The saying had come to him on the beach and would not leave him. Nothing felt real.
Emory’s eyes met his from across the room. The soft morning light drew out the gold in her hair, which had dried in messy curls draped over the arm of the sofa. It was strange seeing her there, in Kai’s favorite spot. She wore a too-big flannel shirt and slacks she’d borrowed from him last night, her own clothes left near the window to dry.
Baz tried not to blush.
“Hi,” she said, and he was glad not to be the one to break the quiet.
Just like that, reality came crashing down around them. The weight of what they’d seen, what they’d done, so much starker now in the daylight.
Emory sat up, glancing warily at the window that overlooked Dovermere.
“Is she…”
A shake of his head. “Someone must have found her.”
A fisherman, a student, anyone but them. It was what they’d intended when they left Lia’s body on the beach: that someone might find it at dawn, and they’d assume it was simply brought in by the tide.
He and Emory had decided on it by some unspoken agreement as they knelt in the sand, reeling from everything that happened. Afterward, Baz had led her back up the secret stairs to the Eclipse commons, where they’d gotten out of their wet clothes and fallen asleep on the sofas, too spent to even talk about it.
The coffee was ready. Baz poured two cups and handed one to Emory as he sat in the chair across from her.
She drew her feet under her, wrapped her hands around the warm cup. She looked around the shabby space, as if seeing it for the first time, with the cloud of urgency and veil of darkness from last night finally lifted.
“Doesn’t it ever get lonely down here, all by yourself?”
“Sometimes.”
Not presently, he thought, and when her gaze met his, he was sure she understood. It felt… nice, to have her here. Like this was something they’d been heading toward all their lives, and now she was here, in her rightful house. With him.
Emory took a sip. A sunken feeling gripped Baz at the widening of her eyes.
“What is it?”
“Nothing, just… Tides, I get it now, why you never drink the coffee I bring you.” She took another gulp. “This is divine.”
Baz couldn’t help it—he laughed, the sound unfamiliar to his own ears. It eased something in his chest to see the laughter reflected in her eyes. The weight of last night wasn’t so heavy, he thought, carried as it was between the two of them. Still, as Emory’s attention drifted to the window again, brows scrunching together as if she could see the scene replaying on the beach below, Baz decided they desperately needed a distraction.
“Come on.” He set his coffee down on the table. “Let me give you the official tour of Obscura Hall.”
He could have shown her the precariously stacked books, the initials carved in the tapestry, the bedrooms upstairs. But the true glory of their house was just outside the Eclipse commons themselves. Emory faltered as he opened the door and parted the lush mane of leaves draped over the other side. Tentatively, she followed him out. She turned on her heel to puzzle over the great willow tree they’d emerged from, the door carved in its trunk left slightly ajar.
Baz tried to see it all through her eyes. The field of wild grass swaying in the breeze. The beaten path that cut through patches of boneset and gorse, hyssop and snakeroot, bordered by a rope fence that ran down the gently sloping hill toward a strip of white-sand beach and the sea beyond. The ceiling-less expanse above their heads, open skies and puffy white clouds.
Emory ran her fingers through the yellowing feather-reed grass, and Baz knew she must be grappling with how real the illusion felt, how impossible it was that this should be in the lower levels of Aldryn. He saw it in the wonder on her face as she took in the sky, the sea, as she breathed in the smell of brine and grass on the air and strained her ear to the sound of gulls and the buzzing of bees and the melody of songbirds.
“I didn’t quite believe it last night,” she murmured. “It all felt like a dream, but now… How is this possible?”
“Illusion magic. This path through the field is really just a corridor, and the sea isn’t really there—well, it is, but there’s technically a wall between us and it. Same with the willow tree. The common room inside it is real. The rest of it is just a trick of the mind.”
It was a remnant of the magic that Illusionists had wielded over the years, though the shape of the illusion itself was entirely dependent upon the students presently occupying Obscura Hall. It changed to suit the preference of the oldest student there, taking on a scenery that held some meaning to them. And since Baz was the only Eclipse student remaining…
“It reminds me of the fields behind Threnody Prep,” Emory said. “The ones we used to run in with Romie, remember?”
Baz felt his face heat. Of course he remembered. It was the image he cherished the most, the ideal he had of happiness. A simpler time he often wished he could return to.
One particular day always came to mind. It had been gloomy all week, storms battering the seaside town of Threnody, and when the sun at last pierced the sky, Romie had coaxed Baz and Emory to slip out from the boarding school while the rest of the students were at some assembly.
The images were imprinted on his soul, how the light hit Emory’s face and made her hair shine like gold. He remembered the sound of her laugh and the way she’d smiled, the blue of her eyes, how everything had felt right in the world before it all got ripped apart days later by his father’s Collapsing. He remembered the weightlessness of running downhill through singing tall grass, the sharp briny smell in the air, and the coarse sand beneath him as the three of them fell in a heap on the beach, heads turned to the clear blue sky.
Look how free they are, Romie had said of the gulls soaring above them. She’d pushed herself up and run into the water after them, arms extended on either side of her as if she, too, were about to fly away.
He remembered stealing a glance at Emory’s rosy-cheeked face then and thinking he would like to stop time, freeze the here and now and live in it forever. She had smiled at him, and his heart had never been so full.
Baz cleared his throat, wondering if that day meant the same to her as it did him. Likely not. It had gotten him through the darkest days of his youth. A memory he’d clung to in the aftermath of his father’s Collapsing, the place he went to in his mind when he sought reprieve. It had planted a seed in his heart, and hope that she might feel the same about him made it bloom—only to wilt away to nothing when she’d pulled away from him like everyone else.
But that was long ago. And now… Now he didn’t know. Didn’t want to let himself hope again only to see it crushed.
Still, he replayed the moment right before Lia had appeared. How close they’d been. The glimmer in Emory’s eyes, as if she were finally seeing him.
Baz kicked at the dirt path. “Speaking of Romie…” He palmed the back of his neck. “I stayed up all night going over everything in my head. Trying to make sense of the pattern between the two bodies that washed ashore.”
They had reappeared on a night that corresponded to their respective lunar houses, each succumbing to strange magics that seemed to twist their own: Travers, a Healer, withering away to a husk of a person; Lia, a Wordsmith, robbed of her ability to speak.
And Emory—always Emory at the heart of it. As if her mere presence at Dovermere had called to them somehow, drawing them back to these shores from the depths that had claimed them.
She seemed to read his thoughts, her gaze drifting to the imagined sea. “Maybe it is all my fault.”
The quiet despair in her voice compelled him to reach for her, just like he had last night.
Why don’t you hate me, Baz?
Instead, he shoved his hands in his pockets, too scared of screwing up whatever tentative, fledgling thing might be between them. “It doesn’t matter now,” he offered weakly.