Tidecallers, people would call them begrudgingly. Tidethieves. Unworthy of the stolen magic in their blood, a version of which Eclipse-born today still carried.
“See, this is why I hate this version of the myth,” Kai had said to him once. “It’s bullshit. In the Constellation Isles, we tell a different story, where neither the Tides nor the Shadow are portrayed as evil.”
Baz had come to know the story quite well. It was one of love and sacrifice, in which the Shadow, cast aside by the sun god he had sprung from, found sanctuary with the moon-blessed Tides. They shared with him the power of their loving moon goddess, and when the vengeful sun found out, he twisted the Shadow’s power, turning it against those he had come to love. The Shadow begged the Tides to send him to the Deep, willing to sacrifice himself to keep this power in check. They decided to leave these shores with him, thus appeasing the moon and sun gods and saving the world together.
It had been Kai’s favorite story to tell.
Something pressed against Baz’s leg. He looked down to find a gray-and-black tabby nuzzling against him.
“Hey, Dusk,” he crooned, scratching behind the cat’s ear.
His sister’s cat—a stray that Romie had found on school grounds one day and adopted as her own, which Baz had taken under his wing after her death, meowed at him before darting off to the windowsill, where he sat looking back at Baz with piercing green eyes. Baz joined him at the window that overlooked the cove, giving Dusk a little scratch on the chin. Outside, actual dusk painted the sky in various shades of purple mirrored on the Aldersea’s surface.
The Eclipse commons offered the best vantage point at Aldryn, built as they were in the cliffside the college stood upon. When the tide was particularly high and the waves especially strong, Baz could poke his head out the window and feel the spray of salt water on his face as the sea broke loudly against the rock below. He did so now and noticed the bonfires littering the beach, the students amassed around them.
“Guess I won’t be going there tonight,” he grumbled to the cat.
Since Romie’s drowning, he’d made it a habit to go down to Dovermere Cove on every first day of the new moon, a way to sit with his grief, his regrets.
You just like torturing yourself, he imagined Kai would sneer at him if he’d still been here. And maybe he’d be right, but Baz found it strangely cathartic, despite the horrors of that place.
He reached for the note in his pocket, reading his sister’s handwriting for what felt like the thousandth time today. He’d spent all day debating if he should find Emory, show her the note, get her to talk. She had to know something, and perhaps that was why she’d acted so shifty around him earlier. But he never did find the courage to go knock on her door, and not because he didn’t know where it was—he remembered the way easily enough, having been there once at the beginning of last year when he helped Romie move her things in, and again at the end of last spring, when he packed up all her possessions to bring home to their mother.
No, it was fear that kept him from seeking Emory out. Irrational, stifling fear.
This was something he was all too familiar with: to become so overwhelmed when confronted with a difficult situation, he simply shut down, fear keeping him confined to the prison of his own mind. Time would slip past him mockingly in those instances, as if to say, You have the key, idiot. Let yourself out.
Time sounded a lot like Kai, he thought. A trigger switch to bring Baz back to himself. But Kai wasn’t here to push him to action, and Baz didn’t know how to do it alone. He’d been trying to snap out of this stagnant state all day without success, and thus he was here, hiding away in the Eclipse commons instead of looking for Emory on campus.
Below, Dovermere Cove was dotted with the light of a dozen fires or so. Baz remembered how much Romie had loved the bonfires when she’d gone with Emory last year, how she’d teased him for not going himself.
He thought he heard a bawdy tune being sung, and the revelries suddenly angered him, so out of place in such a site as Dovermere, with the recent casualties hanging over it. It was like death attracted students to it like flies to a corpse.
He paused his scratching of Dusk’s chin. Surely Emory wouldn’t have gone back… would she? She hadn’t even come to Romie’s funeral, for Tides’ sake. But if this was her own weird way to grieve… to face the horrors she’d lived through that night…
Shadow burn him.
Baz stuffed the note back in his pocket. “I’ll be back later,” he told the cat, unable to explain this urgency tugging at him. He didn’t want to go with all those students there, would probably be better off waiting to track down Emory tomorrow. But he had to know what brought Romie to Dovermere. What made his sister march so carelessly to her death.
He took the secret passage down to the beach, a steep stairwell etched in the rocky cliffside, so worn and overwhelmed with weeds and hanging vines, moss and grass, that no one except for the Eclipse students—namely himself—knew of its existence. His feet thudded quietly on the sand as he emerged from the tangle of vines. He was far enough away from the light of the fires that he knew no one saw him, but still he snuck toward the path that emerged from the tall grasses to make it seem like he was coming from town.
It was too dark for Baz to see the cave entrance from here, but he could feel the presence of the odd magic within, like static crawling along his skin.
He spotted the body a fraction of a second before someone screamed.
It floated in the water near the shore, unmistakably person-shaped.
And then a name was spoken against the wind, sparking a burst of horrid light in the hopeless pit of Baz’s heart. His ears rang, all the blood in his body rushing to his head as he followed the rest of the students congregating around the body of Quince Travers. Except it wasn’t a body at all, because Travers was alive. He was alive, and then he was not, all the life nearly drained out of him so that he was mere skin and bones.
Emory was at his side, trying to heal him through tears, and Baz knew enough of fear to recognize it plainly on her face. He saw the moment she lost her grip on her magic—felt her unraveling before he could spot the signs that something was very wrong indeed, because it was no longer her healing magic she was wielding, but the dark of the new moon and growth of the waxing moon and light of the full moon all at once, in a feat so impossible Baz wondered if he’d fallen down the steep stairs and hit his head, or slipped into one of Kai’s living nightmares.
But the horror twisting Emory’s features couldn’t be imagined. She wrenched away from Travers, away from the Amplifier’s grip, as death exploded from her hands.
Reaper magic. Emory—a Tides-damned Healer—was using Reaper magic.
Baz acted without thinking.
Instinct kicked in, snuffing out his better judgment. The fabric of time itself appeared to shift as he reached for its threads the way he’d done earlier today. The tendrils of light and ribbons of darkness and tangle of weeds around Travers’s unmoving form receded at his command, flowing back into Emory. It was like winding back a figurative clock to a time when these impossible powers had not yet manifested. The death magic was trickier, an intangible thing made to outwit time, to elude it, but Baz pushed against it with everything he had, all too conscious of that line between small magic and big magic, of how dangerously close he was to it, closer than he ever allowed himself to be.