Baz turned and froze as Emory stared back at him.
“What are these two doing here?” she asked Clover.
The unfamiliarity of her voice—the light accent behind it—rattled him out of thinking it was Emory at all. She looked so much like her, but the more he stared at her, the more evident the differences became. The blue of her eyes not as stormy. The blond of her hair lighter than Emory’s, and the texture much curlier. She was shorter than Emory, curvier than Emory, her face rounder and mouth thinner. She appeared a few years older, too, but all her features echoed Emory’s in some way, so much so that Baz was certain she must be an ancestor of hers.
The girl lifted a bemused brow at his open-jawed stare. “Have I got something on my face?”
“I—I’m sorry,” he stuttered. “I thought you were someone I knew.”
Tides, even the way she looked at him with that guarded expression was so very much like Emory.
“You’re the Dreamer I saw in Clover’s nightmare,” Kai said with a frown. “Aren’t you?”
The girl he’d believed to be Emory.
“I really hoped you hadn’t seen me there,” she said with a grimace. Her eyes flitted to Clover as if to gauge his reaction. When he simply shrugged, she added, “Neat trick with the umbrae, though. Thames can’t stop talking about it.”
“Sorry—who are you?”
She stuck her hand out to Kai. “I’m Luce. Luce Meraude.”
Everything shattered inside Baz’s brain, but the world kept going around him. Luce said something to Kai that he didn’t catch—because that wasLuce, and Tides, it couldn’t be the same Lucethat Baz knew of, because how could Emory’s mother be here, two hundred years in the past?
No. This had to be a different Luce Meraude, an ancestor that Emory’s mother might have looked to for inspiration when forging her new identity.
Kai’s voice snapped him back to himself as he asked, “Is your real name Adriana Kazan?”
Never one to beat around the bush.
Luce gave Clover a puzzled look. “Have they confirmed…?”
Clover dipped his chin. “Yes.”
“And they know about me?”
“I was just about to tell them.”
She frowned at Kai. “How do you know that name? Not even Cornelius knows it.”
Tides—itwasher. It made no sense, but the truth was all there, in every line of her, in all the ways she resembled Emory. A relative indeed—though not so distant at all.
Emory’s mother was here, standing in front of him. By the looks of her, she couldn’t be much older than he was himself. Which meant either she hadn’t given birth to Emory yet or she had before somehow ending uphere.
“We know your daughter, Emory Ainsleif,” Baz admitted, taking a chance that he was right about this. “Or wewillknow her, in the future. Time travel is all very confusing.”
Luce didn’t even bat an eye at the admission. “How far back did you travel from?”
“Two hundred years from now.”
“One hundred and eighty-one years for me. I just gave birth to my daughter a few months ago. In the future, I mean. If you know her… How old is she in your time?”
“She’s nineteen. Studying in her second year at Aldryn College.”
“Nineteen?” Tears glistened in Luce’s eyes. She gave a soft,strangled laugh. “Tides, that’s only a few years younger than I am now.”
Sudden fear fell on her face, etching worry in every line. “Her magic—has anything…” She bit the inside of her cheek, stopping herself from saying something she shouldn’t. “Is she a good Healer?”
Baz had the impression she knewexactlywhat Emory was. She must know—she’d been the one to forge Emory’s birth date, after all, so that Emory could be believed to be a Healer instead of the Tidecaller she really was.
