Baz had snorted at that. “So you’re hearing the divine, now?”
“Or maybe,” she’d whispered in a mock conspiratorial tone, “it’s the guardian luring me to his gate.”
“That’s not—the guardian didn’t lure anyone.”
“He literally knew the drowned gods were tricksters and still thought it was a good idea to draw everyone a map to their doorstep or whatever. I’d call that luring.”
She wasn’t entirely wrong. In the story, the young guardian in the fourth realm was the one to guide the story’s heroes to the very gates of the sea of ash, where they would eventually free the drowned gods—only to be trapped there in their place. If the gods were the composers of this devious orchestra, the guardian was their favorite instrument with which to sing their trap. And he was all too willing to be bent and shaped to their will because he believed he could outwit them, defy the grim fate he knew awaited him and his companions. But the gods could not be vanquished, and in the end his naivety led the other heroes and himself to their doom.
Romie had hummed that maddening song again as she flipped through the illustrated pages of his book. “Tempting to follow it, isn’t it?”
And what if that was exactly what she’d done?
A metallic sound made Baz jump. There was a scuttle of feet, a sharp voice in the distance. The sense that his time was up prickled against his skin.
He was no longer welcome here.
Baz stuffed the note in his pocket before locking the manuscript away, discarding the white gloves, and clasping the damper around his wrist once more. With his heavy book tucked under an arm, he hurried back to the center of the Vault, where he caught a silhouette disappearing down the H aisle, footsteps echoing in its wake. The clerk’s colleague, no doubt, looking to tell him his thirty minutes were up.
Feeling like he was going to be sick, Baz slid down the narrow corridor out of the Vault. Behind the permissions desk, the clerk looked at him over her reading, oblivious to the way his heart was racing.
“Find everything all right?”
Baz gave a distracted nod as he handed her the cuff and the massive tome. She stamped the checkout card, and Baz muttered his thanks, carrying the weight of his newly acquired book and his old ones and all his unanswered questions back up to the quad.
She was quite the Dreamer, the clerk had said of his sister.
And she was. Had been. Not just in the way her tidal alignment made her—a Dreamer of House Waning Moon, able to slip into people’s dreaming as easily as she might slip into their hearts—but a true dreamer in every sense of the word, bold and mercurial and more bright-eyed than any star in the sky.
Romie was the antithesis of Baz’s own narrow existence. She never understood how content he was to sit alone with a book, nor why he desired to stay at Aldryn after finishing undergrad. She herself had rebelled against such small aspirations, wanting to experience everything she could while at Aldryn before leaving to see the world and find her place in it. She could never quite forgive him for not dreaming as big.
There’s only so much of life you can experience through books, Baz, she would scoff at him.
But books allowed Baz to dream without fear of falling.
Because that was the thing about dreaming, wasn’t it? Those who dreamed too big and reached too far were bound to fall, in the end. And if Romie had reached for something beyond her understanding, if her wild notions had led her to Dovermere and the death waiting for her in its depths…
There was one person who might have answers for him. One person who knew his sister better than he ever could.
Perhaps it was more than just grief that haunted Emory.
3 EMORY
THE SETTING SUN LINGERED ON the horizon as Emory cut across town toward the beach. The college town of Cadence stood near the northernmost tip of Elegy, an island in the middle of the Aldersea flanked by the much larger Trevel in the east, the sprawling Constellation Isles in the south, and the vast Outerlands that curved around all of it. If the world was a spiral, Elegy marked the very center of it, and Cadence was by far its best feature. It was smaller than the port city of Threnody south of here, and much quainter, too, a postcard-perfect sight with stone cottages and tidy fenced-in gardens and weeping willows dancing in the breeze. And though it had lost some of its charm in Emory’s eyes, tainted as it now was by the drownings, it certainly hadn’t lost its appeal with other students.
Groups and pairs of them ambled down the cobblestone streets, filing in and out of cafés and taverns, leaving the busy corner store with handfuls of provisions Emory assumed were for the bonfires: cheap liquor bottles, packets of crisps, sausages for grilling, bundles of firewood, and canisters of gasoline. Students would also be burning whatever notebooks or knickknacks from the previous year they didn’t want to hold on to, as was tradition. A way to cleanse the past and start the cycle anew. Romie had loved it.
Emory took her shoes off once she reached the beach that stretched the length of town, white sand bordered by rippling tall grass. Idle chatter and carefree laughter pervaded the air, a dozen fires already crackling to life. She stuck to the shadows, trying to remain invisible, wary of the tide coming in. It was deceitfully beautiful, devouring the shore one gently cresting wave at a time. But the Aldersea remained quiet, no voice calling her name.
Still, the farther she walked, the more untamed the beach became, the sparser the fires and laughter. Emory braced for what awaited around the next bend. She thought briefly of turning back, finding the safety of her room, but the absence of Romie filled every empty corner of it with suffocating reproach.
She had to do this. For her.
Dovermere Cove greeted her like the revenant she was. Dark waves battered against the towering seaside cliffs, echoing the thundering in her chest. The cave mouth on the far side of the cove grinned at her wickedly.
There were more students here than Emory expected. Thrill-seekers who wanted to be close to Dovermere and its dark pull for whatever twisted reason. She saw a few of them passing around jars of moonbrew, a potent concoction meant to open one’s senses to the moon and tides to better honor the dead. But there was no solemn remembrance in the gesture; they seemed to do it only for show, getting drunk on it the way they would on any cheap bottle of wine.
It sparked anger in her, bitter defensiveness. Had they even known the students who drowned? Surely their grief couldn’t be more than an abstract thing, a pale shade of the monster clawing at her own insides. She wanted to grab those bottles from their hands, smash them on the sand, wipe away their careless smiles.
His eyes met hers over one of the fires, as if called by the violence in her mind.
A chill ran through her as Keiran Dunhall Thornby stared at her for the second time that day. Flames danced golden on his skin and gilded his carefully styled-back hair, a few chestnut locks of which fell across his forehead. He was the picture of ease and nonchalance, sprawled as he was on the sand and leaning back against an impressive piece of driftwood. His pants were rolled up past his ankles, bare feet resting near the fire. A stark contrast to the last time she’d seen him here.