Keiran nodded. “And with the festival happening at the same time, the whole campus will be otherwise occupied. No better time to hold our first ritual with our Tidecaller, I think.”
The fall equinox festival was widely celebrated at Aldryn. Students gathered on the banks of the River Helene to cast boats out to sea, a way to entreat the Tides to guide them into autumn. A handful of students from each house were selected to stand upon their respective houses’ boats and perform feats of magic representing each of their lunar houses as they traveled down the river toward the sea. It was a grand spectacle, and an opportunity for the chosen students to showcase their talents to important dignitaries from grad schools and institutions that sought to recruit them.
House Eclipse was always omitted, likely for fear of its students Collapsing while performing their magic.
Emory watched Keiran as he pocketed the ritual drawing, thinking again of the stark difference between his and Baz’s reactions to her magic. How Baz, Eclipse-born like her, seemed more wary of it than Keiran, when it should have been the other way around.
“Why aren’t you scared of me?” she asked. For all he knew, she could Collapse at any given moment, yet there wasn’t a trace of fear in him. “I’m Eclipse-born. Surely—”
“Surely I must hate all Eclipse-born because one of them killed my parents?” Keiran finished for her with a snicker.
The words were too raw, slicing between them like a blade.
“Maybe I did once.” His brows scrunched together. “I was fifteen and looking for someone to blame, and it seemed so easy then to despise all Eclipse-born for destroying my family. But that was a long time ago, and I don’t think that anymore. I’m not afraid of you, Ainsleif.”
“Why not?”
A hint of his dimpled smile. “Would you prefer it if I were?”
“Of course not. But it would make a lot more sense than… this.” Whatever this was, this thing between them.
Keiran seemed to grasp her meaning. She wished to drown in his molten gaze.
He tugged on her hand then, and she had no choice but to follow as he pulled her deeper into the archives. She hadn’t even known the archives were this big to begin with, and the farther they went, the older everything got, a musty smell clinging like cobwebs to the shelves. He helped her climb up a narrow wrought-iron ladder to a hidden attic that was plunged in darkness.
Keiran’s hand left hers to flick on an everlight lantern. And suddenly dozens of the same light shone around the room, that single lantern reflected in a dizzying array of mirrors of every shape and size, all perfectly aligned to refract the light around them.
It felt more like an abandoned museum than an archive attic. Unhung frames lined the walls, great oak dressers and old bookcases and lecterns gathered dust, and in every corner were things that did not quite belong: swords and bows and arrows, scrolls of parchment so ancient they’d begun to disintegrate, broken clocks and chipped vases, golden string instruments, an easel with a half-painted canvas of wildflowers in a sunlit field.
“Farran dubbed this the Forgotten Place,” Keiran said at her side. “We found it during our freshman year while scouring the archives for anything we could find on the Order. A lot of it is junk, but—”
“Are those the photographs you’re restoring?”
She reached for a silver plaque like the one she’d seen him working on, displayed on top of a claw-footed dresser. The surface was no longer mottled but polished enough to reveal the outlines of three people posing for the camera.
“One of them, yes,” Keiran said. “This one’s not done yet. I think with more work I can restore it enough that we see their faces.”
“It’s amazing, the things you can do with your magic.”
“I’m glad you think so. You know, I used to resent being a Lightkeeper,” he admitted with a bashful smile. “I wanted to be a Memorist or a Seer or an Unraveler. I thought there was only so much I could do with Lightkeeper magic, and I wanted more. That’s what drew me to the Order. We’re taught that there’s the magic we’re born with and ways to excel at it, to push this singular ability we have to its limits. But I wanted to exceed those limits. I wanted no limits at all.”
He looked at her like she was the answer to that dream. A way to attain all magics. She ducked her head, studying the shadows on the silver plaque. They were very clearly the outlines of three men dressed in an older fashion, sitting in what might have been a lavish taproom. Only their faces remained tarnished, rendering them featureless.
“My father’s a Lightkeeper,” she said quietly. “He tends a lighthouse for a living. He doesn’t have enough magic to wear the Full Moon sigil, but that’s what he does. And he loves it. It’s where I grew up, in this tiny lighthouse in Harebell Cove.”
The thought of home made her wish she were there. “I always feared I might end up like him. That I wouldn’t pass the tests, wouldn’t get to wear my house sigil, wouldn’t get to study here at Aldryn.” Emory laughed sullenly at the admission. “I always felt unremarkable as a Healer, and now I have this impossible magic and I’m afraid I’ll mess it all up.”
Keiran reached for her hand, his thumb brushing her marked wrist. “You won’t.” He drew her attention to a large painting propped up against the wall. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
It was strangely beautiful in the refracted light of the mirrors. Dark, muted colors in loose brushstrokes depicted a young man lying in a pool of water and blood and sea-foam, his hands folded neatly on his chest. He was smiling, even as blood ran from a wound in his middle.
“What is it?” It was an odd thing for him to show her, Emory thought.
There was something like reverence on Keiran’s face as he beheld the painting. “It’s a mystery. There’s no signature, nothing known about the painting or its maker, nothing in the technique that might echo another artist’s work. I don’t know why I’m so drawn to it. It’s exquisite in a morbid sort of way. The darkness of it, the featurelessness of the man. The way he’s smiling even at the end. I suppose it reminds me there’s beauty even in death. That’s what Farran always believed.”
Emory thought of what Virgil had said about Reaper magic. She studied the painting again, trying to see it through another set of eyes.
“My parents were in Threnody for work when they died,” Keiran said softly, still fixated on the painting, like it was easier to speak if he didn’t look at her. “Collecting pieces for their gallery. It’s part of why I like this place so much. It reminds me of them.” He cleared his throat. “There was nothing left of them for us to bury. That’s how strong the Collapsing blast was. I remember sitting at their funeral hating the person who’d done this. I didn’t care that it was an accident. I needed someone to blame and make into a monster for taking my parents away, and I was glad to see him sent to the Institute to receive the Unhallowed Seal.”
An impossible realization dawned on her. Blood pounding in her ears, Emory asked, “Who was it, the Eclipse-born who killed your parents?”
He met her gaze with a sad, knowing smile. The sorrow on his face broke her.
“Say it. Please.”
His throat bobbed. “Theodore Brysden.”
Baz and Romie’s father.
Emory shook her head, refusing to believe it. But it made sense—the timeline of it all, the way Baz had locked up at the sight of Keiran with her in the quad. The way Lizaveta had seemed to despise her from the start, even before she knew she was Eclipse-born, likely because she was Romie’s friend, and Romie was a Brysden as much as Baz.
“Tides, Keiran. I’m so sorry. Did Romie know?”