“Shut up, Manuel,” said a voice that Livvy knew. Zara. And now she recognized Manuel’s voice as well. “We have been told to check the wards, and so we will check the wards. Obedience is a virtue in a Shadowhunter. So is patience.”

“Patience!” Manuel said. “Like you’ve ever practiced patience in your life, Zara.”

Livvy could see nothing but the meadow around her, the far white peaks of the mountain range. But she found that she could feel Idris, warded against her, pressing against her consciousness. Though she couldn’t penetrate the wards, apparently she could eavesdrop through them. They must be standing right there, Livvy on one side of the wards and Zara and Manuel on the other.

“I am practicing enormous patience right now in not killing you,” Zara retorted.

“I wish you would,” Manuel said. “Then I wouldn’t have to suffer through another dinner of dandelion greens and half a parsnip garnished with unseasoned pigeon while your father’s cronies bicker about whether we mark the start of this new age by naming ourselves Raziel’s Chosen Angels or the Birthright or the Glorious Front. Why not just call ourselves Super Amazing People Who Did the Right Thing but Now Have Run Out of Coffee and Staples?”

“You think with your stomach,” Zara said.

Manuel ignored this. “Meanwhile, out there, there are Downworlders having baguettes slathered with Brie, and chocolate chip cookies, and vats and vats of coffee. Do you know how awful it is to spy on people who are eating delicious things like chocolate croissants when you don’t even have a cube of sugar? By the Angel, I never thought I would say this, but I miss the food at the Scholomance. What I would give for olive loaf. Olive loaf!”

Livvy thought, I’m dead and I wouldn’t eat olive loaf. But then, I wouldn’t hang out with Zara, either. She could still see nothing of Idris inside the wards, but as she tried to push through again, glittering symbols she did not recognize appeared, hanging in the air.

“This will be a brief chapter in the history of the Imperishable Order,” Zara said. “Or whatever historians end up calling us. Anyway, the point is, when we see that the time is right to leave Idris and we have the whole world to set to rights, no one is going to bother recording that you missed olive loaf. They’re going to write about all the battles that we won, and how good we looked winning them, and how all our enemies like Emma Carstairs died pitifully choking on their own pleas for mercy.”

“Last time I looked, she was partying on a beach,” Manuel said. “As if she wasn’t thinking about us at all.”

“Good,” Zara said. “Let them not think about us. And then let us be the last thing they ever see. Come on. The wards are holding. Let’s get back before there’s nothing left for lunch.”