Alastair winced. For a long moment he was silent. “I was awful to you…,” he said at last, “because I could be.”

“Anyone can be a bastard if they want to be,” said Thomas. “You had no reason to do it. Your family are friends with the Herondales. You could at least have been kinder to James.”

“When I got to school,” said Alastair slowly, the effort clearly costing him, “loose talk about my father had preceded me. Everyone knew he was a failure, and some of the older students decided I was an easy target. They… let’s just say that by the end of the first week, I had been made to understand my place in the hierarchy, and I had the bruises to remind me should I ever forget.”

Thomas said nothing. It was bizarre to think of Alastair being bullied. He had always seemed like a prince of the school, striding about with his hair perfect and his chin in the air.

“After about a year of being knocked around,” Alastair went on, “I realized I could either become one of the bullies, or suffer for the rest of my school days. I felt no loyalty to my father, no need to defend him, so that was never a problem. I wasn’t very big—well, you know what that’s like.”

He eyed Thomas for a moment, speculatively. Feeling self-conscious, Thomas shrank back a bit. It was true that his muscles had come with his growth spurt, and he still wasn’t entirely comfortable taking up so much space in the world. Why couldn’t he have turned out more like Alastair—elegantly made and graceful?

“What I did have,” said Alastair, “was a savage tongue and a quick wit. Augustus Pounceby and the others would collapse laughing when I cut some poor younger student down to size. I never got my hands bloody, never hit anyone, but it didn’t matter, did it? Soon enough the bullyboys forgot they’d ever hated me. I was one of them.”

“And how did that turn out for you?” Thomas said in a hard voice.

Alastair looked at him matter-of-factly. “Well, one of us has a close-knit group of friends, and the other one has no friends at all. So you tell me.”

“You have friends,” Thomas said. But as he thought about it, he realized that whenever he saw Alastair at parties, he was either alone or with Cordelia. Or Charles, of course. Though that hadn’t been the case since Charles’s engagement…