Chapter Text
Tessa was warm.
Not so warm that she was comfortable, per se - that would have made her instantly suspicious. But warm enough that she could almost pretend she was home. Perhaps she was ill, and she’d been allowed to remain in bed, and any minute now there would be soup, or maternal scolding from her aunt. Or both.
She didn’t want to get up and shatter the illusion - even her thin blanket felt softer than she was used to. Chali was dozing beside her, out of his cage for the moment, his golden breast rising and falling. A chill breeze rattled through the window, but it didn't quite reach her bones, and in fact that was a welcome change from the oppressive, damp clamminess of the other rooms in which she spent her time.
But she knew what her aunt would say about people who spent their time dreaming instead of facing the facts. She didn’t even have to imagine it - she’d heard it often enough, directed at her, or more often at her brother, whose head was always off his shoulders. (Had always been off his shoulders, past tense, said a small and unpleasant voice in the back of her mind.)
Don’t think about that, Tessa. Nate’s fine. They said Nate was fine.
She glanced around the small bedroom. One bed. One drafty window. Two worn books on its sill. One vanity, upon which a tiny metal cage was chained.
Soon, Miranda would be in to bring her downstairs, out of her little sanctuary. She would face her captors, as she did every day, and she would obey them and fail, as she did every day, and then she would return to her room and plot her escape. Or… something of the sort.
It was getting harder and harder for Tessa to keep up her escape plans. None of them had ended well for her, but the other option was giving up, and she would not bear that.
Chalivan, awake now, fluttered to her shoulder as she sat up. “We’ll be all right,” he said, quiet, and she nodded.
A knock on the door sounded. Miranda, the maid, was standing outside. With, Tessa knew without having to look, the same blank expression on her face. The same clothes, the same words, the same day over and over again.
Chali ruffled his feathers. For all the times they’d seen her, neither girl nor goldfinch had been able to find Miranda’s daemon.
Perhaps she didn’t have one.
Perhaps she was like the Sisters, whose daemons were - don’t think about that, Tessa.
“You must come with me now, miss.” Even the maid’s voice was slow, uninflected. Familiar. Dead-sounding.
“A minute, please.” Her voice shook, but she steadied it through force of will. “I’ll be out quite quickly.”
Theresa Gray climbed out of bed, donned her worn black dress, clenched her fists, and promised herself - as she had for nineteen days before - that today would be her last day in the Dark House. Today she would run, and unlike all the days before, today she would succeed.
Consciousness returned slowly.
When she came to, she was back in her bed - but this time, the Sisters were leaning over her. Mrs. Black was grinning a sick grin that twisted the flesh around her jaw.
“What have we learned, little girl?” She asked, her doughy face swimming in Tessa’s vision. Tessa kept her mouth shut, trying to sit up. No luck. She was tied tightly down, Chali caged on the vanity beside her. He flapped angrily at the bars, looking at their captors with undisguised fury. “We took you in out of the goodness of our hearts! We trained you! We brought you out of unformed clay and made you ready for the Magister, and this is how you repay us?”
Her sister was silent, watchful. Mrs. Dark’s daemon - a small lizard - perched on the brim of her ludicrous, brightly colored hat. As if he - it? - sensed her eyes on it, it changed, into an equally bright, poison-colored frog. Then it was a mouse. A snake. Form after form, circling her hat like a twisted carousel of different animals, though her set expression never changed, never seemed to merit the endless indecision.
Tessa felt a familiar curl of wrongness in her stomach, though it had lessened greatly since the first time she’d seen them. Adults weren’t supposed to have unsettled daemons. Chali hadn’t left goldfinch form in years, and she didn’t expect him to - and these women were old, much older than -
Her thought scattered. Mrs. Black’s daemon had puffed into a copy of Chali. A near-perfect copy, save for the beadiness in its eyes. She flinched away, helplessly, the feeling of sick wrongness intensifying.
“If you run away again, we’ll flay you until your skin peels off,” the daemon crooned. “Now. Change for us."
