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A mbrose staggered out of Emery’s path, shock temporarily overcoming his instincts to intervene. He’d been so focused on preventing Morcant from harming Emery, it hadn’t occurred to him that they might end up in a scenario where it was the other way around.

Emery’s fist snapped Morcant’s head around. He righted himself quickly, wiping at the blood on his lip.

Emery panted, a tripwire ready to snap, and Morcant said, “Why, you little rat.”

Emery threw himself at Morcant again with a snarling cry of rage. They collided bodily, the force taking them to the ground. A lock of hair hung madly loose over Emery’s forehead as his hands found purchase around Morcant’s throat.

It was pointless to choke the man to death, they both knew it, but nothing rational piloted Emery’s body. Animal rage, fear—they demanded an outlet and found it by squeezing the air from Morcant’s lungs.

Morcant scrabbled for something in his robes. Hellebore rushed in, preparing to cast some spell as he rolled, managing to pin Emery under him. He withdrew something glinting and sharp from his pocket.

Ambrose didn’t have the time to assess the risk in revealing himself.

The sight of the knife spurred him into motion.

He dragged Morcant off just as he lashed out with the knife, nicking Emery’s arm.

A shallow cut. Ambrose threw Morcant to the grass.

Emery, still not returned to his senses, lunged after him, but Ambrose caught him by the shoulders.

He fought against the restraint, his whole body shuddering.

The altercation only lasted the space of some seconds, but it must have looked inexplicably strange to the spectators—as if an invisible force had thrown Morcant aside and frozen Emery in place.

The initiates wore identical looks of horror and alarm. In any other circumstances, it would have given Ambrose away, except they were in a graveyard for the express purpose of summoning spirits.

“Was that a ghost?”

“Can’t be. Poltergeist?”

Convenient. It wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny if Ambrose continued this way.

Morcant spat blood into the grass. “Neither. It was the wind. As Emery just artfully demonstrated, he’s out of practice at even the most basic spells and must resort to cruder tools, like his fists.”

Emery breathed harshly, his chest rising and falling under Ambrose’s arm, but he wasn’t looking at Morcant anymore. He looked at the gravestone.

“Fucking bastard,” he said under his breath, but the fires of his rage had extinguished, leaving a wretched despair in their ashes.

The initiates all whispered back and forth, their voices like wind through the leaves. Ambrose caught snatches of conversation.

“Craig Kendrick. Who’s that?”

“Student. Went missing.”

“Turned up dead, though. Real gruesome.”

“Did Emery know him or something?”

“Don’t think so.”

Emery had never mentioned a Craig Kendrick, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t known each other. Had they been friends?

Or more than friends. Craig was a boy’s name.

Ambrose convinced himself that the twist in his stomach was solely due to the cruelty of tricking Emery into speaking with the spirit of a dead lover, and not because Emery having a lover made him jealous.

“What do you want me to do with him?” Hellebore helped her father up by the elbow and awaited instruction—not with eager zeal but grim anticipation.

Ambrose bristled, awaiting Morcant’s verdict.

“Nothing,” Morcant said. “Let him go.”

Hellebore blinked. “What? Really?”

“He is troubled. Punishing him will only make it worse. I have tried teaching, I have tried compassion. Neither worked, so now I will try patience.” He looked at Emery with a glittering sadness in his eyes. “I understand you’ve had challenging relationships with teachers before.“

“Stop,” said Emery in a raw voice.

“But I wish you wouldn’t use us as scapegoats for your anger toward him. We aren’t responsible for the way you feel. Certainly not the way you act. It’s a shame you behave this way, when you showed such promise.”

He turned away, wiping at his lip. It wasn’t even swollen, healed already, but under the blood and in the dark, the others wouldn’t notice. “You may go, but I expect an apology when you return.”

Emery had been holding his breath. Ambrose felt the moment it all rushed out of him in a derisive laugh, hollow and hopeless.

Morcant marched off into the graveyard. The other initiates followed dutifully, casting Emery wary looks like he might snap on them next. The last to go was Hellebore.

“Pathetic,” she muttered.

The word lacked heat, but it burned Emery all the same. His eyes were sleeplessly bruised. Harrowed and humiliated, he hung his head to look away from them.

This was the true punishment. Morcant had rigged the spirit summoning to make it more difficult and used the pain of some buried history to goad Emery into a reaction, alienating him from his peers, making him look violent, dangerous.

Now, whatever judgments Morcant passed down would appear justified. The other students would believe he deserved it.

Ambrose had expected something more physical, like the spell that choked the truth from Emery, or the one that made all his food taste vile, but he was beginning to understand that Morcant’s weapons were not all made of spells or steel.

He’d found tools that cut the spirit, wounded the heart, and confused the mind.

He’d tormented Emery where no one watched, then made him look unreasonable. Reactionary. Crazy.

Ambrose’s heart hammered. His mind turned to a buried memory of a horse’s flaxen hide shivering under his hands, just before—

It wasn’t the same, he told himself, casting the recollection aside.

