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Ash sat down in front of the cage. “I feel perhaps we got off on the wrong foot.”

Clary almost laughed at the understatement, but she was wary. Sebastian had also had a sense of humor; you could be funny and still be a murderous despot.

“Not that wrong of a foot,” she said. “I get the feeling that if you’d wanted to really injure me with one of those daggers, you would have.”

“Janus wouldn’t have forgiven me if I’d actually hurt you,” he said. “But he knew I had questions.”

Clary curled her cold fingers in against her palms. “Are you really that angry about Sebastian? You never knew him.”

Ash took a moment to think about it, and while he did, she studied his face. No one had known Sebastian better than she had, and now, up close, she could note the differences between them. Ash was more fey-looking, but also more human-looking. There had been something cold behind Sebastian’s eyes, something reptilian, but behind Ash’s eyes there was a burning that spoke of real feeling—curiosity, anger, regret—for better or for worse.

“I think it’s natural for a boy to be curious about his father,” Ash said, and reached up to touch the silver chain around his throat, a seemingly involuntary gesture. “It’s not as if the Shadowhunters were fond of him. How do you think he felt when his own people treated him like an abomination?”

Ah, Clary thought. Now I’m finally getting some insight into what he has been told. The story he believes.

She softened her voice, trying not to sound as if she were correcting him. “The Shadowhunters didn’t know your father existed, not until he and Valentine came out of hiding to start the Mortal War. By that point, my brother was a murderer many times over.”

“What we call murder is called something else in wartime,” Ash said.

“There are rules, even in wartime. He killed a nine-year-old boy. Beat him to death with a hammer.”

Clary saw real shock pass across Ash’s face. So he hadn’t known about Max.

“What did Janus tell you Sebastian was like?” Clary asked.

Ash got up and started pacing. It reminded Clary of the way Jace couldn’t sit still when he was upset. She wondered if it was something Ash had picked up from Janus.

“Janus wanted you to believe that your father would have loved you in this world,” Clary added. “A sign of his care for you.”

“Janus always cared about me,” Ash snapped, but Clary heard the uncertainty beneath the words. Interesting. “But you think your Sebastian wouldn’t have?”

“I don’t know,” Clary said, and she meant it. “He died before you were born. But in all my time with him, I never knew him to love anybody. I don’t think he could, but his own child…. maybe. We’ll never know. And I’m sorry that because of me, you don’t know. But if he’d lived, he would have turned our world into Thule.”

Ash said nothing, only watched her with those unnerving green eyes, eyes she’d seen before in dreams. Eyes she’d seen when her brother lay dying in Edom. She’d seen the darkness fade out of him, color taking its place even as the life left him.

She pressed on. If she could make a connection with Ash, maybe she could make him understand the Nephilim weren’t his enemy, that there were alternatives to a life caught between the Huntsman and the Queen. “I know what kind of life you’ve had. Always at the mercy of someone who wanted to use you. Hasn’t there ever been someone who loved you but didn’t want anything in return?”

Ash was silent for so long Clary thought he might not answer. When he did, it was with one surprising word. “Nene.”

“Nene? Mark and Helen’s aunt?”

“Yes,” Ash said. “She was my nursemaid when I was a child. If it had not been for Nene, I believe my mother would have left me in a corner to starve. Not out of malice, more out of indifference.”

For the first time, Clary felt the urge to comfort him. She’d known for years that Ash had the power of inspiring loyalty and obedience in other people: a dark gift bequeathed to him by the Unseelie King, in his attempt to work the spells of the Dark Artifices on Ash. They were meant to turn Ash into a monster, but he’d refused to kill Kieran when the King had ordered it, refused to spill royal blood as the spell required. Maybe that meant that Ash had the potential for good in him. Or maybe she was just hoping that was true because thinking the best of him was a response to his power.

“Your mother certainly mourned you when the Unseelie King took you to his Court,” she said. “She does not seem indifferent to you now.”

Ash snorted. “The only gentle hand I recall in my childhood was Nene’s. When I could not sleep, and I screamed, she came to me and sat by me until I slept again. She would tell me, ‘Fear not the night, for the stars are with you.’ Not that we can see the stars, of course, down here.” He glanced away and again Clary saw Sebastian in him, in the curves of his mouth, his posture. Another boy who had never been loved. “When I was five or six, my mother suddenly took an interest in me, or at least in trying to hide me from the Unseelie King and his spies. She even placed a geas, a binding oath, upon the Seelie Court, not to speak of me to outsiders. It made no difference. Eventually the old King took me anyway. I looked for Nene when I returned to the Seelie Court, but she was gone. The Queen told me she was a traitor.”

“Nene fought with us Shadowhunters against the Cohort,” Clary said. “I remember her as good and kind. Many people are, if you give them a chance.”

“You need not speak to me as if I am a child, in need of comforting fables.”

Clary rubbed her hands together; it was cold in Janus’s room. Jace would have hated it. “I know why you threw those daggers at me,” she said. “Would you like to hear the reason?”

“Oh, yes,” he drawled. “Enlighten me.”

“You wanted Janus to think you hated me,” Clary said, “so he’d never consider the possibility that you’d come and talk to me like this. Without him.”