Page 49

W here are you going?” Emery asked.

Ambrose donned his cloak, already heading for the door. “If the witch king wants those bones back, they probably benefit him in some way. I can’t let him have them.”

“We.”

“What?”

Thump.

The cellar wasn’t locked. Ambrose had broken in. Whatever made those noises was too weak to push them open from within. It was colliding with the doors with each attempt.

Emery pulled up the hood on his own cloak. “ We can’t let him have them. And if undoing the spell requires the flaming husk of a hanged man who’ll not be missed, then the witch king’s remains are as good as any.” He gave Ambrose a searching look. “Will you miss him?”

Thump. Thump.

“No,” Ambrose said, his throat hoarse. He hated that it needed to be said. His hand held the door handle, but he didn’t turn it. “I don’t want to risk him hurting you. You should stay within the wards.”

Emery narrowed his eyes. Ambrose could practically read his thoughts. He wanted to trust that Ambrose was protecting him, but what if this was part of a conspiracy to aid the witch king?

Thump. Thump. Thump.

“He wants you ,” Ambrose said. “He wants your body. I don’t know why, but this could be a ruse to draw you outside the protection of the wards.” He chewed his lip, heart thundering. “If you don’t trust me, watch from the open door, from the window, but please don’t cross the wards.”

Emery hesitated. Was it self-reproach in his eyes or just more mistrust?

The next thump was thunderous, the sound of wood splintering apart.

Emery said, “Take Katzica.”

Ambrose bolted out the door, Katzica stalking by his heels, her hackles high. The wards and the cozy warmth of the ruin leaked away as they stepped foot into the damp woods.

“Here.” Emery was backlit like a stained-glass angel in the doorway of his home. He cast the spell for a witch light, which floated from his open palm to hover over Ambrose’s.

“Thank you.”

“Just deal with it and come back.”

Cryptic noises issued from around the corner, where the cellar door had broken open. Something rattled and hissed through the dried leaves as it crawled over the forest floor. Ambrose raised the witch light high as he turned the corner.

The doors to the cellar were blown wide open, some of the wood splintered in places.

On the ground were the scattered bones of the witch king. They rattled and twitched, crawling over each other like insects feeding on fresh carrion, reassembling into a skeleton.

It righted itself, held together by magic. It turned its hollow sockets on Ambrose, the crown fused to its skull glinting in the light from the ruin’s window, where Emery had come to watch. His face blanched at the sight.

Katzica issued a warning growl as the skeleton took its first hobbling steps toward the tree line.

Ambrose shouted to Emery, “Get me something to contain the bones.”

Emery nodded and vanished out of sight.

The skeleton took another halting step, less precarious than the first. A third.

Before it could reach the trees, Ambrose rushed it. He seized its femur and rained heavy blows down on its crowned skull. Katzica snarled and snapped the wrist bones in her jaws. They came apart, littering the ground with pale debris.

The shambling creature clawed at him, bony fingers leaving welts across his shoulder, but he didn’t stop. He struck over and over, dissolving the skeleton into a mess of bones, which tried to reassemble, though Katzica broke the ulna between her teeth, and Ambrose smashed through several ribs.

Emery reappeared with an old blanket. He shoved it through the broken pane of the window. Ambrose set to work bundling all the witch king’s bones within it. Katzica helped, but it was no simple task, as they kept moving of their own volition, trying to reach the man they belonged to.

A fever had come over Ambrose. A single-minded, teeth-gritting determination to be done with this. He didn’t want to be haunted by the witch king any longer. He wanted an exorcism. He wanted to be free.

Once he was sure he had them all, he held the ends of the blanket together.

Emery had produced a skein of rope to tie it shut.

Ambrose took the sack of bones around the ruin to the front, where a tree had a low-hanging branch he could hurl the rope over.

He tied it there and searched the forest floor for stones.

While he worked, Katzica paced the tree line, ears back, hackles raised.

