“Actually…” Baz met Emory’s gaze. He swallowed thickly. “We only just found each other. I was… A lot has happened since we left.”
Professor Selandyn scanned their group, doing a double take as she saw Sidraeus. “Clearly.” She frowned. “Where’s Kai?”
Emory’s heart sank. She’d been so focused on Romie, Atheia, Sidraeus, and every little thing in between, that she hadn’t clocked Kai’s absence until now. Her gaze snapped to Baz. The devastation on his face was brief before he schooled his features into stiff tenacity.
“We lost each other. But I… I’ll find him again.”
Emory knew there was more to the story. Could see it plainly in his eyes, in the way his throat undulated as he swallowed back whatever emotion he was suppressing.
“And Romie?”
This came from Baz’s mother, Anise. She was looking at Baz with such hope, but when Baz turned to Emory, so did everyone else.
Emory closed her eyes to keep the tears from falling.Romie’s gone because of me,she thought.Again.
Familiar guilt threatened to choke her. But then a hand brushed hers, and she opened her eyes to see Nisha at her side, giving her a nod of encouragement. Emory took in a steadying breath. “Romie became the vessel to the Tides. And she’s come back here…” She peered at all the Eclipse-born staring back at her. “To eradicate Eclipse magic.”
People spoke all at once, their shocked murmurs rising ever louder. Emory could feel Sidraeus hovering behind her, watchingwith careful awareness as if ready to disappear if he sensed any sort of hostility toward him.
Jae managed to get everyone to quiet down. “Seems we have a lot to catch up on,” they said, looking between Baz and Emory, “but if what you say is true… if the Tides have truly returned…”
“It is true,” Emory asserted.
Jae blanched. “Surely they wouldn’t want toeradicateEclipse magic.”
“Rosemarie would never want that,” said Anise. She clung so tightly to her husband’s arm, her knuckles were white.
“She won’t have a choice,” Nisha said in the gentlest way possible. “She’s the Tides’ vessel now, forced to do their bidding.” She met Emory’s gaze. “Unless we stop her.”
“How?” Baz’s father asked. “How can we stop a deity?”
Tell them.
Sidraeus’s voice in her mind.
Emory faced the Eclipse-born. “Because we have a deity of our own on our side.”
“The Shadow reborn,” Jae said, looking at Emory.
She shook her head. “I’m not the Shadow reborn. I’m just a Tidecaller.” She locked eyes with Sidraeus as he stepped at her side, tilting her head up to look at him. “Heis the Shadow. And he’s here to help us.”
Silence swept the commons.
“But… he’s only aboy,” said a woman with tattoos like Kai’s peeking from the collar of her blouse. “And he looks so young…”
“I assure you, I am he,” Sidraeus said in that low, level voice.
Shadows gathered around him, slithering along his limbs. They reminded Emory of when she’d first found him in the sleepscape, when he was still in his umbra form and had taunted her with his shadows. The way her breath had hitched as they slithered aroundherlimbs. She chased the memory away, watching theawed faces around her as the shadows lengthened, as they took the shape of an obsidian crown atop Sidraeus’s head. His eyes flashed silver and gold, the light swirling and dipping around his pupils, the very embodiment of the eclipse.
“Forgive me,” breathed the woman who’d said he looked young. “Mighty Phoebus.”
Your people did not always know me as the Shadow,Emory remembered him telling her.They called me Phoebus, once. The bright one. Associated with the sun because I appeared to them on an eclipse.The name seemed to draw the slightest smile from him now.
“We are at your mercy,” a man said with a hand to his heart. “We are yours entirely.”
He and the Luaguan woman bowed their heads in reverence. A few other people quickly followed suit, holding their tattooed hands to their hearts, the Eclipse sigils turned to Sidraeus in recognition of this deity they owed their magic to. But most, Emory noticed, kept their heads high and their hands at their sides, staring at Sidraeus with looks ranging from careful skepticism to outright distrust.
A young man, pale-faced and wearing a teal blazer embroidered with what looked like the emblem of one of the Trevelyan colleges, scowled at Sidraeus.
