23
VALENTINE
“I SEE I’VE INTERRUPTED SOMETHING,” SAID VALENTINE, HIS voice as dry as a desert afternoon. “Son, would you care to tell me who this is? One of the Lightwood children, perhaps?”
“No,” said Jace. He sounded tired and unhappy, but the hand on her wrist didn’t loosen. “This is Clary. Clarissa Fray. She’s a friend of mine. She—”
Valentine’s black eyes raked her slowly, from the top of her disheveled head to the toes of her scuffed sneakers. They fastened on the dagger still gripped in her hand.
An indefinable look passed over his face—part amusement, part irritation. “Where did you come by that blade, young lady?”
Clary answered coldly. “Jace gave it to me.”
“Of course he did,” said Valentine. His tone was mild. “May I see it?”
“No!” Clary took a step back, as if she thought he might lunge at her, and felt the blade plucked neatly out of her fingers. Jace, holding the dagger, looked at her with an apologetic expression. “Jace,” she hissed, putting every ounce of the betrayal she felt into the single syllable of his name.
All he said was, “You still don’t understand, Clary.” With a sort of deferential care that made her feel sick to her stomach, he went to Valentine and handed him the dagger. “Here you go, Father.”
Valentine took the dagger in his big, long-boned hand and examined it. “This is a kindjal, a Circassian dagger. This particular one used to be one of a matched pair. Here, see the star of the Morgensterns, carved into the blade.” He turned it over, showing it to Jace. “I’m surprised the Lightwoods never noticed it.”
“I never showed it to them,” said Jace. “They let me have my own private things. They didn’t pry.”
“Of course they didn’t,” said Valentine. He handed the kindjal back to Jace. “They thought you were Michael Wayland’s son.”
Jace, sliding the red-hilted dagger into his belt, looked up. “So did I,” he said softly, and in that moment Clary saw that this was no joke, that Jace was not just playing along for his own purposes. He really thought Valentine was his father returned to him.
A cold despair was spreading through Clary’s veins. Jace angry, Jace hostile, furious, she could have dealt with, but this new Jace, fragile and shining in the light of his own personal miracle, was a stranger to her.
Valentine looked at her over Jace’s tawny head; his eyes were cool with amusement. “Perhaps,” he said, “it would be a good idea for you to sit down now, Clary?”
She crossed her arms stubbornly over her chest. “No.”
“As you like.” Valentine pulled out a chair and seated himself at the head of the table. After a moment Jace sat down as well, beside a half-filled bottle of wine. “But you are going to be hearing some things that might make you wish you had taken a chair.”
“I’ll let you know,” Clary told him, “if that happens.”
“Very well.” Valentine sat back, his hands behind his head. The neck of his shirt gaped open a little, showing his scarred collarbones. Scarred, like his son’s, like all the Nephilim. A life of scars and killing, Hodge had said. “Clary,” he said again, as if tasting the sound of her name. “Short for Clarissa? Not a name I would have chosen.”
There was a grim curl to his lips. He knows I’m his daughter, Clary thought. Somehow, he knows. But he isn’t saying it. Why isn’t he saying it?
Because of Jace, she realized. Jace would think—she couldn’t imagine what he would think. Valentine had seen them embracing when he’d walked in the door. He must know he held a devastating piece of information in his hands. Somewhere behind those fathomless black eyes, his sharp mind was clicking away rapidly, trying to decide how best to use what he knew.
She cast another beseeching glance at Jace, but he was staring down at the wineglass by his left hand, half-full of purplish red liquid. She could see the rapid rise and fall of his chest as he breathed; he was more upset than he was letting on.
“I don’t really care what you would have chosen,” Clary said.
“I am sure,” replied Valentine, leaning forward, “that you don’t.”
“You’re not Jace’s father,” she said. “You’re trying to trick us. Jace’s father was Michael Wayland. The Lightwoods know it. Everyone knows it.”
“The Lightwoods were misinformed,” said Valentine. “They truly believed—believe that Jace is the son of their friend Michael. As does the Clave. Even the Silent Brothers do not know who he really is. Although soon enough, they will.”
“But the Wayland ring—”
“Ah, yes,” said Valentine, looking at Jace’s hand, where the ring glittered like snake scales. “The ring. Funny, isn’t it, how an M worn upside down resembles a W? Of course, if you’d bothered to think about it, you’d probably have thought it a little strange that the symbol of the Wayland family would be a falling star. But not at all strange that it would be the symbol of the Morgensterns.”