Tessa closed her eyes, pretended she was somewhere, anywhere else, and reached inside herself for someone else’s mind. Pulled their skin, their being, over her own, until someone else’s eyes flew open to see the Sisters, smiling and proud.
They didn’t leave until she was beyond exhausted, headache pounding behind her eyes, wrists chafed from the ropes binding her in place, skin prickling from taking on so many forms so quickly. That wouldn’t have been so bad, she thought, but the voices of the forms seemed to echo in her head - whispering, afraid, telling her what it was like to die. Telling her stories of lives that weren’t her own, loves she didn’t feel, battles she didn’t care about.
She would not cry. She would not. And she would not be sold to this ‘Magister’ for her skill, either. She didn’t care what the Sisters did to her, she would not bow her head and silently accept it.
The conviction that used to accompany those thoughts had been replaced with a bone-deep weariness. But she still thought them, out of habit.
I’m sorry, Nate, she thought, though she had the creeping suspicion her brother was beyond her reach now. I endured it this long for you, because I didn’t want them to hurt you. But I fear they already have, and they plan for me to meet the same fate.
Where are you?
God! What use was being able to look like someone else? If only her useless ‘talent’ was something that could break through ropes, or kill her tormentors with a single look, or shrink down to the size of a bird, or -
Perhaps she could shrink down to the size of a bird.
It was difficult, of course, to force yet another Change in so short a time, but she managed it. And this one, the little girl who had been stabbed under a streetlight a month before, was a familiar skin. A familiar mind.
Tessa didn’t want to bear the thought that any of this could be growing familiar. But bear it she must, for her wrists and ankles were suddenly tiny, her hair wispy, her dress (which never changed with her) hanging off her smaller frame. Blood - so much blood - welled up from her chest as she wrenched her arms free.
It hurts, said a voice in her mind, quiet and sad. What's happening?
Not now, Emma. Tessa didn’t want to brush her off, but - was this even the girl, Emma Bayliss? Or was it just an echo, a leftover voice? A strong echo, yes, an echo that told Tessa things she had no way of otherwise knowing, but was this really a person, this mind of a being who was dead now? And if it was, was Tessa really herself anymore? Which mind was the real one, which body? She remembered Emma's family, her favorite games, the night she'd died. Had Tessa ceased to exist, becoming Emma for good, owning her thoughts, her memories?
“Tessa,” said Chali’s quiet voice. It shocked her out of her panicked thoughts. Of course. She was Tessa Gray, for as long as she had Chalivan. For all of her fluctuating forms, he remained a constant, a golden bird to tell her who she was, no matter who she looked like or whose voice spoke through her.
The dead had no daemons.
She took a deep breath and stood up. After so much time, she didn’t need to stop and adjust to the weight of a new body. Now, she simply let go of her borrowed skin, sighing, and rubbed the feeling back into her limbs.
Chali chirped in contentment. Tessa took comfort in it for a moment, crossing over to run her finger through the space between the bars. “We’ll be out of here soon,” she murmured, pulling at the lock on the cage. It was quite small, barely large enough to hold the finch at all, and affixed to the vanity with heavy bolts. It was not the first time the Sisters had locked him away, in some bid to keep her in place.
It worked, of course - no one could withstand being far from their daemon for long - but they couldn’t keep him confined and also bring her to their parlor for their lessons, so it wasn’t a common punishment.
The bars were too thick to bend apart. Perhaps a hairpin? She’d read plenty of novels in which heroines picked locks with their hairpins, but they’d been particularly unhelpful in describing how. And anyway, she didn’t have any of her possessions. Only her rough black dress, currently stained with someone else’s blood.
Now, Tessa fiddled with the lock for some time, growing increasingly agitated as Chalivan grew more and more panicked, hopping in his confines.
“Let me out.”
“I’m trying, Chali, I’m trying!”
“Let me out.”
Frustrated tears burned at her eyes - I will NOT cry - as she rattled the lock again, looking around frantically for something to pry it off with. The rattling continued as she turned her back on the cage.
Odd. It took her exhausted mind far, far too long to realize - it wasn’t the cage. The lock on her door was being forced.
