Pale Kings and Princes (6 page)

He stopped thinking about what could happen, and what could go wrong.

He took her in his arms and kissed her—kissed her the way he’d been longing to kiss her since he first laid eyes on her, kissed her not like a romance novel hero or a Shadowhunter warrior or some imaginary character from the past, but like Simon Lewis kissing the girl he loved more than anything in the world. It
was
like falling into the sun, falling together, hearts blazing with pale fire, and Simon knew he would never stop falling, knew that now that he’d grabbed hold of her again, he would never let go.

*   *   *

The marriage of true minds admits no impediments—but the make-out sessions of teenagers all too often do. Especially when one of the teenagers was a student at Shadowhunter Academy, with both homework and a curfew. And when the other was a demon-fighting warrior with a stakeout in the morning.

If Simon had had his way, he would have spent the next week, or possibly the next eternity, entangled with Izzy on the grass, listening to the lake lap against the shore, losing himself in the touch of her fingers and the taste of her lips. Instead, he spent a memorable two hours doing so, then galloped at breakneck speed back to Shadowhunter Academy and spent another hour kissing her good-bye, before letting her leap into the Portal with a promise to return as soon as she could.

He had to wait until the next day to thank Helen Blackthorn for her help. He caught her just as she was packing up to leave.

“I see the date went well,” she said as soon as she opened the door.

“How could you tell?”

Helen smiled. “You’re practically radioactive.”

Simon thanked her for relaying Izzy’s message and handed her a small bag of cookies he’d cadged from the dining hall. They were the only thing at the Academy that actually tasted good. “Consider this a small down payment on what I owe you,” he said.

“You don’t owe me anything. But if you really want to pay me back, come to the wedding—you can be Izzy’s plus one.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” Simon promised. “So when’s the big day?”

“First of December,” she said, but there was a quavering note in her voice. “Probably.”

“Maybe sooner?”

“Maybe not at all,” she admitted.

“What? You and Aline aren’t breaking up!” Simon caught himself, remembering that he was talking to someone he barely knew. He couldn’t exactly command her to have a happy ending just because he’d suddenly fallen in love with love. “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business, but . . . why would you come all this way and take all their crap if you didn’t want to marry her?”

“Oh, I want to marry her. More than anything. It’s just, being back here has made me wonder if I’m being selfish.”

“How could marrying Aline be selfish?” Simon asked.

“Look at my life!” Helen exploded, the day’s—or maybe the year’s—worth of pent-up fury blasting out of her. “They look at me like I’m some kind of freak show—and those are the kind ones, the ones who don’t look at me like I’m the enemy. Aline is already stuck on that godforsaken island because of me. Is she supposed to suffer like that for the rest of her life? Just because she made the mistake of falling in love with me? What kind of person does that make me?”

“You can’t possibly think any of this is
your
fault.” He didn’t know her very well, but none of this sounded right to him. Not like something she would say or believe.

“Professor Mayhew told me that if I really loved her, I would leave her,” Helen admitted. “Instead of dragging her into this nightmare with me. That holding on to her is just proof I’m more faerie than I think.”

“Professor Mayhew is a troll,” Simon said, and wondered what it would take to get Catarina Loss to turn him into one for real. Or maybe a toad or a lizard. Something that would more befit the reptilian nature of his soul. “If you really loved Aline, you would do everything you can to hold on to her. Which is exactly what you’re doing. Besides, you’re assuming that if you tried to break up with her for her own good, she’d let you. From what I’ve heard about Aline, that’s not likely.”

“No,” Helen said fondly. “She’d fight me tooth and nail.”

“Then why not fast-forward to the inevitable? Accept that you’re stuck with her. The love of your life. Poor you.”

Helen sighed. “Isabelle told me what you said about the fey, Simon. About how you think it’s wrong to discriminate against them. That faeries can be good, just as much as anyone else.”

He didn’t understand where she was going with this, but he wasn’t sorry to have the chance to confirm it. “She was right, I do think that.”

“Isabelle believes that too, you know,” Helen said. “She’s been doing her best to convince me.”

“What do you mean?” Simon asked, confused. “Why would
you
need convincing?”

Helen kneaded her fingers together. “You know, I didn’t want to come here to tell a bunch of kids the story of my mother and father—I didn’t do that voluntarily. But I also didn’t make it up. That’s what happened. That’s who my mother was, and that’s what half of me is.”

“No, Helen, that’s not—”

“Do you know the poem ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’?”

Simon shook his head. The only poetry he knew was by Dr. Seuss or Bob Dylan.

