Chapter Text
Tessa was seven years old on the day of the attack. She wouldn't remember it well as she got older. There was a man with too-large eyes like a frog's who repeated the same phrase on a loop in a rusty voice. There was a big carriage with a black lacquered door and bright purple taffeta curtains. Or maybe the lilac fabric belonged to a dress. There were the hands and the brown paper parcel and her mother's voice and a sword. It was the parts that her adult self most wanted explained that were lost. Things like the exact order of events. Things like why any of it had happened. Her memories of that were never clear.
The carriage pulled alongside them as they walked back from the cake lady's house.
Her mother had been taking her to the cake lady's house since she was just a baby, maybe even before then. Their rooms in the Institute were home but the cake lady's kitchen was her favourite place to be. There was a tall bookshelf on one wall, a big wood-burning stove in the far corner, and a dining table with a long wooden bench and a table cloth. Usually, there was cake or at least fresh bread and sometimes even fruit from the little garden out back if the weather was agreeable.
The cake lady always called Tessa by pet names like Darling and Little One and would crouch down in front of her to fuss over her dress or her hair ribbons and give her a kiss on the forehead. She had soft blonde hair streaked with gray and little crinkly lines around her eyes. The cake lady also had a husband who wasn't quite as kind or seen quite as often. Tessa glimpsed him sometimes in his study at the end of the hall and her mother would say polite things to him and he would say polite things back but it was a little bit like talking to Great-Grandfather Aloysius: a responsibility that had to be completed on penalty of rudeness.
Maybe it was the penalty of rudeness that made her mother stop and turn to look at the big black carriage. She stood straight and tall with sharp eyes trained on the windows that were too high for Tessa to see.
She craned her head for the first few lines of the conversation but it was about street names and train stations. Dull. Adult business. Nothing to interest a seven-year-old. Besides, her mother's skirt was in the way of her getting a good view. Tessa stayed close. Her mother used a glamour rune to keep them from being noticed by passersby and it didn't work on children unless they stayed close. Tessa had learned this as she learned how to walk.
Tessa turned her attention to her very important package. She fiddled with the brown paper tied around the loaf of bread that the cake lady had given her. She was hoping that the package might contain cinnamon bread or some other treat. The cake lady had winked when Tessa's mother had scolded that, "If we came any more often, I think she would turn into a sticky bun. Then what would I do? All this trouble for a sticky bun?" Then there had been laughter and the promise that, "She's worth any trouble."
Tessa’s thoughts were on that. On sticky buns and that warm kitchen and her brown paper package full of baked goods. The adults talked over her and she tucked herself in against her mother’s skirts and waited for the adult business to be finished.
“Absolutely not,” her mother’s tone had been polite and boring, and then all at once, her mother was angry.
It happened in a flash. It usually did. Her mother's temper flared like cannon fire. Brief and bright and cacophonous but then gone. It happened often enough that Tessa knew the tone and the way her jaw would set but it didn't often flare on public streets.
Tessa had been trying to lift the corner of the wrapping on the bread to see what kind it might be when her mother's voice snapped out.
"Don't you dare."
Then things went very wrong, very quickly.
The man with the frog eyes appeared from the crowd and picked Tessa up. She was still a very small child and he simply grabbed her around the ribs and hoisted her into the air. She shrieked and kicked. Either her mother's magic held or the man with the iron hands had magic of his own.
Later, one of the few details that stuck was that no one had even glanced at them as she screamed and her mother pulled a sword. Tessa would remember that no one came to help. No one even looked up.
People should have noticed.
Someone should have helped.
No one did. Tessa's mother was fast. For all that the men in the Institute liked to say that she was improperly trained, she had all the strength and speed of a Shadowhunter. She stepped around the man and swung the sword at his back before he could take a jagged step to follow her.
The sword clanged.
Even through her panic and her confusion and her irrational worry about her loaf of bread, Tessa knew that was the wrong sound. The sword was there, lodged from behind in the man's ribs but he was still turning. His feet were heavy and slow, slamming into the ground on each step. The blade twisted and it squealed with the twisted sound of metal on metal like a train grinding to a halt. Tessa heard her mother call her name.
The hands around her body were tightening as the man juddered and the shrieking metal on metal sound came again.
Tessa screamed again.
The first time had been shock and fear. This time it was pain. The hands around her body were squeezing. Relentless and unthinking and too strong.
The world blurred with a cracking sound that Tessa wouldn't understand came from her body until long after someone had explained it to her.
The last thing she remembered was a flair of golden light that made her eyes water and then the world had gone dark.
The world didn't come back into focus until she was in bed. Dark stone, dark wood, the smell of candles because witchlight was too harsh. Tessa was home and she was stuck. Wrapped up too tight and weighed down by blankets. She wanted to squirm away but she was too tired.
"Just tell me if she will recover," her mother's voice was saying.
