he could give it. A presence in its life of someone who could not quite be a parent, but who would try to be a better brother than he had been to Cordelia. Someone who would tell the child he or she was loved, and perfect, and need not change for anyone or anything.
There was a knock at the door. Alastair started—it was late, too late for anyone paying their respects to stop by. Not that many people had. Even the older Shadowhunters who knew Elias as the hero who slew Yanluo had forgotten over the past decades; his death was a ghost’s death, the vanishing of someone who had barely been there at all.