Chapter 62 Baz
BAZ WOKE IN THE INFIRMARY, bruised and battered but with all his limbs intact.
At least he thought so. Bleary-eyed, he surveyed his surroundings.
All the beds around him were occupied with bandaged-up students.
Cordie, he noticed, stood near the windows, red-eyed and with her arm in a sling, but alive.
She spoke with a white-faced Polina. Outside, the sun was setting, casting them both in a golden glow.
Cordie noticed he was up and was instantly at his side. “How are you feeling?” she rasped.
Baz winced as he sat up. “Like I should be dead.”
His mind raced back to what had happened. The magic of the door barring him entry into the sleepscape, whispering about his work not being done. “How did I get here?”
His right wrist was bandaged. He lifted his good hand to his head—still fuzzy from when he’d landed in the Belly of the Beast—but found he was bound to the bed, a damper cuff around his wrist. “What—”
“A precaution,” Cordie said. “You were found on Dovermere Cove, half-drowned and barely breathing.” Tears glistened in her eyes. “Cornelius is gone, isn’t he?”
Baz nodded. Clover was gone. Kai and Luce too. And Baz was left here stranded in the past, with not the faintest clue if he would ever see Kai again.
Polina shuffled uncomfortably by the bed, hunched as if she were trying to make herself smaller or disappear entirely. She too wore a damper cuff, though hers wasn’t keeping her tied to a bed. Baz noticed the stares from injured students around them. They were glaring at them—at him specifically.
“What happened?”
“There was a blast,” Polina explained. “It ripped through the Vault and the Decrescens library and the whole quad, and, well…” She gave a furtive glance at the glaring students, lowering her voice.
“They assume the blast was from Thames’s Collapsing.
That he cheated his way past the wards. And that you must have helped him, even though you were found on the cove, not in the Vault.
They thought you’d Collapsed too, but don’t worry, they tested your blood. Red, not silver.”
Equal parts anger and sadness rushed through Baz. All the progress he’d made with these students, all the animosity that had started to fade around him… it had all been for nothing. He was Eclipse-born, and so they would find a reason to blame him for this.
“What happened to Thames’s body?” Baz asked.
Cordie suddenly plopped down at the foot of Baz’s bed, her shoulders racked with sobs. “I’m sorry. I just—I can’t believe he’s gone. I don’t understand how he ended up down there. After I thought he’d left for Trevel? Why was he there at all?”
Polina threw her arm over Cordie’s shoulders as she broke down, whispering to her in soothing tones. She met Baz’s confused gaze. “They found another body down in the Treasury. It was Louka.”
Baz’s stomach fell. Louka? It made no sense. How in the Tides’ name would he have found a way past the wards? And how had they not seen the body? “Cordie, I’m so sorry.”
His heart broke for her as she cried in Polina’s arms. A Healer brought Cordie to an empty bed to calm her down.
“None of this makes sense,” Baz muttered.
Polina looked at him, worrying her lip. “I may have done something.” She fished out two silver lockets from her pocket, laying them on the bed.
“I took both Thames’s and Louka’s memories and imbued them in these.
The pertinent ones, at least. I haven’t shown Cordie yet, but… I needed someone else to know.”
Baz’s heart raced as he reached for the lockets. He’d nearly forgotten about Polina’s Enshriner magic—the ability to extract memories from the dead. He hesitated before touching the lockets. “What did you see?”
Polina shook her head. “I can’t say. You have to see for yourself.”
Baz wasn’t sure he wanted to, given the sickly tint to Polina’s face. But he had to. “How does it work?”
“Put the necklace on and open the locket. It’ll pull you into the memories it contains. You won’t be… yourself when you’re there. You’ll experience the memories through the bearer’s eyes, with their thoughts, their feelings.” She handed him the bigger of the two lockets. “Start with this one.”
Haltingly, Baz slipped the chain over his head. With fingers that were surprisingly steady, he opened the locket—and gasped as the infirmary and everyone in it disappeared. As Baz himself disappeared, his mind replaced with another’s.
“This isn’t working.”
Cornelius’s frustration was evident as he shoved his journal aside, nearly knocking over an ink pot. Thames looked up from where he sat reading on Cornelius’s bed. The sheets were undone from their earlier tumble, and Thames luxuriated in the silky feel of them on his skin.
Cornelius ran a hand through his hair, mouth set in a petulant line as he leaned back in his desk chair.
