Once the door shut behind her, Emory looked at Romie’s desk, too curious and concerned to let it go. Forgotten beneath a vial of salt water, half stained with tea, was a piece of parchment artfully burnt around the edges. The letters S.O. were stamped in the middle of the note. Emory flipped it over, where an inscription had been written in sprawling silver script: Dovermere Cove, 10 p.m.
She put the note back where she found it, dread making her mouth taste like ash. Students tended to avoid Dovermere Cove because of the dark stain its infamous sea caves cast on it. Tales of all the drownings that took place there over the years were the first thing freshmen were told when starting at Aldryn. There were always a few foolhardy students who went into the caves looking to prove something to their peers, though Emory didn’t think Romie would be reckless enough to do so. Yet when the clock neared ten and Romie still hadn’t come back to their room, panic seized her. She looked at the note again, wondering what S.O. might stand for and if it had anything to do with Romie’s change in behavior.
Unable to shake this sense of foreboding in her bones, Emory pocketed the note and went down to Dovermere Cove just in time to see Romie and seven other students slip into the caves where they would meet their end.
Emory shook the haunting image of that night from her mind. The room suddenly felt too stuffy. Too small. She rushed to the stained-glass window between the beds and threw it open wide, letting the breeze in to kiss her face. She took a deep breath, then another, and the panic that wanted to pull her under slowly receded.
Pressing her forehead against the window frame, she swore softly.
Maybe coming back to Aldryn had been a mistake. All summer, she had been able to pretend that dreadful night at the caves had never happened. She could look out at the Aldersea and not feel the weight of her guilt pressing down on her, because even though home and Aldryn bordered the same sea, they did not share the same shore, nor the same painful memories of darkness and drowning. But now Emory glanced at her friend’s empty side of the room, and all she could see were the things she could have done differently.
If she’d said something to keep Romie from walking out that door. If she hadn’t gone after her. If she hadn’t been inside those caves. If she’d been quick enough, powerful enough, to save everyone, healed them as she’d healed herself…
If she had stayed home, she wouldn’t have to wonder. She could shut everything out and not have to face this suffocating guilt.
But she had tried doing exactly that this summer. Sheltered up in her room, ignoring everything and everyone until the sight of that mark on her wrist and the spiraling nightmares of that night and this feeling of wrongness in her blood drove her out of her stupor at last, and she’d known that she had no choice but to go back. To seek answers as to why those students went into the caves and ensure no one else met the same fate.
It was what Romie would have done had their roles been reversed.
The hint of a voice slithered in through the still-open window, or maybe it was just the breeze. In the courtyard below, Emory glimpsed Keiran near the fountain. The ghost of his gaze on her lingered, the intensity of it raising the hairs on the back of her neck.
You’re alive. You’re all right.
She promptly shut the window, throwing the room into silence once more, and made her way to the armoire.
She had a bonfire to go to.
2 BAZ
IT WAS NOT UNUSUAL FOR Baz Brysden to lose track of time, which truly had to be the height of all irony, given the nature of his magic.
A book was all it ever took to hold him captive, make him forget to eat, to sleep, to exist in his own body. Naturally, nothing contented him more than libraries, and Aldryn College had plenty of those to indulge his fondness. Four, to be exact: a library for each of the main lunar houses, and a fifth if you counted the small collection amassed down in Obscura Hall, home of the Eclipse students. Though Baz firmly believed that a few shelves of dusty tomes in a severely underused classroom did not a library make, even if it did offer the quietest backdrop for studying—even quieter now, he supposed, with Kai gone.
And then there was the Vault. The heart of all knowledge, hidden in Aldryn’s lower levels at the juncture between its four libraries. It housed some of the world’s most precious and ancient texts, carefully warded against thieves and unwanted eyes and the cruel passage of time. Only a select few professors and students were ever granted access, and only if the dean of students herself allowed it.
Three long years at Aldryn, and Baz had not once stepped foot in the Vault, despite all the research he helped Professor Selandyn with, which often required the perusal of such texts as those found in the Vault. But the aging Eclipse professor—who was an Omnilinguist, a play on Unraveler magic that allowed her to understand and speak any language she encountered, a rather benign ability as far as Eclipse magic went, yet one which brought her wide respect—was peculiar when it came to her books and her research.
She trusted Baz implicitly as her teaching assistant, yet she never let him do much more than run errands and transcribe her handwritten notes on his typewriter, a near-impossible task given the illegibility of her penmanship, but one he’d come to master all the same.
Today was different. Professor Selandyn needed a book for her new research topic—the mythology surrounding the disappearance of the Tides—and had sent him to retrieve it from the Vault in her place.
“It’s your last year of undergrad,” she’d told him this morning when he’d gone to see her instead of heading to the assembly hall. “It’s time I start giving you more responsibilities if you’re serious about becoming a professor.”
He’d heard the unspoken words in the ensuing silence, seen the truth of them in the grief she wore like a shawl: that with Kai gone and Baz the only one left under her tutelage, her heart wasn’t in it, the teaching. That he would likely be leading his studies himself this year while she remained in her office with her books and research and endless supply of tea.
The Vault’s permissions desk was manned by a vaguely familiar student. Her Waxing Moon tattoo, a muted silver crescent entwined with a creeping vine of blooming indigo hollyhocks, was stark against the tawny brown of her hand, which held up an all-too-familiar book: Song of the Drowned Gods. One of the newer editions, from the looks of it. A thrum of excitement ran through Baz. He wasn’t one for small talk—or any social interaction, really, something Romie had constantly reminded him of, always trying to get him to engage in anything other than his books—but if he must speak to people, he didn’t mind it being about this.
“Has the scholar found the other worlds yet?”
The girl’s mouth quirked up as she set her book down. “Just the sea of ash, but I’m almost at the part where he finds the Wychwood.”
“The rib cage that wraps around the heart of the world,” Baz recited.
The girl dramatically pressed a hand over her heart. “My favorite.” She gave him a rueful smile.
Baz palmed the back of his neck, incapable of thinking up more words. Behind the desk was an impressive silver door set into the crude stone wall, wrought with intricate motifs of frothy waves and the Tides of Fate themselves, fitting guardians for what lay beyond.