Outside, the tide was receding just as the sun began to rise, though it did little to chase away the darkness of the night.
Baz took his mug back up the stairs. He’d put off packing Kai’s belongings for too long and desperately needed something to distract himself with now. He headed straight to the room at the end of the small corridor, the door to which had been kept shut since Kai left. Baz opened it now, steeling himself for the other boy’s scent to engulf him.
The narrow bed in the corner was still messily unmade, the gauzy curtains not even pulled open. Dusty light filtered in, a dull shimmer that touched all the lingering traces of Kai with something close to reverence: various souvenirs from his travels adorning the walls, tapestries and garlands and postcards that had seen the world with him; incense sticks and candles and golden Luaguan relics sitting orderly atop the otherwise messy desk, where unopened and likely untouched schoolbooks were strewn across it; an old chessboard on the floor, all its pieces missing save for the white queen and a chipped black rook. Sad remnants of someone gone.
With a pang, Baz realized he had never once been in here. It was much like his own room, the tapestry faded and fraying around the same exposed wooden beams, but the ceiling, he noticed, was painted with stars. Muted gold and silver winked down at him, forming a constellation he did not know. Among them were words crudely carved into the wood:
HEAR THE BLOOD AND HEAR THE BONES AND HEAR THE FIERCELY BEATING HEART.
Baz’s own heart gave a painful squeeze at the line Kai had loved best from Song of the Drowned Gods. Their obsessive interest in Cornus Clover’s book was perhaps the only thing they’d ever had in common, a shared language to bridge the gap between opposites. He remembered the first time he’d seen Kai reading it in the commons, and all his unease about having to share this space with someone new had faded away to nothing.
On the bench below the window was a stack of multiple editions of Song of the Drowned Gods, all of them in different languages Kai had spoken fluently. Baz picked up the only copy in the one language he knew, an illustrated first edition. Something had been nagging at him since seeing Quince Travers’s body last night, a feeling he couldn’t pinpoint until just now. He flipped through the well-loved pages to the part he was looking for. “The Guardian at the Gate” had been Kai’s favorite section in the book, where the scholar and the witch and the warrior made their way to the fourth realm, wherein they found the guardian. The final member of their band of heroes, the missing piece of their grand puzzle.
He’d never been surprised at Kai’s fascination for the guardian. It was fitting, really, that he should so ardently defend the most widely criticized character. The guardian was just a boy at first, one who sought to be a hero, with grand dreams of one day guarding the mighty gate that separated his world from the sea of ash. Only those who could tame the winged horses that ruled this world’s stormy skies could become guardians, and so the boy journeyed to the icy gate atop the highest mountain peak, where an aging guardian stood, a god in his own right.
The old guardian laughed at the youth before him, certain he would never have the skill to tame the fabled beasts when so many had died trying. But the boy was undeterred, for he had purpose and something else others before him did not: he had skill with the lyre, an instrument said to make the winged horses amenable.
The guardian of the gate asked him to play a song to judge his talent for himself. And so the boy played, the guardian wept, and the gate itself sighed at the melody that echoed around the mountain. The winged horses descended from the skies and blessed the boy, marking him as the newest guardian of the gate.
Baz looked at the illustration beneath the part header. It depicted the boy sitting by the great gate as he plucked the chords of his lyre. Frost lined his lashes, and on his brow was the silver marking the winged horses had blessed him with.
The symbol went by many names: the Sacred Spiral of Rebirth, the Lunar Conch, the Selenic Mark, the Shadow’s Seal. Always associated with the Tides or the Shadow in some way or another, meant to depict the descent from the physical world, which was on the outermost ring of the spiral, into the Deep, which lay at the center. He’d never thought much of it before, why such an archaic symbol would be used in Song of the Drowned Gods. Clover was indeed known to include religious symbology in his story; after all, the drowned gods were a thinly veiled metaphor for the Tides, believed to have forsaken their shores long ago, sinking to the bottom of the ocean—the Deep they ruled over—just as the drowned gods in the story ruled their sea of ash.
But here it was, plainly drawn on the guardian’s brow. A symbol of divine connection, though which divinity it was attributed to was highly debated. Tides or Shadow. Or mythical flying horses, in the story’s case.
Baz’s insides thrummed as he thought of Romie’s note. His fingers skimmed the text below the illustration—the epigraph that preceded each part in the book, giving readers a glimpse into the new world they’d be entering—and quickly found the lines he knew so well:
He sings himself a role in their story, wills the chords of his lyre to draw them a map among the stars. Come, he beckons the scholar and the witch and the warrior, whose souls are an echo of his own. Seek me as I seek you.
He couldn’t make sense of why Romie would have thought this song—the call heard across worlds, a rallying cry for all the heroes spread across the stars—might be associated with Dovermere, or why she’d suddenly been so interested in anything having to do with Song of the Drowned Gods. But one thing he knew for certain:
That symbol was the same one he’d glimpsed on Quince Travers’s wrist, dark as dried blood, as his body was carried from the beach.
It could be nothing. Probably was. Yet he couldn’t shake the sense it was all connected.
He wished Kai was here. With how obsessed he’d been with the guardian and the missing epilogue, he might have been able to shed some light on all of this. But Kai wasn’t here, and so Baz would have to make do with who was, the only one who might have answers, even if the thought of seeing Emory now made him want to hide down here forever.
A Tidecaller. He still couldn’t believe it, thought it all might have been a fever dream.
Last night, between the howling wind and crashing waves, the pleading in her voice and the image of Travers’s withered body, it had been too much to bear, too loud and grating against his senses. A nightmare he couldn’t escape, like Kai’s Tides-damned bees. Baz had agreed to consider helping her out of a sense of duty, sympathizing with her fear of the Unhallowed Seal, but he’d done so against his better judgment. By the time he’d come back to the Eclipse commons, he’d all but decided to tell her no. A part of him realized he should have been jumping at the opportunity. If he so badly wanted to become an Aldryn professor, help keep other Eclipse-born from Collapsing, why not start with her?