Chapter 45 Baz
AT THIS POINT, BAZ SHOULD have been unfazed by all the minor rule-breaking he’d been coaxed into, but there was something particularly upsetting about sneaking past the nighttime librarian in charge of enforcing the newly imposed curfew that shut down access to the libraries after dark.
Baz understood the need for such a curfew—it was the college’s way of preventing other students participating in the games from ending up like the Vanished Four, as they’d been dubbed—but this warred with his deep-seated belief that libraries should be accessible at all hours of the day.
What was he supposed to do with all his burning questions?
Ignore them until the morning? Not a chance.
Sneaking into the Decrescens library might make him feel like a common criminal, but this couldn’t wait.
Thankfully, the librarian on duty seemed otherwise preoccupied. In fact, there was no one at the front desk at all, though Baz and Kai did hear footsteps echoing in the aisles—the librarian making their rounds, no doubt.
They hunkered down in the Unraveler section, where works on arcane magic were usually kept. Surely ley lines would be mentioned in one of these books, and Baz had a hunch the information would help them make sense of everything.
“The authors of Dark Tides thought doors to the Deep were dotted along a spiral ley line, right?” Baz whispered.
“And Dovermere has always been believed to be sitting on the innermost part of the spiral. The most powerful spot. What if we did something to disturb the ley line while we were in Dovermere? A rift opened up, pulling us through time. If we can map out the ley line, find another time rift…”
“We could go back to our time,” Kai finished, understanding lighting his eyes.
A sound made them both snap their heads up. Baz was distinctly aware of how close he and Kai were. They held their breath as the librarian appeared farther down the aisle. She walked past them without glancing their way.
Shoulders slumping in relief, Baz resumed his perusal of the shelves.
“What are we looking for exactly?” Kai asked.
“Anything that has to do with arcane magical sources, tidal influences, geographical anomalies….”
Kai reached around Baz, breathing into his space as he pulled a book off the shelf. “Something like this?”
Baz found it hard to concentrate on the title with Kai standing so close. He finally managed to make sense of the letters, which read The Sacred Spiral of Rebirth: Influences in Art, History, and Magical Theory.
Baz clutched the book to his chest, beaming at Kai. “Exactly like this.”
There was a charged moment before Kai stepped back, craning his neck to see if the librarian was nearby. He motioned that the coast was clear. They tiptoed their way through the library, and stopped as they came upon the archway that led into the Vault.
The door was open. Someone was coming up the narrow staircase beyond. The laurel-leaf-crowned marble busts on either side of the door let the person through like it was nothing.
Cornus Clover stopped dead in his tracks as his gaze locked on Baz and Kai.
“This isn’t what it looks like,” he said.
“Really?” Baz exclaimed, mind blank with incredulity. “So you haven’t found a way around the very wards we’re trying to break through?”
“Not exactly,” Clover hedged. He glanced nervously around the library. “We should speak somewhere else—”
“You’re going to tell us what you’re up to right here, right now,” Kai said with a dangerous edge to his voice.
Clover sighed, readjusting his vest and sleeves. Baz had never seen him so out of balance. “The truth is,” he said, “that I am part of a select group of students who have express permission to go into the Vault. The wards don’t prevent me from going in and out of it as I please.”
Kai laughed in disbelief. “Then why the hell are you even participating in the games?”
Baz’s thoughts exactly. All the research he’d done with Clover… Why would he have bothered?
“Because,” Clover said, “while the wards may not keep me out, they are keeping something hidden from me. There is something in the Vault that no one has access to—not any student or professor or even the dean, I suspect. I believe the wards’ main purpose is to keep this thing hidden from everyone.”
“And what might this thing be?” Baz asked, his curiosity piqued.
“A door.”
Something prickled along Baz’s spine. “A door to where?”
Clover shrugged, but there was something feigned about the nonchalance of the gesture. “That’s what I mean to find out. This is the reason I joined the games despite already having access to the Vault. I believe the only way to unveil this door is by breaking through the wards.”
