Keiran folded his hands behind his back and intoned, “Illustrious Tidal Council, I bring forth Emory Ainsleif, Healer of House New Moon.”
There was a momentous quality to his voice, to the air around them, as though the walls of the lighthouse themselves were waiting with bated breath to hear what would be said next.
“Four lunar cycles past, she faced the depths of Dovermere with the rest of our initiates and lived to tell the tale,” he continued, addressing the room at large. “The sea took eight of our brightest that night, the best the Tides had to offer, yet it spared her. A ninth soul there by happenstance, whom fate chose to return to us with the sigil of our Order on her skin. Marking her, for all intents and purposes, as one of our own.” He turned to Emory and gently lifted her arm so that the Tidal Council could glimpse her spiral mark. “She appears now before you to seek acceptance in our ranks.”
There was a resounding silence, more deafening than the waves outside or the whispers Emory thought would have risen at the revelation. But she felt the tension in the air, the hostility, all the same. This, she knew, was something that had never happened before. That went against the Order’s precious rules.
The man wearing Bruma’s face spoke first: “You’re saying she was never tapped for initiation, yet passed our initiation rites all the same?”
“Correct.”
“Then she’s an intruder,” the man with Aestas’s face seethed. “Why was she at Dovermere to begin with? Trying to weasel her way into our Order, perhaps?”
Emory stood frozen, unsure what to do. If it had been Romie standing here before the Tidal Council, she would have brazenly told them all to shove it, would have proved her worth with one clever trick. If there was ever a time to be more like Romie, it was now.
Emory took a grounding breath and slid off her Bruma mask. “I knew nothing of your Order at the time, sir,” she said loudly. “I simply went after a friend whose well-being I was worried about and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“And now?” This from Vivianne, the Memorist. “Surely you must know enough about our Order to end up here tonight.” She threw Keiran a suspicious glance. “Unless someone told you about us?”
“She pieced most of it together on her own after discovering an initiation invitation in her roommate’s things,” Keiran said smoothly. “Romie Brysden, one of last year’s initiates. It was only when she approached me with this information that I invited her here to appear before you.”
Emory was grateful for his quick intervention. The Tidal Council looked at her expectantly, and she seized her chance. “I did the ritual, same as the others. I survived the tide filling the Belly of the Beast. I escaped Dovermere, and though I wish I could say I wasn’t the only one who did, I was. I already bear your mark. Why not your title, too?” She swallowed hard, Romie’s face flashing before her eyes. “Please, let me join your ranks so I can honor those who’ve fallen.”
“I admire your mettle, Ms. Ainsleif,” Leonie said with a kind smile. “Unfortunately, surviving Dovermere alone is not enough. There are traditions to follow, preliminary trials to pass, all of which last year’s initiates went through to be deemed worthy of becoming Selenics.”
“So let me do those trials,” Emory pleaded. “Let me prove to you that I deserve my place here too.”
“I don’t know how to put this gently, girl,” the man with Bruma’s face said gruffly, “but the Selenic Order accepts only those of the highest quality into its ranks. Nothing but the best and brightest. As I recall, your name was never even on our list of potential candidates.”
Anger rose in her at that. “With all due respect, sir, I survived what eight of your apparent best and brightest could not. I might not be from one of your legacy families or have the highest grades, but surely that must mean something.”
“It means you were lucky,” Vivianne said. She looked to her companions with bored annoyance. “I say we wipe our name from her memory and be done with this nonsense.”
Emory’s thoughts raced. She would be damned if she let them take her memories. She stepped forward, holding out her wrist. “Your initiates died for this mark, for a chance to wield all lunar magics as their own. When the mark engraved itself on me, it gave me that chance too. It made me into something more than just a Healer. Allowed me to wield magics outside of my own tidal alignment.”
She reached for the Sower magic first, just as she had earlier tonight. She tried not to think of the fact that, even under Baz’s careful tutelage, she hadn’t been able to wield the magic for much more than a few seconds, or how the philodendron she’d tried to revive was just as dead now as it had been before.
Instead, she thought of Romie, a memory rising unbidden to the surface. It was Emory’s sixteenth birthday, and the only time Romie had ever gifted her a plant. “String of hearts,” she’d announced proudly. “I propagated it myself from some cuttings I collected. Pretty, isn’t it?”
It hadn’t survived the week. When Romie found out, she’d laughed herself to tears and teased Emory for her lack of a green thumb.
“I’m a Healer, Ro, not a Sower!”
Romie had gotten that dreamy look in her eyes. “Don’t you wish you could be everything all at once?”
Now Emory had what Romie wished for: access to every magic, something Romie would have never struggled to master had their roles been reversed. But Romie was dead. She was gone and Emory was still here, and the only thing she could do to honor her friend now was to seek justice from within.
She gritted her teeth, imploring the waxing crescent to unlock its mysteries for her, to share its secrets until they became as known to her as the Healing magic she’d been born with.
And it did.
The ivy at the Tidal Council’s feet moved at her command, leaves rustling in an imagined breeze. A vine crept toward her, slithering up her dress to wrap around her wrist. She heard the faint hum of awe in the crowd but did not let it distract her, reaching instead for more. Light and dark answered, as they had the night of the bonfires, but this time, she was in control. The candles flared dramatically, then burned out all at once, plunging the room into darkness except for the everlights strung on the walls. Emory called those lights toward her. They moved slowly, made to look like floating stars, and came to rest in her outstretched hand where they formed a single bright light.
Pride swelled in her as she beamed at it, this impossible magic she wielded. Not the shade of magic that Virgil had imbibed, not a mere taste or impression of it as Nisha described, but the real thing, here at her fingertips. Hers to command.
She let the light extinguish, the vine of ivy fall at her feet. A few bulbs of everlight had remained untouched on the walls, now the only source of light that remained.
In the semidarkness, Emory held her head high as she looked at the Council. “You see? I, too, have the mark and the Tidecaller magic it gave me. The same as Keiran, who can heal birds and make roses bloom. Should that not be enough to earn my place in your Order?”
Something crackled in the air, a tension she couldn’t understand. Scathing remarks of Tidethief and Eclipse-born slithered along her skin. Her heart sank to the pit of her stomach.
This was a horrible mistake.
Emory rounded on Keiran, searched his face for answers; the half of it she could see beneath his mask gave nothing away, but his eyes… His eyes glittered with what looked like triumph.
“I’m not a Tidecaller, Ainsleif,” he said quietly.
His words pounded in her head, utterly incomprehensible. “But I saw you…”