There are tides that drown and tides that bind,
tides with voices not all kind,
moon-kissed tides with pitch-black eyes,
and those that dance ’neath stranger skies.
Baz leaned in excitedly. “I found an underlined passage about doors to the Deep that I must have missed before. It mentioned portals that carry youon the tides of time—the authors used those words specifically.”
Kai frowned. “Wasn’tDark Tidespublished after Clover’s time?” It was written anonymously, and since Clover had brainstormed an early version of the epigraph in his own personal journal—a journal he had yet to write in, apparently—they’d speculated whoever authoredDark Tidesmust have taken the epigraph from him.
“I thought so too,” Baz said. “I guess not?”
“What are you two doing out here in the cold?”
Kai and Baz twisted around to see Clover smiling at them.
Shit.How much of that had Clover heard? Students had appeared all around them, heading from one class to the next. Judging by the textbooks in Clover’s arms, so was he.
“Just enjoying the fresh air,” Kai said, plastering on a smile. “Thanks again for the clothes—Cordie was great help picking out all the best styles. We’re grateful to you both.” He elbowed Baz. “Aren’t we?”
“Y-Yes,” Baz stammered. “We’ll pay you back as soon as we can.”
Hopefully they’d be long gone before that.
Clover waved a nonchalant hand. “Please, it’s my treat. And you can keep the ones you got from my closet.” He winked at them. “They suit you.”
Kai felt his skin prickle, hoping he didn’t know they’d just gonebackto his room.
32BAZ
THE FIRST BICENTENNIAL CHALLENGE SAWparticipating students divided into teams of four, each member representing a different lunar house. Their respective tidal alignments were written on badges pinned to their shirts. Clover, whose badge readHealer, was on a team made up of an Amplifier and a Memorist from Aldryn College, as indicated by their school badges, and a Soultender from Ilsker College, the more illustrious of Trevel’s two magical establishments (both of which paled in comparison to Aldryn, according to academic snobs).
Sixteen teams sat at tables that had been pushed into the middle of the assembly hall. The gathered crowd of students and professors and foreign dignitaries alike stood along the walls of the hall, craning their necks for the best view. Baz, Kai, Cordie, Thames, and Polina had managed to find spots at the front, right next to Clover’s table. Clover winked at them with a confident smile, his eyes lingering on Thames.
Aldryn was playing host to five other colleges. Karunang wasthe only school from the Constellation Isles, with the largest number of students present. “Easier for us to blend in,” Kai noted. Not all its students were participating in the games; most of them were in the crowd, along with someone Baz assumed was their dean—a short man with a graying beard who wore a navy silk tunic embroidered with the emblematic Karunang owl in silver and gold thread. Some students wore similar clothing traditional to Luagua, while others were dressed in fashions more common to Elegy and Trevel.
Then there were the two rival Trevelyan colleges, Ilsker and Sevstar, with as many students between them as those from Karunang alone. On one side of the assembly hall was the Ilsker crowd, all of them dressed in burgundy robes thrown over their straitlaced suits and gowns. The emblem pinned to their robes depicted a wave weaved through with the eight phases of the moon, curved around a droplet of blood. On the other side of the hall were the Sevstar students in similar robes of teal, their emblem a quill and dagger over a spiral conch. The rival deans, two pompous fair-skinned men in stuffy cravats and refined suits the colors of their respective colleges, glowered at each other from across the room.
And finally, two tiny groups from the Outerlands: Fröns, a college found in the frozen north, and Awansi, hailing from the far southern plains. The Fröns dean, a pale, austere-looking woman in a fur-trimmed robe, stood with one of her students in the crowd; only two more were participating in the games proper. They were recognizable by their white frocks adorned with intricate silver buttons, and their delicate emblem that portrayed the four lunar flowers sprouting from the pages of an open book.
The Awansi students—the four of whom all seemed to be participating in the games—wore kaftans in colorful, patterned fabrics, their emblem composed of the eight moon phasesconnected by geometric lines and symbols, with a blazing sun in the middle. Their dean, a woman with rich dark brown skin wearing a kaftan threaded with beads and patterns that echoed the Awansi emblem, smiled proudly at her students from the sidelines.
Each participating team received a specific moon phase and time of day—these were written on a sign at their respective tables, and each set was different. At first no one knew what these meant, until a student moderator from Aldryn explained that the teams would need to solve a problem using only the magic at their team’s disposalwithoutresorting to bloodletting, which meant they needed to find a way to work around the specific lunar and tidal circumstances of their table.
“For example,” the moderator said, “if you’ve been given a full moon at an ebbing Lightkeeper tide, and the problem you must solve is, say, finding your way on a treacherous path in the dark without slipping and falling to your death, how do you use the magic at your team’s disposal to succeed? There is only one rule: bloodletting to access your magic outside of the particular lunar and tidal alignment set you’ve been given is not permitted. You have an hour to solve your challenge. Good luck.”
“Wait, that’s it?” Baz asked Cordie. “This is all the games are?” This sounded a lot like what Aldryn had planned for the Quadricentennial—not a dangerous event with the potential to end in death.
“This is only a warm-up to the real games they’ll face over the next month,” Cordie explained. “It’s a way to givesomeinsight into what the actual games will require.”
Clover’s team was given a complicated ward to break through as their problem. But none of them were Unravelers, and none of their abilities, even if theyhadbeen allowed to use bloodletting, would be able to decipher the ward.
Baz’s gaze traveled to the other tables, his brain working tomake sense of this as if he were participating himself. Though if that were him up there, he’d most definitely let panic overtake him with all these eyes on him. But in the anonymity of the crowd, things were easier and plainer to see. Which is why, about twenty minutes in and with multiple dead ends encountered in his head, the solution finally came to him.
“They have to help each other,” he said under his breath. “To show that magic is collaborative.”
He might have imagined the way Clover caught his eye at that very moment, as if he’d heard him—or read his mind. Clover looked around at the other tables’ sets of lunar and tidal alignments. The same realization seemed to dawn on him. He stood up, chair grating so loudly on the floor it made everyone jump. Clover ignored his teammates’ confused looks—and the scowl that Wulfrid, who was also participating, gave him from where he sat at a nearby table. Clover made his way to a team whose set of lunar and tidal alignments readNew Moon, Rising Healing Tide.
