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I n the morning, Emery emerged, slamming open his bedroom door and looking more risen-from-the-dead than Ambrose had after five centuries in the ground.

“Feel rough as a badger’s arse,” he said.

Ambrose didn’t feel much better, really. He’d slept poorly after reading that book. He didn’t think Emery had truly been drunk the night before, but he certainly looked hungover now.

Katzica rushed over to greet Ambrose, licking his hand with an alarmingly dry tongue.

“Get dressed,” Emery ordered. “We’re going for a fry-up. I need to consume something that’s ninety percent grease.”

It wasn’t a command, for Ambrose felt no compulsion to get up with any haste, but he sensed Emery kept the tether on his person. It beat like a second heartbeat in his ears.

He dressed in another smothering turtleneck, and Emery enchanted a portal to a pub in a converted stable yard, with a fresh produce stand squatting outside the open barn doors.

Emery picked up a punnet of those small tomatoes, which he called cherry tomatoes, paid the farmer, and flicked coins into the tip jar on their way past.

Inside, the original foundation remained, with stalls made into booths and the tack room now a tap room. The smell of hops and frying fat mercifully replaced the expected stench of manure and hay.

The difference sent a pang through an old, forgotten scar of Ambrose’s. He recalled the precise color of his cremello mare, her hide like flaxen wheat as he ran his hand along her flank, darkened with foamy sweat.

He shook the memory aside. He couldn’t dwell on that.

Emery sat them in a booth, secluded enough they wouldn’t be overheard, and a red-faced youth brought them lists of dishes, which were called menus.

“I haven’t cooked in some time. Morcant’s curses left me rather without appetite—but it’s impossible to turn down the breakfast here.”

Ambrose’s appetite wasn’t much better, soured by memory. Perhaps he could avoid revealing he couldn’t read the menu by skipping breakfast altogether.

You must eat. You must stay strong.

Ambrose bowed his head. It was true. The menu’s lifelike illustrations helped. They depicted honest fare of eggs, bacon, sausages, and toast.

He ordered the same thing as Emery: a stack of pancakes and bacon.

Once the waiter left, Emery said, “I have a plan.” He pushed the punnet of tomatoes into the center of the table. “There are spells that induce heart attacks. I could hex one of these, and you chuck it in with Morcant’s snacks while invisible.”

Ambrose considered the timing of Emery picking up the punnet. “Did you come up with that just now?”

“When else? I woke up ten minutes ago.”

“Shouldn’t we be more …” He chose his words carefully. “Methodical?”

“There are about a thousand different ways to kill someone, but the longer we plan, the longer Morcant has to discover that plan.” Emery’s lip curled whenever he uttered the professor’s name, who, Ambrose noted, he never gave the proper honorifics for.

Never Professor Van Moor . Always Morcant , said as if spitting something out from between his teeth.

The plan struck Ambrose as strange, the same way Emery drinking alcohol in front of someone he didn’t trust had.

He’d assumed, given the meticulousness necessary to resurrect him, get him through the secrecy pact, and into the guild’s quarters, Emery tended toward over-preparation.

This spontaneous plan contradicted that assessment of his character, so which was he?

Mastermind, or just rash and talented enough to get lucky?

“How will you enchant it?” Ambrose asked.

From his satchel, Emery produced—death would be a mercy—more books.

Emery pushed one toward him. The leathery cover contained dusty, moth-eaten pages.

“I brought these along for inspiration. Found them at an antiques store. They look like medical texts, but, you know, for people who definitely shouldn’t practice medicine.

I’m sure they’ll have something we can use. ”

Ambrose nodded airily, leafing through the one in front of him. He pretended to read it, but the letters were no more use to him than spider silk was for sharpening a sword.

On one page, he came upon nude diagrams of a man and woman, as defined by standard medicine, their genitals and bodies all in alignment with who they were.

The images were a kick to the stomach. He’d avoided thinking about his body thus far.

The witch king’s magic had crafted him a form more comfortable to embody than the lumps and curves his teen years had cursed him with.

The witch king’s magic still hungered in him.

Would it also maintain his body’s transformation, partial though it had been?

He doubted it. His body had been maintained by regular potions.

The waiter brought their food. It was a welcome distraction.

Ambrose pushed the book away from him and picked up his utensils.

The pancakes in front of him were unlike the sort he remembered; these were thick and fluffy, fried golden.

He watched Emery drizzle some whiskey-colored syrup over his pancakes and, at a loss, copied him.

The moment he took a bite, he forgot his worries.

The pancakes were fluffy and sticky with the sweetest syrup he’d ever tasted.

The meat was salty and succulent with dripping fat.

Together, the combination made him close his eyes and slump back in his seat, head knocking against the wood panel behind him.

“Should I leave you two alone?” Emery said.

Ambrose flushed, swirling his fork through the sticky sauce on the pancakes. “What is this?”

“Maple syrup.”

“Nectar of the gods, more like.”

Emery almost smiled. Or his cheeks dimpled, which seemed close. Then he seemed to recover himself, regarding Ambrose with his customary suspicion. “It’s made from tree sap, though the trees aren’t native here. Yet another thing that wouldn’t reach us until a few centuries after you died.”

Ambrose was a man lost in time and mostly terrified, unable to read menus and hearing the voice of his dead king in a body that could betray him any moment while at the beck and call of a half-mad and vengeful witch.

But the food … The food might make it worthwhile.

