Page 48

When Ambrose returned once more with a bowl of boiled water, cooled to a comfortable temperature with a cloth to soak, Emery was weakly undressing, halfway out of his shirt.

Once free of it, his hair settled in a sweaty cloud around his face.

He looked at the bowl of hot water and, brows scrunched in mild embarrassment, turned so Ambrose could wash his back.

“Feels wrong to make you do this. Like you’re my servant.”

Ambrose’s knuckles brushed bare skin, feverish and clammy, as he soaked the warm cloth over it to loosen the blood. It had made a river of his spine.

“Serving someone felt sacred to me, until I discovered the person I served was …” He cleared his throat, gently rubbing clean a rune from Emery’s neck. “I do not think you will make me regret caring for you like this.”

Those words and the warm cloth wiping him clean seemed to give Emery a measure of comfort, relief, or both. His taut shoulders unwound a fraction.

But he still gripped the tether in one hand like a lifeline.

He returned to the grimoire in his lap. “We have two immortal necromancers to reckon with now. Let’s hope this holds some answers.”

As he read, he turned the bones over in his fingers. It made Ambrose shiver. That was a piece of his spine, a part of him that shouldn’t have been possible to remove. It filled him with revulsion and not an insignificant amount of self-loathing that the witch king’s vertebra now replaced his.

“Do these have anything to do with his immortality?” Emery asked. “Or were they only a means to give him more control over you in the event his resurrection didn’t go to plan?”

“All the witch king ever told me was that he could not die so long as I lived.”

“That gave him a certain level of invulnerability, but it’s not immortality. It should have ended when you died, and why would he betray you, then?” He tapped the rune engraved—tiny as a grain of rice—onto the knob of the vertebra.

“You don’t think his immortality had anything to do with me.”

“I think the spell he cast on you has something to do with it, but you don’t have to be alive for it to work.” Emery wouldn’t meet his eyes. “It’s hard to take at face value anything he told you.”

“Or anything I tell you.”

Emery winced. “So long as he can control you …”

He doesn’t trust me anymore.

Why would he, you craven deserter?

Ambrose set his wounded feelings and the echoes of his old master’s voice aside.

“He was buried for centuries. Something must have happened that went against his plan, or he’d have returned from the dead like Morcant, right?

” Emery hummed. “The coffin I found you in. It was covered in runes and powerful wards. Maybe they kept his body locked up and decaying too badly for him to return.”

That did sound plausible.

Emery closed his fist around the bone. “How it is made is how it can be unmade. That is the basic principle of magic like this. If nothing else, we should try to reverse the effects of the spell that allowed him to possess you.” He scanned the pages of the grimoire thoughtfully.

“He doesn’t outline the recipe, but you lived through it.

If you can walk me through the steps. We can perform them in reverse. ”

Ambrose held out his hand. Emery clutched the bone more tightly before reluctantly placing it in Ambrose’s open palm, carefully and without touching him.

“There was some phrase you said?”

Ambrose nodded. “It was in the grimoire. Page three hundred and thirty-two.”

Emery flipped to it. “Here. Em ruoved regnuh tel .”

“I had to put the vertebra on my finger like a ring and say that, along with our old names, and it … melted into me, replaced my spine with a piece of his.”

Emery’s guarded expression flickered. “Did it hurt?”

To put it lightly. The spell might have allowed bones to morph and phase through his body without permanent harm, but it certainly didn’t feel good. “It was unpleasant.”

Emery looked uncertain whether they should continue.

“Whatever it takes to be rid of him,” Ambrose said.

Emery nodded stiffly. Ambrose took a deep breath and slid the smooth gray bone over his finger. Clearing his throat, he said the enchanted phrase along with the witch king’s true name, “ Amelia, em ruoved regnuh tel, Desmond Caepernicus. ”

Nothing happened.

They waited a moment longer.

“Did I say it wrong?”

“No.” Emery’s expression turned inward. He grabbed a quill and ink from the side table and, without ceremony, wrote across the top page of the grimoire.

Once, Ambrose might have seen it as desecration of the witch king’s property—graffiti on a priceless relic. Now it seemed appropriate, like drawing a moustache on a portrait of someone loathsome. Like saying the king’s true name instead of his title, for all that it tasted thorny on his tongue.

Emery finished writing, his mouth twisted in disapproval.

Ambrose could hardly read right side up, let alone upside down. “What is that?”

“I thought, maybe to reverse the spell, we have to say the phrase in reverse.”

“And?”

“It reads, Let hunger devour me. ”

Ambrose shuddered. There was that word again. Hunger . It was at the center of this spell, the magic all twisted up in the very bones of him. It was another piece of the puzzle; he just didn’t know how .

Emery’s expression pinched with sympathy. “If you need a minute …”

“Desmond Caepernicus, let hunger devour me …” Ambrose paused. “Ambrose.”

Like last time, the vertebra squeezed around his finger as if aiming to sever it.

It melted under the skin, traveling up his arm, gritty as pins and needles.

His back arched as his bones ground together.

The vertebra phased through nerves and muscle and sinew.

Once more, he found himself choking before hacking up the piece of spine, wet and bloody.

The rune on it still glowed. The magic was as active as ever.

Emery frowned. “Was there anything else the witch king did to cast the spell?”

The memory came back to Ambrose, and his cheeks heated with a mix of shame and uncertainty. “He … He sealed it by kissing the back of my neck.” Ambrose rubbed the bump of his spine, still bruised and sore. “There.”

Emery’s mouth fell open. It shut with a click. “Oh. All right. Well.”

“You don’t have to.”

Emery got up in answer, taking a seat behind Ambrose. He had to push aside some of Ambrose’s hair, tickling the back of his neck. Ambrose tried not to shiver or show just how much he appreciated even the most practical, least affectionate of touches.

It still felt intimate. It still felt like being saved when Emery’s warm lips kissed apart the spell.

Ambrose felt it break. The magic loosened its hold, a shackle come undone.

But only one. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt there would be more. The witch king had layered his spells to make them indestructible, and this would be far from the exception.

“Did it work?” Emery asked, close enough his breath could be felt.

Ambrose opened his palm. The bone no longer glowed with the mark of its enchantment. The rune carved there was no more. “I don’t think he can possess me any longer,” Ambrose said. “But the compulsion collar, his immortality …”

“What else went into the spell?”

The ash-stained skin of Ambrose’s hands was the only reminder required. “Fire.”

Before Emery could register that, Katzica jumped to her feet and let out a low growl.

She snuffled along the floor before stopping with her noise pointed at the window. The curtains were drawn, so Ambrose couldn’t see anything out there, but then a noise came.

A heavy thump. Another. The shelves shook.

Emery said, “Something’s trying to get into the cellar.”

Ambrose remembered the remains of the witch king’s skeleton moldering down there. Dread washed over him. “Or out of it.”