Also by Cassandra Clare

seems weeks ago they came to me at the Hunt and told me I was to go back to the world.”
“Did they tell you that you’d be coming home?”
“No,” he said. “They told me I had no choice but to leave the Hunt. That the King of the Unseelie
Court had commanded it. They pulled me down from my horse and bound my hands. We rode for
days. They gave me something to drink, something that made me hallucinate and imagine things that
were not there.” He looked down at his hands. “It was so I would not be able to find my way back,
but I wish they had not done it,” he said. “I wish I could have arrived here as I have been for years, a
capable member of the Hunt. I would have liked my brothers and sisters to see me standing tall and
proud, not fearful and crawling.”
“You do seem very different now,” Emma said. It was true. He seemed like someone who had
woken up after a hundred years of sleep, shaking the dust of a century’s dreams from his feet. He had
been terrified; now his hands were steady, his expression somber.
Suddenly he smiled wryly.
“When they ordered me to reveal myself in the Sanctuary, I thought it was another dream.”
“A good dream?” Emma said.
He hesitated, then shook his head. “In the early days of the Hunt, when I disobeyed, I was made to
see dreams, horrors, visions of my family dying. I thought that was what I was meant to be seeing
again. I was terrified—not for myself, but for Julian.”
“But now you know it’s not a dream. Seeing your family, your home—”
“Emma. Stop.” He squeezed his eyes shut as if in pain. “I can say this to you because you are not a
Blackthorn. You do not have Blackthorn blood running through your veins. I have been in the land of
Faerie for years and it is a place where mortal blood is turned to fire. It is a place of beauty and
terror beyond what can be imagined here. I have ridden with the Wild Hunt. I have carved a clear
path of freedom among the stars and outrun the wind. And now I am asked to walk upon the earth
again.”
“You belong where you’re loved,” Emma said. It was something her father had said, something she
had always believed. She belonged here because Jules loved her and the children loved her. “Were
you loved in Faerie?”
A shadow seemed to come down over Mark’s eyes, like curtains closing in a dark room. “I meant
to tell you. I am sorry about your parents.”
Emma waited for the familiar burn of sickening rage that the mention of her parents by anyone but
Jules always brought on, but it didn’t come. There was something in the way he said it—something
about the strange mixture of formal, faerie speech and sincere regret—that was oddly calming.
“And I’m sorry about your father,” she told him.
“I saw him Turned,” Mark said. “Though I did not see him die in the Dark War. I hope he did not
suffer.”
Emma felt a ripple of shock pass up her spine. Did he not know how his father had died? Had no
one told him? “He—” she began. “It was in the middle of battle. It was very quick.”
“You saw it?”
Emma scrambled to her feet. “It’s late,” she said. “We should get to sleep.”
He looked up at her with his eerie eyes. “You do not want to sleep,” he said, and he looked wild to
her suddenly, wild as the stars or the desert, wild as all natural, untamed things. “You have always
been one for adventure, Emma, and I do not think that has died in you, has it? Tied though you might
be to my unadventurous little brother?”
“Julian isn’t unadventurous,” Emma said angrily. “He’s responsible.”