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H ellebore regarded the turned-out pockets with a roll of her eyes. “What’s in your hand?”

Ambrose thought, You’d better have a plan for this. Emery couldn’t cast a spell. Hellebore had all his tithes in that belt.

Emery raised his hands in surrender and opened them, palms facing her.

They were empty. Even Ambrose, close as he was, hadn’t seen its vanishing. If there was magic for concealing an object that could be cast using the ephemeral dust on the air, he’d never heard of it.

“Good boy,” Hellebore said. “Now get in your cage.”

A bolt of anger brought Ambrose a step closer to her. He couldn’t count the number of guardsmen and pretentious associates of the witch king who’d used those words against him in cold disparagement. As if he was a domesticated animal, just the witch king’s mad dog and not his—

Ambrose swallowed his pride and stayed stock-still. He stood between the two now. If Hellebore came closer to Emery, she’d encounter the barrier of his body.

A foolish move, after they’d taken such pains to maintain his secret.

She tilted her head, still wearing the impudent smirk on her darkly painted lips, but her arms raised with goose flesh. She couldn’t see Ambrose, but she could sense a threat.

He quietly backed away. It wasn’t worth it.

Emery got in the cage. “Don’t lose the key.”

“It’d be a mercy if I did.” A flash of regret passed over Hellebore’s face, too fleeting to be sure it had been there at all. “He’s really angry with you. You’re safer in here, I think.”

She left with a passing promise to return with water. Ambrose waited until even the echoes of her footsteps faded into silence.

Emery stood against the back wall of the cage, arms crossed. He affected an air of nonchalance, but Ambrose had been pressed close enough to feel a pulse fast as hummingbird wings in the delicate skin of Emery’s wrist. He was rattled.

“Where did you hide it?” Ambrose asked.

Emery gave his hand a flick, and the finger bone slipped from his open sleeve into the palm of his hand. If Ambrose hadn’t watched closely, he’d have missed it.

“Sleight of hand. The sort of magic they can’t stop me from performing with hexes, counterspells, and talismans.”

Ambrose should have known. He’d watched Emery perform the same trick with a coin while drinking a whole bottle of wine. “You could have trusted me to protect you.”

“Can I?” He sang it like a sardonic melody. “If that’s so, I suppose I can trust you to break me out of here?”

Ambrose looked at the iron lock to Emery’s cell. If he could break a statue, he could break that.

The question, now, was whether he wanted to.

A conflict had been playing out in his mind for the past few days. A tug-of-war between his instincts to protect Emery and the wiser goal to get free of him. He would play along with the murder plot. It was the witch king’s wish, and he didn’t feel too guilty over Morcant.

But a second voice had joined the first in his head, its whispers so distant they seemed imaginary. They asked a far more frightening question.

What if the voice he heard, the one he thought belonged to the witch king, the one guiding him to murder Morcant, was an illusion?

A simple disease of a mind addled by centuries of death and the pains of resurrection?

It could be real, or it could be a habitual echo from a man who left an indelible imprint on Ambrose’s life.

He didn’t have answers, and didn’t know which prospect he found most distressing: that he felt compelled to protect a man he couldn’t trust or that his king was never coming back.

I’m as real as you are. We are two sides of the same coin. I could no more be parted from you than the sun from the sky.

He had to hope that was true. For now, he had a choice between voluntarily freeing Emery, or refusing, at which point Emery would compel him to do so anyway.

To most it was not a choice at all, but to Ambrose, who’d been given so few choices in life, this one was weighty. Significant. Emery’s raven eyes watched intensely. He held too still, the knot in his throat bobbing on a swallow, betraying his false calm. His fingers tightened around the leash.

Ambrose couldn’t fight his nature. He wrapped a hand around the cage’s lock, iron turning to bruised fruit flesh, pulped in his fist. His magic couldn’t slake its thirst on metal like it could meat.

Ambrose had to ignore the way it made his stomach roil as the tumblers of the lock, succumbing to his power, disintegrated into ash and shrapnel.

The door opened.

Emery didn’t move. The effect of his dark eyes, now wide in quizzical uncertainty, made Ambrose’s heart skip, youthful hope peering through the cracks in Emery’s scavenger facade.

It died in a flash. “Trying to get on my good side?”

He pushed off the wall to brush past, but Ambrose put out an arm to block the door. Emery stopped short. His chest rose in a held breath against the barrier of Ambrose’s forearm.

“I don’t like being compelled,” Ambrose said. “I’d rather choose to help you.”

“And why would you want to help me?”

