The Last Hours: Chain of Iron

Let conversation stop. Let laughter cease. Here is the place where the dead delight to teach the living.

All one had to do was pretend, she realized, marveling a bit, and everyone else would fall into line pretending along with you.

“So here it is: always tell Cordelia what you feel.” He looked James in the eye. “You may fear what will happen if you speak your heart. You may wish to hide things because you fear hurting others. But secrets have a way of eating at relationships, Jamie. At love, at friendship—they undermine and destroy them until in the end you find you are bitterly alone with the secrets you kept.”

But the truth is that sorrow is fleet and loyal. It will always follow you.”

James tilted his head back. The air was full of fog and smoke; he could not see the stars. He wondered if Cordelia could see them yet—if the train had carried her far enough from London for the skies to clear. “I fear it has been following Matthew for a long time,” he said. “I fear that in that time I have been… disconnected from the people I love the most, the people who I should have been able to save from such pain.”

“You cannot save people who do not want to be saved,” said Magnus. “You can only stand by their side and hope that when they wake and realize they need saving, you will be there to help them

potted palm, and a hatstand

And thus the heart will break, yet brokenly live on:

Even as a broken mirror, which the glass

In every fragment multiplies; and makes

A thousand images of one that was,

The same, and still the more, the more it breaks;

And thus the heart will do which not forsakes,

Living in shatter’d guise, and still, and cold,

And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,

Yet withers on till all without is old,

Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold.

—Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

“You,” he said. “Did you know, you grow more beautiful every day?”

“Well, that’s odd,” said Tessa, resting her chin thoughtfully on the spine of her book, “because as a warlock I do not age, and so I should look the same day to day, neither improving nor worsening.”

“And yet,” said Will, “you continue to accrue radiance.”

“You’re fretting,” Tessa said, reading his eyes. When she tilted her head up and brushed his lips with hers, he cupped her face in his hands. So many years, he thought, and each kiss was new as the break of day.

Tessa let her book fall to the floor, her hands rising to grip the front of Will’s shirt.

. But love is not always a lightning bolt, is it? Sometimes it is a creeping vine. It grows slowly until suddenly it is all that there is in the world.”

She was like starlight, Ariadne thought: it seemed warm and radiant and near, but was in truth uncountable miles away