Pale Kings and Princes (2 page)

At that Julie Beauvale stood up and, without a word, walked out of the classroom.

Simon felt for her, or tried to. During the final hours of the Dark War, a faerie had murdered Julie’s sister right in front of her. But that wasn’t Helen’s fault. Helen was only half-faerie, and it wasn’t the half that counted.

Not that anyone in the Clave—or the classroom—seemed to believe it. The students buzzed, faerie slurs bouncing between them. At the front of the classroom, Helen stood very still, hands clasped behind her back.

“Oh, shut up,” Mayhew said loudly. Simon wondered, not for the first time, why the man had become a teacher when it seemed the only thing he loathed more than young people was the obligation to teach them. “I don’t expect any of you to respect this . . .
person.
But she’s here to offer you a cautionary tale. You will listen.”

Helen cleared her throat. “My father and his brother were once students here, just like you.” She spoke softly, with flat affect, as if she were talking about strangers. “And perhaps like you, they didn’t realize how dangerous the Fair Folk could be. Which almost destroyed them.”

*   *   *

It was my father, Andrew’s, second year at the Academy,
Helen continued,
and Arthur’s first. Normally, only second-years would be sent on a mission to the land of the fey, but everyone knew Arthur and Andrew fought best side by side. This was long before the Cold Peace, obviously, when the fey were bound by the Accords. But it didn’t stop them from breaking the rules where they thought they could get away with it. A Shadowhunter child had been taken. Ten students from the Academy, accompanied by one of their teachers, were sent to get her back.

The mission was a success—or would have been, if a clever faerie hadn’t snared my father’s hand in a berry thornbush. Without thinking, he sucked the blood from a small wound—and, with it, took in a bit of the juice.

Drinking something in Faerie bound him to the Queen’s whim, and the Queen bade him stay. Arthur insisted on staying with him—that’s how much the brothers cared for each other.

The Academy teacher quickly made a bargain with the Queen: Their imprisonment would last only one day.

The Academy teachers have, of course, always been rather clever. But the fey were more so. What passed as one day in the world lasted much longer in Faerie.

It lasted for years.

My father and my uncle had always been quiet, bookish boys. They served bravely on the battlefield, but they preferred the library. They weren’t prepared for what happened to them next.

What happened to them next was they encountered the Lady Nerissa, of the Seelie Court, the faerie who would become my mother, a faerie whose beauty was surpassed only by her cruelty.

My father never spoke to me of what happened to him at Nerissa’s hands, nor did my uncle. But upon their return, they both made full reports to the Inquisitor. I’ve been . . .
invited
to read these reports in full and relay the details to you.

The details are these: For seven long years Nerissa made of my father her plaything. She bound him to her, not with chains but with dark faerie magic. As her servants held him down, she latched a silver choker around his neck. It was enchanted. It made my father see her not as she was, a monster, but as a miracle. It deceived his eyes and his heart, and turned his hatred of his captor into love. Or, rather, the curdled faerie version of love. A claustrophobic worship. He would do anything for her. He did, over those seven years, do everything for her.

And then there was Arthur, his brother, younger than Andrew and young for his age. Kind, they say. Soft.

Lady Nerissa had no use for Arthur, except as a toy, a tool, something with which to torture my father and affirm his loyalty.

Nerissa forced my father to live all those years in love; she forced Arthur to live in pain.

Arthur was burned alive, many times over, as a faerie fire ate away his flesh and bone but would not kill.

Arthur was whipped, a chain of thorns slashing wounds in his back that would never heal.

Arthur was chained to the ground, cuffs binding his wrists and ankles as if he were a wild beast, and forced to watch his worst nightmares play out before his eyes, faerie glamours impersonating the people he loved most dying excruciating deaths before his eyes.

Arthur was left to believe his brother had abandoned him, had chosen faerie love over flesh and blood, and that was the worst torture of all.

Arthur was broken. It took only a year. The faeries spent the next six stomping and giggling over the rubble of his soul.

And yet.

