a cross in the void // christopher lightwood {4}

five // the first key

Dinner was awkward. Pluto, appearing far smaller than usual, dry-eyed and calm-breathing but clutching themself tense, emanating fragility, exhaustion. Christopher hovered, worried. Cordelia was lost somewhere in her own mind. Matthew may well have been physically bleeding out for how obvious it was that he was doing so emotionally. Seanan played cool-headed, benevolent Lady of the House as if she were Ellen Terry at the Globe, and gave everyone their ten feet of space, demanding no conversation and making no attempts to strike anything up, hiding her own worry gracefully.

Gloria had no idea what Cordelia or Matthew would do, but she could predict the movements of the rest of the house. Pluto and Christopher would close themselves away somewhere and sleep. Seanan would retreat. Gloria would go to her. And she did, cursing the squeaking of her wheel-chair on the stone floors of Taigh Liath.

They were not easy people to be, her and Seanan. Gloria knew that better than anyone. Both of them young, just newly adults in the Clave and still adjusting to all that came with that. Seanan, who'd inherited a townhouse at seventeen and been deeded a whole estate as soon as she was old enough for that to be legal, whose family loved her but could no longer stomach the country she lived in. Gloria, body broken, no hints of magic stirring inside her where everything she knew said there should be.

Seanan was in the study-parlor-thing their bedrooms shared, in a gold velvet armchair, elbow on the table beside it, the side of her head resting on the tips of her splayed fingers. Her glasses lay upturned on the wood beside her arm, arms unfolded, round lenses winking in the soft glow of the room's witchlights.

"I don't want to spend my whole life guiding you to bed when you're sleepy and comforting you when you're down," Gloria admitted. "But I'm here now, and you're upset, and I can tell it." She reached to take Seanan's thin, cold hand. "What's wrong?"

Seanan's eyes flicked up to hers, dark silvery grey like washed hematite. "I hate being in this miserable house full of miserable people," she said, "where no matter what I do to bring a little light into the place it only gets worse."

"That's not your fault," Gloria promised her, "and I daresay it's not the fault of the house either. Cordelia and Matthew and Pluto were miserable before they even got here. You've worked yourself up into misery because you hate the house and it has too many bad memories both for your parents and you. Christopher and I are only miserable because the people we love are miserable."

"You . . ." Seanan's mouth opened and stayed that way. She swept strands of copper hair out of her face with her free hand and blinked, bleary-eyed, disbelieving.

"It hasn't been obvious? I thought we talked about this, enough to . . ."

"I never thought . . ." Seanan let out a breathy, near-silent shaking noise that could only be a laugh, and a real one, too. She shook her head, reached for her glasses, put them on. "It doesn't matter that I'm a woman, even if I had been a man I—I would still feel like I haven't enough to give you."

"And what on earth does that mean?"

"Look at me!" Seanan was grinning, practically hysterical. "The one thing close to estates I have I'm giving away! I have a townhouse full of crap. I'm not anyone socially interesting. You're the Queen of São Luis, Enclave and Downworld, and you choose . . . me?"

"And we're both women," Gloria said, "so you're right in saying that it doesn't matter. Because the same rules do not apply. You need not bind yourself to some idiot male identity, some need to protect and provide. I can do well enough for the both of us. Yes, even from sitting in this wicker chair."

Seanan's face took on something softer as her expression faltered: not hurt, but confusion. And then a flash of guilty, laughing annoyance. She groaned and buried her face in her hands, pushing her fingers up under her glasses. "Goodness, I never thought of that, did I? I am an idiot, Gloria. A complete and utter foolish idiot."