The shadows felt thicker than they should be, but if something sinister approached, it gave him all the more reason to dispose of the remains as quickly as possible.

He made a ring of stones on the ground beneath the sack.

Emery looked a mix of things. Concerned foremost among them, but no longer mistrustful. He disappeared and reappeared with matches and a dark black stone.

“I can’t find an accelerant, but I can use this as a tithe for a spell. It will work just as well.”

“Good.”

As Ambrose turned back to the bundle of bones on the ground, Katzica began to growl and hedge away from the deep shadows of the wood, where an even darker shadow emerged.

No, surely not. Surely he couldn’t have found them here so quickly.

“Have you really no love left for me?” said the figure emerging from the wood. “My sweet wolf?”

As he emerged into the light, it was not the witch king’s face, but Valenti’s. His voice was strange. A reedy version of the old professor’s, distorted and braided with that of the soul inhabiting the body.

The wards should have prevented him from coming here. They should have shielded the ruin from scrying spells.

“How did you find us here?” Ambrose asked.

“If death could not separate us, do you think any distance or ward could keep us apart?” the witch king said, his voice somber. “We are twin souls, you and I.”

“He’s lying,” Emery spat from within the safety of the ruin. “He was drawn here by his own remains. He can probably sense them through the wards.”

“Can I?” The witch king’s expressions looked alien on Valenti’s features.

In spite of the power with which he spoke and held himself, a frailty weighed upon him.

His return, and to an incompatible vessel, had not come without its challenges.

“And you’d believe this thief over the one who loves you? ”

Ambrose had never heard the word love from him aloud before. Once, it would have made his heart soar. Now, it broke it.

He drew a match from the packet Emery had given him. He said, “You killed me.”

“I killed us both,” answered the witch king.

Ambrose hesitated before he struck the match.

“Don’t listen,” Emery said. “He’s just trying to manipulate you.”

The witch king’s rasping took on a compelling edge. “We were born to an era where love like ours was answered, not with wedding bells, but a death knell.”

“You were a king. You had the power to change that,” Emery snarled.

“In law , but not in the minds of the lords, not in the minds of the people who believed my sodomy was to blame for miscarriages and failed crops.” The witch king took a step closer.

Ambrose held his ground and put the match’s end to the striker. He would need Emery’s spell to accelerate the flames, and Emery would have to cross the wards to cast it.

The witch king continued, “I knew, after all my efforts failed, that no matter how much power I accrued, it could never hold a candle to the power of time . Ours was a love that would have to wait for a world that didn’t hate us.”

“He’s lying,” Emery said.

“You’re lying,” Ambrose echoed. “We didn’t die in each other’s arms. You sent rebels with an enchanted axe.”

“I had to set the stage for our resurrection. I had loyalists prepared to pass down the knowledge through generations, to bring us back when the time was right.” In Valenti’s eyes was a facsimile of love.

Perhaps the fog had lifted after discovering how he’d died, or perhaps it was only that he’d seen more fondness in Emery’s face than had ever shown in the witch king’s, but he could see beyond the mask now, and the only genuine emotion there was contempt.

“ Think about it. We can finally be together in earnest! After all these years …” The witch king wearing Valenti’s skin took another step closer and reached out a hand.

There was something in his hand .

A fistful of bloody nettles.

“Don’t you fucking touch him!” Emery snarled.

He burst through the wards with a spell kindled in his palm.

Ambrose struck the match.

The witch king lashed out with a spell of his own.

The nettles burst into inky shadow, springing from his palm to slither around Emery’s throat, twisting around his wrists and pinning him to the wall of the ruin.

Emery’s spell winked out, as did Ambrose’s match when it hit the writhing sack of bones.

Emery tried to cast the spell once again, but nothing happened.

Whatever the witch king had done had dampened Emery’s magic. He lunged past, hands outstretched like claws. His aim had never been Ambrose. It was, as before, to ensnare Emery. He counted on it taking Ambrose by surprise.

