“By birth, says Mama,” she said cautiously. “But not by choice. Shadowhunters are brutes and killers, she says. And we’re not allowed to train.”
Her brother prepared to throw the knife again. “And yet we live in Idris, a secret nation built for and known only by Shadowhunters. You bear a Mark. I—ought to.”
“Jesse,” Grace said slowly. “Do you really care so much about being a Shadowhunter? About fighting demons with sticks, and all that?”
“It’s what I was born to do,” he said, his brow dark. “I have taught myself, since I was eight years old—the attic of this house is full of old weapons and training manuals. It’s what you were born to as well.” Grace hesitated, and a rare memory surfaced in her mind—her parents throwing knives into a board hung on the wall of their small house in Alicante. They had fought demons. It was how they had lived and how they had died. Surely that was not all foolishness, as Tatiana claimed. Surely it was not a meaningless life.
Jesse noticed her odd expression but didn’t press her to tell him what she was thinking. Instead he went on making his point. “What if one day we were attacked by demons? Someone would have to protect our family.”
“Will you train me, too?” Grace said, in a rush, and her brother broke into a smile that made her burst into tears, overwhelmed by the sudden feeling of being cared for. Of being cared about. Of belonging to something larger than herself.
* * *
They started with the knives. They didn’t dare train during the day, but when their mother was asleep, she was far enough away not to hear the thunks of the blades into the backstop. And Grace, to her own surprise, did well at the training, learning fast. After a few weeks, Jesse gave her a hunting bow and a quiver of beautiful red cured leather—he apologized that they were not new, but she knew he had scrounged them from the attic and spent weeks cleaning and repairing them for her, and that meant more than would have any expensive gift.
They began archery lessons. This was an altogether more dangerous prospect, involving sneaking out of doors in the middle of the night to practice at the old range behind the house, almost to the walls. Grace would get into bed in all her clothes, wait until the moon was visible through her window, and descend the house’s unlit gloomy stairs to join her brother. Jesse was a patient teacher, gentle and encouraging. She had never thought of having a brother, but now she was grateful every day to have one—and not only grateful in the dutiful way she was grateful to her mother.
Before she came to live with Tatiana, Grace had never understood how potent a poison loneliness could be. As the months passed, she realized that loneliness had driven her adoptive mother mad. Grace wanted to love Tatiana, but her mother would not allow such love to grow. Her loneliness had become so twisted up on itself that she had grown afraid of love, and rejected the affections of anyone besides Jesse. Slowly Grace came to understand that Tatiana did not want Grace’s love. She wanted only her loyalty.
But that love had to go somewhere, or Grace might explode, like a river bursting a dam. So she poured all her love into Jesse. Jesse, who taught her to climb trees, to speak and read French, who finished every evening by her bedside, reading to her from works as diverse as the Aeneid of Virgil and Treasure Island.
When their mother was distracted by other matters, they would meet in the disused study at the end of the hall, where there were bookshelves floor-to-ceiling on all sides and several large decaying armchairs. This, too, was part of their training, Jesse told her, and they would read together. Grace never knew just why Jesse was so kind to her. She thought perhaps that he understood from the start that he and Grace were each other’s only true allies, and that their survival depended on one another. Apart they might fall into the same pit that had claimed their mother; together they might even thrive.
When Grace was ten, Jesse convinced his mother to allow him, at long last, to take a rune. It was unfair, he said, to live in Idris without even so much as a Voyance rune for the Sight. It was understood that anyone who lived in Idris was Sighted, and it might even be dangerous for him not to be. Their mother scowled, but she gave in. Two Silent Brothers came. Grace barely recalled her own rune ceremony, and the sight of the scarred, drifting figures in the dark halls of Blackthorn Manor made her skin crawl. But she summoned her courage and was with Jesse when a Silent Brother inscribed the Voyance rune on the back of Jesse’s right hand. She was there to see him hold up his hand, to regard it in wonder, to thank the Brothers profusely.