“It’s Keats,” she said, and recited a few stanzas for him by memory.

She took me to her elfin grot,

And there she wept, and sigh’d fill sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dream’d

On the cold hill’s side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!”

“Keats wrote about
faeries
?” Simon asked. If they’d covered this in English class, he might have paid closer attention.

“My father used to recite that poem all the time,” Helen said. “It was his way of telling me and Mark the story of where we came from.”

“He recited you a poem about an evil faerie queen luring men to their deaths as a way of telling you about your mother? Repeatedly?” Simon asked, incredulous. “No offense, but that’s kind of . . . harsh.”

“My father loved us despite where we came from,” Helen said in the way of someone trying to convince herself. “But it always felt like he kept some part of himself in reserve. Like he was waiting to see her in me. It was different with Mark, because Mark was a boy. But girls take after their mothers, right?”

“I’m not really sure that’s scientifically accurate logic,” Simon said.

“That’s what Mark said. He always told me the faeries had no claim on us or our nature. And I tried to believe him, but then, after he was taken . . . after the Inquisitor told me the story of my birth mother . . . I wonder . . .” Helen was looking past Simon, past the walls of her domestic prison cell, lost in her own fears. “What if I’m luring Aline to that cold hill’s side? What if that need to destroy, to use love as a weapon, is just hibernating in me somewhere, and I don’t even know it? A gift from my mother.”

“Look, I don’t know anything about faeries,” Simon said. “Not really. I don’t know what the deal was with your mother, or what it means for you to be half one thing and half another. But I know your blood doesn’t define you. What defines you is the choices you make. If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that. And I also know that loving someone—even when it’s scary, even when there are consequences—is never the wrong thing to do. Loving someone is the opposite of hurting her.”

Helen smiled at him, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. “For both our sakes, Simon, I really hope that you’re right.”

In the Land under the Hill, in the Time Befo
re . . .

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful lady of the Seelie Court who lost her heart to the son of an angel.

Once upon a time, there were two boys come to the land of Faerie, brothers noble and bold. One brother caught a glimpse of the fair lady and, thunderstruck by her beauty, pledged himself to her. Pledged himself to stay. This was the boy Andrew. His brother, the boy Arthur, would not leave his side.

And so the boys stayed beneath the hill, and Andrew loved the lady, and Arthur despised her.

And so the lady kept her boy close to her side, kept this beautiful creature who swore his fealty to her, and when her sister lay claim to the other, the lady let him be taken away, for he was nothing.

She gave Andrew a silver chain to wear around his neck, a token of her love, and she taught him the ways of the Fair Folk. She danced with him in revels beneath starry skies. She fed him moonshine and showed him how to give way to the wild.

Some nights they heard Arthur’s screams, and she told him it was an animal in pain, and pain was in an animal’s nature.

She did not lie, for she could not lie.

Humans are animals.

Pain is their nature.

For seven years they lived in joy. She owned his heart, and he hers, and somewhere, beyond, Arthur screamed and screamed. Andrew didn’t know; the lady didn’t care; and so they were happy.

Until the day one brother discovered the truth of the other.

The lady thought her lover would go mad with the grief of it and the guilt. And so, because she loved the boy, she wove him a story of deceitful truths, the story he would want to believe. That he had been ensorcelled to love her; that he had never betrayed his brother; that he was only a slave; that these seven years of love had been a lie.

The lady set the useless brother free and allowed him to believe he had freed himself.

The lady subjected herself to the useless brother’s attack and allowed him to believe he had killed her.

The lady let her lover renounce her and run away.

And the lady beheld the secret fruits of their union and kissed them and tried to love them. But they were only a piece of her boy. She wanted all of him or none of him.

As she had given him his story, she gave him his children.

She had nothing left to live for, then, and so lived no longer.

This is the story she left behind, the story her lover will never know; this is the story her daughter will never know.

This is how a faerie loves: with her whole body and soul. This is how a faerie loves: with destruction.

I love you,
she told him, night after night, for seven years. Faeries cannot lie, and he knew that.

I love you
, he told her, night after night, for seven years. Humans can lie, and so she let him believe he lied to her, and she let his brother and his children believe it, and she died hoping they would believe it forever.

This is how a faerie loves: with a gift.

A new cover will be revealed each month as the Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy continue!

Continue the adventures of the Shadowhunters with Emma Carstairs and Julian Blackthorn in

Lady Midnight

The first book in Cassandra Clare’s new series, The Dark Artifices.