She seized up the vase from the vanity. She was out of her bonds now, there was no going back if the Sisters came in and found her like this. She’d have to do her best to fight her way past them, though that had never once worked. And why would they even need to force the lock? They had the keys to every room in this horrible house, and came and went as they pleased.
She didn’t have time to think about it much more, because someone cursed in a startlingly deep voice, and then the door crashed open. Tessa swung the vase with all her strength, but the intruder, still just a dark-haired figure to her eyes, was faster. They ducked out of the way of the pottery, which would have undoubtedly shattered on their head, and she only caught the edge of their arm with it.
The vase still shattered, crockery raining onto the floor. Her visitor yelled in pain, stepping back, and Tessa threw herself between them and Chali’s cage.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake - you cut me!” Betrayal was evident in the tone. "What's that for?"
She didn’t dignify it with an answer.
The voice belonged to a boy - more of a young man, really. He was pretty enough to look at, all black hair and blue eyes, which would have impressed her more if he wasn’t most likely there to torture her, or carry her off. Or perhaps he was the mysterious Magister? None of it boded well for her, but it had been weeks since she’d seen anyone besides the Sisters and Miranda, so she tried, quickly, to memorize his appearance.
He wore odd clothes, she noticed, like workman’s clothes but made of a tough black material, with no jacket or hat. He had slightly curly black hair and even features. He was perhaps an inch or two taller than she was, but Tessa was quite tall to begin with. His daemon was a pretty Siamese cat, standing at his feet. In fact, both of them gave off the impression of a beautiful thing that would hurt you to touch, at least, as much as the man could give off such an impression while waving his bloodied hand around.
“Are you the Magister?” She asked, frantic.
The intruder had calmed down and was watching blood drip onto the floor. “Massive blood loss,” he remarked in a tone of mild displeasure, stacked on top of the previous betrayal. “Death could be imminent.”
“Are you the Magister? ”
“The Magister? That means ‘master’ in Latin, doesn’t it?” The cat jumped onto the vanity and blinked slowly at Chali. Chali puffed himself up in anger and fear, but neither moved. The man went on. “Always been a bit rubbish at Latin, but I’ve mastered many things in my life. Let’s see, navigating the streets, dancing the quadrille, lying at charades. Concealing a highly intoxicated state. But no one’s ever called me a Magister, more’s the pity.” He fixed her with a look of mild indifference. “What’s your name, then?”
“My name?”
“Yes, don’t you know it?”
“You - what on earth’s your name?” Tessa was beginning to feel as if she had passed out under the Sisters’ lessons after all, and was having a particularly bizarre dream.
“William Herondale, at your service,” he said, though he didn't extend a hand, too busy pulling his torn sleeve back down over the gash. “Will, preferably. And that’s Issalinde. Is this your room? Not very nice, is it?”
The cat, Issalinde, had stopped staring at Chali and returned to Will, gesturing with her chin to the cage. Will sighed as if greatly put-upon, and walked around Tessa to get to it, pulling an odd, crystal-colored pencil-like object from one of his pockets.
“Leave him alone,” she said, not proud of the note of panic in her voice.
“If I did that, we’d never get out of here, would we?” He picked up the lock and began scrawling on it. To her surprise, black inky lines seemed to flow from the object, wrapping themselves around the lock. It took a moment, but the bolt shattered, as Tessa gasped.
Chali flew free in a burst of motion, and she pulled him to her chest, feeling him shaking. So William Herondale was magical as well. She hardly had the room to judge him, but it didn’t bode well for her if she was rescued, only to find herself in a the same situation as before. A prisoner of another magician.
At least the daemon Issalinde hadn’t changed form. Perhaps he would be a better captor than the Sisters, or easier to escape from. He certainly seemed madder than they.
“Now then, miss…” he looked at her expectantly, and she took a deep breath.
“Gray. Theresa Gray, and this is Chalivan.”
“Now then, Miss Gray, I have things to attend to. So unless you’d rather stay here…”
A crash echoed from downstairs. Tessa shook her head.
“That’s what I thought.”
He grabbed her roughly by the wrist, and then they were running.