20 EQUAL TEMPER
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”
By the time they reached the carriages waiting for them outside the Market, Matthew had produced his refilled flask from inside his coat and was drinking steadily. He stumbled getting up into the carriage and refused James’s offer of help, batting his hand away before collapsing onto the velvet seat and breaking into a rousing chorus of “I Could Love You in a Steam Heat Flat.”
Cordelia and Lucie exchanged a worried look before clambering into their own carriage. Balios started off through the thinly powdered snow, and they rattled away from the Market. Outside the windows, London had been transformed into a winter fantasia, fat flakes of snow settling prettily on bare tree branches and dancing in the light cast by the gas lamps. Candles flickered in the windows of St. Saviour’s Church, and the distant hum of trains was muffled and almost pleasant.
“I hate this,” Lucie burst out, wiggling her fingers inside their damp gloves. “I hate the idea of James going into the shadow realm. I know—if Magnus says it’s all right, I’m sure it will be, but I hate it.”
“I hate it too,” Cordelia said. “But Luce, I’ll be there with him—as much as I can be—”
“I know. But it seems dreadful, and I hate that—that Matthew is—”
“Miserable?” Cordelia said, trying hard not to think about the broken bottle in the snow.
Lucie glanced at her, biting her lip. “I know none of us talk about it. We can’t. I don’t even know how much Christopher and Thomas are aware of it. But he’s been like this for ages now. He must be awfully unhappy. But I don’t know why. We all love him, and James loves him so terribly much. When we were younger—James had this shirt, just an ordinary shirt, you know, and Mam threw it away because he’d outgrown it and he was so furious and went to fetch it from the rubbish. It was the shirt he was wearing when Matthew asked him to be parabatai. He wouldn’t get rid of it.”
Cordelia hesitated. “Sometimes,” she said, “it is not enough for others to love you. I do not think Matthew loves himself very well.”
Lucie’s eyes widened. “What is there about him he could possibly not love?” she said, with such sincerity it made Cordelia’s heart ache. She would try to convince Matthew to tell his friends his secret, she thought. They loved him so. They would never judge him as he feared.
The two carriages clattered noisily under a railway viaduct and down a narrow backstreet toward a courtyard surrounded by Georgian row houses. A peeling sign declared it to be Nelson Square. They were cutting along one corner, wheels crunching on gravel and ice, when Balios whinnied loudly, rearing up.
The girls’ carriage stopped so abruptly that Cordelia and Lucie nearly toppled out of their seats. The door was ripped open, and a taloned hand reached inside, snatching a screaming Lucie out into the night.
Cordelia whipped Cortana from its sheath and launched herself out into the darkness, her boots crunching on snow, her skirts swirling. Outside, the blank faces of the row houses surrounded a patchy and dilapidated garden, edged with a few leafless plane trees. A dozen small demons were scampering around it, frightening Balios, who stamped and snorted. Lucie, half-covered in snow where she had fallen, had already yanked herself free of them. Her hat was gone, and she stood bareheaded and furious, brandishing her axe.
Cordelia looked around, Cortana in her hand. The sword sat perfectly, any feeling of wrongness banished. It hummed with the rightness of being wielded, of being one with her. She saw that the boys had already spilled from their carriage some distance away; they were bright shadows in the darkness, Christopher with a glowing seraph blade, Matthew with gleaming chalikars in his hand. There were dozens of small, gray-skinned, trollish demons charging about Nelson Square like mad things, hopping on top of the carriages, hurling snowballs at each other.
“Hauras demons!” called James, who wore an expression that mingled annoyance and anger. Hauras demons were pests. Sometimes called scamp demons, they were fast and ugly—scaled and horned, with vicious talons—but only about the size of small wolves.
James let a blade go. Cordelia had seen him throw before but had nearly forgotten how good he was at it. The knife flew like silver death from his hand, severing a Hauras demon’s head from its body. Ichor splattered, and the two halves of the demon puffed into nothingness; the other scamp demons shrieked and laughed.