“You’re certain the Regulators tested your blood when you were a child?” Baz asked. He couldn’t work it out, how it seemed her Tidecaller magic had somehow been locked inside her until now—until Dovermere.
Her voice was honed to something sharp. “I can show you everything—birthing chart, selenograph results, they all say I’m New Moon. A Healer. I know how impossible it sounds, trust me. But I have no more explanation for it than you do because, as you pointed out, the only person who might know something left me on my father’s doorstep when I was a baby and disappeared forever.”
Baz remembered her telling him about her mother, how vulnerable she’d been. I want to learn how to sail, she’d said, and maybe I’ll find her out there, still traveling the seas. He didn’t know what to say to her now as she toyed with the ripped-up pieces of her disposable cup, frowning at them as if they were the sad remnants of that childhood dream.
He pushed his glasses up, glancing around the empty library as an idea suddenly struck him. “We should test your blood.”
Emory’s face blanched. “What?”
“That way we’ll know for sure whether you’re Eclipse-born or not.” He pushed out of his chair. “I know there’s a selenograph here somewhere…”
The Decrescens library was full of things there was no apparent use for, from those intricate, mysterious clocks to things as mundane as selenographs, the metal contraptions the Regulators used to test magic in children and confirm the lunar house and tidal alignment that comprised their birth chart.
Baz liked to imagine this was the library the scholar in Song of the Drowned Gods had inhabited, full of treasures he might have brought back from other worlds: the marble busts flanking the arch that led down to the Vault, the gold war helmet wrought with motifs of delicate flowers, the wooden effigies depicting gods and goddesses their own world held no recollection of. The selenograph was certainly not from other worlds, but he was certain he’d seen it in here.
They found it in the Memorist section, so high up on the shelves that Baz had to climb up the rolling ladder to tug the machine out from between two thick, cobwebbed tomes. He set it atop the pile of open books on their table and blew on the layer of dust coating it, Emory watching nervously at his side. The selenograph was made up of various cogs, knobs, and needles, an older model than what Baz remembered being used when he was younger. Three vials sat atop it like a crown, one filled with liquid silver, another containing salt water, and the last one empty, meant to be filled with the person’s blood. It was the three elements thought to govern their magic: silver for moonlight, salt water for tides, and the blood they both flowed through.
A rusty, antique-looking syringe came with the selenograph. Emory’s mouth twisted in disgust as Baz gingerly picked it up.
“I am not stabbing myself with that,” she warned.
After a moment’s hesitation, Baz pulled back the threads of time so that the selenograph and the syringe looked new—still old by all accounts, antiquities, really, but shiny and unmarred, at least.
Emory quirked a brow. “Thought you didn’t like using your magic.”
“Small bursts of magical release, remember?”
He tried to hand her the syringe, but she shook her head, looking slightly queasy. “I can’t do it on myself. I’m bad enough as it is with needles to think about finding my own vein. You’ll have to do it.” At his horrified look, she put her hands on her hips and said, “This was your idea, not mine. It’s easy, you’ll see.” She sat down and pushed her left sleeve up around her bicep. “I’ll walk you through it.”
Baz pushed his chair close to hers. He was suddenly all too aware of his body, the awkwardness of his limbs, the blood pumping in his ears. Emory instructed him on how to search for a vein in the crook of her arm. She rested her free hand atop his, guiding it to place the tip of the needle on her skin. He tried to concentrate on her words as she explained how to insert the needle and draw the blood, but the feel of her fingers around his own consumed him.
Tides, when was the last time he’d sat this close to someone? He could see all the delicate strands of gold in her hair, the way the messy fringe that swept her brow curled slightly at her temples.
Get a grip, Brysden.
He swallowed hard and focused on the task at hand. He did exactly as she’d instructed. Emory winced as the needle pierced her skin.
“Are you okay? Am I doing it wrong?”
“I’m fine.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Just tell me something.”
“What?”
She breathed loudly through her mouth. “Anything, please.”
Her unease somehow made him feel more assured, and with her blood slowly filling the syringe in his hand, he felt bold enough to ask, “Do you remember Song of the Drowned Gods?”
Emory’s grimace twisted into a smile. “Of course. You always had your nose buried in it. You were so obsessed, I remember you drawing the characters in that old sketchbook of yours.”
Baz was grateful she wasn’t looking at him as a flush crept up his neck. Better she didn’t know how obsessed he still was—or that he occasionally still made art inspired by it, in the rare moments he could find the time. “Did Romie ever say something to you about it?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” His hand almost twitched with how badly it wanted to reach for the note in his pocket. “You know she used to love that book as much as I did when we were kids? We’d play-act scenes together, pretend we were going off on these wild adventures across worlds.” He thought of those memories fondly, how he would always play the scholar or the guardian, and she the witch or the warrior. “She grew out of it, but me… Romie always teased me for it, but then I found out she was reading it last spring, just before…” He stopped himself. “I guess I just thought it was odd.”
He took the syringe out, full of Emory’s blood. There was a stark look of relief on her pallid face as she pressed a finger to the red pinprick on her arm.
“Maybe she felt nostalgic,” she said distractedly, eyes closed and head tilted up to the ceiling.
Baz studied her openly, trying to discern any hints of deceit. He’d never noticed the small freckle on her neck, the particular curve of her mouth, the way it parted as she heaved a grounding sigh. His cheeks burned as he heard again what sounded an awful lot like Kai’s sneering voice in his mind, telling him to pull himself together. Before she could catch him staring, he turned to the selenograph, pouring her blood sample into one of the vials.
The three vital liquids—silver, water, blood—dripped slowly into a fourth compartment, a slender horizontal glass tube where they blended to form a murky substance. Beneath it all was what resembled a clock, divvied up in nine sectors: one for each of the moon’s eight phases, and the last for the eclipse. Each sector was quartered off into four tidal alignments, except for the eclipse one, which was cleaved in two—one half for the lunar eclipse, the other for the solar eclipse.
New Moon and Full Moon students, Baz knew, were rarer than their Waxing and Waning counterparts, given that their respective phases lasted no more than three days, while the waxing and waning moons lasted three times as long as that, each one composed of secondary phases—crescent, quarter, gibbous. Without bloodletting, adepts of House Waxing Moon and House Waning Moon could only wield their magic on the specific secondary phase they were born to, which leveled the playing field between lunar houses, everyone having access to their magic for roughly the same amount of time.