But there was nothing he could do here. No way for him to help.
Kai should have welcomed the nothingness, found solace in the fact that nothing here could follow him back into waking. Instead, all he felt was more despair than he’d ever known.
He bit down on an angry sob.
All this power coursing through him, and the only thing it was good for was sowing more fear.
Kai left the nightmare with an acrid taste in his mouth. Despair and bitterness must have called to each other here in the sleepscape, for he immediately found himself in a nightmare that was brimming with both.
A woman in her midthirties, dark hair braided in a crown atop her head, sat hugging her knees amid a pile of bodies.
She was singing something Kai had heard before, a Trevelyan lullaby that mothers sang to their children despite the grim stories it told: young men lured out to sea in storms that drowned them, women who disappeared in thick coastline fogs, ships devoured by mythical sea creatures that spat out their bones on the other side of the world. Indeed, this woman held a small child in her arms that Kai hadn’t seen at first, all bundled up in a blanket. The woman rocked him gently. Tears ran down her cheeks. Her singing was beautiful despite the breaking of her voice, the gruesome scene at her feet.
The woman set down the child atop the mound of corpses. The young boy looked peaceful in his sleep; the lullaby had worked its magic. The glint of a knife caught the light as the woman lifted it above the child. Kai took an involuntary step forward just as she brought it down upon the boy. Kai flinched and tripped over a corpse whose face was oddly familiar: a girl with red hair, her mouth set in a smirk even in death.
“I warned him it would not work.” The woman was staring at Kai through tears, her hands slick with the child’s blood. “The dead are meant to stay dead.”
The corpses around them sat up in one great movement. In sync, their lifeless eyes turned to Kai. He stumbled backward, suspecting who this was, what he was seeing. He needed to wake up. But something darker caught his eye.
Watching the scene was a towering umbra wearing an obsidian crown. It spoke in that same tongue as before, uttering the same words that Kai understood instinctively.
Open the door.
Suddenly the corpses moved at an unnatural speed, scrambling toward Kai. He screamed as he willed himself to leave this nightmare behind andwake the fuck up—
When he opened his eyes, Kai found he was no longer beneaththe illusioned sky of Obscura Hall. He stood on the beach, waves lapping gently at his shins. In the pale moonlight, Dovermere’s mouth seemed to laugh at him in the near distance. That unnatural tongue resonated in his mind.Open the door.
But Kai turned his back on it, only to find that another sort of door had been opened, and out of it had crawled an army of revived corpses.
11ROMIE
AT FIRST LIGHT, ROMIE HEADEDto the herbarium.
It was a lovely place that reminded her of her old greenhouse. Whatever rot was affecting the woods had not yet reached the plants and herbs and flowers that grew in here, all fresh and verdant and healthy. Romie knelt to study a particularly interesting variety when a voice made her whip around.
“Careful. That one’s poisonous to the touch.”
Mr. Ametrine, an old, bent man with knobby hands, stood behind her, leaning on a sculpted wooden cane. Romie pulled away from the plant, which shewasn’tgoing to touch; she knew better than that, thank you very much. “I thought it might be foxglove,” she mused, “but I take it it’s not?”
“Monkshood,” Mr. Ametrine said. “Also known as wolfsbane. Very toxic.”
Romie hummed. “It’s always the toxic ones that are the prettiest.”
The corner of his mouth lifted at that. “You have an interest in botany?”
“Oh yes. Very much.” She thought of Nisha, their shared love of plants. Their secret trysts in the greenhouse. Tides, she missed her.
Romie lifted her still-healing hands with a self-deprecating smile. “I was actually wondering if you had more of that salve for me?”
Mr. Ametrine wobbled off to prepare it, leaving Romie to puzzle once more over why her hands had burned at all when she’d grabbed hold of those stars in the sleepscape. She understood that this space between worlds was not quite the same as the sleepscape she knew, in that it was atangibleplace in which her physical body had been present, whereas when she visited it in dreams, it was only her subconscious. Grabbing hold of a star in sleep let her access whatever dream it contained; but doing so in the space between worlds, apparently, only hurt her.
Odd, then, why Emory had been able to do so without getting burned. A perk of being a Tidecaller, Romie supposed.
Tidethief.
The word came to mind against her will. She was still trying to make sense of it all, how the friend she’d known all her life had been a Healer when she’d last seen her but had since become a mythical Tidecaller, with all these powers at her fingertips.
Envy was not a color Romie enjoyed wearing. She’d never seen the point of it. If someone had something she desired, she used them as inspiration to fix what was lacking in her life instead of begrudging them for it. But she couldn’t exactly manifest Tidecaller magic of her own, could she? And it was a particular sort of sting to realize that what she’d dreamed of her whole life—to know every facet of the lunar cycle as her own—was indeed possible, just not for her.