Ambrose didn’t know. Each guess felt like grasping a heart in his hands, hoping each beat would bring answers, only to squeeze too hard and watch as it all leaked out between his fingers.

The only thing, the truest thing, felt too personal to tell. I didn’t like watching them starve you.

Ambrose knew what it was like to be hungry. He didn’t like to think about the source of his hunger. He didn’t want to think about what Emery had said to him in the park, either, but it echoed in his ears.

I suppose it’s easier to pretend to love your chains than break them.

“I don’t trust you. Whether I use the collar or not, what difference does it make?” Emery said.

“I can’t break my chains, but I can hope you won’t use them to yoke me to your will.”

Emery’s gaze searched his expression until Ambrose began to feel undressed by it.

Finally, he said, “Have it your way.”

It felt a bit like blinding sunlight off snow in winter. Not warm nor comfortable, but tentatively hopeful of summers to come.

Back at the chapel ruin, Emery buzzed around the walls of the building to check and double-check his wards. Ambrose shadowed him, watching the dense woods for signs of Morcant or Hellebore.

“Do they know where you live?”

“Of course not.” Emery spat to dispel a waning ward and redraw its rune.

He roughly rolled the leg of his trousers to the knee and drew corresponding runes on his skin.

“I converted the ruin and portal to and from school to protect myself from their surveillance.” He cast the spell, wincing as it took a tithe of flesh.

“Blood is stronger,” Ambrose said.

“Yes, well, I don’t fancy carving myself up today.”

Ambrose shrugged, rolling up his sleeves. Emery regarded him like a mutated carp he’d fished from the bog.

“It’s just blood. My body will make more,” Ambrose said.

He thought it was sensible, but Emery pointed at the ladder of scars on Ambrose’s arm and said, “The witch king harvested from you whenever he required, like some kind of vampire?”

“I offered.”

Emery’s dark stare held a sudden comprehension that made Ambrose feel more naked than the night of his resurrection. “Like you offered to let me out of that cage.”

Rattled and trying not to show it, Ambrose lowered his sleeve, deeply offended enough to take the offer off the table.

It didn’t faze Emery. He finished repairing the wards and paced into the chapel, putting a new log on the waning embers of the last fire and speaking as he worked.

“He’s likely aware I’m trying to kill him in earnest now. He probably believed all my threats were just hot air before.”

Ambrose hovered over Emery as he stoked the fire. “What do you think he’ll do?”

“Up his defenses. Protect himself more thoroughly.” He paused a moment, then gave the embers an aggressive stab with the poker. “Punish me.”

“How?”

Emery’s gaze flickered to Ambrose’s arms, now covered. “His punishments may seem nothing compared to yours. They’re creative. Meant to inflict suffering without leaving scars. Not the visible kind, anyway.”

“Like the hunger Hellebore hexed you with.”

“Yeah … like that one,” Emery said.

An unwelcome thought crept up on Ambrose. It occurred to him how similar his own spells felt. Punishing. Hungry . There was something in that, though he didn’t know what.

“We need to act quickly. Whatever chance we get, we probably won’t get a second one,” Emery murmured.

“Given how poorly our plans have gone, what makes you believe improvisation will go any better? How are we to make it look like an accident?”

“No. No improvising, and no more making it look like an accident.” He tapped his fingers against his lower lip.

At his heel, Katzica nudged him, wagging her tail anxiously.

He hardly noticed her, too absorbed in the panic of rectifying his situation.

“Maybe I’ve been approaching this the wrong way.

I resurrected you. Doesn’t it make the most sense to play to your strengths? ”

A queer mix of yearning and repulsion stewed in Ambrose’s gut. The spell stains on his hands felt tacky with the memory of blood. “You mean—?”

“It’s what you’re known for, isn’t it?” Emery raised the poker, the hot end of it burning like a coal.

He stared into it. “I’d put this through his eye if I had the stomach for it, but I’ve never—” He set the poker down in its stand, one finger still tilting it by the handle.

“If I faltered at the crucial moment, I doubt Morcant would afford me another opportunity.”

Ambrose startled as a dry nose pressed into his palm. Katzica gazed up at him, the pale cataracts of her eyes unseeing. Her white fur still bore the rusty stains from where Emery cut her open.

Had he been about to say that he’d never killed anyone before? Did Katzica not count? Or was it a charade? A means to lure Ambrose into making the killing blow, so that if things went wrong, he’d be the one to blame?

“There will be an inquest into his murder,” Ambrose said. “How do you plan to avoid suspicion?”

“It’s only a murder investigation if they find the body.”