They handed Baz the napkin, where a name had been scribbled over an address in Cadence. “The Veiled Atlas?” Baz read.
Jae rolled their eyes. “It’s what this group calls themselves. That, or Clover’s Inner Circle, which really is just laughable.”
“Who are they?”
“One might call them a cult. They believe everything Clover wrote about in Song of the Drowned Gods was true and that Clover himself went through all these other worlds.” They snorted. “Speculations bordering on fanaticism, if you ask me. I would take what they say with a heavy pinch of salt. None of them have any sort of credentials to back up their claims. But if hearing what they have to say gives you closure… Ask for Alya Kazan. She’s usually quite secretive about all this, but if you tell her I sent you, she might be willing to help.”
They considered him closely. “She’s a Shadowguide, and a damn good one at that. Do with that what you will.”
Baz folded up the napkin and stuffed it in his pocket. “Thank you, Jae.”
Jae reached across the table to pat his hand. “You know you can come to me with anything. We’re family, you and I. We stick together until the bitter end.”
Emotion threatened to choke Baz. He knew Jae meant well, but their words only conjured his father’s face, Kai’s too, and more guilt than Baz could bear.
11 EMORY
EMORY’S STOMACH WAS IN KNOTS all day as she thought of tonight’s Selenic Order soiree.
She’d barely gotten any sleep after her encounter with Keiran in the archives. Instead, she’d stayed up all night reading An Introduction to Alignments, determined to learn all she could in the short time she had. She refused to walk into that soiree ill-prepared; having at least some grasp on this new power of hers would put her mind at ease, but for that, she needed practice.
It was how she found herself in Romie’s greenhouse before the sun had even begun to rise, hoping to make something happen before her study session with Baz. It was a risk without him here to stop time for her, she knew, but one she was willing to take. No help was needed, in the end, because try as she did, she couldn’t quite grasp the Sower magic she’d used on the beach the other night, despite it now being a waxing moon. And when she aimed for Darkbearer magic instead, thinking of the cloud of shimmering blackness she’d called upon in the library the other day, it was like the rising sun that filtered through the dirty glass panes chased away the flimsy shadows she tried to pull on. By the time she reached for Lightkeeper magic, head pounding and ears ringing with Lizaveta’s voice chanting mediocre over and over, she was late meeting Baz.
She left the greenhouse with a frustrated sigh, feeling like a failure. It felt like she was back at prep school, ten years old and trying to achieve the simplest magic that every other Healer in her class had already mastered. She had been ridiculed; told she’d never wear House New Moon’s sigil. Go back to being a nobody in your nowhere town, a particularly nasty girl called Mildred had jeered at her. And Emory had been ready to do just that because everyone was right. She didn’t belong at Threnody Prep, wasn’t like most kids there who were either brilliant or came from families with money. She was the motherless daughter of a humble lighthouse keeper, whose own magic was never enough to send him to Aldryn College.
Her father had scraped for every penny to send her to Threnody, knowing how badly she wanted to go to Aldryn and make something of herself. My place was always here, he’d told her, but there are wider horizons calling you, just like they did your mother.
She’d wanted so desperately to be like Luce, had entertained all these grand notions about herself, which all got reduced to dust when she got to Threnody and realized how insignificant she and her magic were compared to others. If it weren’t for Romie, she might have run out of there crying and never left her father’s lighthouse again.
Emory remembered the morning everyone in their dorm room woke to find a crying, embarrassed Mildred had wet her bed. Romie had looked innocently at her and said, “You shouldn’t drink so much water before bed, Mildred, if you’re going to dream about running streams and waterfalls all night.”
Fury had swept over Mildred’s face. “You bitch—”
“It’s pronounced Dreamer, actually,” Romie had said, looping her arm through Emory’s. “You’d do well to remember it next time you want to come at my friend.”
The two of them had become inseparable right then and there. Emory had been enthralled by Romie, had tried to emulate everything she was—bold and magnetic and uncaring of what others thought of her. Emory had eventually found her stride at school, thanks to her, and without the pressure of bullies, she’d come to realize she wasn’t bad at all, was even better than some. Never as good as Romie, of course, but that had always been fine because Romie thought she was good, and special, and funny, and deserving of her friendship. And that was all that ever mattered to Emory.
But without her here, she couldn’t see it, her own worth.
She had everything she’d once wished for—something that made her unique, the ability to pull on all alignments the way Romie had always wanted—yet she seemed doomed to be just as mediocre a Tidecaller as she’d been a Healer.
Emory was in a foul mood by the time she got to the Decrescens library, itching to get something done more than reading. She slumped into the chair across from Baz and dropped the book he’d given her onto the table. “All done.”
Baz eyed her over the rim of his glasses. “All of it?”
“Front to back.” She smiled sweetly, fluttering her lashes at him. “So can we start practicing some magic now?”
His mouth quirked up like he thought she was joking. “You can start A Deeper Look into Alignments next. I think there’s a copy lying around here somewhere. Dreamer section, maybe.”
Emory picked at the coffee cup she’d stopped to get on her way—her second by this point already. “How long will you have me studying all these books before I get to practice? Until I know all the ins and outs of every tidal alignment?”
“If that’s what it takes, yes.”
She rolled her eyes. “No one even knows that much about their own tidal alignment. You can’t expect me to know every single thing about every single one of them. It’s impossible.”
“A few days ago, I’d have said Tidecallers are impossible.” He cocked a brow at her. “Yet here you are.”
Something in his teasing tone—in the way he held her gaze more steadily than he normally would—took Emory aback. Was he trying to flirt with her? She took a scalding gulp of coffee, breaking his stare. Her leg bounced nervously beneath the table, and she couldn’t tell if it was from the caffeine or Baz or the creeping restlessness she felt, this same pressure in her veins that had been there all summer.
“Maybe I should go grab my bloodletting instruments,” she mused. At Baz’s puzzled expression, she added, “If I’m not going to use magic anytime soon, I’ll have to resort to bloodletting, won’t I? You said the pressure would become unbearable and I’ll likely Collapse unless I use magic or bleed myself of it.”