Emory had cared even despite how isolating it had felt. While she’d been spending the better part of her time studying in the Noviluna library, fighting for her place at Aldryn because getting in was just the first step and now she had to earn that place by keeping her grades up, Romie had been off chasing the next best thing, the next best friend.
We get to reinvent ourselves here, be whoever we please.
Never had Emory thought this new life Romie imagined for herself might not include her at all.
She barely registered Professor Cezerna dismissing them at the end of class. She was merely going through the motions, grabbing her books only because everyone else around her did, her thoughts so full of Romie she almost didn’t hear her name being called through the hum of chatter.
“Emory!”
Penelope West stood a few steps down the creaking wooden staircase, peering up at her with large doe eyes and a friendly smile. “I’m so glad I caught you.”
Emory gripped her satchel strap tight as she descended toward her, forcing a smile of her own. “Hey, Nel.”
“I tried to catch you at the assembly yesterday, but I don’t think you saw me. How are you holding up?”
A question Emory would rather never hear again in her lifetime. “All right, I guess.”
Penelope cast a wary glance around them. “Did you hear what happened last night? They’re saying Travers’s body washed up. That he was still alive.” She shook her head in disbelief. “I’m sure it’s just a rumor, though. He drowned; there’s no way he could still be alive.”
Emory’s throat constricted. She looked away. Penelope gripped her arm. “Wait—were you there when it happened?” At Emory’s telling silence, her eyes widened to saucers. “And it’s all true?”
“Yeah, it’s true.” She couldn’t stand the images that swam in her mind.
“Impossible,” Penelope breathed. Her brows knit together. She squeezed Emory’s hand. “You poor thing. I can’t imagine… all those memories it must have dredged up…”
The pity in her expression was suffocating. Emory wanted desperately to be anywhere but here. She knew Penelope was only being nice, knew she should be grateful to still have a friend who cared while everyone else only whispered and stared. But Penelope was a reminder of the friendship she’d lost, the one that had meant the world to her. And Romie, she knew, was wholly irreplaceable.
“Ms. Ainsleif, a word, if I may?”
Never had she been so glad to hear a professor calling her name.
“Meet me for supper later?” Penelope asked eagerly as they climbed down the rest of the steps to Professor Cezerna’s desk.
“Yeah, sure.”
She touched Emory’s arm again. “I’m here if you need anything, Em.”
The kindness in her voice made Emory feel bad for being so standoffish. Shaking the thought, she turned to Professor Cezerna. He looked at her sternly from under his bushy brows. “I’m letting you take this class as a courtesy so that you don’t fall behind, but since you missed your Level I exam last spring, you’ll have to retake it to pursue my class.”
Emory dug her nails into her palm. It sounded so painfully normal, given everything going on. But the selenography classes were requirements for all students to graduate; she needed those credits.
“I’ll give you time to go over what we covered last year before giving you the exam. How does two weeks sound?”
“That’s fine,” she said with a polite smile, though inside she wondered how, exactly, she would pull off studying for it on top of doing the work for all her other classes and dealing with this new magic she found herself saddled with, all while seeking answers about Dovermere. She’d been keeping on top of her coursework by a single, flimsy thread last year; the chances of her managing it now seemed all but inexistent, though for some reason, she felt entirely disconnected from it all, knowing there were more important things to focus on. “Thank you, professor.”
She left the lecture hall feeling unmoored. The rest of her morning was free. She tried to spot Keiran on campus, determined to press him further, but he was nowhere to be found. She was on her way to the library when she passed the Fountain of Fate and halted, an idea springing to mind.
Those sacred lunar flowers still floated on the water’s surface, one for each of the students who drowned last spring, the blooms perfectly preserved by some magic or other despite the early September chill. Emory forced herself to look at the silver plaques fitted below the Tides’ marble feet and read the names that had been added to an already long list, all of them dated on the same spring day:
QUINCE TRAVERS—NEW MOON, HEALER
SERENA VELAN—NEW MOON, DARKBEARER
DANIA AZULA—WAXING MOON, WORDSMITH
LIA AZULA—WAXING MOON, WORDSMITH
DAPHNé DIORé—FULL MOON, WARDCRAFTER
JORDYN BRIAR BURKE—FULL MOON, SOULTENDER
HARLOW KERR—WANING MOON, UNRAVELER
ROSEMARIE BRYSDEN—WANING MOON, DREAMER
She fought down the nauseating images those names conjured. Her eyes traveled up the list. There had been a single drowning victim three springs ago, two more a few years before that. The list of drownings wound back fifty years, a hundred, a hundred and fifty, all the way back to Aldryn’s inception nearly four hundred years ago. Never more than a name or two here and there, nothing like the absolute carnage of last term.
But nearly all the drownings, Emory realized, had one thing in common: they happened in May, within the last few weeks of school.
It might be coincidence. If these names proved anything, it was that Dovermere had always been the dangerous beast that it was. But Emory couldn’t get her pulse to slow as she rifled through her satchel for a piece of paper to write on. She scribbled names and dates in a hurry, purpose keeping her hand steady.
She would scour the campus archives for every tiny morsel of information she could find on these drownings if it meant getting any insight into the circumstances that led Romie to Dovermere.
You see? she wanted to yell at the thought of Baz’s earlier words. I do care.
* * *
She didn’t find much in the archives, which were located right next to the library in Noviluna Hall. A few newspaper articles about the drowning victims from the last couple decades or so—mostly freshmen, it seemed—and interviews with deans of years past in response to public outcry on the dangers of the caves. She did stumble upon a rather lengthy article on the most recent drowning dated two and a half years ago, which again had taken place in May, but all it told her was that Farran Caine was a Reaper who’d had excellent grades for the entirety of his short-lived time at Aldryn and was sorely missed by all who knew him. He looked dapper in the faded color photograph the newspaper had used, with pale blond curls and a strong jaw, a crinkle around his eyes as he smiled brilliantly at someone who’d been mostly cropped out. It hurt to look at that smile. All Emory saw in it was Romie and the others who’d had their futures ripped away by Dovermere.
What Lizaveta said at the bonfire came back to her. How the eight students who’d drowned were all top of their freshmen class, the best at what they did—same as Farran and some of the others mentioned in these articles, it seemed. But none of it explained what they’d been involved in, why they’d gone to Dovermere at all.
Fury suddenly swept through her. If this was something that had happened for years and kept happening still, why had no one thought to stop it? To barricade the way into the caves to prevent others from dying, or something. Whatever it was, Emory couldn’t let it happen again, couldn’t let anyone else meet their end in the Belly of the Beast.