Eclipse-born.
She couldn’t be. Her blood would have marked her as Eclipse-born. And surely Emory would have known, would have pieced it together at some point during her training. These other powers would have manifested. She would never have had to resort to bloodletting to use healing magic outside of the new moon, because the Eclipse-born could call on their power at will, no matter the moon phase.
But that had never been the case. She’d had no inkling of these magics until…
Emory looked at the dark stain of Dovermere in the distance. She pressed a thumb against the spiral scar on her wrist, the same symbol that was burned black on Travers’s corpse. The same one gleaming silver on Keiran’s skin.
If the ritual had done something to her that night, burned this symbol on her… could it be the source of all this strangeness?
“Is that what happened in the caves?” Baz asked as if he could read her thoughts. “Romie… All those students who drowned… It was you, wasn’t it? Your magic.”
You killed them.
He didn’t say the words aloud, but the look on his face conveyed them all the same. Tears sprang to Emory’s eyes. She couldn’t blame him for thinking it, not after what he’d just witnessed her doing—what she would have done had he not stepped in. Not when she herself was wondering the same thing.
Your fault, Travers’s eyes had screamed.
Was it her fault, what happened in Dovermere? Had she called upon Reaper magic then, too?
She couldn’t bear the thought. She already felt guilty enough as it was, wondering how things would have been different had she not gone into those caves.
“It was the tide,” Emory professed, words nearly drowned out by the Aldersea. “Nothing more.”
Perhaps saying it would make it true.
Baz tore his gaze from her, shaking his head. “You need to tell Dean Fulton about this.”
It took a beat for his words to register. The threat beneath them. Emory blanched. “She’ll send me to the Regulators.”
“Better that than you losing control.”
Fear bloomed in Emory’s chest. If the dean found out, if people learned she’d used magic outside of her lunar house—that she might, in fact, be in the wrong lunar house…
They would brand her with the Unhallowed Seal.
To receive the seal—to have one’s magic, their lifeblood, permanently sealed off—was a fate most often reserved for Eclipse-born who Collapsed, a steep price to pay for losing control. But others could receive it too. Reapers who used their death touch to murder innocent people. Glamours who made others do terrible things against their will, thanks to their gifts of compulsion. She’d heard of Shadowguides whose necromantic practices were too sickening to speak of, Memorists who wiped people’s entire minds until they were left with nothing, not even their own names.
The Unhallowed Seal was the ultimate penalty for misusing magic. And to lie about one’s tidal alignment was among the very worst offenses.
Once, the Eclipse-born had been so wildly feared that it wasn’t uncommon for parents to forge birth certificates in the hopes of protecting their children from persecution. And though that was a long time ago, and lying about one’s alignment had since become damn near impossible to do, what with the appearance of intricate machines that tested their blood to verify their lunar house and tidal alignment, Emory was fairly certain this had never happened. That no one had ever suddenly become Eclipse-born, much less anything as unheard of as a Tidecaller.
She curled her hands into fists at her sides. This was the spiral mark’s doing, it had to be—she refused to believe she was Eclipse-born.
“You can’t tell anyone. This has to stay between us.”
Baz’s eyes bored into hers. The wind tore at his tangled curls, the only sound in the silence that stretched between them. He was the one person who knew, and if he turned from her now…
Fear and desperation seized her. “Please, Baz. I didn’t want this. These powers aren’t… I’m still the same as before.” She took a tentative step forward and Baz recoiled, as if he feared death still clung to her. “You have to believe me.” She hated how her voice broke.
Baz ran a hand over his tired face, pushing his glasses up to pinch the bridge of his nose before letting out an angry sigh. “Don’t you have any idea how dangerous Eclipse magic can be? It isn’t something you can keep secret. Even to the most well-trained of us, it’s unstable and unsafe. It has to be controlled, and from what I just saw, you have no control over it whatsoever. You would’ve likely Collapsed if I hadn’t intervened.”
Realization dawned on Emory. He was right. Whether or not these magics were the mark’s doing—that it somehow gave her Eclipse magic, made her into a Tidecaller through whatever twisted ritual she’d interrupted in the caves—she’d had no control tonight, had nearly killed someone because of it.
She couldn’t let that happen again.
“You could train me,” she said quietly.
A nervous laugh bubbled from Baz’s mouth before he saw how serious she was.
“Absolutely not.”
“You could.” Her heart thudded in her chest at how perfect this was. The answer to her problem, staring right at her. “You could show me how to control it, how to—Where are you going?” she yelled at Baz’s back as he stormed off again.
“Did you not hear a single word I just said?”
Emory hurried to catch up to him. “I get it, it’s dangerous. So teach me how to control it so I don’t hurt anyone before I can even make sense of it.”
“There’s no way in the Deep I’m training you. I don’t know the first thing about Tidecaller magic.”
“At the very least, you know more than I do about Eclipse magic.”
“Exactly, which means I know that if you slip up, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“That little display of power you did back there begs to differ. You wound back time, kept my magic from slipping further. You said it yourself, you probably stopped me from Collapsing.” His pace quickened, but she matched it stride for stride. “If Eclipse magic is so dangerous, then having you train me is the best solution for everyone.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s stupid and irresponsible and I don’t want any part of it.”
“Please, Baz.”
“You’re on your own.”
“You know I’ll get branded if I go to the dean!” Emory shouted as he kept walking away from her. Her desperation sharpened. “She’ll send me straight to the Institute, and they’ll seal my magic off without question because when’s the last time anyone’s heard of a fucking Tidethief existing?”
Before she could think twice, the words Emory knew might finally reach him tore angrily from her throat: “Do you really resent me so much you’d let them brand me like they did your father?”
His back went straight as a rod. Emory’s face flushed as he ever so slowly turned to her. She almost wished she had his ability so she could swallow the words back, knowing how sore a subject his father’s Collapsing was. It was the moment that changed everything for Baz—that changed everything between them, too, squashing the budding friendship they’d had as he became a recluse and she let him, finding it easier to keep him at a distance like everyone else did because the alternative would have been social suicide.
She wasn’t exactly proud of herself for it, nor for bringing the subject up now. But she wouldn’t back down from this. She needed him. Needed someone to help her control this magic while she figured out why—how—she had it at all.
“I can’t do this on my own,” Emory whispered against the chaos of the wind and the sea, on the verge of tears at the veracity of those horrible words. She’d never been alone. Romie had been by her side since their first day at Threnody’s prep school for gifted children, a steady presence to count on at every turn. But not here now when Emory needed someone most.
And whose fault was that, in the end?