Baz kicked at the dirt path. “Speaking of Romie…” He palmed the back of his neck. “I stayed up all night going over everything in my head. Trying to make sense of the pattern between the two bodies that washed ashore.”
They had reappeared on a night that corresponded to their respective lunar houses, each succumbing to strange magics that seemed to twist their own: Travers, a Healer, withering away to a husk of a person; Lia, a Wordsmith, robbed of her ability to speak.
And Emory—always Emory at the heart of it. As if her mere presence at Dovermere had called to them somehow, drawing them back to these shores from the depths that had claimed them.
She seemed to read his thoughts, her gaze drifting to the imagined sea. “Maybe it is all my fault.”
The quiet despair in her voice compelled him to reach for her, just like he had last night.
Why don’t you hate me, Baz?
Instead, he shoved his hands in his pockets, too scared of screwing up whatever tentative, fledgling thing might be between them. “It doesn’t matter now,” he offered weakly.
“How can you say that after what happened?”
“Passing around blame won’t bring Romie back. What we need now is to figure out what the hell’s going on so we can save her.”
He had just started to accept her death and move on, as everyone around him said he should. But that was before Lia showed up without a tongue. Certainty now thrummed at his fingertips, because of this he was sure:
Romie was alive.
Alive.
It felt almost too big, too impossible to even think it, but it had to be true.
He eyed Emory’s wrist, where he’d seen the spiral on her skin glow silver. “You put your hand in the water last night, and that mark glowed.” Her silence spoke volumes. Baz pressed on: “Tell me what it is. What you were trying to do with it.”
She chewed the inside of her cheek, and he thought for a moment she would lie again, tell him it was nothing. “It appeared that night in Dovermere.” The words came haltingly, as if she were weighing each one. “I’m not sure how, exactly, but when I woke up on the beach, there it was. The others… the ones who didn’t make it… They all had it too, though theirs was black. I thought maybe Dovermere marking us this way might connect us. That if Romie was alive, maybe I could…”
“You thought you might reach her somehow?”
Emory nodded. She studied him, a crease forming between her brows. “That note you showed me of Romie’s. Why do you think she went to Dovermere because of Song of the Drowned Gods?”
Baz hesitated for only a second. A part of him still wasn’t sure he could trust her—she was clearly still hiding something from him, yet she’d trusted him enough to come straight to him after seeing Romie in her dreams, despite how her involvement in all of this made her look. She was just as eager for answers as he was—that much he believed. And now they held the secret of Lia between them and needed to figure out what was going on before it happened again.
So he told her everything: Romie’s interest in the relation between Dovermere and Song of the Drowned Gods, her search for the missing epilogue and belief in the existence of other worlds. His own research into the parallels between the Tides and the drowned gods, the Deep and the sea of ash. The song heard between the stars and the doors to the Deep and the spiral Emory bore, a symbol somehow tied to all of it, just as she seemed to be.
She stroked the scar on her wrist, a pensive look in her eye. “You think the four students who vanished—Travers, Lia, Jordyn, Romie… They all went through a door inside Dovermere. To answer the call of fictional gods that may or may not be the Tides themselves.”
“Possibly.” The look on her face wasn’t as skeptical as he’d have thought, which was a relief. “What else might explain how two of them have come back now, still alive and seemingly fine? Not a scratch on them, no bloated skin, not a single sign of starvation or anything when they first appeared. No one can survive that long inside those caves. Unless they’re not inside the caves at all.” His thoughts raced. “Do you remember seeing anything that might resemble such a door?”
He almost felt bad for asking as he glimpsed the haunted look in her eye.
“No,” she breathed, “nothing like that.”
Baz knew it couldn’t be that easy, yet he refused to let it go. “You said you heard a melody in your dream. What if it’s the same one Romie was hearing?”
A beat as they shared a look.
“You think it’s the song in Song of the Drowned Gods,” Emory said.
“Something is calling you to Dovermere. Just as it called Romie.”
And Kai.
Baz pressed on, too worked up now to stop: “There are four heroes in Song of the Drowned Gods. Four people who cross through worlds to find the sea of ash. And there were four students that night whose bodies never made it out of Dovermere.”
Four students born of four moon phases, each with a different magic: Healer, Wordsmith, Soultender, Dreamer.
Blood and bones and heart and soul.
“What about the four students who washed up onshore with me that night?” Emory asked.
In her eyes he thought he could glimpse those bodies, could imagine the horror she must have felt when she came to on the beach, surrounded by death.
There are tides that drown and tides that bind…
“Maybe they just… died. Drowned by the tide. Maybe the door only admits four. You didn’t go through it either.”
“That still doesn’t explain how Travers and Lia came back,” Emory argued.
“That’s the real question, isn’t it? Because if the four of them did somehow go through a door they’d been searching for, be it to the Deep or the sea of ash or some other distant shore, what would make them turn back? And most importantly, what might make them suffer such horrible deaths once they returned?”
The image of Lia’s burnt insides and Travers’s withered corpse flashed between them.
Emory looked at Baz expectantly, brows slightly arched. “Clearly, you have a theory.”
A rush of excitement and growing certainty vibrated through him. “If the missing epilogue is the key to traveling between worlds, they must have never found it. They tried to do it without this key element, and now they’re stuck.”
“Stuck where?”
… and those that dance ’neath stranger skies.
Baz pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “In another world.”
He knew how it sounded, knew it made little sense—and yet, maybe there was truth to Clover’s story after all. Maybe the Veiled Atlas had it right.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “Romie and Jordyn are still alive somewhere. We just have to figure out how to get to them before the same thing that happened to Travers and Lia happens to them, too.”
23 EMORY
A LETTER WAS WAITING FOR her under her door.
Emory had been about ready to cry as she rushed back to her room, intent on changing out of Baz’s clothes and getting her thoughts in order. The sight of her father’s handwriting on the envelope finally brought her to tears.
A pang of homesickness washed over her as she opened it. Her mind conjured her father in stark detail: reddish-blond hair a tangled mess that fell to his shoulders, a big smile in the middle of his beard. Emory imagined burying her face in the rough-spun wool of his sweater, the scent of brown bread and chowder in the kitchen, playing cards together in the evenings while a fire crackled in the hearth. She could almost hear his gruff voice in her ears as she read his words: