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S carlet bloomed along the dagger’s edge, and Emery, who should not have been able to move at all, bolted into sudden motion.

He knocked the dagger flying with his free hand, then swiped the blood from his arm and cast a spell that flung Hellebore back into a pile of books.

He made a desperate bid for the dagger, stumbling clumsily under the effects of the paralysis agent.

Ambrose didn’t know how it had worn off or if Emery had used a spell to clear his system, but Hellebore had all her strength, and her familiar reacted even more quickly.

She sprang after him, and the stoat sank its teeth into Emery’s wrist just as he reached the dagger.

He recoiled. Hellebore took advantage of his pause, seizing his robes, pinning him to the floor. He rolled to dislodge her. In the ensuing struggle, one of them kicked the dagger. It spun, coming to a stop with its chipped end pointed unerringly at the spot in which Ambrose hid.

They clawed at each other, punching and kicking, attempting to pin the other down.

The desperate speed of their exchanged blows left no time to search for the right tithe to cast a spell, nor the time to think of the right one.

Hellebore bade her familiar keep back, worried he’d be crushed.

He perched on the arm of the sofa, poised to intervene if she needed him.

The scuffle brought them closer to the fire, throwing wild, leaping shadows across the floor, stretching in a macabre dance.

Emery let out a winded gasp. Hellebore, shorter but stronger, had finally got the upper hand as she pinned him with a knee in his stomach. His fist landed a disorienting blow to her head, but it didn’t dislodge her. She got her fingers around his throat and pushed his head toward the fire.

Yes , whispered the witch king in anticipation. Ambrose felt his magic rise to the threat of encroaching death like a stray dog scenting raw meat.

He’s no saint , Ambrose reminded himself. He’s done horrible things, too. You don’t owe him a rescue.

Yet every bone in his body felt as though they splintered with the effort to hold still and not intervene.

Hellebore’s expression twisted with the effort to push Emery’s face toward the fire. Ambrose’s spell scars burned with the memory of their making. He knew what it felt like to burn.

It was too much.

He thought, I can’t watch this.

You must! You pledged yourself to me . You are loyal to me . What virtues will you have left if you break your oath? Let him die .

“Stop fighting ,” Hellebore gritted out. “What do you have to fight for anyway? Your reputation is ruined. He’s never going to let you graduate. He got rid of your only ally and killed your familiar.”

Ambrose’s heart stopped.

He looked at Katzica, soulless and empty, wagging her tail as she watched someone try to kill her witch.

Emery hadn’t killed her?

Why would he let Ambrose believe it if it wasn’t true? Ambrose racked his mind for any clue he could have picked up on, anything at all, and only recalled the moment with Morcant in the bog.

Even at your most unpredictable, I didn’t think you’d be so quick to add a second murder to the blood on your hands.

Ambrose thought the first had been Katzica.

Now he knew it was Craig Kendrick.

Emery hadn’t killed either of them, not really. Morcant had been the architect of their fates, and Emery the implement, a circumstance with which Ambrose empathized too keenly.

Why Emery concealed the truth mattered less than the truth itself. He was not the villain of this tale, he was the victim, and Ambrose had misjudged him horribly.

Now he was about to die thinking Ambrose hadn’t cared enough to come to his rescue.

Emery managed to let out a noise—not quite a word, the spell still gagging him, but a sound so tragically sad and scared, it spurred Ambrose to action.

He couldn’t stand by. He couldn’t watch Emery die. Not like this.

But when he went to move, the collar shackled him in place.

He tried again, but his body refused to obey his orders. A frisson of real horror went through him.

The last order Emery gave him was to hide. He’d offered none to follow.

Ambrose couldn’t help, not even if he wanted to.

Emery didn’t realize the folly of his first command, and while Hellebore’s spell rendered him mute, he couldn’t give a second one.

The thought of standing by while Hellebore killed him was intolerable, but the thought of him dying with the belief Ambrose hadn’t cared? Hadn’t tried to help?

He struggled against his bonds. They lashed out with punishing echoes of the pain incurred when the collar had been cast upon him.

His muscles screamed, pain running molten to the marrow of his bones.