Arthur was a Shadowhunter, and these should never be underestimated. One day, half-mad with pain and sorrow, he had a vision of his future, of thousands of days of agony, decades, centuries passing in Faerie as he aged into a wizened, broken creature, finally returned to his world to discover that only one day had passed. That everyone he knew was young and whole. That they would pray for his death, so they wouldn’t have to live with what had become of him. Faerie was a land beyond time; they could steal his entire life here—they could give him
ten
lifetimes of torture and pain—and still stay true to their word.

The terror of this fate was more powerful than pain, and it gave him the strength he needed to break free of his bonds. He was forced to fight against his own brother, who’d been enchanted into believing he should protect Lady Nerissa at all costs. Arthur knocked my father to the ground and used Lady Nerissa’s own dagger to slice her open from neck to sternum. With that same dagger, he cut the enchanted silver from my father’s throat. And together, both of them finally free, they escaped Faerie and returned to the world. Both of them still bearing their scars.

After they made their report to the Inquisitor, they left Idris, and left each other. These brothers, once as close as
parabatai
, couldn’t stand each other’s sight. Each was a reminder of what the other had endured and lost. Neither could forgive the other for where they had failed, and where they had succeeded.

Perhaps they would have reconciled, eventually.

But Arthur went to London, while my father returned home to Los Angeles, where he quickly fell in love with one of the Shadowhunters training at the LA Institute. She loved him too and helped him forget those nightmare years. They married. They had a son. They were happy—and then, one day, their doorbell rang. My mother would have been feeding baby Julian or laying him down for a nap. My father would have been buried in his books. One of them would have answered the door and discovered two baskets on their doorstep, each of them bearing a sleeping toddler. My brother Mark and me. My father, in his bewitched state, never realized the Lady Nerissa had borne two children.

My father and his wife, Eleanor, raised us like we were full-blooded Shadowhunters. Like we were their own. Like we weren’t half-blooded monsters who’d been slipped into their midst by their enemy. Like we weren’t constant reminders of destruction and torture, of the long nightmare my father had labored so long to forget. They did their best to love us. Maybe they even
did
love us, as much as anyone could. But I’m assured that Andrew and Eleanor Blackthorn were the best of Shadowhunters. So they would have been smart enough to know, deep down, that we could never truly be trusted.

Trust a faerie at your own risk, because they care for nothing but themselves. They sow nothing but destruction. And their preferred weapon is human love.

This is the lesson I’ve been asked to teach you. And so I have.

*   *   *

“What the hell was
that
?” Simon exploded as soon as they were dismissed from class.

“I know!” George sagged against the corridor’s stone wall—then quickly reconsidered as something green and sluggish wriggled out from behind his shoulder. “I mean, I knew faeries were little bastards, but who knew they were
evil
?”

“I did,” Julie said, her face paler than usual. She’d been waiting for them outside the classroom—or, rather, waiting for Jon Cartwright, with whom she now seemed to be somewhat of an item. Julie was even prettier than Jon and almost as big a snob, but still, Simon had thought she had slightly better taste.

Jon put his arm around her, and she curled herself against his muscled torso.

They make it look so easy,
Simon thought in wonder. But then, that was the thing about Shadowhunters—they made everything look so easy.

It was slightly disgusting.

“I can’t believe they tortured that poor guy for
seven
years,” George said.

“And how about his brother!” Beatriz Mendoza exclaimed. “That’s even worse.”

George looked incredulous. “You think being forced to fall in love with a sexy faerie princess is
worse
than getting burned alive a couple hundred times?”

“I think—”

Simon cleared his throat. “Uh, I actually meant, what the hell was that with Helen Blackthorn, trotting her in here like some kind of circus freak, making her tell us that horrible story about her own mother?” As soon as Helen finished her story, Professor Mayhew had pretty much ordered her out of the room. She’d looked like she wanted to decapitate him—but instead, she’d lowered her head and obeyed. He’d never seen a Shadowhunter behave like that, like she was . . . tamed. It felt sickeningly wrong.

“ʻMother’ is a bit of a technicality in this situation, don’t you think?” George asked.

“You think that means this was
fun
for her?” Simon said, incredulous.