Clary stared. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“I forget how regrettably lax mundane education is,” Valentine said. “Morgenstern means ‘morning star.’ As in ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!’”
A small shiver passed over Clary. “You mean Satan.”
“Or any great power lost,” said Valentine, “out of a refusal to serve. As mine was. I would not serve a corrupt government, and for that I lost my family, my lands, almost my life—”
“The Uprising was your fault !” snapped Clary. “People died in it! Shadowhunters like you!”
“Clary.” Jace leaned forward, nearly knocking over the glass at his elbow. “Just listen to him, will you? It’s not like you thought. Hodge lied to us.”
“I know,” said Clary. “He betrayed us to Valentine. He was Valentine’s pawn.”
“No,” said Jace. “No, Hodge was the one who wanted the Mortal Cup all along. He was the one who sent the Raveners after your mother. My father—Valentine only found out about it afterward, and came to stop him. He brought your mother here to heal her, not to hurt her.”
“And you believe that crap?” Clary said in disgust. “It isn’t true. Hodge was working for Valentine. They were in it together, getting the Cup. He set us up, it’s true, but he was just a tool.”
“But he was the one who needed the Mortal Cup,” said Jace. “So he could get the curse off him and flee before my father told the Clave about everything he’d done.”
“I know that isn’t true!” said Clary hotly. “I was there!” She turned on Valentine. “I was in the room when you came to get the Cup. You couldn’t see me, but I was there. I saw you. You took the Cup and you lifted the curse off Hodge. He couldn’t have done it by himself. He said so.”
“I did lift his curse,” said Valentine measuredly, “but I was moved by pity. He seemed so pathetic.”
“You didn’t feel pity. You didn’t feel anything.”
“That’s enough, Clary!” It was Jace. She stared at him. His cheeks were flushed as if he’d been drinking the wine at his elbow, his eyes too bright. “Don’t talk to my father like that.”
“He’s not your father !”
Jace looked as if she had slapped him. “Why are you so determined not to believe us?”
“Because she loves you,” said Valentine.
Clary felt the blood drain out of her face. She looked at him, not knowing what he might say next, but dreading it. She felt as if she were edging toward a precipice, some terrible hurtling fall into nothing and nowhere. Vertigo gripped her stomach.
“What?” Jace looked surprised.
Valentine was looking at Clary with amusement, as if he could tell he had her pinned there like a butterfly to a board. “She fears I am taking advantage of you,” he said. “That I have brainwashed you. It isn’t so, of course. If you looked into your own memories, Clary, you would know it.”
“Clary.” Jace started to get to his feet, his eyes on her. She could see the circles beneath them, the strain he was under. “I—”
“Sit down,” said Valentine. “Let her come to it on her own, Jonathan.”
Jace subsided instantly, sinking back into the chair. Through the dizziness of vertigo, Clary groped for understanding. Jonathan? “I thought your name was Jace,” she said. “Did you lie about that, too?”
“No. Jace is a nickname.”
She was very near to the precipice now, so close she could almost look down. “For what?”
He looked at her as if he couldn’t understand why she was making so much of something so small. “It’s my initials,” he said. “J. C.”
The precipice opened before her. She could see the long fall into darkness. “Jonathan,” she said faintly. “Jonathan Christopher.”
Jace’s eyebrows drew together. “How did you’?”
Valentine cut in. His voice was soothing. “Jace, I had thought to spare you. I thought a story of a mother who died would hurt you less than the story of a mother who abandoned you before your first birthday.”
Jace’s slim fingers tightened convulsively around the glass’s stem. Clary thought for a moment that it might shatter. “My mother is alive?”
“She is,” said Valentine. “Alive, and asleep in one of the downstairs rooms at this very moment. Yes,” he said, cutting off Jace before he could speak, “Jocelyn is your mother, Jonathan. And Clary—Clary is your sister.”
Jace jerked his hand back. The wineglass tipped, spilling frothing scarlet liquid across the white tablecloth.
“Jonathan,” said Valentine.
Jace had gone an awful color, a sort of greenish white. “That’s not true,” he said. “There’s been a mistake. It couldn’t possibly be true.”
