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Emery’s touch was different. Less inhibited. Curious. “Were all of these for the witch king?”

“Most.”

“The rest?”

“Battles.”

Emery checked the cut and found it had clotted enough to stop bleeding. “He was more monstrous to you than Morcant was to me.”

“That isn’t true.” Ambrose rushed to his king’s defense. “All that I suffered, I did in service of a cause we both believe in.”

Emery raised an eyebrow. “And that is?”

“A better world.”

Emery laughed dryly. His fingers had once again found a lattice of scars just beneath Ambrose’s elbow. “And you trusted someone who did this to know what a better world would look like?”

All Ambrose’s accustomed protests—about the need to sacrifice, the nobility of service to a higher power than oneself—died when Emery crunched the shed skin of a snake in his fist to draw on a spell, which glowed between his fingers like a caged star.

He smoothed his open palm over the cut, healing it partially like waves wearing smooth a trench in the sand.

He paused, still holding Ambrose’s arm in that frustratingly tender grip. “You still care for him, don’t you?”

Emery had aimed the question precisely. It pinned Ambrose in place.

He’d seen evidence this world tolerated people like him far better than his era ever had, but it was another thing to express out loud something he’d kept secret until the day he’d died—a complicated bond between him and a man he’d given all his devotion and received an axe to the heart for, a bond which felt anathema to the feelings evoked by the idle brush of Emery’s thumb over his scars.

In the end, he could only speak the closest approximation of the truth.

“He is my king.”

Emery’s nod contained its own hidden feelings.

They prepared for sleep in weary silence. Before Emery closed his bedroom door, he lingered, as if reluctant to be alone.

Ambrose felt the same, afraid of what he might face in the solitude of his room, which was not solitude at all when he shared his head with another.

He hadn’t the chance to ask if Emery desired company before he said goodnight and hurriedly shut his door.

Ambrose sequestered himself in his own room. Alone. Before he got changed into sleep clothes, before he got into bed, he waited.

The witch king’s presence made the air thin and hard to breathe. He existed within and without, impossible to ignore.

Into the silence, Ambrose whispered, “I’m sorry.”

You’ve forsaken me, your king.

“No.”

You’ve cast me aside in favor of another.

“No!”

Don’t lie , the witch king hissed, his presence so thick in Ambrose’s throat it was difficult to speak through it. I feel how your heart warms to a morsel of comfort or a kind word from him. You have thrown away two opportunities to save me instead of him.

Ambrose shuddered with a wave of memory. Prostrating himself at the witch king’s feet to beg his forgiveness, promising he’d never endanger his life again, vowing to do whatever it took to restore the king’s trust in him.

“That trust is broken,” the king had said. “Only one thing can restore it.”

And Ambrose had said, “Anything. I will do anything.”

He had been kneeling when the witch king carved the runes into his spine with magic and a white-hot needle.

There’d been no medicine to dull the pain, but he didn’t think one existed which could inoculate him against such a unique agony.

It sutured his soul into the lining of the witch king’s will, and he had chewed the inside of his cheek and suffered it with the constant reminder that it was less than he deserved.

His reward might have felt worth it, if not for what had come after. Once the runes were carved into the very bones of him and his flesh knitted back together, the witch king smeared his lips with Ambrose’s blood and sealed the spell with a kiss to the nape of his neck.

Sometimes, if Ambrose closed his eyes, he could remember the warmth of that kiss spreading through the bones of him. Their first and only one.

When he’d risen with the collar freshly inked around his throat, the witch king gave him his first compulsion order.

Ambrose didn’t even remember what the witch king’s voice sounded like. He hardly remembered what his own body had felt like at the time.

He did remember the coarse sheen of Primrose’s fur as he ran a hand over her flank, still foamy from battle.

Her ribs had caved to his magic like any other.

He’d been sick for days afterward, and the witch king had tended to him like a lover, while Ambrose rotted in the oubliette of his pain, guilt, shame, and grief.

He’d blamed himself entirely, at the time.

Watching Emery fight back, suffering with the guilt of killing Craig Kendrick but not the blame , which he put solely on Morcant’s shoulders—it opened a door in the attic of Ambrose’s mind which he’d long kept shut.

Even now, you turn your back on me , the witch king said, his voice a well of pain and resentment.

“No,” Ambrose insisted. He had many difficult and conflicted feelings about his history, feelings he could not sort through in an evening, but he was still assured of a few things.

Among them, a deep-set belief that the witch king’s vision of a kinder world had been a dream worth realizing, and that he would never have done the things he had if he didn’t think they were necessary.

Now, Ambrose had to prove to him they no longer were.

He still loved him too much not to try. He wanted the witch king to know the comforts of chocolate and a hot shower and a world that didn’t force them to hide who they were.

He pushed away the vivid sensation of Primrose’s shivering hide carved open by the magic’s appetite and replaced it with a different one—the yearning for more than the pragmatic touch of tending wounds and tightening one another’s vambraces.

The sweet agony of kissing his king’s ring instead of his lips.

“I will bring you back, but not like this. Not by killing a man who doesn’t deserve it. There has to be another way. With your magic, there must be. If any witch could defeat death, it would be you.”

A long, unsettling silence followed. The room had been alive with the sound of wind whistling through the eaves and rain on the windowpane, but even these sounds seemed muted, leaving only Ambrose’s heartbeat to thunder.

Finally the witch king said, We will need my remains and my grimoire.

Relief unwinched all the taut muscles of Ambrose’s body.

He seized upon the idea immediately. Emery had magically ferried away the witch king’s skeleton somewhere.

Perhaps he’d be willing to return it. And the grimoire—that might prove difficult, but there had been so many books in the library, surely they could find one which gave a hint as to its location.

He went to sleep with these ideas spinning in his head. The collar felt looser. The future, brighter.

Fate had other plans for him, though. The next morning, Emery fell ill.