A laugh that was so unlike Romie spilled from her mouth. “Who will stop me? The world has fallen to chaos. Anyone with a sliver of power and influence answers to me, the Tides who so generously restored their magic to its full might. No one’s coming for you, Tidethief. You may as well be dead to what’s left of your friends.”
Emory had to believe she was wrong. Baz would come. The Eclipse-born would find a way to her. Her friends would be all right.
But another face occupied her thoughts, eyes of silver and gold, hair the color of autumn leaves, voice like the night clinging desperately to the dawn. When she called out to him in her mind, no answer came. There was only empty silence. She couldn’t bring herself to ask Atheia what she’d done to him.
Atheia smiled as if she could read her thoughts all the same, and maybe she could. “That bond you share is quite an interesting one. For him to feel not only your pain, but that of all Eclipse-born…” She picked up a syringe, examining its sharp point. “I expected this place to be the worst sort of torture for him, but he’s too stoic for my liking. It’s tiresome.”
She gave a long sigh and plunged the syringe in Emory’s arm unexpectedly, drawing a whimper of surprised pain from her. The lights in the room flickered in and out, as if the raw power being drawn from her veins was affecting them.
The door opened as two Regulators dragged someone in. Sidraeus hung limply from their arms, head bowed, eyes closed. Emory fought against her restraints, his name slipping from her lips as the Regulators pushed him to his knees and forced his head up. Finally coming out of whatever groggy spell they had him under, he settled his gaze on her. He composed his features into stony neutrality, but his eyes held something of an apology, a trace of fury.
Emory hoped to hear his voice in her mind, but again it was only silence.
And then her ears filled with screaming—her own or his, she wasn’t sure—as pain seared across her skin. Atheia’s hands were grasping Emory’s arms, emitting a bright, burning light. As if she were concentrating rays of sunlight, focusing them as a mirror or magnifying glass might, so that it burned through Emory’s flesh. The smell invaded her senses. The pain was worse than any she remembered feeling. Tears streamed down her face as her screaming turned to a whimper, too weak was she to muster much else.
When Atheia drew her hands away, giving her a second of reprieve, Emory realized that her magic was truly gone. The healing power that had always saved her, that had made any hurtfeel like a distant dream once it took away the source of it, was silenced by the Unhallowed Seal on her hand. The pain kept going in throbbing waves, yet she sought Sidraeus with her gaze, knowing he would have experienced it too. He was trembling on his knees, biting down on his own fist as if to keep from screaming, his eyes shut as if he couldn’t bear the sight of Atheia’s torture.
Atheia merely smiled and motioned for the Regulators. “Take him to see the other creatures,” she ordered them. “I want to see if hurting them will hurt him too, or if this curse branded on his skin binds him to Eclipse-born of this world alone.”
“Stop it,” Emory breathed as she watched Sidraeus being dragged away. He didn’t fight back, and that alarmed her more so than the burned handprints on her skin. “Haven’t you done enough to him?”
Fury flashed in Atheia’s eyes. “Typical of you Tidecallers to defend him so willingly. After everything he’s done to your kind, I’m surprised you even care. Oh, but I suppose he’s made you believe he had no choice, that he regrets everything he did.”
Atheia smiled wickedly at whatever expression flickered over Emory’s face. She tucked a strand of Emory’s sweat-soaked hair behind her ear, the tender gesture made perverse by the cruelty seeping into her words.
“I too have been swayed by his honeyed words and brooding charms before. But here’s a secret for you, Emory.” She lowered her face close to Emory’s ear, whispering, “Sidraeus will never care for anyone but himself, and if he has made you believe otherwise, it’s only to get something from you.”
With that, Atheia exited the room, leaving Emory alone with the pain.
Days might have bled into night without Emory’s knowledge, the passage of time marked only by the comings and goings of thosewho took her blood. Groggily, she was aware of faces hovering over her, some she recognized as members of the Selenic Order. There was Vivianne Delaune, the Memorist who’d wiped Penelope’s memories. And there was Leonie Thornby, Keiran’s great-aunt, whose greedy expression as she took a vial of silver blood in her hands cut through the fog in Emory’s mind.
“Why?” Emory asked, voice so weak she thought for certain Leonie wouldn’t hear.
The older woman turned to her, hovering at her side for a moment. “I’m sorry, child.”
But there was no remorse in her eyes.
Perhaps seeing Leonie is what made Emory dream of all the ghosts in her life. She hadn’t seen Keiran’s face since the abyss, but here he now was, sitting with her in a pile of broken glass. They were in Dovermere, she realized, the hourglass of her dreams already shattered. It was so quiet, Keiran’s voice startled her.
“You should have listened to me, Ains.” His face didn’t have the distorted pallor of the ghost she’d seen in the abyss, nor the one that had haunted her in the Wychwood before that. He looked like he had the night of the bonfire when she’d first returned to Aldryn, alive and bright with that gold-hued charm of his. “None of this would have happened if you’d become the Tides’ vessel like I’d planned.”
And he was right. Instead, Emory had evaded that fate and pushed it onto Romie. Now her best friend was lost to the whims of a deity, Emory was going to die giving up all her power, and Eclipse magic would be eradicated.
“She’s still in there, you know.”
It was no longer Keiran sitting beside her, but Aspen. The witch looked as alive as she had been before Clover sacrificed her, except there was an open cavity in her middle showing her rib cage. A single rib bone was missing.
“Aspen,” Emory cried, reaching toward her to heal her, before she realized this was only a dream, and she had no more magic besides.
Her eye caught on the other two people sitting beside the witch. There was Tol, who gave her a sad smile. His chest was open, his golden heart missing from where it should have been. And then there was the boy with blond curls whom Emory had only seen briefly in the godsworld. Orfeyi stared glassy-eyed into the distance, his vacant face hinting, perhaps, at his missing soul.
The sight of the three of them brought tears to Emory’s eyes. So much had happened since the sea of ash that she hadn’t fully processed their deaths. What happened to their souls, she wondered? She hadn’t felt them among the restless ones that had escaped the abyss, but if no soul could find eternal rest with the fountain being depleted of magic, she couldn’t fathom what might have become of theirs.
“I’m so sorry.” Her words got caught in a sob. “I should have listened to Romie, should have stayed away from the sea of ash. Maybe then you wouldn’t be dead and Romie wouldn’t be—wouldn’t have to—”
Aspen grasped Emory’s hand, squeezing it tight. “There was no stopping the fate that awaited us. You can’t keep blaming yourself for something you had no control over.”
It was Emory’s own words echoed back to her, but she couldn’t bear to hear them here, not now. It wasn’t just the keys’ fate she felt responsible for, but everyone else’s, too. The friends she knew were imprisoned here with her, and those whose fate remained unknown to her, like the Eclipse-born left behind at Aldryn, and Vera and Jae and the others who’d been scoping out the Institute perimeters. If her plan had led to their capture—or something worse—she would never forgive herself.
