The Time of Two #2
It was true that now that the Clave had been cleaved in two, those who remained outside Idris had discovered the consequences of fanatical adherence to tradition. Many had begun questioning the rigidity of their Law. Or at least looking the other way when duty collided with humanity.
“So what happened?” Clary said.
“The message wouldn’t burn. No matter what I did.
I ended up crumpling it and tossing it out.
” Maryse sighed. “I thought, just maybe, Max was still enough of a Shadowhunter that it would work. And I couldn’t think of any other way.
I don’t know what name he lives under. I don’t even know”—her voice caught—“if he’s alive. ”
Jace cocked his head to the side. “Do you think he’d want to come to a Shadowhunter wedding?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older, but—I find myself thinking about him more and more.
For years, the loss of him was a sort of dull pain, a constant that could easily be ignored.
And when big things happened—when Alec and Izzy and Max were born, or when we took you in, Jace—the pain would flare up again.
Max should be here. Max should see this.
” Maryse bit her lip. There was more gray in her hair now than there had been when they’d first met, Clary thought.
She hadn’t noticed until now. “And when it did hurt, I’d just tell myself: He was the one who chose to leave.
He picked a mundane over his own family.
Over me. I was furious about that, for a very long time. ”
Maryse gazed unseeingly at the window as Clary struggled to think of what to say. She’d had a brother once, herself. Sebastian. Not a brother she’d loved, and yet she’d mourned when he died, mourned the person he’d never really been. Even the idea of family was powerful: She knew that in her soul.
“And then, at Alec’s wedding, I realized—Alec also had chosen to love someone the Clave didn’t approve of.
Years ago, he could have been exiled for it.
Would I have turned my back on him, as I did with Max?
” Her voice tightened, as if she were fighting back tears.
“I was so brainwashed back then—by Valentine, by the Clave, even—that I couldn’t see that the choice to be apart wasn’t just Max’s. It was mine too.”
Jace reached out and laid his hand over Maryse’s. “You were only a kid,” he said. “You believed what you were told. It wasn’t your fault.”
“It’s been a slow realization,” Maryse said.
“Of understanding that my anger was gone. That I just wanted my brother.” She sighed.
“And if I feel that way…imagine how he must feel, alone all these years, thinking his family hates him. Or that we’ve forgotten him.
I want him to know we haven’t. You’re getting married, Isabelle’s getting married—I just wanted him to know.
And that he’s welcome to attend. If he even wants to. ”
“I’m sure he would,” Clary said.
“I’m not,” Maryse said, a bitter edge to her voice. “He’s been shut out for decades. By the Clave, by me. Even if I could find him, he’d probably want nothing to do with me.”
“That can’t be true,” Clary said. “He’s your brother. There must be a way to let him know you miss him. That he’s got a whole family he could come home to.”
She waited for Jace to agree, but he was quiet beside her.
“It’s impossible anyway. There’s no way to track him down, if he’s even alive.” Maryse laid the Trueblood ring down on a side table with a light clink. “I’d better get home. Kadir will be worried.”
She rose to her feet, picking up her coat, and headed for the door.
Impulsively, Clary called out to her. “Maryse, wait—”
Maryse paused in the doorway. Clary hesitated—she’d wanted to promise Maryse that they would find her brother, reunite the remaining Truebloods, assure Maryse that she wouldn’t have to sit through another wedding without her brother. But who was Clary to make a promise like that?
“What was he like, your brother?” she said, instead.
Maryse’s expression softened. When she smiled, Clary could see a trace of the little sister she’d once been.
“He was my hero,” she said. “I wanted to be just like him. It’s why I took up the broadsword—that was his favorite weapon.
When I was a kid, it was almost taller than me.
I must have looked ridiculous. But I was determined.
Max teased me, mercilessly. But he also told me I was going to grow up to be a fearless warrior. ”
“He was right,” Jace said.
Maryse shrugged, turning away. “He never got to see it. By the time I mastered the broadsword, he was long gone.”
—
It had begun to rain, that soft October rain whose sound was muffled by a carpet of fallen leaves. Clary was sitting on her bed, her back against Jace’s chest, toying with her phone. Jace, behind her, was reading a book with one hand and idly stroking her hair with the other.
