Sorry to startle you, I just wrote “Dear Cristina” with the comma first and it seemed a little down. Thought I would try to spice it up a little. And I want to hear from you because I miss you and it’s highly annoying that you couldn’t be in New York.
Why did Nene have to pick this exact time to visit you guys? Is it because she has faerie intuition and carefully decided to keep us apart? I mean, no, probably not, she seems like a pretty good person. But still! Show up a week later, Nene! Also disappointed to hear that she didn’t spill anything about what the heck is up in the Seelie Court. I guess if she had given up the court’s secrets to Kieran — who is, technically, the King of the Unseelie Court — the Seelie Queen would consider that “bad” and Nene to be a “traitor,” but that’s nothing compared to how much we want to know what’s up.
Anyway. We’re back from New York, where the weather was much worse than in London, but whatever. We’d sent that picture of the candlesticks from the church to Alec, and he showed them to his mom, who recognized them. She said Robert had brought them along with a bunch of other inherited Lightwood stuff when they left Idris for NYC, and she had no idea what had happened to them since, but they were probably in the NY Institute somewhere. Well, we’ve got the Ghost Sensor, so we said goodbye to Rupert and headed over. (Julian wondered whether Rupert misses us when we’re gone, but it’s hard to tell if ghosts can tell the passage of time. In any case we didn’t find sad faces drawn in the dust when we came back, or anything like that.)
So we saw Jace and Clary, of course, and Alec came to help. I think he was really curious since it’s his family’s stuff. (We were hoping to see Simon and Isabelle but they were off recruiting for Shadowhunter Academy. And Magnus stayed home with the kids. He texted us a video from their apartment where he asked Max and Rafe, “Are we going to help our friends?” and they both shouted, “No!” It was cute. I mean, Max and Rafe were cute. Magnus was maybe milking it a little.)
Finding the candlesticks was…pretty easy, actually, kind of anticlimactic. They were hiding in plain sight in the church’s nave among all the other candlesticks and candelabras and other candle-related things. And the Sensor led us right to them. So maybe they weren’t removed in the Blitz but instead the Lightwoods took them back? Or maybe they were removed and then brought back and sometime after that Robert’s parents took them out of the church? We’ll probably never know, but it also probably doesn’t matter since, whatever, we have them, mystery solved.
In celebration we ordered a pizza and ate it by the light of the candlesticks. New York pizza! It is the best. It hurts to say that a little, as an LA girl, but the truth is the truth. I’d missed it so. Pizza in London is…well, best not to speak of it.
So while we were eating Jace asked Alec if there was any news from Idris, and Julian and I kind of looked at each other because there’s never news from Idris, the Cohort have all shut themselves in there and refuse to come out or let anyone in, you know the deal.
Alec revealed that they had been working on some new variation on fire-messages that would be able to get through the wards around Idris. Mostly using Clary’s power to invent new runes. They’ve been sending them for a while, trying different things, but hadn’t gotten any responses until very recently when they heard from one of my least favorite people, Manuel.
So Alec and Manuel have apparently been sending messages back and forth. Zara refuses to respond and Manuel implied that she didn’t like that he and Alec were talking. Alec thinks he might be lying and Zara might not even know. But Alec also thinks Manuel is tired of being stuck there and might be their way in, since (as we all know) Manuel cares about Manuel above everything else, certainly way more than he cares about the Cohort’s supposed mission. Like Jace said, Zara is a true believer, but Manuel is just an opportunist.
This was all super-interesting, of course, but Julian and I started to feel bad remembering that Alec is, you know, the Consul. Julian said he knew Alec had important Consul stuff to do and it was great that he had come to help find the candlesticks anyway. And then Alec said a really nice thing! He said that their New York crew had always had to work in secret, that they’d always thought of the Clave as the enemy. Well, maybe not the enemy, but not their ally. The Clave they grew up with, you know, locked Jace in the Silent City and refused to believe that Valentine was returning. They would never have thought of going to them for help. So Alec said it was really important to him as Consul to actually be there for the Shadowhunters, to be someone they could know and talk to and bring problems to, rather than hiding. And I guess we did know Alec personally before, and they are his family’s candlesticks, but still, it was nice that he thought of it as part of his Consul duties to help us out, rather than thinking of it as something taking time away from his Real Work. He said this was his Real Work, and we’d better not stop coming to him and Magnus for help.
So then after a while Clary announced that she and I needed to have some girl talk and whisked me off to Taki’s for coffee. Julian she left with Jace and Alec. When last I saw him Jace was guiding him towards the weapons room to take a look at the collection of 17th-century Spanish military swords he’d recently found in one of the church weapons caches somewhere in New York. Julian watched me leave like a puppy being taken to the vet for shots, but I think he had a good time. So he says, anyway.
Clary and I settled into a booth at Taki’s. She wanted to ask me how I was doing, and I started telling her, but she seemed distracted, and I realized that maybe she needed to talk to me about how she was doing. Which turned out to be true. She’s worried because Alec likes to believe the best of people, and he’s really optimistic about the progress they’ve made getting in touch with Manuel, but Clary thinks Zara is a manipulative psycho. On which topic we agree.
“You think it’s a trick?” I said. “Or a trap?”
She said she didn’t know. But then she kind of argued with herself and said she understood how important it was to open up Idris, that she knew the Clave couldn’t survive forever split in two like this.
I said it seemed like it was really weighing heavily on them, and she kind of sighed and gave me the big news, or rather the lack of big news, which is that she and Jace have decided they don’t want to get married until the Clave is reunited. And Simon and Isabelle feel the same way.
“It’s not like there’s any reason to rush,” she said. She was looking out the window as she said it, though, and she sounded kind of sad. “But we don’t want a wedding where all anyone is thinking about is how Idris is off-limits and the Clave is broken.”
She kept looking out the window, so I asked if she saw someone out there, and she kind of looked guilty and turned back to me. “Oh, no, I thought I saw Jace for a minute, but it wasn’t him.”
Finally we got around to how I’m doing and I got to tell her the thing I’m worried about, which you and I have talked about a little. Which is that Julian and I are fixing up this house and I guess…we’re going to move here? Like, move to London. And out of Los Angeles for good. And I haven’t really gotten to think about what that would be like. I was thinking of it as a kind of temporary thing where we would fix up the house and then go home. And it’s easy to feel that way because of all the stuff going on with the Clave.
But for Julian, this will be our new home. And I can’t blame him for wanting that. I mean, for one thing, he’s a Blackthorn and it’s Blackthorn Hall. But we grew up in Los Angeles. I’m an LA girl, all my memories of my parents are of them in Los Angeles. But then we both do have many hard memories from the LA Institute, and it would be nice to put them behind us and get a fresh start. I don’t know. Do you ever find it strange, that you live in New York now? And Faerie? Do you miss the D.F.?
Maybe it’s Idris being out of reach that makes it feel so strange. I grew up always knowing that however spread out the Shadowhunters might be we all had a home together in Idris. It held the Clave together all over the world. But what if Idris is really gone for us, Cristina?
What if it’s gone forever?
