“Oh! Daisy! Your leg!” Lucie leaped to her feet and raced over to Cordelia, dropping down and pressing her stele against Cordelia’s arm. She began to draw an iratze. “I am the worst,” she moaned. “The most dreadful would-be parabatai who ever lived. Please forgive me, Daisy.”

As the healing rune took effect, Cordelia could feel the bone in her leg beginning to knit back together. It was not an entirely pleasant feeling. She gasped and said, “Lucie, it’s nothing—I would have done it myself, but I dropped my stele in—in that other place.”

Lucie pushed Cordelia’s hair out of her eyes and smiled at her. “There is no need ever to do it yourself,” she said. “Runes given to you by your parabatai are best.”

“Ghastly,” said Matthew. “Look at them, affirming their eternal bond of friendship. In public.”

“I would question your definition of ‘public,’ ” said James. Lucie and Cordelia exchanged a smile: if James was capable of mocking Matthew, he was certainly on the mend. “This is a mostly deserted graveyard.”

“Hmmm,” said Matthew, in a surprisingly serious tone, his eyes narrowed. He rose to his feet, helping James to sit up against a tree. As Matthew paced to the edge of the clearing, James said:

“Luce. Let me talk to Cordelia for a moment.”

Lucie exchanged a glance with Cordelia, who nodded and stood up—it still hurt to put weight on her leg, but Lucie’s iratzes had mostly done their job. Lucie went to join Matthew as Cordelia limped over to James and sank down beside him under the shadow of a cypress tree.

For a moment, as James’s breaths had faded, Cordelia had seen life fork into two paths. One path in which James was dead—in which there was no meaning in the world, in which Lucie was heartbroken and Matthew destroyed, in which Thomas and Christopher were crushed and the Herondale family never smiled again. And a second path in which life continued as it was now—imperfect, confusing, but full of hope.

They were on the second path. That was what mattered—that James was breathing, that his lips were no longer blue, that he was looking at her with steady gold eyes. Despite the fact that her whole body ached, she found herself smiling.

“You saved my life,” he said. “Just as you saved my sister’s all those years ago. We should have given you a more warrior-like nickname. Not Daisy, but Artemis, or Boadicea.”

She laughed softly. “I like Daisy.”

“So do I,” he said, and reached up to lightly brush back a strand of her hair. She felt her heart nearly stop. In a low voice, he said, “ ‘And when her cheek the moon revealed, a thousand hearts were won: no pride, no shield, could check her power. Layla, she was called.’  ”

“Layla and Majnun,” she whispered. “You—remember?”