This is perfect happiness, Clary thought, as she often did in moments like this—quiet moments, when they weren’t running around saving the world or dispatching demons.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like being a Shadowhunter.
She loved so many things about it. But life beyond the walls of the Institute had, in some ways, never felt so fraught.
There was peace, in a way, but it felt more like paralysis.
An intolerable wait for the next terrible thing to happen.
But in their bedroom, Jace’s arms around her, it was impossible not to be at least a little happy.
Even if that happiness had a slight flaw in it, like a fleck in amber.
Jace set his book down. He kissed the side of Clary’s neck, and she shivered a little, the way she always did at his touch. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he said.
“I was thinking that we have to help Maryse find her brother. Is that weird?”
Jace stopped kissing her neck. “Not as weird as you thinking I’m thinking about my adoptive mom right now.”
Clary laughed. “Sorry. I just can’t stop worrying about her. She seemed so anguished.”
It wasn’t as if Clary had never thought about Maryse’s past before.
Maryse and Robert had been Valentine’s loyal lieutenants in the Circle, alongside Luke and her mother.
Somehow it was easy to imagine the headstrong teenagers that Luke and Jocelyn used to be.
But Clary couldn’t picture Robert or Maryse as anything but adults.
Cynical, tired adults who had been through a wringer, who had seen their adolescent idealism turn to poison, the leader they’d adored revealed as a purveyor of evil and lies.
“She’s lost so much these last few years,” Jace said. “She just doesn’t show it much.”
That was true. Maryse always did her best to make sure she was the last of anyone’s worries. Something all her children had also learned to master, in their own ways.
“You’ve lost a lot too,” Clary said.
“But I’ve gained so much.” Jace set his book aside. “And Isabelle found Simon. Alec has Magnus, the kids. When I met you, my life felt—confined. As if I were in a play with only a few characters. Now everything seems so much bigger.”
Clary put her hand over Jace’s. “I know what you mean,” she said, and she did. A few years ago, she’d had her mother and Luke, she’d had Simon—and that was it. Her life now was overflowing with people to care about, people whose lives she would defend to the death, and sometimes had.
“I never thought about how Maryse might feel the opposite,” Jace said.
Clary turned to look at him; his dark gold eyes had softened, lost in thought.
“She lost Robert, she lost Max—our Max and her Max. Her kids grew up and now we’re all making our own families.
Maybe she feels like she’s losing us too? ”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Clary said firmly. “And you know Maryse loves seeing her kids happy. She loves being a grandmother. She loves Kadir. Her life isn’t empty.”
Jace wound a lock of Clary’s hair around his finger.
“You know, when I first came to the Institute, I was so determined not to get soft. I’d been taught that kindness was weakness.
That love was poison. If Maryse had been more…
motherly, I probably would have run away screaming. I know how that sounds.”
“It sounds true.” Jace so rarely talked about his childhood, especially those raw months right after Valentine had “died” and left Jace an orphan.
“Maryse didn’t try to get me to talk about my feelings. She just let me sit with them, and she sat with me. That was enough. But there was this one time, Isabelle was having a temper tantrum. Not an unusual occurrence, you can imagine.”
Clary laughed. Isabelle was known to have the occasional temper tantrum even now.
“Maryse gave me this kind of secret smile, like we were a team—like she was saying we would never put on such a display. She was right. And, deep down? I was jealous. I put so much effort into keeping my pain a secret and there was Isabelle just…letting it out.”
“Maybe Maryse was jealous too,” Clary said.
“People who are good at asking for help usually get it.” She turned her body around so she was facing Jace.
She ached to put her arms around him—not just him the way he was now, but as the lonely little boy taught that love was poison.
“You know what we have to do now, right?”
He ran a finger along her collarbone. “I have some thoughts.”
“Remove your mind from the gutter for a moment,” said Clary. “We have to find Maryse’s brother, and bring him home.”
To her surprise, Jace looked worried. “There’s the chance he won’t want to come home.”
“Of course he will. Think how you would feel, if you spent decades completely cut off from your family, your friends, everyone and everything you know.”
“I think,” Jace said carefully, “that I would feel extremely angry, if my family and friends and everyone I knew made me choose between them or losing you.”