She gave a coy smile and what she hoped was a nonchalant shrug. “You know us first-years. Must have been all that foolishness got to our heads.” She peered at Keiran and asked, in the most innocent of tones, “Surely you must have done the same during your freshman year?”
Tension crackled in the air like sparks from the fire.
There was a challenge in Keiran’s eyes. “Now, what makes you say that?”
She was spared from answering when a girl suddenly plopped down in the sand next to Virgil. “Sorry we’re late!” She handed him an unopened bottle of wine. “Brought gifts.”
Virgil beamed. “Ife, you magnificent creature!”
Ife shoved him off with a laugh when he kissed her cheek. She swept her mass of long, tight braids over a shoulder and said something to another girl who sat beside her, whom Emory recognized all too well.
Her heart dropped as their gazes met.
“Emory, hey,” Nisha Zenara said with a tentative smile, a note of surprise in her voice. “How’ve you been?”
Keiran raised a brow. “You two know each other?”
Nisha looked as uncomfortable as Emory felt. “We met once or twice through a mutual friend.”
Her blood boiled. Mutual friend. More like the friend Nisha had all but stolen away from her.
Emory had been there when Nisha and Romie first met. It was their first week at Aldryn, and Romie had been dragging Emory all over campus, so eager to see everything their new life had to offer. Her excitement had been infectious, and when they’d stumbled upon Nisha in the Crescens Hall greenhouses where Sowers practiced their botanical skills, Romie being Romie had walked right up to her, and the two of them had instantly bonded over their love of plants—all while Emory stood back, feeling entirely out of place. She’d heard nothing but Nisha this and Nisha that for the better part of the following weeks, before Romie grew so secretive and distant that she barely spoke to Emory at all.
And if Nisha was friends with Keiran…
Was she a part of it too, whatever Romie had been involved in?
Her throat closed. She couldn’t handle this. Facing Keiran was one thing, but Nisha she hadn’t accounted for. She suddenly felt terribly out of place. Coming here was a mistake; she would have better luck confronting Keiran when he was alone anyway.
“I’d better go.” Emory grabbed her shoes and shot to her feet, wiping the sand from her trousers. She read the question in Keiran’s expression, felt the awkward silence hanging over the others. “Thanks for the wine,” she said lamely.
How pathetic.
She headed for the water’s edge without a backward glance. The waves lapped at her ankles, the squishy sand between her toes making her feel unsteady. She took a deep breath in, berating herself for not being able to go through with her plan.
“Ainsleif, wait up.”
Keiran was heading her way. Maybe she hadn’t so completely messed up after all. He caught up to her just as a wave slammed into her shins, knocking her off-balance. She yelped in pain as she stepped onto something wickedly sharp. His hand shot out to steady her.
“Are you all right?”
“I— Oh.”
Blood trickled down her foot where a piece of broken shell had pierced it, still lodged in the soft pad near her toes. Balancing on one foot, with Keiran’s hand around her elbow, she made to pull the piece out, swearing in anticipation of the pain.
Keiran’s hand closed over hers. “I’ve got it.”
He was standing so close, she could smell the subtle notes of his aftershave, see the warm greens and golds of his irises. At Emory’s nod, he tugged the shell clean out. She winced, but half a thought had the wound already closing.
A decent enough Healer, but nothing special.
Keiran flipped her hand over to rest the jagged, bloodied conch in her palm, the spiral shape echoing the mark on her skin, the matching symbol on his own wrist.
She regarded him squarely. “That mark you have. How did you get it?”
Another wave hit them then, stronger than before. They gripped each other’s arms as they lurched at the impact. She dropped the shell in the water.
The wind picked up, and Emory swore she heard a voice carried by the breeze, dark and teasing and lovely.
Emory, Emory.
It was just a memory, she tried to tell herself. It wasn’t real.
Come find us, Emory.
A shiver up her spine. “Did you hear that?”
Keiran frowned, still gripping her wrist. “Hear what?”
Before she could answer, someone screamed—a high-pitched thing in the night that rose and broke like waves yielding against rock.
She turned toward the sound. A student stood a little farther down the beach, pointing at something in the water: a dark, floating mass pulled in by the tide.
No, not something, Emory realized.
Someone.
The world went still.
For a beat, no one moved, and even the sea seemed to pause. Emory stood rooted at the edge of the water, her breath coming in fast and shallow, blood pounding in her ears. She watched numbly as Keiran sloshed into the water and a few other students followed closely behind him. They reached the body, dragged it back to shore. From where she stood, it looked like a young man, and though Emory was here and now, she was suddenly transported back to last spring, when she was the one dragging herself from the sea, fingers clasped around another’s body.
Someone swore loudly. “It’s Quince Travers!”
Emory blinked. The words were so impossible she thought she must have dreamed them. They meant someone else, had to mean someone else. Or maybe this was indeed a dream—a nightmare.
Her feet started moving without her telling them to, and then she was standing with the others, looking over Keiran’s shoulder at the body sprawled on the sand.
His face came into view, and Emory stumbled back.
It was indeed Quince Travers, with his constellation of freckles, his unmistakable shock of red hair and wiry frame. Quince Travers, still dressed in the clothes he’d worn that night four months ago when the sea claimed him.
His body didn’t have a scratch on it, only a few stray weeds and barnacles tangled in his clothes, slick algae clinging to his hair. His skin wasn’t bloated from staying so long in the water, nor wrecked from being battered against the cliffside. He looked… alive, his cheeks still rosy with the faint glow of life.
Keiran lowered his ear to Travers’s chest—and jerked back with a swear as the boy’s eyes shot open.
Travers did not spew water, nor even draw breath. He merely sat up, empty eyes searching the faces around him until, impossibly, they landed on Emory. His mouth opened, and the words that came out were an indistinct gargle as water trickled down the sides of his mouth.
Emory, Emory, the sea whispered.
And suddenly Travers convulsed, collapsing on the ground. He seized and frothed at the mouth, his eyes so wide the whites around his pupils showed.
Keiran looked up at Emory, yelled something about healing him—because of course she could heal him. She was a Healer of House New Moon. Her magic could save him, just as it had saved her that night.
But Emory couldn’t tear her eyes away from Travers, couldn’t get her feet to move or even remember how to breathe. It made no sense. They were all supposed to be dead. It didn’t matter that there had only been four bodies accounted for that night, the other four lost at sea. It wasn’t unheard of that those who ventured inside Dovermere lay trapped there, the currents entombing them in the confines of the caves, their bones bound to turn up eventually in some fisherman’s net.