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M orcant was only a couple paces from the edge of the sigil.

Ambrose lunged, reaching as far as his arm could stretch, using his momentum to press through the searing pain of the sigil’s prison. His magic, already agitated after retrieving the grimoire, answered his call readily.

But before he could reach Morcant’s heart, the necromancer snapped his fingers. The still-damp blood on them ignited, and a spell struck Ambrose aside and pinned him to the back wall.

“You’ve really helped to solve all my problems,” Morcant said as he took one step inside the sigil.

Emery backed away, reaching for his tithe belt, but Morcant snapped his fingers again.

The wall next to Ambrose shuddered where Emery impacted stone, air punched from his lungs in an audible gasp.

Ambrose wrenched viciously against his bonds, distraught to see Emery hurt, but the spelled runes on his wrists glowed fiercely orange, and it felt as if a hot iron burnt more into his neck and wrists.

The grimoire and Valenti’s cage rang against the floor where they’d been dropped, Valenti screeching in terror.

“You represented all my problems, so it’s only just that you helped solve them,” Morcant finished.

“What are you talking about?” Emery spat. Crimson speckled his upper lip where his nose had spouted blood from his impact with the wall.

“Patience, and I’ll explain,” Morcant said in the even tones of a teacher as he stooped to pick up the grimoire. Valenti, in the cage next to it, cowered away from Morcant’s dripping fingers.

“This grimoire is a prize. Your old master was a most brilliant sorcerer, far ahead of his time. He understood old magic long lost to the modern witch.”

An hour before this moment, Ambrose might have agreed. Now, his mind echoed over and over like his skull was a drum: He killed me, he killed me, I loved him, and he killed me.

Morcant drew close to Emery and put a hand in his pocket. Ambrose strained to free himself, but it was fruitless. Morcant withdrew his tether with a look of satisfied curiosity.

“It is no small feat that a spell he cast centuries ago still holds power today without a solitary tithe to sustain it—or not any tithe insofar as our understanding of the word goes.

“The grimoire contains journal entries, musings, and wondering of the witch king’s genius.

Take this one.” He flipped the book open to an excerpt he’d returned to often, from the way his hands knew the precise place to split the pages, leaving bloody stains on its edges.

He read aloud, “ There is weakness and power inherent in hunger—the unfed mouth and the hand offering scraps. What spells could be cast from an unsatisfied appetite? ” He paused, smiling to himself.

“ There isn’t much a man won’t do when he is hungry. ”

As if in answer, the hollow pit of magic made of Ambrose’s insides howled to be fed, but he didn’t understand the connection between the witch king’s words and the spell imbuing him with these awful abilities.

Morcant mirrored Ambrose’s thoughts. “These musings I could read, but not understand. He never outlines his conclusions or spell recipes. I said they were enciphered. A white lie, since they might as well be. I thought, perhaps, by letting you find it, you’d hold the key to decrypting it. You, who knew him so … intimately.”

The word caught on the points of Morcant’s teeth so it came out serrated and ready to cause a ragged wound.

Ambrose stung with it. How long had the relationship he’d bled and died for been anything except romantic? That final betrayal had rewritten his history, repainted it from rose to blood red.

“Now, I don’t need you to decrypt it,” Morcant said. “Your little spat gave me all the insight I needed.”

“How?” Emery asked.

Ambrose cast back through recent memory for anything they’d said which could reveal the answer, but drew a blank.

His confession about bringing the witch king back, the truth about the enchanted axe, Ambrose reckoning with that betrayal.

How did any of it reveal the secrets of the spell chaining Ambrose to the witch king’s will?

“I could explain it to you,” Morcant said, “but I’ve always found my students learn better by demonstration.”

He bent to pick up Valenti’s cage.

Valenti’s shivering made the metal rattle. With another snap of Morcant’s fingers, the rat froze. He tipped the tiny gray body onto the floor before stepping back to cast a spell transfiguring him back into a human.

Valenti had only spent a few hours in the rat’s body, but those hours might have been an age for how transformed he still was.

Fear hollowed out his eyes, and livid bruises marred his face from his rough treatment in Morcant’s custody.

With the same spell used to bind Ambrose and Emery, he was yanked up to stand on the edge of the open sarcophagus at the center of the room.

With a flourish, Morcant conjured a noose.

“The first tithe is perhaps the simplest, and the one you already knew—the body of a hanged man whom nobody will miss or mourn.”

Valenti whimpered, “Please don’t do this.”

Morcant cast a spell to render him silent. The tomb filled with harsh, stifled sobs instead.

“You’re fucking sick,” Emery said. “It won’t work. He was the only professor who tried to help me. I’ll miss him.”

“You can’t miss someone who wasn’t there when you needed him most.”

Emery’s mouth shut with a click of his teeth.

Ambrose felt as though he could hear Emery’s thoughts, feel what he felt.

All those years he’d suffered under Morcant, and Valenti had given up on him in the end just like the other faculty had.

Valenti’s expression crumpled, defeated.

He’d cared enough to try, but against Morcant, that hadn’t been enough.

“This second part is hardly simple, but the most obvious.”

Morcant went to the wall of weapons and selected a knife—not one of the daggers used in his initiation rite, but a slim finger of a blade, as common in appearance as a letter opener.

He stopped in front of Emery, the point of the knife aimed at his chin.

Ambrose renewed his efforts to struggle free, and the binding spell burnt a new collar around his neck in recompense.

