They stood staring at each other from across the wilted space. Emory noted Baz’s disheveled appearance, the glasses that sat crookedly on his nose. He looked tired, as if the events of last night and their encounter this morning had taken everything out of him.
He palmed the back of his neck. “I can go if you…”
“It’s fine.”
“I’ll go.”
He shuffled awkwardly, hesitating by the door. Like her, he seemed unsure of what to say to fill the silence, to mend what was broken. The space felt at once too big and too small for just the two of them. It needed Romie. Not her ghost, but the real her, the easy way she struck up conversations and made everyone feel instantly at ease. They needed the girl who’d coaxed them out of class at Threnody Prep to run through the wildflower fields down to the beach—something neither of them would have done on their own, but who could ever resist Romie? They needed the girl who’d kicked up sand behind her as she ran barefoot with her arms thrown out wide on either side of her, pretending to be one of the gulls.
That girl had made them laugh. Had made them feel free.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” Baz asked.
Emory glanced at the sorry collection of dead plants. “I don’t know.” What had she hoped to find here? Romie was gone, and even the things of hers that remained would not bring her back. “I guess I needed to see this place again.”
Baz ran a hand along a beam of whitewashed wood, the paint flaking away. “I came here at the end of last spring to pack up her belongings, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.” He cleared his throat, looked away from the pile of blankets and books. “I didn’t come back after that. Too many dead things taking root.”
Emory brushed a withered plant. “I’d give anything to see it back the way it was.”
The leaf beneath her finger was a crisp brown. She wondered what it would be like, to have Sower magic flowing through her like it had on the beach, to grab hold of it and return the plant to a healthy, waxy green. Her eyes flitted over to Baz, who seemed to know exactly what she was thinking.
She let her hand fall.
Baz stuffed his own hands in his pockets. “I’m sorry about what I said earlier. That wasn’t fair of me.”
Emory ducked her head, picking at her nails. “No, you were right. The funeral… It’s not that I didn’t want to go. I tried, I really did. But after the memorial they held at school… I just couldn’t go through it again.”
“I get it.” He looked like he meant it—like he wished to take back everything that happened this morning. “I’m sorry I implied otherwise.”
“I’m the one who should apologize for pressuring you into helping me.” She thought of what she’d overheard in the dining hall, about his classmate Collapsing. “I get it, you know. The dangers of this type of magic. And as much as I don’t want to hurt anyone, I don’t want to have them take away my magic either. So I need to figure this thing out before either one happens.”
Emory studied him. She could tell it was eating away at him, this conflict between following the rules and helping an old friend in need. She saw in that hesitation the soft spot he’d always had for her, wondered if it might swing his decision in her favor. If she might use it to her advantage.
She needed him to keep what she could do secret. More than that, she needed his help controlling this magic she knew nothing about, and no one had as much control over their own peculiar power as Baz did. If he could master his Timespinner abilities without ever coming close to Collapsing, surely he could help her master these strange powers the mark had given her. She might not be Eclipse-born like he believed her to be, but it wouldn’t hurt to learn everything she could, all the while keeping him close enough to ensure he kept her secret.
Emory ignored the tightness in her chest. Her reluctance was nothing next to the growing desperation she felt. She had to do this, but needed to approach the matter delicately, didn’t want to appear too forceful. “I understand if you don’t want to help me,” she said with a sad, wobbly smile she hoped might tug at his heartstrings. “If you could just point me in the right direction. A book that might help me understand Tidecaller magic, something to help me make sense of this…”
Baz dug his hands deeper into his pockets, as if rummaging for something in them. He worried his lip, and then the words spilled out of him in a jumbled mess: “Why did you go to Dovermere that night?”
Emory’s hands curled inward, nails biting into her palms. Anything but that, she thought. It had been one thing to lie to Penelope, but him…
Baz let out a sigh and closed his eyes. “The truth. That’s all I ask for.”
There was such anguish on his face, in his voice, it dislodged something in her. She owed him, yet she couldn’t bear to tell him the truth of what little she remembered, see his expression once he realized he was right to be wary of her magic. That it might very well be to blame for all of this.
Her gaze darted past him as she finally said, “We were drunk and foolish and thought we could best Dovermere. We got to the Belly of the Beast, and then the tide came and I… I don’t remember much else after that. I woke up on the beach surrounded by bodies, and Romie was gone.”
Lying to him—at least in part—was ten times worse than doing it to Penelope. She blinked past the tears forming in her eyes, wholly aware of Baz looking at her. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could go back and stop us from ever going.”
Surely, he had to know just how much she cared that Romie was gone. She felt like all these plants around them, left to wither away in Romie’s absence. And though the rot had started to set in the moment they’d arrived at Aldryn, with Romie pulling away from her so inexplicably, Emory had still felt like there’d been something salvageable between them then. Now it was too late.
She couldn’t save what had been lost, but she could find the reason behind it, at least.
“I would do anything to not have to miss her like this,” she breathed.
Baz stared quietly at his feet. “Thank you,” he said after a beat, taking his hands from his pockets. “For the truth.”
Emory swallowed past the guilt. “It’s the least I can do.”
Her shoulders dropped as he took a step back toward the rickety door, thinking that was the end of it, that she hadn’t been able to sway him. But then he stopped, heaving a sigh. “If you agree to take this seriously and do the work, then I’ll do it. I’ll help you.”
She blinked at him. “You’re serious?”
“No using your magic until we figure this out. And if I decide it’s too dangerous—if your magic becomes too much of a threat to you and me and everyone around us—you go to the dean.”
“All right.”
“I mean it, Emory. If I say we stop, we stop.”
“We stop.”
He studied her face. The dwindling light was reflected in his glasses in a way that she couldn’t quite make out the look in his eyes. Finally, he said, “We start tomorrow. Decrescens library, seven a.m. sharp.”
“I swear I won’t be late this time,” Emory said, trying to lighten the mood.
Baz pushed the door open with his shoulder. “Please don’t make me regret this.”
Alone in the greenhouse, Emory looked at the decay around her and thought perhaps it wasn’t too late to mend things after all.
SONG OF THE DROWNED GODS
PART II:
THE WITCH IN THE WOODS
There is a world not far from our own where things grow wild and plenty.