Page 21

T hey went through two logs on the fire discussing the new plan. Though it was not so intricate as those previous, Emery couldn’t stop from repeating their roles and combing over the details several times.

He would agree to meet Morcant under the guise of fear and contrition. Once they had him alone, Emery would keep him distracted and talking until the time was right. Ambrose would strike, and if luck was on their side, Morcant would join the specters of his beloved tomb.

It was crude in its simplicity, but in Ambrose’s experience, murder was rarely elegant.

After brainstorming various ways it could go wrong and how they could circumvent those (increasingly unlikely) events, Emery penned a note on a torn scrap of paper, apologizing to Morcant and requesting they meet.

Ambrose couldn’t read it, but Emery did so aloud, asking whether it sounded too sycophantic. It had to be believable.

“Perhaps make it more petulant,” Ambrose said.

“Are you saying I’m petulant?”

“I see no benefit in answering that.”

To his surprise, the ghost of a smile tickled Emery’s face as he edited the note. After staring at it an interminable time, he threw it on the fire.

Ambrose raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you have sent it to him?”

“I just did.” He rubbed his temples. “Not by conventional means, though.”

He didn’t elaborate further, just continued rubbing his head.

“Headache?” Ambrose asked.

“Morcant. He uses the rune we got at initiation to send us untraceable messages. A boon for us in this case, since it leaves no paper trail. Police won’t know I’m the last person he spoke to.

He’s agreed to meet to discuss what happened.

Neutral territory , he proposes. Somewhere private.

I need to suggest a place. Somewhere no one can observe us but won’t raise his suspicions. ”

Ambrose scowled. “Will he not aim to harm you?”

“Oh, undoubtedly. He’ll want to punish me for the mild concussion he got after getting knocked in the head by a pair of stone horse bollocks.”

“I still don’t understand how he survived that encounter.”

“That’s something I’ve been considering,” Emery said. “If you believe he got a solid smack, yet came out of it no worse for wear, we could be dealing with a powerful defensive charm. An armor enchantment, maybe.”

Ambrose wasn’t used to being taken seriously. It was an agreeable change. “The witch king used such enchantments, in my time.”

“Did he? Well, then Morcant definitely would. He adores the witch king. Idolizes him. I swear, he’d bring the bastard back just to suck his dick.”

Ambrose experienced a multitude of emotions at once—humor, anger, jealousy, disgust—in the span of five seconds, all of them most likely playing out on his face.

It took an incalculable amount of willpower to master himself.

Not because, he found upon inspection of his feelings, he had any true animosity for Emery’s slight to the witch king, who’d been called worse than “bastard” before, but because the idea of the witch king doing anything sexual with Morcant was about as appealing as a moldy breakfast.

“Is Morcant—” Ambrose spat the words out like they tasted sour. “Inclined toward men?”

“God, no. Or, I don’t actually know. I’d be offended if he was one of ours, though.”

“Ours?”

“Queer,” Emery elaborated. “Gay. Homosexual. Sodomites, I guess, was the word people favored in your time.”

Ambrose felt heat climb up his throat and into his cheeks. He’d never, not once, been identified as such. “I never said—I’m n—How can you tell?”

“You were buried together.” A sad look flitted across Emery’s eyes, then took flight, gone. “Unless I’m mistaken, and he only viewed you as property.”

Ambrose flinched. “No, we—” He felt tongue-tied.

Never had he given voice to the secret feelings between him and his king.

They’d gone their entire lives performing an elaborate dance to disguise it, even from themselves.

Like the faithful’s belief in divinity, they’d known what they had was more than the devotion of a knight to his liege king.

Ambrose had never been religious, though, and in his more shameful moments he’d wondered whether the love between them was shared or a figment of his imagination.

After all, they’d never … consummated those feelings.

You were the only one who knew my heart. That which keeps to the shadows for safety is no less real for being hard to see.

Ambrose cast aside his doubts. He couldn’t allow Emery’s prying to crack his regard for the witch king.

There was one element of the conversation he turned over with more fondness. One of ours. A homosexual.

“You’re not mistaken.” Ambrose couldn’t keep the quiet awe from his voice. “It was not acceptable, in my time. I’m not used to it out in the open. ”

Emery had many hard lines to his face. The high cheeks drawn to a pointed chin, the steep slope of his forehead leading to the high arch of his nose, the sharp sneer of his mouth. Ambrose might never have known all those edges could look soft.

“It’s different now,” Emery said. “Not all better, but not like it was for you.”

The delight that inspired almost made Ambrose smile. “It will take getting used to.”

“Just wait until you meet a drag queen. But we’re getting distracted. Morcant. We need to meet him, find a way to strip him of his defenses, and kill him. I don’t suppose your ability to pierce inanimate and animate objects alike includes enchanted armor?”

Ambrose unconsciously touched his chest, where a blaze of scar tissue marked the place an enchanted axe had cloven him from his past life. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t put faith in an untested theory.”

“Then we will need to disarm him.”

“Is there a spell you could cast that would counter his defenses?”

“Yes, but even if I could gather the tithes in time, casting a spell right in front of Morcant is risky. He could retaliate too quickly, counter my own spell, or flee the moment he sees me casting. No, I need something subtler. A trap of some kind. Something I could prepare before Morcant arrives.”

Ambrose nodded. “Like the sigil.”

“Hm?”

“The sigil you used to trap me after resurrecting me.”

Emery’s eyes lit up. Clicking his fingers, he marched back to the living room and started seizing books off of shelves until he had a stack he could bury himself in.

