“I don’t want to hurt you,” Tessa said. “I know I can’t replace her or make up for the loss of her. But I wanted to tell you that your mother, the lost Herondale, the descendant of the First Heir—she loved you. She never wanted to leave you. She spent her life running because she thought that was the best way to protect you. She’d always been running: it was the only way she knew. But the happiest time for her was the time when she returned to your father, and they lived together in hiding for a few years, and she had you. I don’t get memories as clearly as I once did, but I can remember being her, remember holding you when you were as small as my Mina is now. I know the song she used to sing to you.”

Kit scrambled up now. He sat at Tessa’s feet with his head bowed as she began to sing. Jem reached for his violin. He played a tune of love and loss, of searching and finding, a melody that ran like a river beneath the bridge of his wife’s voice, the melody he loved best in all the world.

“I gave my love a story that had no end. I gave my love a baby with no crying.”

She sang the song of Rosemary Herondale, and Jem thought of how impossibly lucky he had been. It could all have been darkness for him, and silence, forever, until he lost hope even for what came after death. If there had been no Tessa, if he had lost her, too, if she had not been immortal—but then she would not have been who she was. That might have been part of what drew him to her first, when he was a dying boy a century and more ago, and she was the loveliest girl he’d ever seen: a girl who had traveled to him across the sea, impossible and magical and beautiful beyond stories or music, a girl who would live forever.

At last, he was no longer doomed, and she was still so lovely.

Jem played a song for Will, for all those he loved on the farthest shore, and for his wife and his baby and the boy who was safe in his keeping, here together in this warm small room at home. One day they might be parted, but they could remember this moment and this melody.

“The story that I love you,” Tessa sang. “It has no end.”

Jem believed her.

Janus visited the Seelie Queen before he went back to Ash.

“You knew my plans had no chance of succeeding,” he said to her, his voice flat. “You knew that I could not pretend to be that—that arrogant fool.”