They looked together at the staff. The letters were worn by time and Zachariah’s own flesh, but they had been struck deep into the wood in the precise places where Zachariah would put his hands on them when he fought. So, in a way, they would always be fighting together.

The letters were W and H.

No, said Brother Zachariah. I am the only one. I carved them into the staff on my first night in the City of Bones.

“Were they your initials?” the boy asked, his voice low and a little timid. “Back when you were a Shadowhunter, like me?”

Brother Zachariah still considered himself a Shadowhunter, but Jonathan clearly did not mean any offense.

No, said Jem, because he was always James Carstairs when he spoke of what was dearest to him. Not mine. My parabatai’s.

W and H. William Herondale. Will.

The boy looked struck yet wary at the same time. There was a certain guardedness about him, as if he was suspicious of whatever Jem might say before he even had the chance to say it.

“My father says—said—a parabatai can be a great weakness.”

Jonathan said the word “weakness” with horror. Jem wondered what a man who had drilled a boy to fight like that might have considered weakness.

Jem did not choose to insult an orphan boy’s dead father, so he arranged his thoughts carefully. This boy was so alone. He remembered how precious that new link could be, especially when you had no other. It could be the last bridge that connected you to a lost life.

He remembered traveling across the sea, having lost his family, not knowing that he was going to his best friend.

I suppose they can be a weakness, he answered. It depends on who your parabatai is. I carved his initials here because I always fought best with him.

Jonathan Wayland, the child who fought like a warrior angel, looked intrigued.

“I think—my father was sorry he had a parabatai,” he said. “Now I have to go and live with the man my father was sorry about. I don’t want to be weak, and I don’t want to be sorry. I want to be the best.”

If you pretend to feel nothing, the pretense may become true, said Jem. That would be a pity.

His parabatai had tried to feel nothing, for a time. Except what he felt for Jem. It had almost destroyed Will. And every day, Jem pretended to feel something, to be kind, to fix what was broken, to remember names and voices almost forgotten, and hoped that would become truth.

The boy frowned. “Why would it be a pity?”