It took time to design the sigil which could both ensnare Morcant and disarm him of defensive charms, but Emery proved an adept spell crafter. He drew and redrew variations on paper before he was satisfied enough to draw the final one on the floor of his living room.

“I need to test that it works,” Emery said. “Come here.”

Ambrose rose from the chair, offering his arm.

Emery stared at him. “Just like that?”

Ambrose shrugged. “Do I have reason to hesitate?”

“It’s bizarre that you trust me to cast spells on you so readily. I didn’t think the Grim Wolf of Bellgrave would be so … amenable.”

It wasn’t that Ambrose didn’t feel a degree of wariness around spell magic. “I’m sure I’ve endured far worse than whatever flesh tithe you need of me now.”

“I’m not taking a flesh tithe!” Emery said, horrified.

“Then I have even less reason to fear.”

Emery made a noise of disbelief, but he stepped forward. Ambrose offered up his bare arms, but the smoky ash stains of spell magic covered him from his fingertips to the ditch of his elbows, so Emery had to draw on his biceps.

Abruptly, he felt it was a mistake to comply. Not for the reasons Emery expected, but because it brought a measure of tactility to their interaction he hadn’t prepared for.

Emery wrapped one hand around Ambrose’s arm and used the other to draw. The warm, firm pressure of his fingertips and the brush of knuckles as the charcoal scratched across his skin felt oddly intense. All of Ambrose’s nerves awakened to the sensation of touch that wasn’t aimed to harm.

“I’ve been wondering.” Emery cleared his throat like something was stuck in it. “This spell—Your abilities. It’s remarkable that even after resurrection, the spell sustains itself. What did the witch king tithe for it?”

Ambrose clenched the answer behind his teeth.

He didn’t want to recall the pain of that spell’s making, and sank further into the soothing sense of Emery drawing on him instead.

His answer came out strained. “He burned the body of a hanged man whose death no one would mourn. I was forged in his ashes.”

Emery, to his consternation, stopped drawing and said, “What?”

Ambrose needed that sensation as an anchor to the present. Slipping into memory never went well, but he answered all the same, like that could quench the flame devouring him. “I had to put my hands in the forge while the witch king cast this on me.”

“Is that why you’re so nervous around fire?”

“I’m not nervous around fire.”

“I see how you look at the fireplace.”

Ambrose hadn’t realized Emery watched him closely enough to pick up on these things. It unnerved and … flattered him. Deeply contradictory feelings. “Perhaps they do awaken memories, yes.”

Emery brushed a thumb over the smoking tendrils of spell magic, and Ambrose tried to disguise a shiver. “It’s a barbaric spell.”

The contradictory feelings continued. Ambrose found he took offense and agreed in equal measure. “It was necessary.”

“Hm. Still doesn’t explain how the spell endured so long without further tithes to feed it. Is there any other component? Something you have to do in order to get the spell to work?”

Ambrose shook his head. He had never tithed anything.

The spell lived on in him, an unquenchable, infinite hunger.

Much like the witch king himself, whose voice he still heard.

If the two were linked, he couldn’t betray his king by telling Emery.

“I can’t cast magic the way witches can.

The spell changed me. That’s all I know. ”

Emery sobered. “I imagine it hurt.”

He’d looked up as he said it, meeting Ambrose’s eyes.

Firelight cast Emery’s a treacle shade of brown.

He mostly looked at Ambrose with guarded disdain, sometimes tinged with fear.

He looked open now. Like he was sketching Ambrose anew in his mind, a sigil with a different shape to its history and purpose.

Ambrose had to look away. “It was like no agony I’ve known before or since.”

Emery didn’t reply out loud, but his touch, which had already been gentle, was even more so. He finished drawing on one arm and moved to the other, conveniently able to capture Ambrose’s gaze once more as he said, “This one won’t hurt. Promise.”

It kindled a feeling in Ambrose he was too afraid to name.

Emery placed his hands over each of Ambrose’s biceps and subtly squeezed. The spell settled over him like a blanket. So soft, it could not be armor, yet it was. Warm and protective.

Emery sucked in a sharp breath. “Done.” He stepped away, brushing a knuckle over his brow. It left a streak of charcoal in its wake, and Ambrose had the inane thought he should scrub it away.

You are too loyal for these foolish thoughts, sweet wolf. He is unworthy to hold the bone that binds you.

Ambrose’s insides gave a sick swoop of guilt. He’d been so starved of touch in his past life, just the act of Emery drawing on him had awakened a different sort of appetite, but these thoughts and feelings were nothing but the mirage of an oasis to a parched man.

“Now to see if it works. Step into the center of the sigil.” Emery cleared his throat again. “Please.”

Ambrose walked up to the very edge. The sigil had a series of concentric circles around a triangle, with many runes written around the perimeter, making an intricate circle of its own to encompass the whole.

The uneven stone floor hadn’t offered the most flawless surface, but Emery had managed a near-perfect drawing, free of smudges or broken, jagged lines. He was an adept witch.

It was not Ambrose’s first time playing test subject.

Not all of the witch king’s experiments had gone well.

Spells backfired. Sometimes in humorous ways, like stripping Ambrose of his trousers, leaving him standing in his tunic and nothing more.

Sometimes less humorous, like when it had struck him ill and set him vomiting for the span of three days.

It was the cost of learning. Yet, Ambrose found that the perfectionism of Emery’s sigil made it easier to trust the spell would behave as intended.

He stepped into the center. In that instant, the warm embrace of armor fell away, leaving a windswept cold in its place. He tried to leave the circle, but beams of light sprang up to imprison him there.

It worked.