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A mbrose explained, while sitting on the edge of the bathtub and washing his feet, how he’d come to the conclusion Morcant’s immortality could be linked to the humans sacrificed by his guild in their initiation rites.

Emery looked disheartened but not surprised. “I had a similar thought last night.”

“Oh?”

“Remember that moment before you killed him in the bog? I asked him what it was all for—the cult, the rats, trapping us. He said I’d soon find out.

We found out.” He wrung the blankets in his hands, which he still wore around his shoulders.

“It’s all so tidy. Without dirtying his hands, he gains immortality and the leverage to control us.

I don’t relish the thought. If it’s true, it means I helped make him immortal. But to find out how it works …”

His eyes lit up with an idea, then he disappeared out the door. Ambrose dried off, followed, and found Emery on his belly, reaching under the sofa.

From beneath it, he retrieved the dagger Hellebore tried to kill him with.

Ambrose had forgotten about it in the turmoil. “He can’t use it as evidence against you now.”

“I’m more interested in whether we can ascertain any spell placed on it related to his immortality.”

Emery went to his bedroom to gather tithes from the chest of drawers with different-colored knobs.

An array of smells wafted from its cabinets, filling the air with the fume of old tea, dusty and herbal.

He seemed to have a sorting system determined by the different styled knobs and paintings on each drawer.

After gathering some poppy seeds, an oak leaf, and the feather of a jaybird, Emery shuffled out to the kitchen, where the dagger used to kill Craig Kendrick lay wrapped in a cloth on the table.

After laying the spell ingredients around the dagger, Emery unwrapped it.

“Perhaps you should wait until you’re well,” Ambrose said. “Spells can be draining.”

“Now you’ve put the thought in my head, I have to know.”

He sat down for it, crossing his legs. After steeling his resolve, he swiped a hand across the tithes.

They burst into dust like dandelion seeds.

Emery opened his hand, as if waiting for a bird to eat out of his palm, and the swirling particles of the spell landed there, seeping into his skin and leaving a stream of rune marks.

Emery held them up to read, then sighed with disappointment.

“That would have been too easy.”

“What did it say?”

“The only spell cast through the dagger was the one I performed to create the spell jar. If there is no evidence of any spell cast, I’d assume Morcant cleansed it to cover his tracks, but that’s not the case if my spell’s aura is still there.”

“Perhaps the spell jar was the objective after all?” Ambrose said.

“Seems a waste of a human sacrifice for a measly spell jar.”

“What could he use it for?”

“Anything. I suppose you could pack quite a lot of spells into a jar made with a human sacrifice, but that still seems a gratuitous waste of a tithe like that, and besides, I don’t see how it would make him immortal.

” He worried his bottom lip between his teeth, a deep furrow between his brows as he thought.

“There’s every possibility he did use the sacrifice as a tithe, but through a different vehicle than the dagger.

We could test the sarcophagus in the mausoleum where the sacrifices are made, but let’s face it, it’s unlikely he’d leave evidence lying around. ”

Ambrose had hoped for a better clue than this, but it offered him an opportunity to ask the questions he otherwise didn’t know how to broach.

“There is somewhere else we might find answers …”

Emery perked up, eyes bright and inquisitive.

He almost never looked that way at Ambrose. Not before the night they’d killed Morcant. Since then, Emery had opened up little by little. Trusted him more and more.

Ambrose needed to tread carefully if he meant to keep that trust. “The witch king was immortal himself.”

Emery’s mouth fell open a little. “And you think Morcant might have used the same method?”

Ambrose shook his head. “Not precisely the same one, but it stands to reason, given his … affinity for the witch king, he might have derived inspiration.”

“How did he do it? The witch king. Did he tell you?”

“Not … entirely.” He took a steadying breath.

It felt dangerous to divulge this. Emery had made clear his low regard of the witch king, so Ambrose didn’t know how revealing this information might go.

Would Emery view the strength of Ambrose’s bond to his king as a threat and rescind his newly gifted trust?

Would he take steps to prevent the witch king’s return, thwarting Ambrose’s quest for redemption?

Fortunately, Ambrose knew so little, and nothing particularly damning. At least, not yet. “He didn’t share with me the specifics of the spell or how it worked, only the result. His immortality was tied to me. So long as I lived, so, too, would he.”

