I want to speak to Romie Brysden.
Ominous clouds swallowed up the stars. Behind her, Baz shouted her name, but she didn’t listen.
Romie, please, answer me…
There was salt on her cheeks, her lips—from the sea or her tears, she couldn’t tell. A wave threatened to knock her off-balance. Fingers dug painfully into her arm to keep her steady. Baz’s face was inches from her own, eyes wide and distraught behind his glasses. She realized they were standing waist-deep in the water as another wave broke against them, making her lurch toward him. The Aldersea was stirring, as if angered at their presence. Wordlessly, they pulled each other back to shore, Baz’s hand still tight around her arm. They stumbled onto the beach, falling to their knees on the wet sand. The cuts on her feet burned, but it was a distant sort of hurt. She didn’t bother healing them.
“Are you crazy?” Baz bit out on a shaky breath.
Emory drew her knees close to her chest, trembling against the cold. Baz lingered at her side, shoulders tense, as if he thought she might flee into the water again. She pulled the coat he’d lent her more tightly around her. It was warm and dry and smelled like him.
“I know what I saw was real,” she said forcefully. “I was dreaming of Dovermere. There was a melody… someone calling my name… I followed it into the sea and there she was. Her voice was crystal clear, Baz. Then the nightmare creatures came and pulled her into the waves, and someone told me to wake up, and I just knew I had to come here.”
Emory’s eyes drifted to the water, those cliffs. When she looked at Baz again, she noted the concerned line of his mouth, his utter stillness as he watched her.
Her shoulders slumped. “You don’t believe me.”
Baz held her gaze, and it felt like the whole world hinged on what he would say next. Something flickered in his eyes. Not quite reproach, not quite anger, but perhaps as close to it as it would ever get with him. It banked, disappearing as quickly as it had appeared, and when he spoke, his voice was soft, nearly drowned out by the waves.
“You told me you don’t remember everything that happened that night. That there are pieces missing. And with Travers and everything that’s happened… It can’t be easy, to live with that kind of trauma. That guilt.” His throat bobbed. “But Romie’s dead, Emory. It took me this long to come to terms with it myself. But she’s dead, and the sooner we accept it, the sooner we can move on with our lives.”
Emory shook her head, wiping furiously at her tears, desperate to deny it. But his words broke something in her. He was right: Guilt chipped away at her soul. Guilt at not remembering exactly what occurred in Dovermere. Guilt over what happened to Travers and Romie and all the others, which she could never know for certain wasn’t her doing.
Everything might have been her fault. The result of her Eclipse magic unlocking at whatever strange pull Dovermere had on her. And even if the Selenic Order did find a way to bring back the Tides, and the deities managed to return those they’d lost to them, Emory would forever carry that guilt.
She tried to find an answer in Baz’s eyes, searched for that glimmer of accusation she’d feared to see so many times, the resentment he surely harbored toward her. But the way he looked at her… There was none of that. Only a heartbreaking sort of understanding.
“You should hate me.” Suddenly she couldn’t stand his silence, his softness. An angry sob tore past her lips as she shoved at him. “Why don’t you hate me, Baz?”
He reached for her as she moved to shove him again, freezing fingers wrapping around her wrists. Emory fought weakly against his hold, tears falling in earnest down her cheeks now.
“Emory…”
She came undone, sagging against the curve of his arms, and then he was holding her close, a solid weight to keep her from shattering. And here in the dark, with the angry sea and Dovermere’s looming presence, with the crushing sadness and guilt and dream madness pressing down on her, this was the only thing that felt real. The sound of her name on his lips, the solidity of his embrace, the faint smell of coffee and bergamot that enveloped her, soothing, grounding, familiar.
Emory tilted her head up to his. She caught the shadow that fell on his face, the way his lips parted slightly, his throat bobbed.
She caught sight of something else, too, just out of the corner of her eye.
A figure rising from the water.
Emory gripped Baz’s arm. He leaned in, mistaking the gesture for something else before he noticed the widening of her eyes, the leeching of color from her face. He turned around and startled, falling back with a swear.
“What is that?”
Emory was already on her feet, recognition spurring her to action as the figure drew nearer. She knew that small frame, those dark tresses. They were a mirror of another girl, another body that had found its way onto these shores. But where the other Azula twin had been strewn on the sand with her limbs bent at odd angles, this one was alive.
Unchanged.
Lia Azula stepped out of the sea, looking for all the world like she was emerging from a leisurely midnight swim. Her eyes found Emory’s.
The night paused between them.
And then Lia collapsed on the sand.
Emory rushed to her side, barely hearing Baz calling out to her. She grabbed hold of Lia, who looked up at her with pleading eyes. Her mouth fell open, but no words came out, only a trickle of water.
Just like Travers. Just like Romie in her dream.
Emory braced for Lia’s body to start disintegrating as Travers’s had, readying her healing magic, but by then Lia was screaming, a wail that pierced the night. She staggered out of Emory’s grasp and back toward the water. Her hands flew to her neck as her screams turned desperate, then faded to a gargled whimper, then to nothing at all. Emory flung her healing magic at her, desperate to stop whatever afflicted her.
Lia fell limply to the wet sand. She went utterly still, eyes fixed on the night sky. The spiral on her upturned wrist was black. Her mouth hung agape, clouds of steam wafting from it, and Emory stumbled back at what she saw.
Baz fell to his knees on the other side of Lia’s body, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the moonlight, as horror-struck as Emory’s own.
The inside of Lia’s mouth was charred down to her very throat. Burnt to a crisp.
And her tongue was missing.
22 BAZ
THERE WERE DIFFERENT KINDS OF silence:
There were those Baz could comfortably sink into, like the peaceful lull of the Decrescens library with its featherweight fluttering of pages and steady heartbeats of clocks, or the early hours of the morning in the Eclipse commons when the world had yet to rise.
There were those he found unbearable, the awkward pauses and long silences he always felt the need to fill but never quite knew how.
And then there was the knife-edged kind, too full of unsaid words yet too fragile to break, the sort of silence that meant everything was about to change.
Such a silence lingered in the Eclipse commons, punctuated only by the steady drip of brewing coffee, Emory’s soft breathing where she slept on the sofa, the screeching of gulls outside as the morning sun ascended. But even those sounds were quiet, hesitant. As if scared to cut themselves on the sharp truth of it all.
Baz feared if he listened close enough, he might hear Lia’s bloodcurdling scream trapped somewhere in that silence.