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T he tether pulled Ambrose’s heart and his focus toward the portcullis, where Emery still waited, arms crossed, watching.

He yearns for companionship, and I think he’d risk anything for yours.

Ambrose had tried to suppress the desirous thoughts that crossed his mind—preoccupations with tucking silvered hair behind Emery’s ears, or with the way his fingers mapped Ambrose’s scars. The notion that Emery might have those same thoughts about him hadn’t occurred to him before.

He was still loyal to the witch king, but he could no longer deny Emery had stolen some of that devotion for himself while Ambrose wasn’t looking.

What if the witch king wanted him to accept Morcant’s bargain? His lingering spirit fumed, hating Morcant, desiring nothing less than to owe this imposter his life. Yet he hesitated before discarding a tool that could be used.

Ambrose felt like a man on the rack, bones breaking as he was torn between the thing he wanted and the oath he’d upheld to his grave.

Finally, the witch king’s voice broke into his mind. He is arrogant and untrustworthy. My grimoire is not his to barter with. We will retrieve it ourselves, and when I return, he will pay for his impunity. Refuse him.

Ambrose nearly let out the breath he’d been holding in a rush of relief.

He stood, preparing to walk away.

“I’ll let you consider it,” Morcant said.

“There is nothing to consider,” said Ambrose. “My loyalty would be worthless if it was so easily bought.”

There was a smirk in Morcant’s voice. “Loyalty to whom, I wonder?”

Ambrose ignored him. He made his way across the courtyard. Emery straightened up from where he’d been leaning against the wall, taking a rushed few steps forward. The tether loosened its pull, saturating the reunion with a sense of relief.

Emery fell into step with him. “What did he want?”

“He wanted me to explain the arcane collar,” Ambrose said. “So he can put one on you.”

Emery blanched. “In exchange for what?”

Ambrose stopped, suffused with a feeling like sunshine. “You aren’t going to ask me whether I refused him?”

Emery heard the smile in his voice and looked charmingly flustered. “Well, I didn’t think you would. You’re—You’re very straightforward and don’t strike me as the backstabbing type.”

As they left the courtyard, Ambrose clung to the giddy feeling.

It was the first time he felt certain that Emery did trust him.

They spent the afternoon in the library, where Emery started to teach Ambrose how to write.

After collecting a pile of books, Emery took him to a quiet corner with a window overlooking the surrounding moors and large squishy pillows Emery called beanbag chairs. “We’ll start by teaching you to write your name.”

It turned out this was putting the cart before the horse.

Emery wrote the capital letter “A” on a piece of parchment and, handing over the pen, asked Ambrose to copy it.

Ambrose wrapped his fist around the pen to do just that, but found his hand obscured the paper, and he couldn’t control the shapes his pen made with the grace Emery did.

“You’ve never held a pen?” Emery said incredulously.

A stab of frustration and embarrassment went through Ambrose, that something so basic should be so difficult for him.

But then Emery flinched with self-reproach and said, “Sorry, that was unkind. Here.”

With a shy, exquisitely gentle touch, he arranged Ambrose’s fingers around the pen, curling the middle beneath the index and thumb. A feeling just as downy and soft made Ambrose’s heart skip.

For the rest of the lesson, he found himself transfixed by the long graceful bones and veins carving the back of Emery’s hands.

The expressive way he wrote his letters, like each one was the step to a dance.

The way he inserted several fingers between different pages of a book to hold his place, the curves of the paper reminiscent of certain human anatomy.

His embarrassment gave way to a different feeling altogether. A bone-deep craving for the brief moments Emery leaned close to look over his work and nod with approval.

He said. “That’s your name.”

Ambrose tilted his head. His own letters stumbled across the page, but they still felt momentous. “I always thought I’d be too dim-witted for writing.”

“Whatever gave you that idea?”

Ambrose didn’t speak. The answer felt like an admission.

Emery’s smile dimmed. “Or should I have asked, who?”

“A sword only needs a sharp edge, not a sharp mind,” Ambrose said, but as it left his mouth, he felt like the words were damning his king instead of defending him.

A scowl deepened the lines around Emery’s mouth. “He didn’t treat you very well.”

“He treated me better than anyone.”

“That speaks more lowly of everyone than it speaks highly of him.”

Ambrose tried to quell his frustration, but it leaked into his voice. “When I said I was a man, nobody believed me, and he gave me a body to convince them. He gave me a purpose. He kept me in his company.”

“In chains,” Emery said, and when that halted Ambrose, he bit his lip and fell quiet, too. After a beat, he lifted one lithe hand to brush Ambrose’s hair aside and touch the marks on his neck.

Morcant had, an hour ago, tried to do the same. Ambrose’s response now could not be more different.

On the outside, he held still, but inside he quaked while fearfully certain Emery could feel it.

The touch ignited his blood. He had to fight not to lean into those hands he’d spent the past hour admiring.

“You hate it when I speak ill of him,” Emery said. “But you hate Morcant. Are they really any different?”

Ambrose had done everything in his power not to acknowledge those parallels.

They painted his history in overcast hues, poisoned the romantic tales he’d told himself about a guard’s tragic love for a king who could never marry him.

They’d understood that helping one another remove their armor was as close to undressing as they’d come, that tasting wine for him was as good as a kiss.

He had grown used to treating every crumb of stolen affection as a feast.

Compared to that, the touch of Emery’s fingers tracing the inky marks on his neck was an overindulgence.

“Why do you defend him?”