Valentine looked steadily at his son. “A cause for rejoicing,” he said in a low, contemplative voice, “I would have thought. Yesterday you were an orphan, Jonathan. And now a father, a mother, a sister, you never knew you had.”
“It isn’t possible,” said Jace again. “Clary isn’t my sister. If she were …”
“Then what?” Valentine said.
Jace did not reply, but his sick look of nauseous horror was enough for Clary. Stumbling a little, she came around the table and knelt beside his chair, reaching for his hand. “Jace—”
He jerked away from her, his fingers knotting in the sodden tablecloth. “Don’t.”
Hatred for Valentine burned in her throat like unshed tears. He had held back, and by not saying what he knew—that she was his daughter—made her complicit in his silence. And now, having dropped the truth on them with the weight of a crushing boulder, he sat back to watch the results with a cool consideration. How could Jace not see how hateful he was?
“Tell me it’s not true,” Jace said, staring at the tablecloth.
Clary swallowed against the burning in her throat. “I can’t do that.”
Valentine sounded as if he were smiling. “So you admit now that I’ve been telling the truth all this time?”
“No,” she shot back without looking at him. “You’re telling lies with a little bit of the truth mixed in, is all.”
“This grows tiresome,” said Valentine. “If you want to hear the truth, Clarissa, this is the truth. You have heard stories of the Uprising and so you think I am a villain. Is that correct?”
Clary said nothing. She was looking at Jace, who seemed as if he might be about to throw up. Valentine went on relentlessly. “It is simple, really. The story you heard was true in some of its parts, but not in others—lies mixed in with a little truth, as you said. The fact is that Michael Wayland is not and has never been Jace’s father. Wayland was killed during the Uprising. I assumed Michael’s name and place when I fled the Glass City with my son. It was easy enough; Wayland had no real relations, and his closest friends, the Lightwoods, were in exile. He himself would have been in disgrace for his part in the Uprising, so I lived that disgraced life, quietly enough, alone with Jace on the Waylands’ estate. I read my books. I raised my son. And I bided my time.” He fingered the filigreed edge of a glass thoughtfully. He was left-handed, Clary saw. Like Jace.
“Ten years on, I received a letter. The writer of the letter indicated that he knew my true identity, and if I were not prepared to take certain steps, he would reveal it. I did not know who the letter was from, but it did not matter. I was not prepared to give the writer of it what he wanted. Besides, I knew my safety was compromised, and would be unless he thought me dead, beyond his reach. I staged my death a second time, with the help of Blackwell and Pangborn, and for Jace’s own safety made sure that my son would be sent here, to the protection of the Lightwoods.”
“So you let Jace think you were dead? You just let him think you were dead, all these years? That’s despicable.”
“Don’t,” said Jace again. He had raised his hands to cover his face. He spoke against his own fingers, voice muffled. “Don’t, Clary.”
Valentine looked at his son with a smile Jace couldn’t see. “Jonathan had to think I was dead, yes. He had to think he was Michael Wayland’s son, or the Lightwoods would not have protected him as they did. It was Michael they owed a debt to, not me. It was on Michael’s account that they loved him, not mine.”
“Maybe they loved him on his own account,” said Clary.
“A commendably sentimental interpretation,” said Valentine, “but unlikely. You do not know the Lightwoods as I once did.” He did not seem to see Jace’s flinch, or if he did, he ignored it. “It hardly matters, in the end,” Valentine added. “The Lightwoods were intended as protection for Jace, not as a replacement family, you see. He has a family. He has a father.”
Jace made a noise in his throat, and moved his hands away from his face. “My mother—”
“Fled after the Uprising,” said Valentine. “I was a disgraced man. The Clave would have hunted me down had they thought I lived. She could not bear her association with me, and ran.” The pain in his voice was palpable—and faked, Clary thought bitterly. The manipulative creep. “I did not know she was pregnant at the time. With Clary.” He smiled a little, running his finger slowly down the wineglass. “But blood calls to blood, as they say,” he went on. “Fate has borne us to this convergence. Our family, together again. We can use the Portal,” he said, turning his gaze to Jace. “Go to Idris. Back to the manor house.”
Jace shivered a little but nodded, still staring numbly at his hands.
“We’ll be together there,” said Valentine. “As we should be.”