Emery stared, a frown slowly invading his expression, thoughtful and puzzled. “That … but that shouldn’t work.”

“I saw for myself that it did.”

“But it’s so—so—”

“What?”

“Fallible!” Emery got up, sniffling but too agitated to sit still. “He threw you into danger all the time. Unless you were invulnerable, he endangered his own immortality every time he put you at risk.”

“He did equip me with considerable powers to ensure I wasn’t easily slain.”

“But you were slain, and so was he . Was there an added layer to the spell? Some other caveat or contingency in the event something happened to you?”

Ambrose shrugged helplessly. This wasn’t the direction he’d expected the conversation to go. “Not to my knowledge.”

“It shouldn’t work,” Emery repeated. “It … it just shouldn’t work.”

“That was the thrust of my raising the subject,” Ambrose said, hopeful he could redirect things. “If we can discover more about my king’s methods, perhaps we’ll uncover a path to Morcant’s.”

“How do we accomplish that? He died centuries ago.”

“He had a grimoire,” Ambrose said. “A book in which he wrote all the recipes for spells of his own invention. If we can find it, perhaps it will hold the answer.”

As he spoke, Emery’s expression dimmed, the eager hope guttering in his eyes.

“What’s wrong?” Ambrose asked.

He expected Emery to tell him the grimoire had been destroyed, burnt, lost, or locked away where no one could possibly retrieve it.

Instead, he said, “Morcant has it.”

It became clear after some explanation why Morcant possessing the grimoire was only a marginal improvement on it having been lost or destroyed.

Early on, when Emery first tried to free himself from the shackles of Morcant’s pact, he’d attempted to find Morcant’s home and rummage through it in search of the daggers from the initiation rite.

It hadn’t taken much snooping through school offices and files to find an address, but he’d gone and found the house desolate with only the whiff of having been magically kept clean, a pile of letters inside.

Evidently, Morcant had two residences—one he used for all his official correspondences and professor work, another where he actually lived.

Finding his abode would prove no simple task if he had the place warded the way Emery did. They would have to be very sly or very lucky to find it.

The next-best place to search, and the only one available to them, was his office at school.

Ambrose didn’t like it.

“I have classes I need to attend anyway,” Emery said.

“Morcant will be there.”

“Exactly. While he’s teaching, I at least know where he is and where he’s not. If we want to snoop around, the best time would be while he’s occupied teaching.” When Ambrose still looked doubtful, he added, “It’s a public place. He won’t attack me in broad daylight. Not directly.”

Though Ambrose saw the sense in it, he had no desire to repeat the events of last night. It had sparked a particular anxiety to watch without the capacity to intervene.

But they had few other avenues. “If you’re certain.”

So, by the power of “paracetamol” and a pocket full of tissues, Emery went to class. Ambrose no longer accompanied him invisibly. He posed to everyone, once more, as Emery’s cousin, except for Morcant and Hellebore, to whom he posed as a threat.

After one uneventful class, Emery led them to Morcant’s lecture hall.

“We’ll check he’s teaching first,” Emery said under his breath. “Make sure he hasn’t caught the same cold as me and pulled a sicky. Do immortals catch colds?”

Ambrose didn’t know, but it was safer to check.

They paused just outside the door to the lecture hall.

Morcant’s crisp voice drifted past, speaking to an eager first year at the podium.

They peered inside to confirm Hellebore was there, too, scanning the backs of the students’ heads.

None had her boyish sable cut, nor the curly blonde of her girlfriend.

“Fancy seeing you so soon.”

Ambrose had mastered himself enough not to jump at the sound of Hellebore’s voice directly behind them. He did step in front of Emery, though. Hellebore’s stoat familiar glared at him from her shoulder, daring him to try anything.

“Oh, call off your dog, Emery. It’s not as if I’d do anything here .”

Ambrose bristled, but before he could snap at her, Emery said, “He’s not a dog, Hellebore. He has a name.”

“Fido?” Hellebore guessed.

Emery looked up at Ambrose. “Would you like to reintroduce yourself?”

“No,” Ambrose replied, which was apparently funny, because Emery cracked a smile.

One Ambrose found difficult not to reciprocate.

Hellebore smiled, too, though not nicely. “I see. He’s not your dog because you’re the one eating out of his hand?”

Emery’s smile vanished. “You don’t get to revert back to banter after trying to kill me.”