Nieuw fragment uit ‘Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy’

Cassandra Clare heeft weer een nieuw fragment gedeeld. Deze keer is het een fragment uit een toekomstig Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy verhaal, ‘Nothing but Shadows’, en het gaat over twee personages met de naam James…

James could not bear to think how Mother would feel, if she thought she had hurt him in any way. If he could get through the academy, if he could make her believe there was no real difference to him, that would spare her pain.

He wanted to go home. He did not want to face anybody at the Academy. He was a coward. But he was not enough of a coward that he would runa away from his own suffering, and let his mother suffer for him.

You are not a coward at all, said Uncle Jem. I remember a time, when I was still James Carstairs, when your mother learnedthat she could not have children. She was so hurt by that. She thought herself so changed, from all she had thought she was. I told her the right man would not care, and of course your father, the best of men, the only one fit for her, did not. I did not tell her… I was a boy and did not know how to tell her, how her courage in bearing uncertainty of her very self touched me. She doubted herself, but I could never doubt her. I could never doubt you now. I see the same courage in you now, as I saw in her then.

James wept, scrubbing his face against Uncle Jem’s robes as if he was littler than Lucie. He knew Mother was brave, but surely courage did not feel like this: he had thought it would be something fine, not a feeling that could tear you in pieces.

If you saw humanity as I can see it, Uncle Jem said, a whisper in his mind, a lifeline. There is very little brightness and warmth in the world for me. I am very distant from you all. There are only four points of warmth and brightness, in the whole world, which burn fiercely enough for me to feel something like the person I was. Your mother, your father, Lucie and you. You love, and tremble, and burn. Do not let any of them tell you who you are.