Ambrose fought to keep his breath steady. “I swore an oath to do so until the day I died.”

“And you did. You died. So did he. He’s still dead. You should be free of him.”

Ambrose could practically hear the witch king’s teeth grinding together. His magic sharpened its claws, but Ambrose? He could hardly breathe for the desire to taste the freedom Emery offered.

Taking in the soft part of Emery’s lips, perhaps it wasn’t only freedom he’d like to taste.

They were bent over the papers on the table, faces close.

Old instincts made Ambrose prickle with fear.

In his time, looking at another man this way spelled danger.

Just the thought of kissing in public caused the hair on the nape of his neck to rise in anticipation of a noose.

He had to resist the urge to search over his shoulder for onlookers. He wasn’t doing anything wrong—

Except he was , but not because they were both men. He couldn’t kiss Emery when his heart was promised to another.

I never knew you could stray so easily.

Ambrose sucked in a breath and withdrew.

The open look in Emery’s eyes shuttered. “S-sorry. Let’s practice the other letters.”

Emery cleared his throat and tried to brush past the awkwardness by returning to his writing lessons, but Ambrose struggled to concentrate as the witch king continued to admonish him.

Treacherous. How brittle your loyalty has become. If your devotion to me were true, you’d have killed him already.

Ambrose felt the guilt and self-loathing a thousandfold, as he always did, but something else accompanied them. A new feeling, one he could barely name let alone acknowledge.

Anger.

The night of Morcant’s clandestine meeting at the bridge, it didn’t have the decency to rain properly, instead opting for the dismal, misty damp that penetrated your clothes with cold.

Ambrose accompanied Emery along the bank, queued with house boats and sleeping moorhens.

Emery had devised a clever spell that made them both invisible to everyone except each other, allowing them the silent communication of raised eyebrows and pointed fingers.

More importantly, it prevented them from getting separated.

Emery smoothed the wrinkles from the slip of paper he’d written the address on, eyeing the oxidized copper numbers on the restaurant’s red brick.

Ambrose was still muddling through memorization of his letters and their phonemes, but numbers he found easier.

He felt a slight thrill that he could read this one. A two and seven.

“Twenty-seven,” he said.

Emery gave an approving smile. “This is the place. Now we find a spot to wait.”

The restaurant was at the corner of the pier and a canal, which slunk its way deeper into the city.

The bridge, where Morcant’s meeting would take place, crossed the canal, tall lanterns lighting its stone arch.

Emery found a spot beneath the restaurant’s trellised canopy, sheltered from the rain.

A low wall with flower beds fenced in the outdoor seating area and provided cover.

The tables left little space in between, and Ambrose debated where to stand.

The memory of sitting close on library cushions while watching Emery’s hands make elegantly slanting letters across parchment, listening to the rasp of the pen and the thunder of his own heartbeat, was still too fresh.

Emery liberated him from the decision, crowding next to him behind the walled flower bed. Rain dripped helpfully down Ambrose’s back, distracting from the brush of their elbows.

“Who do you think he’s meeting?” he asked.

“Honestly? No idea. It can’t be a common errand if it’s happening at one in the bloody morning.”

They fell quiet at the sound of someone’s approach. Two figures crossed the bridge from its opposite side to stand in the lantern’s spotlight.

“He’s late,” Morcant said. His water deer’s hooves tapped against the planks next to him, her large eyes watching the dark keenly.

Hellebore didn’t answer. She turned her back to Morcant, leaning her elbows on the bridge’s rail to stare into the dark water of the canal.

“Sulking is unbecoming of a woman,” Morcant said.

“I’m not sulking. I’m angry with you.”

“It’s hardly my fault that girl broke things off, but I did say she wasn’t worth your time.”

Hellebore let out a dry laugh. “I know I didn’t give her the clap, yet she seemed extremely convinced I’m the only one it could have come from. I know she didn’t fool around on me.”

Morcant’s expression wrinkled. “Well, one of you did, or we wouldn’t be having this repugnant conversation.”

“Jude isn’t like that. You hexed her.”

“I never laid a finger on her.” Morcant adopted a tone of parental concern. “I warned you. Love can blind you to the obvious. Clearly she wasn’t as faithful as she seemed, only a convincing liar.”

Hellebore didn’t look at him, but from this vantage, Ambrose could see her face. Hurt cut across it, a sliver of doubt wedged in her resolve. Her stoat familiar, cuddled into her hood like a scarf, licked her cheek.

After watching her stand over Emery with a dagger, Ambrose couldn’t scrounge an excess of sympathy, but he felt a twinge of it.

Less for Hellebore’s heartbreak than for the confusion Morcant cultivated in her.

How long could you live with lies and illusions before they disfigured your reality so completely, they might as well have been true?

How long before they disfigured who you were, as well?

Being Morcant’s daughter did not appear to afford her special treatment, nor had it inoculated her to his venom.

Footsteps sounded, and another figure cut hastily toward the bridge from a narrow side street.

He walked with a cane and wore a loose-fitting long coat.

A hood covered his head, but as he approached the bridge, a shaft of light banished the shadows on his face.

He had a trim graying beard on a mouth deeply lined with grim apprehension.

He wasn’t familiar to Ambrose, but Emery tensed with recognition.

“Professor Valenti,” said Morcant.

“It’s just Mr. Valenti now. Thanks to you.”

Ambrose remembered in a rush—the professor Emery had gone to for help, the one who’d suspected Morcant, the one who’d lost his job to rumors of an inappropriate relationship with a student.

This was him.