Just then, Virgil came up to them holding a small pouch with the sigil of House Waxing Moon stitched on the indigo velvet. “Who wants a party favor?”
Nisha was right behind him, arms crossed and looking at Virgil with her nose upturned in mild disdain. Emory watched him dig out a tiny flake of something silvery from the pouch and set it on his tongue. It dissolved before her eyes. Virgil turned his face to the ceiling-less sky and intoned in a voice laced with theater, “Youthful Anima, bestow upon me the powers of your tides.”
Her heart pounded in her chest. “What is it?”
A booming laugh. “What is it, she asks. Oh, to be so innocent.”
Emory felt her cheeks burn so hot she wished to disappear.
“It’s just a party trick, really,” Nisha said.
“An expensive and illicit party trick,” Virgil amended, “so best you keep quiet about what you see here, Healer, yeah?”
What Penelope had said about exclusive parties and weird magics came back to her. “What does it do?”
“It’s a way to bend the rules of magic so we can know what other alignments feel like,” Nisha explained. She jerked her chin at a group of Selenics who were sampling the food with such elation, they seemed to be having a religious experience. “This one uses Amplifier magic to sharpen the senses.”
Emory frowned at the Selenics around her. Most of them had the same air of mindless wonder about them, like they were seeing the world in color for the first time. Whatever this thing was bent the rules of magic, sure enough, but it was a far cry from what she could do, from what she’d seen Keiran doing too. Healing the bird, making roses bloom—that kind of magic had been purposeful. Deliberate. Whatever this was felt exactly like Nisha said: a mere party trick for those who couldn’t do the real thing.
Keiran was watching her carefully, his features hidden beneath the mask, but the meaning in his eyes was plain enough: this wasn’t the same thing she’d seen him do. And if Virgil was resorting to such measures, perhaps the Sower magic she’d glimpsed in the greenhouse had only been Keiran’s doing, no one else’s.
Could it be that only she and Keiran could do such magic at will?
She contemplated the bag still in Virgil’s hand. “So it lets anyone use Amplifier magic?”
“You can’t actually manipulate the magic,” Nisha supplied. “It’s more just an impression of it. A small taste of magic without any real sustenance.”
“And what a glorious, painfully fleeting taste it is,” Virgil mused. “Nothing like the s—”
“The Tidal Council has all arrived,” Lizaveta interrupted, showing up at their side. She gave Emory and Keiran a cold once-over. “They’re waiting for you.”
Time to prove herself, Emory thought. Keiran gave her a small nod of encouragement and guided her in the right direction, his hand hovering at the small of her back. It felt oddly grounding.
Four people sat on high-backed chairs fit for kings in front of a large archway, watching Emory like a council of regal owls. Their heads were crowned with their house’s lunar flowers, making them look like ancient deities against the backdrop of the night sky, with the curtains billowing softly around them and a carpet of ivy at their feet.
The first was a tall, reedy man in an emerald three-piece suit wearing Bruma’s face and a crown of black narcissus; the second was Keiran’s great-aunt Leonie, an arrangement of indigo hollyhocks now sitting atop her silver hair; the third was a smiling man wearing Aestas’s face, a brilliant wreath of white orchids resting on his dark curls; and the fourth was Vivianne, the Memorist that Keiran had pointed out to her, towering over the rest of them with a bouquet of purple-black poppies crowning her head.
Keiran led Emory to stand before the Council. The rest of the Order members threw curious looks their way. As if sensing something noteworthy was about to happen, they moved closer, fanning out into a semicircle around them. Their murmurs were unsettling, and Emory was glad for her mask again as some thirty porcelain faces stared at her.
A hush settled over the lighthouse.
“Whatever happens,” Keiran breathed at her side, “I’ve got your back.”
His words were more comforting than she cared to admit. Still, Emory had never been this nervous. This was it. Her fate to be decided by the Tides themselves, or their likeness, at least. She felt like a wave rushing inevitably toward the shore, unsure if she’d shatter against a barrier of rock or sigh gently across welcoming sands, unnerved as she was by the four porcelain faces staring blankly at her.
Keiran folded his hands behind his back and intoned, “Illustrious Tidal Council, I bring forth Emory Ainsleif, Healer of House New Moon.”
There was a momentous quality to his voice, to the air around them, as though the walls of the lighthouse themselves were waiting with bated breath to hear what would be said next.
“Four lunar cycles past, she faced the depths of Dovermere with the rest of our initiates and lived to tell the tale,” he continued, addressing the room at large. “The sea took eight of our brightest that night, the best the Tides had to offer, yet it spared her. A ninth soul there by happenstance, whom fate chose to return to us with the sigil of our Order on her skin. Marking her, for all intents and purposes, as one of our own.” He turned to Emory and gently lifted her arm so that the Tidal Council could glimpse her spiral mark. “She appears now before you to seek acceptance in our ranks.”
There was a resounding silence, more deafening than the waves outside or the whispers Emory thought would have risen at the revelation. But she felt the tension in the air, the hostility, all the same. This, she knew, was something that had never happened before. That went against the Order’s precious rules.
The man wearing Bruma’s face spoke first: “You’re saying she was never tapped for initiation, yet passed our initiation rites all the same?”
“Correct.”
“Then she’s an intruder,” the man with Aestas’s face seethed. “Why was she at Dovermere to begin with? Trying to weasel her way into our Order, perhaps?”
Emory stood frozen, unsure what to do. If it had been Romie standing here before the Tidal Council, she would have brazenly told them all to shove it, would have proved her worth with one clever trick. If there was ever a time to be more like Romie, it was now.
Emory took a grounding breath and slid off her Bruma mask. “I knew nothing of your Order at the time, sir,” she said loudly. “I simply went after a friend whose well-being I was worried about and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“And now?” This from Vivianne, the Memorist. “Surely you must know enough about our Order to end up here tonight.” She threw Keiran a suspicious glance. “Unless someone told you about us?”
“She pieced most of it together on her own after discovering an initiation invitation in her roommate’s things,” Keiran said smoothly. “Romie Brysden, one of last year’s initiates. It was only when she approached me with this information that I invited her here to appear before you.”
Emory was grateful for his quick intervention. The Tidal Council looked at her expectantly, and she seized her chance. “I did the ritual, same as the others. I survived the tide filling the Belly of the Beast. I escaped Dovermere, and though I wish I could say I wasn’t the only one who did, I was. I already bear your mark. Why not your title, too?” She swallowed hard, Romie’s face flashing before her eyes. “Please, let me join your ranks so I can honor those who’ve fallen.”