Free Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare Page A

Livvy.
    Of course he would have to go see Arthur, Emma thought. Someone had to tell their eccentric guardian that the Blackthorns were home. And of course he was tired. And of course he seemed different: people did, when you hadn’t seen them in a while. It could take a day or two to get back to the way they used to be: Comfortable. Inseparable. Secure.
    She put her hand against her chest. Though the pain she had felt while Julian was in England, the stretched-rubber-band feeling she’d hated, was gone, she now felt a new strange ache near her heart.

3
    T HE M OON N EVER B EAMS W ITHOUT B RINGING M E D REAMS
    The attic of the Institute was dim. Two skylights were built into the roof, but Uncle Arthur had covered them with butcher paper when he had first moved his books and papers into this room, saying that he was worried the sunlight would damage the delicate instruments of his studies.
    Arthur and his brother, Julian’s father Andrew, had been brought up by parents obsessed with the classical period: with Ancient Greek and Latin, with the lays of heroes, the mythology and history of Greece and Rome.
    Julian had grown up knowing the stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey , of the Argonauts and the Aeneid , of men and monsters, gods and heroes. But while Andrew had retained only a fondness for the classics (one that extended, admittedly, to naming his children after emperors and queens—Julian was still grateful to his mother for the fact that he was a Julian and not a Julius, which was what his father had wanted), Arthur was obsessed.
    He had brought hundreds of books with him from England, and in the years since, the room had become stuffed with hundreds more. They were arranged according to a filing system only Arthurunderstood—Sophocles’s Antigone tipping over onto Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War , scattered monographs, and books with their bindings ripped, the individual pages spread carefully across various surfaces. There were probably at least six desks in the room: When one became too overwhelmed with papers and bits of broken pottery and statuary, Uncle Arthur simply purchased another.
    He was sitting at one near the west side of the room. Through a tear in the butcher paper covering the window beside it, Julian could see a flash of blue ocean. The sleeves of Arthur’s old sweater were rolled up. Under the hems of his frayed khakis, his feet were stuffed into ratty bedroom slippers. His cane, which he rarely used, was propped against a wall.
    “Achilles had a phorminx,” he was muttering, “with a crossbar of silver; Hercules was taught to play the cithara. Both instruments have been translated as ‘lyre,’ but are they the same instrument? If they are, why the different words to describe them?”
    “Hello, Uncle,” Julian said. He hefted the tray he was carrying, on which he’d placed a hastily assembled dinner. “We’ve come back.”
    Arthur turned slowly, like an old dog cocking its head warily at the sound of a shout. “Andrew, good to see you,” he said. “I was pondering the Greek ideals of love. Agape, of course, the highest love, the love that Gods feel. Then eros, romantic love; and philia, the love of friends; and storge, the love of family. Which would you say it is that our parabatai feel? Is it closer to philia or to agape—eros, of course, being forbidden? And if so, are we gifted with something, as Nephilim, that mundanes can never understand—and so how did the Greeks know of it? A paradox, Andrew . . .”
    Julian exhaled. The last thing he wanted to talk about was the kind of love parabatai felt for each other. And he did not want to be called by his dead father’s name. He wished he were somewhere, anywhere else, but he came forward anyway into where the lightwas stronger, where his uncle could see his face. “It’s Julian. I said that we’re back. All of us. Tavvy, Dru, the twins . . .”
    Arthur stared at him with uncomprehending blue-green eyes,