Emery had only eaten a few bites himself, but stopped to tap a finger to a page of his book.

“Here. An enchantment to make the heart race. Normally used for medical purposes, but under the ‘adverse effects,’ it warns the spell could stop the heart altogether if made too potent. Let’s see, tithes. Hm. Oh. Well, that won’t work.”

“Why?”

“It requires a tithe of suet from the fat of a rare Tibetan hog, which is strictly regulated since it can also be used in spells for performance enhancement. For, er, sexual purposes. It does mention another tithe here.” He scowled.

“The third eye of a three-eyed toad. Really? Fat chance of finding that at Minty’s Mortar and Pestle. ”

“You live in a bog,” Ambrose pointed out.

“Ah, yes. Shall we don our waders and go hunting?”

Ambrose resented the tone of sarcasm. It was only a suggestion.

Emery squinted at him. “Are you pouting?”

“No,” Ambrose said, adjusting his expression to something more neutral.

“I didn’t know the Grim Wolf of Bellgrave pouted .”

“Witches in my day harvested tithes from the wild.”

Emery slumped back, letting out a groaning exhale. “Well, if we can’t find anything else, I suppose we can try. Not as though it’s easy to come by tithes with lethal purposes at the average apothecary.”

An hour later, Ambrose found himself walking gingerly across peat mats in search of three-eyed toads.

The bog surrounding Emery’s ruin reeked of humidity, compost, and mud.

It was the sort of bog where decaying plant matter floated and congealed on the water’s surface until it was solid enough to walk across.

The spongy mats squelched and bounced underfoot, making Ambrose feel as if he were bobbing on a boat at sea.

He had to walk with his arms out for balance or avoid pitching over into peat, which, if he sank through, was liable to swallow him.

He was a passable swimmer, but he didn’t want to test those skills in waters like these.

Worse than the risk of drowning were the midges. Too small to see or hear, he only became aware of them when he felt a prickling bite on his face or hairline—the sensory equivalent of a rough seam on the inside of a shirt or loud chewing. It made Ambrose itchy all over.

As he saw a toad and went waddling after it, grasping it firmly by the legs to hold up and examine for a third eye, he reflected that he had been given worse orders than these, but perhaps none so undignified.

The history books might reflect less darkly on the Grim Wolf of Bellgrave if their authors could see him now.

Emery, not content to simply whisk Ambrose away on the errand, had joined him in the search. Raising his knees high to pull his boots out of mud or shake out the puddles seeping into his socks, Emery resembled a stork with his long, slender limbs held at odd angles to keep his balance.

It tugged at the corners of Ambrose’s mouth, to watch him lunge for a toad only to belly flop onto the peat mat with a muffled swear word.

“Don’t laugh. It’s not as if you’ve done any better. There’s mud on your face.”

“And is that nearly a smile on yours?” Ambrose didn’t think a bit of jest would be too risky. He smeared the mud away, or tried. His sleeve was equally muddy and only served to paint more on.

Emery paused. “I can smile. I smile all the time.”

“So your sour look is a choice and not an unfortunate paralysis of the face.”

“What have I got to smile about? I’m covered in mud and rotten plant gunk—” He’d gotten up, flicking the aforementioned gunk from his feet with little kicks like a cat with wet paws.

“—getting eaten by midges in a stinking bog, searching for a rare amphibious mutant that probably doesn’t exist so I can murder the bastard who ruined my life, with an accomplice who’d probably murder me, too, if not for the magic shock collar his own bastard of a master saddled him with. ”

He is unworthy of you , the witch king muttered darkly.

Ambrose’s stomach boiled with a motion not unlike the rippling peat mats. “He is—wasn’t a bastard.”

“If you say so—Ah!” Emery pointed. “Look at that. There.”

Ambrose followed the direction indicated but could make out nothing in the yellowing beige-brown of the bog.

“That toad, there,” Emery went on. He’d adopted a hunting stance. It made him look like a squatting toad himself, albeit a far prettier one.

A thought Ambrose squashed like a mosquito.

He stalked toward the spot with Emery. As he got closer, he saw the toad hunkered in the grasses, well camouflaged as a lump of mud. In the center of its forehead was a yellow pustule of an eye.

Emery flexed his fingers and pointed. “You go around and I’ll herd it toward you.”

Ambrose did as instructed, but when Emery moved, the toad did not head in the direction it was chased. It sprang to the right and made for open water.

“No!” Emery shouted. “Get after it!”

Ambrose lunged.

This was his first mistake.

The slippery, rippling peat mats did not offer much traction. He landed a foot short of the toad on a new and weakly patched-together mat, full of holes like honeycomb.

It couldn’t hold his weight and buckled.

He nearly took in a lungful of acidic water as the cold shocked his body. Darkness enveloped him as he sank into the bog.

Shock gave way to panic. His eyes stung with silt when he tried to open them. He kicked for the surface but couldn’t be sure he’d aimed the right direction, until he hit something slimy and semi-solid.

A peat mat. He was underneath one.

He tried to push up through it, but it was far denser than the one he’d fallen through. He sank his fingers into the muddy underbelly, but it held firmly together.

The second mistake he only recognized in the unsettling, serene quiet of the bog’s muddy waters.

Emery hadn’t used a compulsion command. The collar hadn’t squeezed. It hadn’t yanked Ambrose into pursuit. He had, out of idiocy or old habit, obeyed.

Now he was going to drown.