Tessa couldn't hear the answer but if she turned her head she could see bone coloured robes. Silent Brothers. She was sick and the Silent Brothers had come just like they had when Mr. Branksome had been injured fighting demons. The thought made her feel better. Mr. Branksome had been fine and she had caught sight of him at breakfast the next day, eating porridge and looking like nothing had been wrong at all. The same thing would happen to her. She closed her eyes and tried to feel better.
"I am not debating her parentage with a walking skeleton monk. It is not your business," her mother was angry but her mother got angry whenever Tessa got hurt. That time she had fallen down the stairs. That time she had cut her hand on a knife that she wasn't supposed to touch. She wasn't worried. Not really. Tessa was starting to doze as the silence stretched.
Her mother’s voice interrupted the pause and dragged her sleepy thoughts back up to the very edge of waking up.
"Something drove it away. I don't understand what any more than you do but it saved her life. Another few moments and-" her mother stopped talking and then said, "I only care that my daughter will recover."
This time, Tessa heard the Silent Brother’s words: “Your daughter is singular.” His voice spoke into her mind not her ears. It was papery and dry and more thought than sound. His voice was even and flat like it had been rolled too thin. Her mother was still angry. When Tessa forced her eyes open, she could see the pacing form of her mother in her blue dress and the still form of the Silent Brother.
“My daughter is bright and beautiful and deserves the world. I will not have you turning her singularity against her.”
“The Clave may not accept her,” the voice in her head said.
Tessa had seen Silent Brothers at a distance before but none of them had ever spoken to her. She had never been given a window into a conversation. Silent Brothers spoke to the grown-ups about important grown-up matters. It was both horrifying and thrilling to be given access to that world of grown-ups. The Silent Brother knew she was awake and had chosen to tell her this.
Her mother just hummed a response, a non-answer. Tessa knew that hum. It usually meant that the answer was no but she would be learning why the answer was no in some demonstrable lesson. The Silent Brother did not know that hum. The Silent Brother did not know either of them.
Tessa faded out of the conversation and back down into sleep. Maybe there was no more conversation. Maybe her mother ordered the Silent Brother away and he went because no one argued with Elizabeth Starkweather-Gray any longer than they absolutely had to. Maybe Tessa just slept through the interesting parts.
She woke up eventually.
A slow dreamy kind of waking that she would only half remember come morning.
Her mother smoothed back her hair. She had dropped something around Tessa’s neck. A very fine gold chain, the kind Tessa usually wasn’t supposed to touch because it might break if it was pulled on. Her mother’s hand settled on the pendant and held it against Tessa’s chest. The weight of her hand was warm and familiar and it cupped the ticking angel against Tessa’s heart.
“When I was first pregnant and we knew you were coming, your father - the man I chose to be your father - he received a gift from his employer. A little clockwork angel on a chain. I didn’t like it much. I thought it was ugly and industrial but he promised that it would bring me good fortune and bring the child safely into the world. It seemed like superstitious nonsense. But I took it and I wore it because it was polite and who doesn't need a little good fortune?”
Tessa was halfway to drifting off again but she so rarely heard stories of her father that she tried to force her eyes open and really listen. Her mother kissed her forehead and pet her hair and kept the angel ticking against her heart.
“It turns out that there is truth in all the superstitious nonsense that people throw around in their myths and legends. The faeries of my mother’s stories with their bowls of milk and stolen names are really out there and many of them don't mean us well. There is truth in this necklace as well.”
“After my husband died,” her mother continued but there were no details about that event forthcoming. Tessa was too tired to complain or demand answers about how her father had died. “I went first to my sister but they followed us there. They chased me back into the strange clubs that my husband’s employer had been so fond of. They were my enemy and yours. Even then. Even before you were fully realized. They wanted things from you. So we fled to the enemy of my enemy in the hopes that they would be our friend. The Shadowhunters took us in, you and I, and I thought we were safe. I had thought that we could stop running."
Tessa felt a brush of fingers against the bandages around her ribs and shivered. It didn’t hurt. Her mother was gentle and didn’t hurt her as she rearranged the blankets and tucked her in snugly under the blankets.
“I will not put all my trust in a bit of metal and a magic spell to protect you,” her mother said.
A long pause and then: “It worked today. All golden light and metal wings. We were lucky. Both of us. The angel saved you as I had been told it would.”
Tessa remembered the light but not the wings. It had been lost in the confusion but if her mother had seen it, it hadn’t been a dream. The light had happened. The light had pushed away the metal hands and freed her.
“It was impressive and terrifying and it worked but if they keep coming for you, someday it will not work. Someday they will find their way around that protection and drag you off into the dark. I’m not going to let that happen, Tessie.”
The words were a promise. An oath.
“I’m not going to let that happen,” were the last words her mother ever said to her.
Tessa awoke in the morning in the infirmary with her ribs still cracked and her memories still muddled and her mother gone. The clockwork angel remained on its chain, around her neck. Her mother had brought down one of the quilts from their rooms and laid it over the drab Institute sheet.
It was a few days before Tessa realized that her mother wasn’t coming home again.