As one, as if they had only been waiting for his coming, James and Lucie looked up at him. They were pressed together on a sofa at the hearth. By firelight, Lucie’s eyes were as eerie as James’s, a paler and more fiercely burning blue than her father’s. It was as though James’s gold were the corona of a flame and Lucie’s blue its burning heart.

They were a strange pair, these two Herondales, thorned mysterious plants in the hothouse of the Nephilim. Matthew could not have loved either of them more dearly.

Lucie leaped to her feet and ran to him with her hands outstretched. Matthew shuddered away. He realized, with dull pain, that he did not feel worthy of being touched by her.

Lucie glanced at him sharply, then nodded. She always saw a lot, their Luce.

“I will leave you two together,” she said decisively. “Take as long as ever you may.”

She reached out her hand to touch his, and Matthew shrank away from her again. This time he saw that it hurt, but Lucie only murmured his name and withdrew.

He could not tell Lucie this, and see her disgust of him, but he and James were bound. Perhaps James would try to understand.

Matthew advanced, every step a terrible effort, toward the fire. Once he was near enough, James reached out and clasped Matthew’s wrist, drawing him close to the sofa. He laid Matthew’s hand over James’s heart, and covered it with his own. Matthew looked down into James’s fire-gold eyes.

“Mathew,” said Jamie, pronouncing his name in the Welsh way and with the Welsh lilt that let Matthew know he meant it as an endearment. “I am so sorry. What can I do?”

He felt he could not live on with this massive stone of a secret crushing his chest. If he was ever going to tell anyone, he should tell his parabatai.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I was talking about Alastair Carstairs yesterday. What I meant to tell you was that he insulted my mother. He said—”

“I understand,” said James. “You do not have to tell me.”

Matthew drew in a small shaky breath. He wondered if James really could understand.

“I know the kind of thing they say about Aunt Charlotte,” said James with quiet fierceness. “They say similar things about my mother. You remember that man Augustus Pounceby, last year? He waited until we were alone to cast slurs upon my mother’s good name.” A small grim smile curved James’s mouth. “So I threw him in the river.”

Aunt Tessa had been so glad to have a Shadowhunter visitor, Matthew remembered numbly. She displayed Shadowhunter family coats of arms on her walls to welcome any traveler to the London Institute.

“You never told me,” said Matthew.