Are you that bored at Aldryn without me that you find me in sleep even here? Baz had asked.
Clearly you’re the one who can’t handle being away from me. The teasing in Kai’s tone hadn’t quite reached his eyes. Are you going to be all right?
I will. I have to be.
Just remember to breathe, Brysden. Don’t let the nightmare control you.
I know. Easier said than done.
Kai had drawn himself up, the darkness of Baz’s nightmare rippling behind him like a cloak. It’s over now. A hint of that sharp smile, though it lacked some of its usual mischief, weighted by an uncharacteristic sadness. Night, Brysden.
Baz hadn’t realized it then—that it had been Kai’s way of saying goodbye. The last moment they’d shared before he Collapsed.
“Yes, we were friends,” Baz said at last, even though friends sounded entirely too reductive.
Emory arched a brow at whatever she heard in his tone. He focused on the book in front of him, clearing his throat. “This is why knowing our limits is so important. Control is crucial, because our magic isn’t like the other lunar houses. It’s not exactly something you call on. It calls to you, and you have to learn how to resist that pull while at the same time succumbing to it just enough that the pressure doesn’t become too much.”
He flipped to the next page, where blood was shown dripping from a hand. “Bloodletting helps relieve some of that pressure, if needed. The other lunar houses use bloodletting to access their magic when it’s not their moon phase, essentially leeching from their power’s growth cycle so that when their lunar phase comes around again, the scope of their power depends on how often they tapped into it through bloodletting. But it’s different for us. Eclipse magic doesn’t go through this regeneration cycle. It’s just always there beneath the surface.”
One of the many reasons people loathed the Eclipse-born so much: they resented the fact they had to live with all these limitations on their magic—the phasal nature of it and how bloodletting, while practical, came at the price of weakening their magic once their moon phase came around—while the Eclipse-born did not.
“When we use bloodletting,” Baz continued, “it actually weakens our ties to our magic, lessening that pressure, at least for a little while. Using magic in small doses has the same effect.”
Emory glanced at her palms, brows furrowed slightly, as if she could see the power growing in her veins. There was a glimmer of a scar on her wrist, there and gone as she curled her hands into fists and set them in her lap.
Storm clouds gathered in the depths of her blue-gray eyes. “You keep saying us and our,” she said tightly, “but I’m not convinced I’m Eclipse-born at all. I mean… Yes, I felt the sort of pressure you’re describing this summer, and it did seem to lessen whenever I drew blood or used my healing magic. But all my life, bloodletting has worked the way it should for me, letting me call on my magic outside of the new moon like anyone else.”
“Then how would you explain it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a weird coincidence. Something about Dovermere warping my magic. Look what it did to Travers—I wouldn’t put it past it to be at the root of this, too.”
Baz shifted in his seat, pondering the possibility. The newspapers could spin it however they liked; he knew there was no way Travers’s death was natural. It was strange enough that he’d still been alive after all this time—though that might be attributed to his Healing abilities—but the way he died, combined with the sudden appearance of Emory’s impossible magic…
Maybe Dovermere did do something to them.
Baz reached for the note in his pocket, the paper worn completely smooth by now. Again, he thought of showing it to Emory. He wanted to believe what she’d told him in the greenhouse, about why she’d gone to Dovermere and what had happened there. He wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, that if she could make sense of Romie’s note, she’d give him a straight answer.
But after seeing her with Keiran yesterday… he had to wonder if she was hiding something. If she, like Romie, was part of something bigger, a larger piece of the puzzle he wasn’t being allowed to see.
He left the note in his pocket, feeling somewhat protective of it now, this last piece of Romie he had. Besides, he was meeting Jae Ahn tomorrow, and if anyone knew anything about the missing epilogue and might be able to shed some light on this, it was Jae.
“You’re certain the Regulators tested your blood when you were a child?” Baz asked. He couldn’t work it out, how it seemed her Tidecaller magic had somehow been locked inside her until now—until Dovermere.
Her voice was honed to something sharp. “I can show you everything—birthing chart, selenograph results, they all say I’m New Moon. A Healer. I know how impossible it sounds, trust me. But I have no more explanation for it than you do because, as you pointed out, the only person who might know something left me on my father’s doorstep when I was a baby and disappeared forever.”
Baz remembered her telling him about her mother, how vulnerable she’d been. I want to learn how to sail, she’d said, and maybe I’ll find her out there, still traveling the seas. He didn’t know what to say to her now as she toyed with the ripped-up pieces of her disposable cup, frowning at them as if they were the sad remnants of that childhood dream.
He pushed his glasses up, glancing around the empty library as an idea suddenly struck him. “We should test your blood.”
Emory’s face blanched. “What?”
“That way we’ll know for sure whether you’re Eclipse-born or not.” He pushed out of his chair. “I know there’s a selenograph here somewhere…”
The Decrescens library was full of things there was no apparent use for, from those intricate, mysterious clocks to things as mundane as selenographs, the metal contraptions the Regulators used to test magic in children and confirm the lunar house and tidal alignment that comprised their birth chart.
Baz liked to imagine this was the library the scholar in Song of the Drowned Gods had inhabited, full of treasures he might have brought back from other worlds: the marble busts flanking the arch that led down to the Vault, the gold war helmet wrought with motifs of delicate flowers, the wooden effigies depicting gods and goddesses their own world held no recollection of. The selenograph was certainly not from other worlds, but he was certain he’d seen it in here.
They found it in the Memorist section, so high up on the shelves that Baz had to climb up the rolling ladder to tug the machine out from between two thick, cobwebbed tomes. He set it atop the pile of open books on their table and blew on the layer of dust coating it, Emory watching nervously at his side. The selenograph was made up of various cogs, knobs, and needles, an older model than what Baz remembered being used when he was younger. Three vials sat atop it like a crown, one filled with liquid silver, another containing salt water, and the last one empty, meant to be filled with the person’s blood. It was the three elements thought to govern their magic: silver for moonlight, salt water for tides, and the blood they both flowed through.
A rusty, antique-looking syringe came with the selenograph. Emory’s mouth twisted in disgust as Baz gingerly picked it up.
“I am not stabbing myself with that,” she warned.
After a moment’s hesitation, Baz pulled back the threads of time so that the selenograph and the syringe looked new—still old by all accounts, antiquities, really, but shiny and unmarred, at least.
Emory quirked a brow. “Thought you didn’t like using your magic.”