Page 31

W hen Ambrose had completed his training, the witch king rewarded him with the gift of a mare with a coat of flaxen gold called Primrose.

“The Two Roses” they’d been called, as they’d gone into battle together. She had been a magnificent steed, soft to his heel, trusting of his every direction. She’d been particularly fond of strawberries.

He’d reared her himself and ridden her for five years, until the day he erred.

In maneuvering her away from an assailant’s oncoming spear, he’d left the witch king open to attack.

Ambrose had dismounted quickly enough to dispatch the attacker himself, but to protect his horse over his king had been a grave transgression. One the witch king couldn’t forgive.

He’d ordered Ambrose to kill Primrose. She’d been so trusting as he ran his hand along her flank one last time.

Emery looked just as open and trusting as he offered Ambrose the tether.

The collar choked, urging Ambrose to reach out and rend him apart, just as he had with Primrose.

It pained me to see you mourn her, but we could never afford the privileges of even one mistake. Just as we cannot afford your hesitation now. Kill him.

Ambrose recoiled. Whether because the witch king was not fully realized enough for the compulsion to work, or because Emery still held the tether preventing Ambrose from harming him, Ambrose couldn’t tell.

He snatched his hand back as though the bone had burned him. His magic came to a boil in his blood, and the witch king’s voice screamed.

No! Take it, you must take it! It is mine . It is ours .

“Ambrose?” Emery looked worried. “What is it?”

Ambrose shuddered.

During the altercation with Hellebore, he’d struggled between his duty to resurrect the witch king and his growing desire to protect Emery.

He still did not know how to reconcile the two, but deep in the marrow of his bones, he understood that if he took the tether for himself, he might not have the choice.

It soured Ambrose’s longing for a reunion, if it came at the cost of Emery’s life and what was left of Ambrose’s soul.

Emery slowly curled a fist around the bone and withdrew it. “Ambrose?”

“It’s nothing.”

A gradual metamorphosis happened in the subtleties of Emery’s expression, a softness which deepened the lines around his mouth, the heaviness of his brows. “Sometimes, I think I can trust you to protect me from Morcant. Other times, I’m not sure I trust you to protect me from yourself.”

Ambrose cringed. The witch king’s voice railed and screamed like a gale, furious he’d surrendered another opportunity. The half-starved magic seemed to turn inward for sustenance, turning its teeth on Ambrose for lack of outside nourishment.

He couldn’t tell Emery that the bloodlust was not his own.

It isn’t me, just my dead master who insists that killing you will bring him back.

If he tried to explain the witch king’s voice, the way his spirit seemed to linger within his very marrow, Emery would think him mad and mistrust him all the more.

He wanted to tell Emery something , though. They stood on the precipice of something deeper than the strained bargain they’d struck from the moment Ambrose rose from the grave, and if the magic hungered for death, Ambrose was starved for whatever scrap of trust and friendship he could savor.

“You once asked me how my magic works. How it sustains itself without a constant supply of tithes.” He held up his arm, flexing his inky fingers.

“I don’t know for certain, but it always feels …

hungry. Hungriest when I’m about to kill someone, and most sated directly after, though not for long.

More often I feel sick, as if I overindulged. ”

“So the magic takes tithes from the people you kill? A cycle of sacrifice to sustain itself?”

“Perhaps. The witch king never explained it in full. I am likely too dull-minded to understand magical theory in detail.”

“You seem anything but dull-minded to me.”

“I am no great witch.”

Emery studied him, a wary edge to his tone. “Are you telling me the magic lusts for my blood?”

Ambrose nodded. It was at least half the truth.

“But you cannot act upon it while I hold the arcane leash?”

Ambrose nodded again.

“And am I right in saying … you don’t want to do as the magic bids you?” Emery suddenly seemed fragile as a mayfly. “You don’t want to kill me?”

“I want to protect you.” This, at least, was true.

Emery looked momentarily overcome, dipping his chin to avoid Ambrose’s eyes.

The firelight on the angles of his face painted him in the strokes of a fallen angel, and suddenly it was not the urge to kill Ambrose had to wrestle down, but the urge to run his thumb down the steep line of Emery’s cheek bone to the dimples around his mouth.

“I want to believe you,” Emery said.

“I understand why you might not,” Ambrose said. He gestured to the arcane leash still clutched in Emery’s fist. “When that is the only thing between us and self-destruction.”