Morcant said, “The spell needs anchoring between the subject and the one who controls him. I’ve already taken the liberties with my own and, I regret to say, even with anesthetic, this part hurt.”

“You haven’t anaesthetized me,” Emery said.

“I know.”

The spell binding Emery turned him and ground him face-first into the wall. Morcant held the point of the knife against the bump of spine at the base of Emery’s neck. His muscles shivered with the effort to free himself, but apart from a scream of pain, those efforts bore nothing.

Ambrose’s throat went raw. His snarls for Morcant to stop, the viciousness of his impotent threats, dissolved into pathetic pleas as he watched what had been done to him done unto Emery.

The experiences bled together. His mind and body echoed with the remembered pain of having runes carved into his bones as Emery screamed and screamed and screamed.

Emery tried to use the blood trickling down his arm onto his hand to draw a rune on the wall. To free himself, perhaps. Morcant snapped, and more bindings held Emery’s wrists.

Ambrose could do nothing to protect him or throw Morcant off him. His helplessness was intolerable.

You did this. It is because of you that he suffers.

Ambrose didn’t know if that was the witch king’s voice or his own.

Morcant finished his foul work and flicked the knife, casting off a spray of blood on the floor.

He sealed the wound in Emery’s neck with a spell.

By then, blood hung like a hood on the back of his shirt, his olive skin gone wan and sweaty in the sigil’s light.

Morcant cleaned it with a rag and began writing runes with charcoal, enclosing Emery’s neck in a collar to match the one Ambrose wore.

“Don’t.” Ambrose’s voice was hoarse.

Morcant said, “I am almost finished, and then I won’t have to suffer the insolence of either of you.”

He had to turn Emery once more to draw the rest of the runes on his throat. When he finished, the dark marks looked as much like a noose as the one hanging around Valenti’s head.

Ambrose couldn’t let this happen. The notion of Emery enthralled to Morcant made him ill. There had to be some way to escape.

There is.

Ambrose shuddered as the witch king’s voice flicked like a forked tongue in his ear.

Morcant did something inexplicable, something which Ambrose hadn’t recalled being a part of his own enslavement. He turned to Ambrose and roughly cut his shirt open from neck to sternum.

His gaze stuck to the blaze of scar tissue. “Fitting,” he said. Then he drew a simple symbol over Ambrose’s heart, where the axe had split him open all those years ago.

There’d never been a third person in the spell binding him to the witch king. What was this rune for?

Morcant smiled. “You still don’t understand, do you?”

He turned his back on them and gave Valenti his full attention. The enchanted noose tightened. “No matter. I’m sure it will dawn on you.” He slowly raised his fist in the air, and as he did the noose drew taut, hefting Valenti onto his toes. “I have all that I need.”

Once Valenti died, his life would be tithed. The spell would be cast. Emery would be Morcant’s thrall.

Unless you intervene now.

What could Ambrose possibly do?

You have the key in your pocket.

The vertebra. Ambrose used his limited movement to reach for it. It was tangled in the scrap of fabric. He had to wriggle it free, and when a frigid splinter of pain went through his finger from touching it, he knew he’d managed.

Put it on.

Adrenaline flashed ice cold and white hot through his veins. The witch king had betrayed him. The witch king had killed him. The witch king had lied to him. How could Ambrose trust him now?

Put it on. Speak my name and the words from the grimoire. Em ruoved regnuh tel.

He couldn’t trust the witch king. Morcant wanted Emery enthralled, but the witch king wanted him dead.

Neither of you are any value to me ensorcelled or dead.

The noose drew a choked noise from Valenti as it lifted him off his feet.

I will dispatch this problem for you.

The room went silent as Valenti suffocated.

You only have to trust me now as you once did.

Ambrose didn’t trust him.

He also had no other choice.

Valenti’s face turned vivid red.

Do it.

Ambrose put his finger through the ring of bone in his pocket and screamed, “Amelia, em ruoved regnuh tel, Desmond Caepernicus!”

His old name made his tongue feel rough as sand, as though he’d burnt it. The boldness of his words brought Morcant up short. The noose loosened in his lapsed attention. Valenti drew in a desperate wheezing breath.

At the same time, Ambrose felt the bone melt around his finger and seep beneath his skin to fuse within him, to leak into his blood like poison, sweeping through his body.

It quested within like a hound flushing out a fox.

It lodged in his throat and latched on to his spine.

His own bones rattled, all the ligaments and muscles and connections shaking loose the bit of bone that had been inscribed all those centuries ago, and the witch king’s bone, that segment of his spine, fitted into the place left behind like a key clicking into a lock.

“What is this?” Morcant demanded.

“Ambrose?” Emery sounded scared, confused. “Ambrose!”

Ambrose shuddered. He couldn’t answer. Something stuck in his throat, huge and hard to breathe around. He coughed violently until he spat it out on the floor in a spray of saliva and esophageal gore.

It was a bone just like the one he’d put on his finger a moment before, only this one was not the witch king’s vertebra. It was his.

He tried to draw in a much-needed breath, but his body didn’t obey.

The breath he drew instead was even, calm, relieved.

Something cold and powerful and hungry—of course, of course it was hungry—flooded his body in place of any control he had over it.

It wore his skin like a jacket, moved him like a puppet.

It snapped the bonds of Morcant’s spell as if they’d been fraying threads rather than steel.

It puppeted Ambrose upright and away from the wall and rolled his shoulders back.

The witch king said in Ambrose’s voice, “That’s better.”