Nothing was impossible.
“It’s late,” Keiran whispered. “I should go.”
Emory swallowed down her disappointment as he pulled away. What had she hoped for? That he would stay and—Tides. She needed to keep her head straight.
Keiran lingered by the door. “Do you see now why I was so adamant to back you at the lighthouse? Why I asked you to trust me? If this works… it’ll change everything, Ains.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“It will.”
“How can you be so sure?”
His mouth lifted in that boyish grin, though his eyes—his eyes darkened in a way that made her knees weak.
“You underestimate how tireless I can be when I chase after something I want.”
* * *
Dovermere finds her again in sleep. Dream, memory, memory dream—the lines too blurred to know one from the other.
Around her, the cave walls drip with not water but tiny stars that plummet slowly to the ground, fading as they reach the growing darkness at her feet. Romie stands alone before the great hourglass with its shifting black sands and wilting flowers trapped inside. A silver spiral burns on the surface where her hand touches the glass.
“I read that there are symbols like this everywhere, strewn about in the deepest, darkest places in the world.”
Romie’s voice echoes strangely around them. Her hair is a wet mess, her skin bloated and wrong. “Some say they were put there by naiads and sirens as a way to contact each other. A bridge between the world’s many bodies of water.”
Her lightless eyes find Emory’s. Behind her, the spiral unfurls into a golden sunflower that burns through the glass and the flowers and the sand. The remaining ash spills from inside, and it is not ash at all but claws of shadow that slither over Romie’s arms and neck.
Her lips are blue with cold death. Water trickles from the sides of her mouth as she tries to speak, but no sound comes out. Her distorted voice echoes ghostlike in Emory’s ears instead: “The water guides us all, even when it claims us.”
“I don’t understand,” says Emory.
Tendrils of darkness crawl into Romie’s eyes, her blackened throat. Her voice sounds all around and nowhere at all. “There are tides that drown and tides that bind, tides with voices not all kind…”
The breath is squeezed from Romie’s throat. She points a single finger to something behind Emory. A great beast of shadow erupts.
It is darkness
fear
nightmare
bound in a soulless form that sets hungry, fathomless eyes on Emory. The beast lends wrongness to the dream, and when it swipes for her, she knows it will devour her and leave her bones to feed the ancient stone.
She runs toward Romie, but Romie is not Romie anymore. She is stardust that turns to ash that sinks below the stone to depths unknown.
A voice sounds in Emory’s ear, velvet as the night:
“That way lies madness, dreamling.”
* * *
Emory’s eyes flew open, glancing wildly around her in the dark. The dream was already fading, but that voice…
Only a dream, she told herself before falling back asleep.
16 BAZ
* * *
The printing press haunts his nightmares once more.
Baz peers at the grandfather clock in the corner. He knows by now how the scene plays out, down to the very second. Knowing does not lessen the horror.
It starts with his father’s arms wound tight around Baz’s middle, silver veins rippling beneath his skin. Ten seconds from now, the roof will cave in. In twenty, one of the printers explodes and metal bits of machinery start flying. In thirty, the screaming stops, death come to claim its fill. The ink on his father’s hands always turns to blood then, and that is how Baz knows it is only a nightmare.
“It’s going to be all right,” says his father—yet it is not his voice Baz hears but another’s.
He looks up and glimpses Kai before him.
“This isn’t real,” the Nightmare Weaver utters with a frown, as if to convince himself more than Baz.
A second later the world is burned in silver.
* * *
Baz woke with a start, blinking up at the ceiling through tear-blurred eyes. Dazedly he realized he was not in his own room but in Kai’s. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, had only come in here thinking it might appease this guilt he felt at leaving him behind. It hadn’t, but now that he was here, he didn’t want to leave.
Kai’s painted constellations swirled over him in the dark. Not real, Baz thought, and wistfully drifted back to sleep.
SONG OF THE DROWNED GODS
PART III:
THE WARRIOR OF THE WASTES
There is a world somewhere between near and far where things grow from nothing.
Sturdy trees with suits of armor sprout from inhospitable soil, while mighty beasts hatch from delicate stones and molten rock yields swords of gold. Fierce warriors are carved from the most fragile of hearts, and things like courage and love ignite like flames in the dark.
This world is a forge. Brutal and scorching and full of finely crafted things.
A warrior sprang from this world as improbably as the flowers that bloom in its arid wilderness. She was not a warrior at first, but something else she does not care to remember. （A sword does not recall the lump of metal it came from; it knows only the hand that wields it and the sun that kisses its blade and the life that bleeds at its fateful end.）
Now the warrior takes lives and defends lives and binds them too, weaving a ballad of life and death, flame and steel. Metal sings in her hands as it does in a smith’s; the battlefield is her forge. She crafts victories out of impossible odds and wins her people’s love with every beast slayed. Around her, empires rise and burn just as the sun dies and reawakens, and through it all the warrior remains unchanged because she is the heart of her world, the bright burning core of it.
And here come the blood and the bones like moths to a flame, eager to rally her to their cause. To answer the call that she, too, has heard between the stars.
This is her story now as much as it is theirs, and here it begins.
17 EMORY
THE MORNING AFTER EMORY’S OATH-TAKING felt like waking up to a new world, a new her. She was a whetted blade sharpened by intention, and all she wanted now was to be worthy of the Selenic Order’s purpose, of Keiran’s belief in her abilities—all of it to see Romie again.
Waking the Tides. It seemed an impossible feat, yet how many impossible things had she witnessed and done herself since the start of the term?
She needed to master her magic, and fast. The problem, she realized, was the frayed state of things between her and Baz, the only one who might help her hone her power and keep her from Collapsing in the process. He wasn’t in the Decrescens library at their usual appointed hour, and after their little spat in the greenhouse, she feared he might no longer want to see her at all. She couldn’t blame him, really, but it hurt all the same.
No time to dwell on it. Now that Emory knew her Tidecaller magic didn’t come from her spiral mark, her thoughts were full of Luce, wondering why and how her mother might have hidden the true nature of her magic. This, at least, she could tackle on her own. It was easy to find where the lunar almanacs were kept in the archives. She pulled up the one from the year she was born and found her birth date—the second day of a new moon in the dead of winter, at the lowest point of a rising tide. She flipped to the day before it, the first day of the new moon.