Out from under Morcant’s scrutiny, all of Emery’s strength fled him. He slackened, his weight sinking against Ambrose.

“Tell me what you need.”

“I need to go home.”

They had to walk until the rune placed on Emery’s neck faded. Ambrose offered to carry him, but Emery refused. Too proud, though the fight with Morcant had taken its toll. He needed Ambrose’s arm for support, his body warming the expanse of Ambrose’s ribs.

They struggled a half mile before Morcant’s spell wore off. Looking very ill, Emery took them the rest of the way home through a portal.

Once safely within the wards, his strength failed him entirely. Ambrose caught him on his way to the floor.

“I can walk.”

Ambrose lifted him in spite of his protests. He laid Emery on the sofa and pulled a blanket over him.

“Where are your bandages?” The cut on Emery’s arm still bled.

“Bathroom cabinet, underneath the sink.”

Ambrose had to rummage through bottles and rolls of paper towel until he found a green box containing bandages. He returned to the sofa and sat on the edge, holding out his hand. Emery looked like a starving stray animal being offered food. Wary, yet wanting.

Slowly, he held it out. Ambrose took it and examined the cut. He could see no signs of poison or infection setting in, and it was mercifully shallow. He took the roll of bandages from the open box at his feet.

Emery said, “There’s disinfectant.”

He indicated a tube of paste like the kind he’d taught Ambrose to use when cleaning his teeth.

Ambrose squeezed a little ointment onto the cut, cleaning it gingerly, then began winding the bandage around it.

His knuckles grazed the pulse flickering in Emery’s wrist, and Emery met his eyes for a scant second.

It was only a fleeting look, but all Ambrose’s awareness gathered in his fingertips where they touched.

Emery withdrew his arm. “Thanks.”

Ambrose swallowed. The moment felt more dangerous than the tip of a sword under his throat.

He really couldn’t feel this way. Not about him.

He got up to leave, and his heart didn’t skip—couldn’t skip—when Emery grasped his wrist and said, “Stay?”

Ambrose hesitated. If he weighed Emery’s faults against his virtues, it would not be difficult to tell which way the scale tipped. He had appointed Ambrose a comfortable, personal chamber of his own. He’d given him good food. He’d rescued Ambrose from drowning.

He’d also killed his familiar, ensnared Ambrose, and used him to murder a dangerous witch who’d now proven himself immortal.

After the scene in the graveyard, it was clear he’d been withholding information.

A boy called Craig Kendrick had died, and it had something to do with Emery, or Morcant wouldn’t have chosen this particular punishment.

The other kindnesses mattered little against the weight of all that.

So why did his heart flutter when Emery held his wrist and asked him to stay?

Why did he sit on the edge of the sofa?

Why did he flip his wrist so he could urge Emery to release it and hold his hand instead?

The cushions sank with his weight, and Emery sank with it, closer to him.

He had to ask. “Who was Craig Kendrick?”

Emery took his hand away. It was a dance back and forth between begging for comfort and being too proud to accept it. “Would you believe me if I said I didn’t really know?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s true. I didn’t know him.” Emery sucked in a breath. “He was a student here who went missing at the beginning of my first term at Bellgrave. He didn’t have many surviving relatives, apparently. Bit of a loner.” Emery snorted. “Perfect target, really.”

“For Morcant?”

Emery pulled his knees to his chest, picking at a frayed cuticle.

“They found his body in late autumn. Somehow, the mortician’s log got leaked.

They couldn’t figure an exact time of death, but they knew he’d been kept for weeks, at least from the day he disappeared.

He was thinner when they found him, first of all.

Like he’d been starved. And his hair was longer. ”

Ambrose recalled the cells in the catacombs. “Did they know how he was killed?”

“It was hard to miss. He had a massive stab wound. A through and through, back to chest, but it was practically the length of his spine. Stab wound. Some of his insides were cut clean through, but the knife would have to be wide as his torso was long to make a wound like that.”

“Magic?”

“No. There were hints of magic, but no concrete signature. It had been cleaned of anything traceable. They found a chunk of metal in his chest.” Emery’s expression darkened. “Tip of the knife broke off, probably.”

Ambrose absorbed that. He’d never seen anything similar during his time with the witch king, but then, the witch king had rarely used magic or knives. Only Ambrose.

He shook the thought away. The witch king hadn’t used him. He’d served voluntarily.

“What does all that have to do with you?” he asked.

“Do you really have to ask?”

“I want to know.”

“Why?”

“It is easier to protect someone I can trust, and who trusts me.” It was only half of the truth. I want to know you. I want to trust you. He shouldn’t, but he did.

“And if what I tell you makes you trust me less, or at least think less of me?”

“Knowing you’re withholding things from me makes both those true.”

The night sky through the hole in the ceiling was too velvet dark for stars or moonshine to light Emery’s features, the shadows carving his face with dread.

“The rats,” he said finally. “The ones we sacrifice in our initiation ritual.”

“What about them?”

“They weren’t rats.”