It always fascinated Thames, how close to the surface Cornelius’s emotions were when he wasn’t out in public—when he wasn’t being the unflappable scholar everyone saw him as, but the passionate idealist Thames knew.
“What are you thinking?” Thames pried.
Cornelius rubbed pensively at his lip. “For the experiment to truly be successful, I would have to not interfere. Let them fight for their lives on their own, without my healing magic to fall back on.”
“And if they don’t survive?” Thames asked. “Surely people will notice if Aldryn’s best and brightest start dropping like flies.”
Cornelius gave an exasperated sigh. “You’re right.”
Pride soared in Thames’s chest at this small recognition of his worth. “You could keep it outside of the Selenic Order,” he suggested. “The Bicentennial would provide the perfect cover-up.”
“Students dealing with notoriously deadly wards?” Cornelius’s eyes glimmered with excitement. “No one would bat an eye should something happen.”
“Precisely. You’d have to be careful who you target, but…”
“I think I have an idea.” Cornelius’s mouth curled up in a smile. He joined Thames on the bed, tenderly grabbing his face between his hands. “Whatever would I do without this brilliant mind of yours?”
The scene dissolved just as Clover’s mouth descended on Thames’s. The memory bled into another before Baz had time to consider what any of it meant.
Cornelius was being strangled by Wulfrid and still had the audacity to smile—to laugh—in the face of death.
“Do your worst,” he croaked.
Veins bulged on Wulfrid’s neck as he squeezed tighter.
Cornelius’s eyes rolled to the back of his head, legs flailing and kicking as his body spasmed beneath Wulfrid’s.
Thames had seen enough. He pounced, tearing Wulfrid off Cornelius and driving his fist into him again and again, something wild coming loose inside him.
“Enough, Thames.”
Cornelius pulled him up, looking completely unruffled.
He righted Thames’s glasses for him, fixed the lapels of his suit, a crimson mirror to the white one Cornelius had donned for the party.
He grabbed his trembling hand between his and pressed a gentle kiss to his bloodied knuckles.
“There,” Cornelius murmured, and Thames felt the brush of healing magic against his skin, erasing the evidence of what he’d done.
Thames glanced at Wulfrid. “Is he…”
“Not yet. Though he’ll make for the perfect target, don’t you think? It was so easy to bait him.”
“What have you done?”
Thames and Cornelius whipped to the voice behind them. Three students looked at them with wide eyes—Wulfrid’s teammates. The burly Frons student opened his mouth to alert the librarian on duty, unaware that Cornelius had already paid off Luce to be absent from her post tonight, given the party.
“Keep your mouths shut and do as I say,” Cornelius said, voice laced with the compulsion of Glamour magic. The three students went quiet. “Now grab your friend here and follow me.”
Thames was in the secret library room, assaulted by loud music and laughter. He flexed his hand, a phantom soreness after pummeling Wulfrid. His gaze caught on Baz, who watched Cornelius and Kai on the dance floor with an expression Thames knew well. “Cornelius is like that with everyone,” he said.
“Like what?” Baz asked.
“A shameless flirt. It used to bother me, too, at first.”
Lie. It still bothered him. He wanted Cornelius to have eyes only for him, but he was always chasing after those with the most interesting stories and magics.
Everyone could be replaced at a moment’s notice in Cornelius’s eyes, his sister being the one exception, of course.
But no one knew him like Thames did. Not even Cordelia.
If they knew the real Cornelius, they might see a monster. Thames only saw a scholar willing to go to lengths no other had the courage to.
“You’ve got something there,” Baz said to him.
Thames looked at the stain on his shirt.
Blood.
It must have gotten on him earlier. Thank the Tides his jacket was already red, making the stain look like nothing more than spilled wine. Still, he couldn’t risk raising suspicions.
He left the party to wash up, checking in on the four students as he did. Cornelius had Glamoured them to remain unconscious, hiding them away in a dark corner of the library. “Don’t worry, I put up a ward to shield them from unwanted eyes,” he’d said.
The plan was to deal with them after the party. But as Thames vigorously tried to scrub away the blood on him, doubt crept in. If Cornelius’s theory proved wrong, if none of these students turned into a Tidecaller, they would have four deaths on their hands.
They would be killers.
The party was over, the secret library room empty except for Thames and Cornelius and the three bodies splayed out at their feet. Dead, all of them.
The first to go had been the Frons student. Drowned in a shallow bloodletting bowl that Cornelius had filled with the closest available liquid: moonbrew. Fitting.