Emory laughed through tears, adding somberly, “It’ll all be for nothing if we can’t find a way out of here.”
“I trust you, Em. If anyone can get us out of this mess, it’s you.”
Those words meant more to Emory than anything she’d ever heard. Tidecaller, Healer—she realized then that what she was never mattered to Romie, who loved her for her, not for the magic she wielded. Emory had been letting her Tidecaller magic determine her worth, seeing her significance through that and that alone as she lost herself in this power she so desperately wanted to make her special.
But maybe she’d always been exactly who she’d wanted to be. Not mediocre at all, not doomed to live in Romie’s shadow, but her own person with her own worth.
How sad, she thought, that it took losing Romie to find herself.
Still, she was glad for it, even if it had brought them here, to this place with no escape. The shrieks of distant umbrae were closer now than before.
“We need to find a way out of here.”
Farther down the curved path, stars gathered and aligned, with voices rising between them.
Patience, they seemed to whisper. Take heart.
“Follow the song,” Romie mumbled.
Sure enough, a melody took shape in the darkness, and it was a song Emory knew, having heard it before in a dream. An inexplicable sense of surety came over her. It started in her blood and seeped through to her bones. Calm and purpose in her heart. Direction in her soul.
The song was a compass guiding her on, the mournful chords of a lyre beckoning her down the starlit path, past the point where the path curved inward and disappeared into the dark.
And why should she be afraid of this darkness? She’d been born to it, after all. A new moon, a solar eclipse. She’d walked alongside it for as long as she could remember, and so had Romie. A Dreamer born on the very last sliver of a waning crescent.
She could have sworn she heard both their names woven within that melody, calling them forward like a lodestar.
Emory, Emory.
Romie, Romie.
Emory and Romie, their names practically an anagram.
Fate brought them together and ripped them apart and gave them a second chance here in this liminal space, in the seam between living and dead.
Emory threw one last glance at the silver door sealed shut. She thought of Baz and his stories, of Romie and her dreams, of the three of them running through fields of gold that bent toward the sea, their laughter making them soar like all the gulls flying in the cloudless skies above.
We are born of the moon and tides, and to them we return.
They would find their way back. One way or another, she would hear Baz laugh again, would see the three of them reunited, no matter the price. But for now, at least, they had to look onward.
Emory mustered whatever strength she had left to pull Romie up, shouldering her weight, and together they started stumbling toward the song.
Their feet sloshed in the water that traveled down the same direction, guiding them farther and farther. Emory’s pulse beat quicker as she began to make out the shape of a door in the distance, a tear in the swirling stars, still out of reach yet growing closer with every step. The music grew louder as they neared. The door was dark marble, veins like the roots of a tree, with vines that twined in its middle to form a knotted knob. The cloying smell of earth and moss and wetness seeped from its seams, calling to mind the greenhouse that Romie had always felt so at home in.
And this might lead to the Deep or to another world entirely, but it did not matter because this was where they were meant to go—she was sure of it, felt it in her bones, a thrum of magic like none she’d ever known.
A bridge, a door, a song that beckoned to something more.
Emory’s hand closed over the knotted vines, certainty sweeping in her soul in time to the music reaching its crescendo. She took a deep breath, pushed the door open.
Water spilled over the threshold. Only then did Emory hesitate, wondering what would happen to them.
“No turning back now,” Romie said at her side, starlight dancing in her eyes.
The song of the stars followed them past the doorsill.
Wherever it led, whatever shores waited for them next, they would face them together.
42 BAZ
BAZ SLUMPED ON THE FLOOR. From Keiran’s lifeless hand a curious compass slipped, and Baz reached for it mindlessly, his gaze catching on the Hourglass—on the tear in the rock that nulled its magic, barred the door shut.
“Brysden,” Kai said. “We have to go.”
The others were huddled together near the time-still wave, a wary look in their eyes at the sound of the tide battering against Baz’s magic on the other side.
More rocks and dust fell from the ceiling. The crack in the Hourglass deepened.
Baz pocketed the compass and took a step toward the rock. He couldn’t use his power to right every wrong, but he could use it to mend what was in front of him. If he could untangle the complicated threads that bound the door to time itself…
A dark, familiar thing brushed against his magic.
Dovermere, this presence that called to him and repulsed him in equal measure. It whispered lovingly, urging him to wield its strange power.
Your magic is ours and our magic is yours and we are the same because time runs through our veins like rivers to the sea and blood through arteries.
Baz reached for it. He pulled on Dovermere’s magic, no longer afraid of this place because he recognized its power, the same as his.
Time time time time time time time time time
Their heartbeats echoed in synch like the ticking of perfectly tuned clocks. Their magic combined, and Baz pulled back time, made it so that the Hourglass was never cracked. The crumbling cave mended itself, rock shooting back up to the ceiling it had rained down from, and the Hourglass stood tall and unmarred once more. A door repaired.
Baz didn’t stop there. He pushed against the tide, reversed it so that it flowed back out into the sea until it was low tide again, and the way out was clear, giving them all a fighting chance to leave Dovermere unscathed.
When he finally let go of the magic, he felt Dovermere sigh around him, contented by its power being used to its full potential at last, perhaps for the very first time, by someone who understood time the same way it did.
Thank you, each of them said to the other.
* * *
Waves crashed loudly around Baz, the taste of salt bitter in his mouth as he sputtered, dragging himself out of the water.
Exhaustion made his muscles heavy. The others lay sprawled beside him, equally spent—but alive, all of them. Kai was closest, his chest rising and falling to the same rapid rhythm that pounded in Baz’s ears.
They’d brought the two bodies back with them. Keiran and Lizaveta. Virgil Dade watched over them, face grim, eyes hollow.
Baz crumbled on the sand and tilted his face up to the skies. The storm had passed, and the unveiled sun was just starting to dip toward the horizon. It was somewhat crescent-shaped, Baz noted—partly covered by the moon.
An eclipse.
He laughed. And then a shadow blocked out the entirety of the sky as Kai stood over him, offering him a hand.
Baz took it.
They stood panting at the water’s edge, looking out at Dovermere. The tide was low now, though it seemed to rebel against this reversal of fates that Baz had forced upon it, inching determinedly across the sand.