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Y ou cannot die here, my Ambrose. Not while you have my magic at your disposal.

Ambrose clenched his eyes shut harder against the silty water.

Of course. He should have thought of it earlier. The hunger in his breast snarled for blood, but the only thing Ambrose sank his fingers through was the sodden underside of the peat mat. He concentrated, let the magic pour through him like water carving out a new gorge.

It allowed his hands to part the dense matter of the peat and tear through to the other side, but when he grasped for anything solid to pull himself out, all he found was more peat, which sank with him.

His lungs burned. The bog was too thick to swim, dragging at his ankles, filling his bones with lead. He kicked and flailed and—

A hand grasped his.

Desperately he kicked, and another hand grasped his arm, pulling him up.

Breaking the surface felt like bursting through the shell of a fruit from the inside. He gasped, blinking the dirty water from his eyes. Emery lay sprawled on his belly across the peat mat, holding Ambrose by both arms.

“Oh, good, you’re still breathing. I don’t know if you realize, but I only had one familiar, so I really can’t recreate the spell to bring you back.”

Ambrose started to say, “Get me out of here,” but ended up coughing and spitting up the muddy water dripping into his mouth.

“Quit flailing. Listen. The peat won’t hold your weight unless it’s distributed evenly. Try and float on your belly.”

Ambrose swallowed his pride and, taking a deep breath to help his buoyancy, allowed his body to rise in the water as if he were going to perform a swimming stroke. Once he was mostly parallel with the surface, Emery shimmied backward. The peat mat sank a little beneath them but held together.

Bit by bit, Ambrose crawled his way out of the bog and, once they were on a solid mat, he rose to his knees.

Emery got up, looking down at his sodden, muddy clothes. “Not the most dignified rescue, but you’re alive.”

Ambrose looked up at him.

Emery didn’t have the same beatific features as his old master. The witch king had been likened to celestial bodies—the sun, the stars. With golden hair, clear blue eyes, and a smile like a blessing, the bards sang that his looks made angels jealous.

Emery was, in all ways, his opposite. Raven hair threaded with gray, eyes like bottomless night, sharp in all the ways the witch king looked soft.

He was no less handsome, and he’d saved Ambrose’s life.

He tried to eschew the burgeoning warmth in his chest. Saving him had been the sensible thing to do. He was a valuable tool, and he couldn’t serve Emery from the bottom of the bog.

But Emery had also brought him back in the first place, and he was beginning to find it hard not to feel grateful.

“The toad got away,” Ambrose said.

As if to answer him, they heard a creaky croak. They turned in unison. Three feet away, the toad sat watching them as though the spectacle of Ambrose nearly drowning had been its day’s entertainment.

Emery took a step, but Ambrose said, “Wait.”

He had a better method. In hindsight, he was ashamed he hadn’t thought of it before.

Drawing on his magic, he donned his invisibility and crept up on the toad, careful not to bounce the peat mat too much. He grasped the creature by the legs.

The plan was to sneak the tomato into Morcant’s usual punnet of them during a guild meeting.

They had considered doing it during classes, so that there would be plenty of witnesses to the accident of poor health. No foul play afoot.

Emery objected to this setting for one reason. Surrounded by other magical faculty, a witch might well be able to stabilize Morcant and send him to hospital before he met his maker, at which point doctors might discover the true source of his heart attack.

In the guild, there would be witnesses, but none who’d have to hand both the tithes and capabilities necessary to rescue Morcant from his fate.

The next meeting took place in the same tomb they’d visited for the Transcendent Rite. Ambrose accompanied Emery invisibly, breathing shallowly in the dusty air of the crypt. He kept to the walls, to the sarcophagi set into alcoves.

He’d tucked the hexed cherry tomato safely in the pocket of his cloak. While on his person, clothes and objects were invisible, but there was a chance someone might see the fruit appear from thin air when he dropped it in the punnet. He would have to act while no one was watching.

Morcant took his place at the central sarcophagus to wax poetic about the final step in the initiates’ transformation toward true necromancy.

He praised the new initiates on their successful casting of the spell jar, spoke with pride of the powerful witches they were destined to become.

“I want you all, during this last rite, to imagine yourselves as you’ve always dreamed you’d be.

Do not focus on your flaws, your weaknesses.

Embody the powerful person I know you each to be, and you shall succeed. ”

Emery, standing with his arms crossed against the wall nearest Ambrose, rolled his eyes.

Ambrose paid less attention to Morcant than to the array of items left out on the sarcophagus.

There were three long-stemmed black roses, a flask, three potion bottles containing a clear, sparkling blue liquid, and Morcant’s punnet of cherry tomatoes, still dewy from being washed.

While Morcant stood behind the sarcophagus, and the initiates in front of it, there wasn’t room to safely get close enough.

Ambrose would have to bide his time for the perfect moment.

There was a stone door in the back of the crypt, runes carved around its perimeter.

Morcant touched the runes. “This is a corpse door, used to seal in a draugr or revenant. I’ve dispatched it, of course, so you have nothing to fear. Follow my instruction, and your transformation will be complete. Hellebore will accompany us to assist.”

Before entering, he took up a piece of charcoal and asked each initiate to pull the neck of their robes down so he could ink a rune onto their skin, meant to help with their transformation into acolytes.

It all struck Ambrose as rather melodramatic and unnecessary.

His own transformation had not been given ceremony—it was agony to change and best gotten over with.

Saoirse stepped forward, wearing a dress patterned with pumpkins beneath her cloak. When she pulled the neck down for the rune, Ambrose overheard Morcant say, “Next time, be sure to dress more appropriately.”

Saoirse’s expression crumpled with brief confusion. She glanced down at her dress, as if to check it was the same one she’d donned that morning. Ambrose did, too, uncertain what was inappropriate about it.

It occurred to him slowly. She was quite a tall girl. Her voice had a resonant timbre, beautiful and unique.

He wondered if they were kin. Souls whose bodies weren’t in complete alignment. He sensed, more from Morcant’s comment than anything, that it was true, and that this was the true source of his criticism—not that her clothes were too revealing or unprofessional, but that they were feminine.

Ambrose hadn’t felt one way or another about Morcant, but in that moment a fury as hot as the forge of his own unmaking burned through him.

No one else had heard. Saoirse swallowed her hurt and confusion, putting it out of her mind to focus on the ritual.

Morcant finished drawing the runes. Three snaking lines with an upside-down triangle drawn through the middle one.

Reaching into his tithe belt, he crushed a fistful of briar berries and smeared them across the corpse door.

It groaned and moved into a recess in the wall, scraping and making the ground quake, revealing a pitch-black room.

Ambrose squinted but could make out nothing.

Morcant took one of the potion bottles and one of the black roses from the sarcophagus. He ignited a witch light in his palm, but the darkness seemed to swallow its glow, a dim aura surrounding him as he led Saoirse and Hellebore inside.

Curiosity piqued, Ambrose wondered if he should follow and observe the ritual, but he couldn’t tell how large the tomb was. The risk of bumping into someone in the dark was too great, and that wasn’t his purpose in coming here.

Before the door shut, Morcant added, “Hellebore, bring the tomatoes, would you? In case either of us get hungry.”

Hellebore fetched the punnet. Ambrose couldn’t edge out from his hiding spot to intercept her without squeezing through the crowd of initiates. He couldn’t risk it.

The corpse door groaned shut, sealing Morcant, Hellebore, and Saoirse inside.