“I think a lot of things aren’t fun,” Julie said coldly. “I think watching your sister get sliced in half isn’t so fun, either. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t care much about this halfling thing or her so-called feelings.” Her voice shook on the last word, and very abruptly she slid out from under Jon’s arm and raced off down the hallway.

Jon glared at Simon. “Nice, Lewis. Really nice.” He took off after Julie, leaving Simon, Beatriz, and George to stand around awkwardly in their hushed wake.

After a tense moment George scratched his stubbled chin. “Mayhew
was
pretty harsh back there. Acting like she was some kind of criminal. You could tell he was just waiting for her to stab him with a piece of chalk or something.”

“She’s fey,” Beatriz pointed out. “You can’t just let your guard down with them.”

“Half-fey,” Simon said.

“But don’t you think that’s enough? The Clave must have thought so,” Beatriz said. “Why else send her into exile?”

Simon snorted. “Yeah, because the Clave is always right.”

“Her brother rides with the Wild Hunt,” Beatriz argued. “How much more faerie can you get?”

“That’s not his fault,” Simon protested. Clary had told him the whole story of Mark Blackthorn’s capture—the way the faeries had snatched him up during the massacre at the Los Angeles Institute. The way the Clave refused to bother trying to get him back. “He’s there against his will.”

Beatriz was starting to look somewhat cross. “You don’t know that. No one can know that.”

“Where is this even coming from?” Simon asked. “You’ve never bought into any of that anti-Downworlder crap.” Simon might not have remembered his vampire days very well, but he made it his business not to befriend anyone inclined to stake first, ask questions later.

“I’m
not
anti-Downworlder,” Beatriz insisted, full of self-righteousness. “I don’t have any problem with werewolves or vampires. Or warlocks, obviously. But the fey are different. Whatever the Clave is doing with them, or to them, it’s for
our
benefit. It’s to protect us. Don’t you think it’s possible they know a little more about it than you do?”

Simon rolled his eyes. “Spoken like a true Shadowhunter.”

Beatriz gave him an odd look. “Simon—do you realize that you almost always say ‘Shadowhunter’ like it’s an insult?”

That stopped him. Beatriz rarely spoke to anyone sharply like that, especially not him. “I . . .”

“If you think it’s so terrible, being a Shadowhunter, I don’t know what you’re doing here.” She took off down the corridor toward her room—which was, like the rest of the second-year elite rooms, high up in one of the turrets with a nice southern exposure and a meadow view.

George and Simon turned the other way, toward the dungeons.

“Not making many friends today,” George said cheerfully, softly slugging his roommate. It was George-speak for
don’t worry, it’ll blow over
.

They clomped down the corridor side by side. A summer cleaning had done nothing to address the dripping ceilings or puddles of suspicious-smelling slime that cluttered the path to the dungeons—or maybe the Academy’s janitorial ministrations just didn’t extend to dregs’ quarters. Either way, by this point Simon and George could have made it down the hallway blindfolded; they sidestepped puddles and ducked spurting pipes by habit.

“I didn’t mean to upset anyone,” Simon said. “I just don’t think it’s right.”

“Trust me, mate, you made that perfectly clear. And obviously I agree with you.”

“You do?” Simon felt a rush of relief.

“Of course I do,” George said. “You don’t fence off a whole herd just because one sheep’s nibbling at the wrong grass, right?”

“Er . . . right.”

“I just don’t know why you’re getting so worked up about it.” George wasn’t the type to get worked up about much of anything, or at least, not the type to admit it. He claimed apathy was a family credo. “Is it the vampire thing? You know no one thinks about you that way.”

“No, it’s not that,” Simon said. He knew that these days, his friends barely gave a thought to his vampire past—they considered it irrelevant. Sometimes Simon wasn’t so sure. He’d been
dead
 . . . how could that be irrelevant?

But that had nothing to do with this.

This simply wasn’t right, the way Professor Mayhew ordered Helen around like a trained dog, or the way the others talked about the Fair Folk—as if, because
some
faeries had betrayed the Shadowhunters,
all
Faeries were guilty, now and forevermore.