“But where are they?” Sister Emilia said.

Belial said, “The debt is not that great, my dear. And now it is paid.”

Sister Emilia looked at Brother Zachariah, who shook his head. Belial is what he is, he said. A fornicator, a miser, and a polluter of sanctuaries. A creator of illusions. If I had made the other choice, do you really think I would be better off?

“How well we know each other!” Belial said. “We all play a role, and it would astonish you, I think, to know how helpful I am being. You think I have offered you only tricks and sleights, but truly I have extended the hand of friendship. Or do you think that I can simply draw these Herondales out of a hat like so many rabbits? As for you, Sister Emilia, I owe you no debt, but would do you a good turn. Unlike our acquaintance here, you have chosen the path that you are set on.”

“I have,” Sister Emilia said. All she had ever wanted was to make things. To shape seraph blades and be known as a master of the forge. Shadowhunters, it seemed to her, gloried in destruction. What she longed for was to be permitted to create.

“I could make it so that you were the greatest adamas worker the Adamant Citadel has ever seen. Your name would be spoken for generations.”

In the mirrors, Sister Emilia saw the blades she could make. She saw how they were used in battle, how the ones who wielded them thanked the one who had made them. They blessed the name of Sister Emilia, and acolytes came to study with her, and they, too, blessed her name.

“No!” Sister Emilia said to her reflections. “I will be the greatest adamas worker the Adamant Citadel has ever seen, but it will not be because I accepted aid from you. It will be because of the work that I do with the aid of my sisters.”

“Nuts!” Belial said. “I don’t even know why I bother.”

Brother Zachariah said, Roland the Astonishing!

And before Sister Emilia could ask him what he meant by that, he was running out of the maze. She could hear him knocking over mirror after mirror with his staff, in too much of a hurry to find his way out as they had found their way in. Or maybe he knew that all the magic was bound up to make the center hard to find, and that smashing things on the way out would work just fine.

“A little slow on the draw, that one,” Belial said to Sister Emilia. “Anyhow, I ought to make tracks. See you around, girlie.”

“Wait!” Sister Emilia said. “I have an offer to make you.”

Because she could not stop thinking of what she had seen in Brother Zachariah’s mirrors. How much he longed to be with his parabatai and with the girl who must have been the warlock Tessa Herondale.