When Tessa Gray returned to that moment, the moment before, she remembered the taste of honey, which Jem had drizzled onto a sliver of baguette, then popped into her mouth. The honey, fresh from the hive behind the estate, was almost painfully sweet. Her fingers were sticky with it, and when she pressed them to Jem’s soft cheek, they didn’t want to let go. She couldn’t blame them.

Memory has a tendency to fog the mundane. What Jem and Tessa were actually doing: bickering about whether the cheese they’d acquired that morning was goat or cow, and which of them was responsible for eating so much of it that a second trip to the fromagerie was required. It was a lazy, loving bickering, as befitted their sun-dappled afternoon. They’d come to this retreat in the French countryside to strategize about the lost Herondale—who, they had recently discovered, was also heir to the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, and so in more danger than anyone had ever imagined. This estate, the use of which had been offered by Magnus Bane, was a safe, quiet place to plan where to go from here. The lost Herondale had made it very clear to Jem that she didn’t want to be found, but Jem worried this was because she didn’t know the depths of danger she was in. They needed to find her. Warn her. Now more than ever.

The urgency was real, but so was their inability to do anything about it, which left many hours to fill, gazing out at the sunlit hillside—and at each other.

Tessa had nearly decided to give in and admit that Jem was right about the provenance (goat), if wrong about who’d eaten the most (Tessa), when a light sparked between them, like a tiny falling star. Except it didn’t fall; it froze in midair, getting brighter and brighter, blindingly bright, and forming itself into a familiar shape. Tessa sucked in a sharp breath. “Is that …?”

“A heron,” Jem confirmed.

Years before, Jem had enchanted a silver pendant in the shape of a heron and pressed it into the palm of a young woman with Herondale blood. A young woman in danger, who steadfastly refused his help.

With this pendant, you can always find me, he had promised, in the silent voice with which he had once spoken. Jem had been Brother Zachariah then, still bearing the robes and duties of the Silent Brotherhood, but this mission—and this promise—had nothing to do with the Brotherhood. Jem was still bound by it, would always be bound by it. I trust you will summon me for help, if and when you need. Please trust that I will always answer.