After James was expelled from school at Shadowhunter Academy, his parents sent him to Cirenworth Hall to decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Cirenworth Hall was a rambling Jacobean pile in Devon that Elias Carstairs had fallen in love with in 1895 and bought on the spot, intending it as a place his family could return to in between their long travels.

James liked being there, because he liked the Carstairs family—well, other than Alastair, who was luckily spending the summer with Augustus Pounceby in Idris. But on this particular trip, rain had fallen without surcease. It had begun even before they left London, a gray spattering that had deepened during the ride to a steady, regular thrum, and then had settled in for a long residency over Cirenworth that showed no sign of ending. London in heavy rain was a bleak enough affair, but Cirenworth brought things to a new low of marshy wetness that led James to wonder why anyone had bothered to settle Britain at all.

At least it was not for long. His parents had a series of boring political meetings scheduled in Alicante, so he and Lucie were spending a little less than a month at Cirenworth. Afterward, they’d all return to Herondale Manor together, where the Carstairs would visit them in turn later in the season and where, James hoped, it would be a fine and clear summer.

The worst part was that everybody was carefully giving him so much room. He had the understanding that it was expected he desired room in which to feel things. This left him spending most days reading in the parlor while Lucie and Cordelia trained, drew in sketchbooks, put on Wellington boots and stomped out to the blackberry bushes to collect blackberries in the pouring rain, brewed and drank literally thousands of cups of tea, engaged in spirited swordplay in rooms definitely not built for swordplay, at one point caught some kind of small, loud bird and kept it in a cage for a few days, and allowed James so much space that he began to fear he was invisible.

He yearned for the quiet of Idris. Once they were at Herondale Manor, he could wander the woods by himself for hours and nobody would question it. (Except Grace, perhaps: What would he tell her? Would she have heard anything? He didn’t think she and her mother heard a lot of gossip.)

He would never have responded to Cordelia’s kindness with anything but kindness in return, but eventually Lucie became so obsequiously friendly that one afternoon James burst out, “You don’t have to be so careful when you talk to me, you know. I’m all right.”

“I know,” Lucie said, startled. “I know you’re all right.”

“Sorry,” he said. Lucie gave him a sympathetic look. “I’m going to do some training tomorrow, I think,” he added.