“Small bursts of magical release, remember?”
He tried to hand her the syringe, but she shook her head, looking slightly queasy. “I can’t do it on myself. I’m bad enough as it is with needles to think about finding my own vein. You’ll have to do it.” At his horrified look, she put her hands on her hips and said, “This was your idea, not mine. It’s easy, you’ll see.” She sat down and pushed her left sleeve up around her bicep. “I’ll walk you through it.”
Baz pushed his chair close to hers. He was suddenly all too aware of his body, the awkwardness of his limbs, the blood pumping in his ears. Emory instructed him on how to search for a vein in the crook of her arm. She rested her free hand atop his, guiding it to place the tip of the needle on her skin. He tried to concentrate on her words as she explained how to insert the needle and draw the blood, but the feel of her fingers around his own consumed him.
Tides, when was the last time he’d sat this close to someone? He could see all the delicate strands of gold in her hair, the way the messy fringe that swept her brow curled slightly at her temples.
Get a grip, Brysden.
He swallowed hard and focused on the task at hand. He did exactly as she’d instructed. Emory winced as the needle pierced her skin.
“Are you okay? Am I doing it wrong?”
“I’m fine.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Just tell me something.”
“What?”
She breathed loudly through her mouth. “Anything, please.”
Her unease somehow made him feel more assured, and with her blood slowly filling the syringe in his hand, he felt bold enough to ask, “Do you remember Song of the Drowned Gods?”
Emory’s grimace twisted into a smile. “Of course. You always had your nose buried in it. You were so obsessed, I remember you drawing the characters in that old sketchbook of yours.”
Baz was grateful she wasn’t looking at him as a flush crept up his neck. Better she didn’t know how obsessed he still was—or that he occasionally still made art inspired by it, in the rare moments he could find the time. “Did Romie ever say something to you about it?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” His hand almost twitched with how badly it wanted to reach for the note in his pocket. “You know she used to love that book as much as I did when we were kids? We’d play-act scenes together, pretend we were going off on these wild adventures across worlds.” He thought of those memories fondly, how he would always play the scholar or the guardian, and she the witch or the warrior. “She grew out of it, but me… Romie always teased me for it, but then I found out she was reading it last spring, just before…” He stopped himself. “I guess I just thought it was odd.”
He took the syringe out, full of Emory’s blood. There was a stark look of relief on her pallid face as she pressed a finger to the red pinprick on her arm.
“Maybe she felt nostalgic,” she said distractedly, eyes closed and head tilted up to the ceiling.
Baz studied her openly, trying to discern any hints of deceit. He’d never noticed the small freckle on her neck, the particular curve of her mouth, the way it parted as she heaved a grounding sigh. His cheeks burned as he heard again what sounded an awful lot like Kai’s sneering voice in his mind, telling him to pull himself together. Before she could catch him staring, he turned to the selenograph, pouring her blood sample into one of the vials.
The three vital liquids—silver, water, blood—dripped slowly into a fourth compartment, a slender horizontal glass tube where they blended to form a murky substance. Beneath it all was what resembled a clock, divvied up in nine sectors: one for each of the moon’s eight phases, and the last for the eclipse. Each sector was quartered off into four tidal alignments, except for the eclipse one, which was cleaved in two—one half for the lunar eclipse, the other for the solar eclipse.
New Moon and Full Moon students, Baz knew, were rarer than their Waxing and Waning counterparts, given that their respective phases lasted no more than three days, while the waxing and waning moons lasted three times as long as that, each one composed of secondary phases—crescent, quarter, gibbous. Without bloodletting, adepts of House Waxing Moon and House Waning Moon could only wield their magic on the specific secondary phase they were born to, which leveled the playing field between lunar houses, everyone having access to their magic for roughly the same amount of time.
If Emory’s blood had once made the hand on that clock stop in the New Moon sector, in the first quarter that confirmed her as a Healer, it did no such thing now. It stood firmly in the solar eclipse sector.
“There you have it,” Baz said. “Eclipse.”
Emory’s mouth twisted downward, as if the result displeased her—as if she’d expected something else. But these tests never lied. There was no denying it: she didn’t belong to House New Moon. She was Eclipse-born, or perhaps Eclipse-formed was more accurate, if her powers had unlocked in Dovermere rather than manifesting in her early childhood.
They locked eyes, and Baz could tell she was thinking the same thing. Wondering if whatever happened in those caves made her this way, changed the very fabric of her blood somehow.
Emory rubbed at her wrist. “What are the chances of others having this kind of magic?”
“I think we would have heard of other Tidecallers by now if it was a common gift. Besides, Eclipse-born are rare enough as it is, so the chances of there being others with the exact same ability as you are slim to none.”
“Surely I can’t be the only one.”
“You might very well be. No two ecliptic events are ever truly the same, which is why Eclipse magics are always so different from one another. There’s no real pattern, and that makes it hard to pin down what dictates our abilities.” He pointed to the Eclipse sector on the selenograph’s clock, marked by a painted yellow sunflower. “It’s why we don’t have tidal alignments like the other houses do. At least not beyond the distinction between lunar and solar eclipses.”
The tide’s influence on ecliptic events and vice versa was too curious a phenomenon for even the most brilliant minds to make sense of. Professor Selandyn herself had abandoned her research on the subject a few years ago, dejected by the lack of reasoning behind it. It was part of why House Eclipse had been so misunderstood in the course of history. There was a clear science behind the other lunar houses’ magics. They each had four tidal alignments dictated by the tide’s position at the time of one’s birth—two low tides and two high tides a day, each one birthing a different magic depending on the moon cycle.
But there was no such rhyme or reason behind Eclipse magics other than what scholars had deemed different between lunar and solar eclipses. Lunar eclipses, which occurred during full moons, brought out different variations and offshoots of other lunar magics: nightmares instead of dreams, nullification instead of amplification, festering instead of healing, curses instead of protective spells, and so on.
Solar eclipses, which only occurred on new moons, were even harder to pin down. There were trends, sure enough. Repeating abilities catalogued over time. Illusion magic was the most common among them. It seemed to borrow heavily from Wordsmith magic; indeed, the subtle differences between the two had become a favorite subject of analysis among scholars. Illusions ranged from small parlor tricks to elaborate ones like the kind that made the wards around Obscura Hall manifest as ever-changing barriers, each more ludicrous than the last. (The wards themselves were Wardcrafter magic, of course, but the shape they took on to scare non-Eclipse students off was Illusion work at its finest.)