He couldn’t even speak. The order to hide was all-encompassing.

He couldn’t move, couldn’t reveal himself, couldn’t do anything to help.

Fighting it was fruitless. The collar squeezed until he could hardly breathe.

“What do you have left to fight for anyway?” Hellebore said, tears shining in her eyes as she pushed and pushed and Emery’s resistance held for a moment, then his eyes softened, and he surrendered.

Ambrose nearly shut his eyes against it.

The fire licked at Emery’s hair. The scent of it burning fumed through the room, and with it a burst of magic. It sucked Emery under like a riptide, dispelling the hex that held him mute.

“Ambrose, help — please !”

His magical chains snapped. Ambrose broke free, charging across the room.

Hellebore whirled around to see him closing in on her but had no time to reach for a tithe.

He seized her by her robes and tossed her across the floor.

Her back hit the sofa, breath gushing from her lungs in a whoosh.

She scrambled back, but Ambrose was already upon her, grasping her throat in his hands.

The magic bared its teeth against her bare neck, and the witch king’s reticent murmur greeted Ambrose like an unwelcome wind in winter. If you cannot kill the boy, the girl will do for now.

Ambrose recoiled. In the heat of the moment, he didn’t know why.

No! the witch king howled.

Hellebore scrambled to her feet, snatched powder from her tithe belt, and opened a portal.

Her stoat rushed to her side, snuffling her neck where Ambrose’s fingers had been.

Her eyes were wild, dark, and terrified as she cast one baleful look over her shoulder before vanishing through, closing the window behind her.

The ruin fell quiet, except for their harried breathing.

You’ve ruined it. My chance at resurrection, squandered. Where is your loyalty? Where is your love for your king? I did not think it so weak that it could die alongside you and stay buried after you rose.

Ambrose flinched under the admonishment, a bone-deep ache setting in.

He didn’t know why he’d hesitated to kill Hellebore.

He had far less affection for her than Emery.

The witch king wanting Morcant dead, then Emery, then—reluctantly—Hellebore, it tasted like the subtle bitterness of a poison-laced drink.

Emery coughed, the smoky air still thick with the scent of burnt hair. Ambrose jolted from his thoughts and knelt beside him, but Emery nearly backpedaled into the fire, afraid.

“I won’t hurt you.” Though the witch king still growled that he should.

“Why didn’t you intervene sooner?”

Ambrose winced. “You ordered me to hide. Until you told me otherwise, I could do nothing else.”

Emery’s head snapped to the side as if he’d struck himself. “Shit.”

With shame, Ambrose added, “Though I was slow to try …”

He couldn’t tell if Emery’s expression looked mistrustful or just plain hurt.

“Why?”

Katzica, no longer ensorcelled, sheepishly tucked her head under Emery’s elbow and gave his chin an apologetic lick.

“Because I thought you’d killed her,” Ambrose said. “Your own familiar. I thought you hid more from me. I didn’t know if I could …”

“Trust me,” Emery finished for him. He stroked Katzica’s floppy ears, giving her a smile that looked more like a frown. “I suppose neither of us are given to trust easily.”

“What really happened to her?” Ambrose asked.

“She tried to protect me.”

Ambrose waited for more.

“After the professor who tried to help me was dismissed, Morcant sought to punish me. I was still living in the dorms. It was easy for him to hex my food whenever he wanted to. Only, Katzica often sneaked a bite to test them for poisons herself. I told her not to, but—” He looked away and pretended he wasn’t disguising tears in the crook of his elbow.

The crack in his voice gave them away. “It probably would have only made me sick, but it killed her.”

Ambrose looked around them at the empty wine bottles. He remembered his first night, watching Emery drink in front of a man he didn’t trust. An idea came to him.

“Is that how you broke through the paralysis agent Morcant cut you with? You haven’t been drinking wine. You’ve been inuring yourself.”

“Mm. I’d take microdoses of anything I thought Morcant might use against me. Clearly, I didn’t do a good enough job with paralysis poisons. I’ll have to up my dosage of those.”

Katzica whined, licking his chin. Ambrose regarded the hound.

She’d loved her witch dearly to continue miming behaviors she’d perform in life to comfort him.