“How did you know the games would involve breaking in to the Vault to begin with?” Baz asked. “They announced it after you’d signed up.”
“I had it on good authority.”
Pieces started to put themselves together in Baz’s mind. “This group of students you’re part of,” he said slowly, “it’s a secret society, isn’t it?”
Clover lifted a bemused brow. “And why would you think that?”
“Exclusive access to the Vault?” Kai said, picking up on Baz’s train of thought. “The very seat of knowledge hidden behind deadly wards? Sounds like something the Selenic Order would be involved in to me.”
Clover’s eyes sparked at the name, but he said nothing at all.
Kai gave a jerk of his chin to Clover’s hand. “Show us your wrist.”
“What?”
“Your right wrist. Show it to us.”
Clover seemed utterly confused now as he pulled his sleeve up. There was no silver spiral there to mark him as a Selenic, yet he had all the makings of someone who’d be involved in such a secret society. The best connections, the prestige, the grades.
With an unsettling realization, Baz thought Clover had all the same attributes that Keiran had had, even if they were nothing alike—or maybe he was only refusing to see the similarities.
“Say I am part of this secret society,” Clover said as he pulled his sleeve down. “This, of course, would mean I am silence bound. Something I’m sure you understand more than most.”
The meaning behind those words was clear. He knew they were hiding something too.
Baz and Kai exchanged a knowing glance, unsure how to tread here.
This door Clover sought had to be the Hourglass.
If it was hidden by wards in this time, it would explain why members of the Selenic Order didn’t have spiral marks, because they wouldn’t hold their rituals in Dovermere—might not know the Hourglass existed at all (if it even did exist in this time).
It surely wasn’t accessible through the tunnels of Dovermere.
Could there really be another way in through the Vault?
Like the Treasury—the Order’s seat of power, so to speak—that Nisha and Virgil had told them was in a secret grotto carved beneath the Vault.
“I want to be honest with you,” Clover said earnestly. “But I need assurances that this will stay between us. And for that, I think it’s best we drop this veil of secrecy between us, yes? These riddles we speak in are only impeding our trust.”
“Okay.” Kai crossed his arms. “Then talk, Tidecaller.”
A slow smile spread across Clover’s face, as if he were pleased that they’d discovered his utmost secret. “Only if you admit to being from the future.”
“You knew?”
“It was easy enough to guess, once I overheard you talking about time portals, a concept pulled from a book you snuck into my room to find.” There was no accusation in his voice, only mild amusement. “Besides, you’re not exactly the first ones I’ve met.”
Footsteps sounded in the dark, growing louder as they neared.
“Shit,” Baz said. “The librarian.”
He readied his magic, planning to stop time so they could slip out unnoticed, but Clover lifted a hand to stop him. “It’s all right. She won’t tell on us.”
Kai shot daggers at him. “I swear if you Glamoured her—”
“I did not Glamour her. She’s a willing participant in this venture.” His smile grew as the librarian appeared behind them. “There’s my favorite Dreamer.”
“Don’t flatter me, Cornelius.”
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 was Luce, and Tides, it couldn’t be the same Luce that 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—it was her. 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 up here.
“We know your daughter, Emory Ainsleif,” Baz admitted, taking a chance that he was right about this. “Or we will know 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 knew exactly what 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.
“She’s a fine Healer,” Baz decided on saying, haltingly. “Though I wouldn’t say it’s her… defining ability?”
Luce watched Baz with keen eyes. Before she could say anything, they heard a noise coming from the hall.
“We shouldn’t be talking about such things out in the open,” Clover said tightly.
“How about in there?” Kai pointed to the painting behind which hid the secret party room.
And so it was that they found themselves there, in the disquieting emptiness of a hidden ballroom. Three people plucked out of time and the would-be author this had started with, all of their secrets filling the spaces between them.
“All right.” Kai crossed his arms, looking every bit the Nightmare Weaver. “Talk.”