Bitter of Tongue by Cassandra Clare, Sarah Rees Brennan Read Free Book Online

calm center of a bustling Blackthorn crowd. He had a kid in his arms, who was a little big for Julian to carry but was clinging tenaciously to Julian’s neck like an octopus in unfamiliar surroundings. The kid must be Tavvy.
    All the Blackthorns were dressed up for the wedding, but already a little grubby around the edges, in that mysterious way kids got. Simon wasn’t sure how. They were all, aside from Tavvy, a little too old to be playing in the dirt.
    “I’ll get Dru all cleaned up,” volunteered Emma, who was tall for almost fourteen, with a crown of blond hair that made her stand out among the dark-haired Blackthorns like a daffodil in a bed of pansies.
    “No, don’t bother,” said Julian. “I know you want to spend some quality time with Clary. You’ve only been talking about it for, oh, fifteen thousand years, give or take.”
    Emma shoved him playfully. She was taller than he was: Simon remembered being thirteen and shorter than all the girls too.
    All the girls except one, he recalled slowly, the real picture of his thirteenth year sliding over the false one, where the most important person in his life had been clumsily photoshopped out. Clary had always been tiny. No matter how short or awkward Simon had felt, he had always towered over her and felt it was his right to protect her.
    He wondered if Julian wished Emma were shorter than he was. From the look on Julian’s face as he regarded Emma, there was not one thing about her he would change. His art and his Emma, Mark had said, as if they were the two essential facts about Julian. His love of beauty and his wish to create it, and his best friend in all the world. They were going to be parabatai , Simon was pretty sure. That was nice.
    Emma sped away on a quest to find Clary, with one last grin for Julian.
    Only, Mark had been wrong. Art and Emma were clearly not all that occupied Julian’s thoughts. Simon watched as he held on to Tavvy and stooped over a small girl with a round beseeching face and a cloud of brown hair.
    “I lost my flower crown and I can’t find it,” whispered the girl.
    Julian smiled down at her. “That’s what happens when you lose things, Dru.”
    “But if I’m not wearing a flower crown like Livvy, Helen will think I’m careless and I don’t mind my things and I don’t like her as much as Livvy does. Livvy still has her flower crown.”
    The other girl in the group, taller than Dru and in that coltish stage where her arms and legs were thin as sticks and too long for the rest of her body, was indeed wearing a flower crown on her light brown hair. She was sticking close to the side of a boy who had headphones on in the midst of the chaos of the wedding, and winter-gray eyes fixed on some distant private sight.
    Livvy would walk over hot coals and hissing serpents for Ty, Mark had said. Simon remembered the infinite tenderness with which Mark had said: my Ty.
    “Helen knows you better than that,” Julian said.
    “Yes, but  . . .” Drusilla tugged at his sleeve so he would bend down and she could say, in an agonized whisper: “She’s been gone such a long time. Maybe she doesn’t remember  . . . everything about me.”
    Julian turned his face away, so none of his siblings could see his expression. Only Simon saw the flash of pain, and he knew he wasn’t meant to. He knew he wouldn’t have seen it, if he hadn’t seen Mark Blackthorn, if he hadn’t been paying attention.
    “Dru, Helen has known you since you were born. She does remember everything.”
    “But just in case,” said Drusilla. “She’s going away again really soon. I want her to think I’m good.”
    “She knows you’re good,” Julian told her. “The best. But we’ll find your flower crown, all right?”
    The younger kids did not know Helen in the same way Julian did, as a sibling who was there all the time. They could not rely on someone who was so far away.
    Julian was their father, Simon thought with a dawning of horror. There was