She’d protected him with the same devotion Ambrose had the witch king, and died for it.

Only Emery had mourned her fiercely and desperately enough he couldn’t quite let her go.

He’d raised her, just as he’d raised all the rats in Bellgrave.

“You don’t like hurting things,” Ambrose murmured.

“I know it sounds ridiculous given how many times I’ve tried to kill Morcant.”

Ambrose didn’t answer but privately recalled how, in his first year of killing for the witch king, he’d taken ill so badly the physicians thought he wouldn’t survive, and the witch king’s attempts to heal him only served to make him sicker.

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Emery said. “I just don’t know how else I’ll ever be free of him if I don’t.” Emery gave Ambrose a searching, uncertain look. “For a second, I thought you would kill Hellebore. But you didn’t.”

“No. I didn’t.” He still wasn’t sure what that meant for him or the witch king. He chewed the inside of his cheek before finally asking what had plagued him since Hellebore first revealed it. “Why didn’t you tell me the truth about Craig Kendrick? About Katzica?”

Outside, the insects sang more quietly, and even the fire crackled with softer intensity. A vein pulsing rapidly in Emery’s throat was the only sign the question distressed him. Finally, he said, “I was afraid of you, you know.”

Ambrose didn’t see how that was an answer.

“Morcant had us read plenty of history books about you. They depict you as the bloodthirsty right hand of the witch king. I thought you liked killing, and that you’d kill me if not for this.

” He pulled the finger bone from his pocket and held it up between them, a pale sliver in the dark room.

“Then I met you, and you seemed so— sweet . A little overzealous when you were protecting me, but good-spirited. I didn’t expect it.

Didn’t trust it, either. But I should have known the history books only had half the story.

You don’t like hurting people either, do you? ”

Ambrose might have felt less vulnerable if he’d been carved open with a scalpel. “Only when it’s necessary.”

“If I’d known that …” Emery gave a mirthless laugh.

“I didn’t tell you the truth about Katzica because I was afraid of you, and thought it would be better if you were afraid of me, too.

I thought you’d hesitate before betraying me if you thought I was just as ruthless as your former master.

But as you’ve so sensitively pointed out before, I’m a terrible actor. ”

That was not a wholly terrible quality if it meant his lies were easily spotted. Ambrose felt a dash of self-reproach that he hadn’t realized the truth about Katzica sooner, but it had been his very first impression of Emery, before getting to know him.

“You’re not afraid of me anymore,” Ambrose murmured.

Emery flushed. “Well. I figured, if you hesitated to kill someone like Morcant , of all people, you might not be as gleefully murdery as the history books say.” He hugged his knees, leaning forward so their faces were much closer than before. “I’m sorry I forced you to.”

“I would have done it anyway.”

“I know. So I’m doubly sorry. Looking back, I treated you abhorrently. Condescending. Controlling.” He huffed a dry laugh. “No different from how Morcant treated me.” Then his voice got very quiet. “I don’t want to become like him.”

He sounded afraid. Perhaps it was easy, when treated cruelly, to become cruel yourself. Ambrose studied the inky black of his hands and tried not to consider how that might apply to him, but it was becoming difficult to ignore all these nagging comparisons.

“You aren’t anything like him,” he said.

Emery looked at him. He wet his lips. Ambrose found himself enraptured by the sheen left on his mouth, the smoldering flames reflected in his dark eyes. His voice came out hoarse when he said, “I want to promise you something.”

“What?”

“I’ll never use the compulsion again.”

Ambrose’s heart gave a weakly hopeful knock against his sternum.

“I don’t expect you to believe me,” Emery went on.

“I’d break the spell if I knew how. Maybe we can figure that out, but for now—” He reached into his robes and drew out the tether, holding it out in his open palm.

It still had the ridiculous pink ribbon tied in a bow around it. “I want to give you this.”

Ambrose’s breathing came shallow and heady as he looked at that fragile bit of bone laid across Emery’s open hand, innocuous and innocent. As if he were offering to let Ambrose borrow a quill or a pint of milk.

He reached out. His fingertip only barely brushed the bone when the command blazed through him.

Kill Emery.

And the collar gave an alarming jerk.