Thinking of Lia, Emory asked, “Did Farran… Was he lost to Dovermere, or did his body…”
“We got to bury him,” Keiran murmured.
“What was he like?”
“He was the kindest person I knew. He saw only the good in everyone, in the world itself. He was a hopeless romantic that way.” His hand drew slow circles on her arm. “It ate away at his heart to see anyone in pain. Back in prep school, he was dating someone in secret. An Eclipse-born. He thought none of us knew, but we did. It was so painfully obvious how smitten he was. We never brought it up, though, thinking he’d tell us on his own terms. But after what happened with our parents… I think he thought he had to choose. That staying with an Eclipse-born would be an affront to us and the memory of our parents. He was different after that, wanted so desperately to ease our hurt that he threw himself into this endeavor to wake the Tides, and nothing else mattered.”
Then, so soft she might not have heard him: “He shouldn’t have felt like he had to choose. I always regretted not telling him that.”
Emory supposed she understood better now why he was so quick to accept her being Eclipse-born. He thought he’d failed his friend by making him feel like he couldn’t be with who he wanted to be, simply because they were from House Eclipse.
But the mistake of a single Eclipse-born wasn’t all of theirs to shoulder.
When she finally drifted to sleep, she wished with all her being to be carried back to Romie. But her dreams were void, her friend nowhere in them.
24 BAZ
EMORY FOUND BAZ IN THE Decrescens library first thing the next morning.
“What do you know of the sleepscape?” she asked without preamble.
He shot her a skeptical look. “Why?”
She spread her hands on the table. “I want to try reaching Romie in dreams. And before you say anything, I know this is complex magic that’s far bigger than anything else I’ve wielded, and I know you think I’m reckless and not ready to start training yet, but unless you thought of something better, this really is the only option we have.”
For Tides’ sake. His coffee hadn’t even properly kicked in yet.
Before Baz could object, Emory angled her body toward him, leaning in close. “Let me at least try. For Romie’s sake.”
There was a hitch in his breath at her sudden proximity, the softness of her plea. His eyes caught on her lips. Images from the other night tugged at his memory: the way she’d held on to him as waves crashed around them, how close they’d been before spotting Lia in the water.
His throat bobbed. He tried to come up with an argument against her plan but couldn’t. She was right: it was their only recourse. “All right.”
She pulled back in shock. “Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“All right, then.” Emory sank in the chair across from him. “The problem is I don’t know the first thing about accessing the sleepscape.”
“Neither do I.” A field of purple-black poppies glared at him from the stained-glass window above. Baz sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “But I know someone who does.”
Emory lifted a brow. “No one else knows about me being a Tidecaller, Baz. We can’t exactly waltz up to any Dreamer and have them show me how it works.”
“Not a Dreamer,” he said darkly. “A Nightmare Weaver.”
SONG OF THE DROWNED GODS
PART IV:
THE GUARDIAN AT THE GATE
There is a faraway world where things grow like a song builds to its crescendo.
There is always music there. Melodies that make and unmake beneath strangely dancing skies. Symphonies of lightning and thunder and whispering winds. Dissonant chords plucked in the space between stars like faint echoes of worlds beyond.
It is atop the highest peak hidden in the clouds that a boy gives audience to this divine orchestra. He sits by the icy gates he is tasked with guarding, lonely but never alone. The music keeps him company, the winged horses, too, and he has his lyre to play when he aches for something more attuned to his moods.
But mostly he listens.
Not many people listen, and so the moon and sun and stars share their secrets with the boy. They sing visions that swim in his eyes and chant prophecies that prickle at his skin. They whisper of bloodstreams that are also lungs and rib cages that wrap around hearts and the hollow at the center of it all where a once-sprawling sea turned to ash and its once-mighty gods were left unmoored.
Listen, they whisper. Hear the blood and hear the bones and hear the fiercely beating heart.
They fill his soul with hope, longing, purpose, and soon the boy is too unstrung to merely sit and listen.
It is his turn to make music now, to voice all the secrets he cannot keep alone.
Thus he picks up his lyre and begins to play.
Can you hear him? The boy who sings of silver and marble and gold? The gods speak through him, and he lets them, thinking himself the cleverer adversary. Come, he beckons the scholar and the witch and the warrior whose souls are an echo of his own. Seek me as I see you.
He wills the chords of his lyre to draw them a map among the stars, and the skies weep to hear the sound.
Patience, they whisper. Take heart.
They will find him among the stars—he is certain of it.
And so the boy waits by his gate, still lonely, but not for long.
25 EMORY
THE SIGHT OF THE INSTITUTE made Emory’s skin crawl.
She was caught off guard again by the New Moon sigil on Baz’s right hand as they climbed out of the cab. He met her gaze, face bloodless.
“This will work, right?”
Emory ground her teeth. “Let’s hope.”
It had been Baz’s idea to mask his Eclipse sigil to get inside the Institute—a little illusion work to get us through the door, he’d said—but the inspiration behind it had sprung from her. They’d been in Obscura Hall under the twilit hues of its imagined sky, trying to figure out how to get into the Institute—notorious for turning away Eclipse-born for no reason, according to Baz—when she had reached for Baz’s magic, wondering what it might feel like to bend time to her will.
It had felt like plunging into shockingly cold waters, her lungs filling with it as she gasped for breath. She didn’t know which way was up or down, how to pull away from this magic that felt terrifyingly foreign, vast and complicated and crushing in a way she would never understand. She’d finally sputtered out of its grasp, eyes wide and clutching at her chest, to find Baz reaching for her as if he’d meant to shake her out of her stupor.
His voice trembled. “What in the Tides’ name was that?”
Emory hadn’t known how to describe it, how scary it had felt. She’d thought Eclipse magics might somehow be easier for her to wield, that being Eclipse-born herself would create an affinity for them.
“Tidecallers drew on the lunar magics of the Tides, not the Shadow’s own magic,” Baz had argued like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
But Emory was undeterred. Now that she’d tried it, she wanted to see how far she could go, test the limits of her power. “What if I tried with another Eclipse magic?”
Somehow, she managed to sway him, and it was how she found herself reaching for the Illusion magic around them. It wasn’t as overwhelming as Baz’s magic, though it still felt dangerous. Like treading murky water without knowing when she might drop into an abyss. She got the sense that one wrong step would bring her to Collapse faster than it would take Baz to reach for his magic to stop her.