It didn’t. As the witch king made to bolt past him, Ambrose grabbed him by the head with both hands and twisted until he heard the snap of bone.

The spell binding Emery weakened, and he pulled free, the body collapsing between them.

The forest made no sound, but Ambrose heard a rushing in his ears, his heartbeat roaring fast and hard enough to bruise ribs.

He took the body by an arm and leg, then swung it atop the sack of bones, which had ceased their writhing the moment the witch king’s neck had broken.

He felt bad for Valenti. This had been his body once, before the witch king killed him, then claimed and corrupted it. Valenti was gone, for no reason deeper or more meaningful than because he’d tried to protect a student.

In all the centuries since his death, there still was no justice for heroes or the people who tried to be. Perhaps the old stories told about heroes were misguided fables. You couldn’t wield a sword for justice. Swords were only made for one thing.

“Ambrose,” Emery said.

“We need to burn the bones and the body,” Ambrose said. “Quickly.”

“My magic isn’t back yet.”

“There must be a counterspell. Something .”

Emery looked torn between searching for that something and staying with Ambrose, but he went inside and returned a few moments later with a pouch.

“Bat guano,” Emery explained. “Makes a powerful tithe, but it’s also flammable, so …” He emptied it onto the pile. “And this …” In his other hand, he held the witch king’s vertebra and finger bone.

A well of emotion made Ambrose’s throat too tight for words. It seemed fitting that fire, which had unmade him, could unmake the witch king, too.

“Do you want to do the honors?” Emery held the bones out to him.

Ambrose took them. He struck a second match, and this time when it fell, it caught.

The sack charred. Valenti’s hair curled.

The flames spread, devouring with a stomach-pitting hunger Ambrose felt deep in his bones.

The fire reached a roar, and still he held the tether and the vertebra clenched in his right palm, digging into his skin.

The smell of the witch king’s magic burning was rancid, but he had to watch. He had to know.

Side by side, they stood vigil while the fire turned the bones to glowing coals. Ambrose startled when warm fingers pried apart his clenched fist. Emery met his eyes, his own gleaming in the firelight with more compassion and understanding than Ambrose deserved.

“I know it’s not much, but I’m here.”

After an evening of guarded looks and flinching from him, Emery’s closeness meant everything. It gave Ambrose the courage to loosen his grip on the bones and, heart in his throat, toss them onto the pyre.

He watched the tether blacken and begin to glow from within, until the heat expanding in its hollow marrow splintered it apart. It snapped and popped, sparks leaping into the air, and the runes along its length finally, finally went black.

Ambrose didn’t know why he felt like crying. It should have been an exultant moment.

Free. Was he, at last, free?

He looked at his arms, still stained by the witch king’s magic, and found it hard to believe the man would ever really be dead.

He lived on in Ambrose’s every gnarled scar, every craven impulse to bow his head to someone who might hurt him if he disobeyed, in the guarded look with which Emery had fixed him after that moment in the tomb.

Emery wasn’t looking at him like that anymore.

For now, it was enough, but the ever-present, starving magic polluting his body still rumbled like a distant storm.

Emery, watching him, did something inexplicable. He turned and bound Ambrose up in his arms. Shock made Ambrose freeze. The crooked arch of Emery’s nose pressed into his neck, his arms squeezing as if he could wring the poison out of him.

There was a scaffold of strength holding Ambrose together, one which had weathered so many floods, he’d thought it indestructible.

Emery’s embrace made it all crumble.

“I’ll never be free of him.”

“You will,” Emery said. “We both will.”

“He’s in my head, he’s in my blood, his magic has a hold of me.”

“We’ll break its hold, Ambrose. Hey. Look at me.”

Ambrose did look at him, and found none of the earlier mistrust lingered.

Emery’s eyes were dark and open and glimmering with empathy, because he knew what it was to be haunted by someone like the witch king.

Someone who warped your sense of self, twisted your reality, made you feel as though your suffering was both inconsequential and your own fault.

“You have me,” Emery said.