Chapter 66 Baz
THE VAULT WAS INDEFINITELY SHUT down until it could be rebuilt.
The wards, it seemed, were forever broken.
This came as no surprise for Baz, given the intensity of Thames’s Collapsing and the fact that, two hundred years from now, those wards did not exist. The Vault he knew didn’t have such deadly defenses.
Maybe this would serve to open Aldryn College’s eyes to the dangers of keeping such knowledge locked away, accessible only to those who they deemed the best and brightest. Power had the ability to corrupt anyone and everyone, Baz thought bitterly.
Clover was proof enough of that.
It was a few days since the incident now. Foreign students were starting to leave the college, and by tomorrow Baz would be expected to leave too, having been cleared of any involvement in the Vault’s blast. Except he had nowhere to go.
The Hourglass had rejected him. He’d even gone back and tried to open it again, but it was as if the threads of time around the Hourglass were eluding him on purpose. Somewhere beyond it, Kai was in the company of a killer, and Baz could not give him so much as a warning.
With nowhere else to go, he’d asked Cordie to arrange travel to Harebell Cove for him, where he might be able to get the time rift Luce had come through to open. He could find his way back to his time. Professor Selandyn, Jae, his father, the Eclipse-born—they still needed him, after all.
Yet he couldn’t bring himself to leave on the off chance Kai returned.
Baz went to knock on the door to Cordie’s art studio and found it was already open. He pushed his way inside. “Hello?”
“Good, you’re here,” Cordie said with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. All her artwork had been packed up.
Baz scrunched up his brow. “Are you leaving?”
She hugged herself. “I have to get away from this place. Start fresh. Away from…”
Away from the stain her brother had left behind.
The school had asked questions about Clover’s sudden disappearance, which Cordie had explained as an unexpected trip to some distant relative having taken ill. Baz supposed it made sense for her to leave before anyone unraveled that lie.
“My brother was my whole world,” she said now.
“I would have nothing without him, and he would be no one without me. He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t have done the things he did if it weren’t for me.
” She scowled. “Do you know how toxic that is? He murdered people and told himself it was to save me. But I don’t need saving.
I never have. I just want to lead the life I want, free of the burden of his suffocating love. ”
“Will you be all right on your own?”
“I have my art and my wits and the Clover fortune to tide me over in Trevel. But I think it’s time I shed that name, leave it to die here in the rubble of Cornelius’s mess.
I’ll take Louka’s name.” She stroked her stomach absentmindedly, her face lighting up at the thought.
“Cordie Kazan has a nice ring to it, no?”
Kazan.
Of course. The name was a puzzle piece that finally painted a full picture. The Kazans—Adriana, Alya, Vera, even Emory—they didn’t get their Clover blood from Cornus at all. Their line originated with Cordie.
“There’s something I wanted to pick your brain about,” Cordie said, fishing something out of a box full of sketchbooks and paintbrushes.
It was Clover’s journal. “I found it in Cornelius’s room.
It used to be warded to reveal its contents to his eyes only—he was so paranoid about everything—but look, see? ”
She flipped through it to reveal pages full of words and sketches, and for a moment Baz thought it might be the future version of Clover’s journal that he had. But a quick pat on his person revealed that journal to be in his pocket.
He frowned. “Would the wards have lifted when Clover left?”
“I imagine so. But here, this is what I wanted to show you.”
She flipped to a page that Baz remembered poring over, early passages of Song of the Drowned Gods that painted character portraits of the witch, the warrior, the guardian, and their respective worlds.
Cordie looked at Baz oddly. “I told you how my magic works. How it lets me see glimpses of people’s past, things that have emotional resonance and significance.
They’re most often the faintest impressions, but these drawings…
I’ve seen them so clearly before. In your mind.
” She unveiled drawings she’d made of the characters, and Baz realized they were the original illustrations that were included in the first edition of Clover’s work.
“These are the worlds he’s going through, yes?” Cordie asked. “So why am I seeing them in your past?”
Baz explained everything to her—that Clover was supposed to pen a famous book, that these were the images Baz had grown up poring over. Cordie handed him the drawings once he was done.
“I don’t think my brother’s coming back,” she said. “And even if he does, I don’t think that story actually belongs to him at all.”
The words were slow to sink into Baz’s mind. But she was right.
Clover was the very evil he had foreseen in the sea of ash.
He was the Tidecaller who would bring about the end of the worlds, not Emory.
That was what Thames had seen in Clover’s nightmare, the truth behind this vision of his.
Clover, the force of evil. Emory, the light that would go up against him.
And if Clover was still in the sea of ash two hundred years from now, then surely he must never have made it back here. Must never have gotten the chance to write Song of the Drowned Gods.
Which meant Kai would never come back here either.
Without Song of the Drowned Gods, history itself would be altered.
Baz would not be here if it weren’t for Clover’s story.
Romie and Kai would never have chased after the epilogue.
Emory would not have become a Tidecaller.
They might all still be together at Aldryn, safe and ignorant to doors to other worlds.
Luce had the epilogue when she went through the door with Clover—at least, the future version of the epilogue that Baz had brought back here with him and that Kai had given to Luce.
But if Clover never wrote it, would it simply come to disintegrate in her hands?
Would Luce and Kai disappear from Clover’s side, going back to their own world, their own time, because the epilogue would have never brought them here to the past?
Would Baz vanish from this time, too, and reappear back in his own, having forgotten all of this?
And then what? The worlds might still be crumbling, still be in need of saving. And none of them would know.
No. Baz couldn’t take that risk.
He was done being scared. Done coasting along while others did the brunt of the work and put themselves in harm’s way while he did nothing.
He’d always seen everyone around him as heroes in a story, while he was nothing more than a side character.
But heroes were heroes because they did what others couldn’t or didn’t want to do.
They embraced what made them special and faced their problems head-on. It was time for him to step up.
Power had the ability to corrupt everyone, sure enough. But in the same way, everyone had the capacity for bravery.
Baz knew what he had to do.