Emery let out a dry laugh. He twirled the arcane leash. “Well. It certainly complicates things, doesn’t it?”

“What can be done about it?”

“I could research a means to undo the spell which binds you, but if it’s tied to your magic, it would leave you without your abilities.“

“That seems … unwise while Morcant is still alive.”

“Should I hide it?”

Ambrose hesitated before putting words to the truth in his heart. “I’d prefer it in your hands over anyone else’s.”

He thought he heard a quiet hiss in the recesses of his mind and knew he might pay for this later.

Emery looked touched. “All right.” His eyes sharpened with resolve. “What about this? I will be its custodian for now, but only until we find a way to remove its curse without leaving you vulnerable, and under the condition I never use it against you.”

In spite of old instincts which scoffed at the notion Emery would keep his word, Ambrose’s heart gave a hopeful, dangerous leap.

This thing between them, it wasn’t trust. Emery had used Ambrose before.

Ambrose still heard the voice of his old master ordering him to kill Emery.

The leash was a thin boundary between them.

Ambrose could not bite the hand that held it without suffering the collar’s choke, and Emery couldn’t trust that his attack dog’s teeth wouldn’t turn against him if he loosened his grip.

No, what they had wasn’t trust, but if the stalemate of their mutually assured destruction was the closest thing to trust Ambrose could have, he would gorge himself on it.

If a tenuous accord was the only substitute for intimacy he could find, he’d feast. Even as he thought, You will break your promise.

Everyone always does ; a bloom of tender affection unfurled in his heart, and he hungered for it more desperately than his magic lusted for blood.

“Agreed?” said Emery, holding out a hand to shake.

His skin was fine as silk under Ambrose’s calluses. “Agreed.”

Before they could contemplate what to do about Morcant, they had to reinstate the wards protecting Emery’s home.

“They have my blood, so mine won’t work anymore,” Emery said.

He’d changed into practical clothes for walking the perimeter of the ruin—an oversized cable-knit jumper, rubber boots, and jeans, which clung to his long legs in a manner Ambrose deliberately did not notice.

“I could steal something powerful from the apothecary, but they won’t have anything with the same longevity as flesh-and-blood tithes. Perhaps I can reinforce it with—”

“You could use mine,” Ambrose interrupted.

Emery scowled, shaking his head. “No.”

Ambrose rolled up his sleeves anyway.

“It’s quite a lot of blood,” Emery protested. “And it never ceases to unsettle me that you offer it up so willingly.”

“I’m accustomed to it.”

“That is exactly why it unsettles me.”

Ambrose held out his arm, but Emery pushed it away. “It’s not something I’d ask of anyone.”

“You’re not asking, I’m offering.”

“I had to smear mine around the entire perimeter. It took a while. I went through, like, six pints of sports drink— oh Christ. ”

Emery had a small switch-knife on his tithe belt used for harvesting plant cuttings, and Ambrose had seized it to unflinchingly draw a line over the thin skin of his wrist. Blood welled, dripping around his arm in a scarlet bracelet.

“Ambrose!” Emery took his arm, crushing something from his tithe belt over it in a wisp of silvery spell magic. “You could have at least let me sterilize the knife first.”

“We were wasting time when Morcant could find you any moment.”

“Fine. Okay. All right, well, come here,” Emery said. He gently daubed the blood already dripping from the cut onto two fingers and inscribed runes onto the walls of his ruin, but as he cast the first of them, his brow scrunched.

“What?” Ambrose said.

“That’s only one ward, and it’s far stronger than mine were.”

“Because I gave it to you,” Ambrose said. “Gifted tithes make for stronger magic.”

Emery drew another symbol on the next wall. “How do you know that?”

“The witch king taught me.”

Emery went oddly silent at that.

In the end, he only needed one ward per wall.

With the ruin protected, they retreated inside, and Emery went to get the box of bandages and antiseptic, which was getting a great deal of use lately.

He sat Ambrose down at the kitchen table and pressed a clean compress to the wound to staunch the bleeding.

“You didn’t have to cut so deep.”

“You said you needed a lot.”

“Before I knew there was some old-world magic about gifts that would make your blood more powerful than mine.” While he applied pressure to the compress, his thumb found a raised snarl of scar tissue already there. He thoughtlessly brushed along the seam of flesh.

Ambrose studied the floor. The moment stirred reminders of similar encounters with the witch king, where tending one another’s wounds after battle were the only times they were permitted to touch one another without arousing suspicion.