She moved without thinking. “Baz, wait!”
He did no such thing, his pace quickening at her voice.
“Baz.” She caught up to him, watched his stern profile, but he refused to look at her, only kept walking in those infuriatingly long strides.
Emory huffed a disbelieving laugh. “That’s it? You’re not even going to ask me what that was back there?”
“I know what I saw.”
“Then enlighten me, please.”
He scoffed. “Like you don’t know.”
“I don’t.” She tried to block his path, to make him stop and look at her, but he brushed her off, yanking away from her touch as if burned. She flinched, hurt and angry and on the verge of breaking like the waves did against the shore. “Would you please just stop for a—”
Baz whipped around, nearly colliding with her. “Come on, Emory.” He looked at her like he’d never seen her before. Like he didn’t know her at all, and all those years of him pining over her at prep school were a nightmare he was just now emerging from. “You’re a Tidecaller.”
She took a step back. “What?”
“It makes no damn sense, and it was so stupid of me to help you hide it, but somehow, you’re a Tidecaller.”
Her ears rang. The night seemed to pause around them, its curiosity piqued at that mythical word. Because that was all Tidecallers were—a thing of myth, the fabled first followers of the Shadow who could still call on all the Tides’ magics when the rest of the world no longer could.
All of it a myth, so why did the skin on the back of her neck prickle? She cast a look around to see if any students were in earshot, but they were the only ones left on the beach.
“Tidecallers aren’t real, Baz.”
He laughed, a bitter, half-crazed sound. “Trust me, I know that. But how else would you be able to call on all those magics? On Reaper magic, for Tides’ sake? There’s only one house that could produce a Tidecaller.” His next words cut through her like a brand, a curse. “You’re Eclipse-born.”
Emory shook her head. “No. No, I’m a Healer.”
“Not if you weren’t actually born on a new moon.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying maybe your mother lied about when you were born.”
Emory flinched. She had told him of her mother only once, right after Baz’s father Collapsed. At least your dad’s still here. She’d given him a sad smile as she healed the wounds a particularly vile senior had inflicted on him. I never even got to know my mother.
She was surprised he remembered at all, and though what he was insinuating was impossible, she couldn’t help but wonder… Was there any way to know for certain, if the woman who’d brought her into the world—the only person who’d actually been there at her birth—had left Emory on her father’s doorstep when she was a baby, then disappeared forever?
All Emory knew of Luce Meraude was what little information her father had of her: she was a sailor who’d made harbor near Henry Ainsleif’s lighthouse when her boat nearly capsized during a violent storm. She’d stayed with him while working on repairs, and because the lighthouse was in such a desolate place and Henry such a gentle, lonely soul, they took a liking to each other.
It didn’t last. Once her boat was mended, Luce returned to the open seas, only to find herself at Henry’s doorstep again nearly a year later to leave their child in his care—a child Luce said was born under a new moon, and even had the birth certificate to prove it.
Emory was House New Moon; it was the incontestable truth.
And even if her birth certificate were falsified, everything else proved she was a Healer. Like every young child, she’d had her blood tested, had undergone all the Regulation Tests to confirm her tidal alignment, had met every criterion needed to warrant a formal education—a requirement for those who were deemed magically gifted enough for such schooling, a way to ensure no one abused their power or lost control of it. Her lunar tattoo had been given to her when she graduated prep school, like all the others who’d go on to Aldryn College and similar establishments around the world. It was a mark of one’s potential, a way to keep each of them accountable for the power they wielded. A clear indicator that said, This is the magic I have, and these are the rules that govern it.
Emory had worn it like a badge of honor, but now the sigil seemed to burn on the back of her hand, as if willing her to see past this damnable lie inked on her skin.
Eclipse-born.
She couldn’t be. Her blood would have marked her as Eclipse-born. And surely Emory would have known, would have pieced it together at some point during her training. These other powers would have manifested. She would never have had to resort to bloodletting to use healing magic outside of the new moon, because the Eclipse-born could call on their power at will, no matter the moon phase.
But that had never been the case. She’d had no inkling of these magics until…
Emory looked at the dark stain of Dovermere in the distance. She pressed a thumb against the spiral scar on her wrist, the same symbol that was burned black on Travers’s corpse. The same one gleaming silver on Keiran’s skin.
If the ritual had done something to her that night, burned this symbol on her… could it be the source of all this strangeness?
“Is that what happened in the caves?” Baz asked as if he could read her thoughts. “Romie… All those students who drowned… It was you, wasn’t it? Your magic.”
You killed them.
He didn’t say the words aloud, but the look on his face conveyed them all the same. Tears sprang to Emory’s eyes. She couldn’t blame him for thinking it, not after what he’d just witnessed her doing—what she would have done had he not stepped in. Not when she herself was wondering the same thing.
Your fault, Travers’s eyes had screamed.
Was it her fault, what happened in Dovermere? Had she called upon Reaper magic then, too?
She couldn’t bear the thought. She already felt guilty enough as it was, wondering how things would have been different had she not gone into those caves.
“It was the tide,” Emory professed, words nearly drowned out by the Aldersea. “Nothing more.”
Perhaps saying it would make it true.
Baz tore his gaze from her, shaking his head. “You need to tell Dean Fulton about this.”
It took a beat for his words to register. The threat beneath them. Emory blanched. “She’ll send me to the Regulators.”
“Better that than you losing control.”
Fear bloomed in Emory’s chest. If the dean found out, if people learned she’d used magic outside of her lunar house—that she might, in fact, be in the wrong lunar house…
They would brand her with the Unhallowed Seal.
To receive the seal—to have one’s magic, their lifeblood, permanently sealed off—was a fate most often reserved for Eclipse-born who Collapsed, a steep price to pay for losing control. But others could receive it too. Reapers who used their death touch to murder innocent people. Glamours who made others do terrible things against their will, thanks to their gifts of compulsion. She’d heard of Shadowguides whose necromantic practices were too sickening to speak of, Memorists who wiped people’s entire minds until they were left with nothing, not even their own names.