Well, she thought, if she had to spy on the Enclave meeting alone, then that was what she’d do. She had just gone to fetch her stele from atop the dresser when she heard something rattle against the glass of her window. Assuming Thomas and Christopher were trying to get her attention with pebbles—their usual method—she darted over and threw the window open.

Something that looked like a burning butterfly sailed past her head, and Lucie gave a shriek. She ran toward it as it alighted on her desk and burst into red-orange flames. It was small, no bigger than her hand, and she hastened to put it out with a handy pen wiper.

“Sorry, Luce!” It was Christopher, clambering in through her window. He dropped to the floor and was followed a moment later by Thomas, who had a hole burned into the collar of his shirt and looked cross about it. “It was an experiment—method of sending messages using fire runes—”

Lucie looked skeptically at the charred spot on her desk where the message had sparked its last. It had landed on several manuscript pages of The Beautiful Cordelia, and they were now quite ruined. “Well, don’t experiment on me!” she said. “You’ve destroyed a very important scene in which Cordelia is romanced by a pirate king.”

“Piracy is unethical,” said Thomas.

“Not in this case,” said Lucie. “You see, the pirate king is secretly the son of an earl—”

Christopher and Thomas exchanged glances. “We really ought to go,” said Christopher, retrieving Lucie’s stele and handing it to her. “The Enclave meeting is about to start.”

They crept out of Lucie’s room and hurried to one of the empty storerooms on the second floor, above the library. It was Lucie’s father who had taught her how to draw this particular rune, so she did the honors as they all knelt in a loose circle on the floor: the rune was a large one, covering a good amount of space. When Lucie was done, she finished it off with a flourish and sat back.

The floor between their kneeling legs shimmered and went transparent. Lucie, Thomas, and Christopher were now looking down at the library below them as if through the lens of a telescope. They could see everyone gathered in the room very clearly, down to the colors of their eyes and the details of their clothes.

Extra rows of tables had been set up, and Shadowhunters filled the room. Lucie’s father and mother were there, of course, and her uncle Gabriel as well, seated toward the front of the room where Will stood, flanked by Inquisitor Bridgestock and a stiff-looking Charles Fairchild. Lucie could not help but wonder what their relationship had been like since Charles had ended his engagement to Ariadne.