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When they finally drew apart to catch their breath, Emery’s mouth was reddened, and he wore a dreamy smile.

“Not bad, for someone who hasn’t had much practice,” he jibed.

“I could use more.”

Emery leaned in again. Between the press of their lips, he said, “The food will go cold.”

Ambrose remembered the purpose of all this. He looked at his hands, still spell-stained, but the magic was … quiet. “Should we see if the counterspell worked?”

Emery nodded and awkwardly maneuvered out of Ambrose’s lap. He sat in his own chair, looking flushed and anticipatory. His slicked-back curls were mussed from the attentions of Ambrose’s fingers.

In that brief snapshot, Ambrose could imagine a future in this kitchen, with this boy in his rumpled clothes stained from cooking, his undead familiar begging under the table, having a domestic evening of home-cooked dinner and reading by candlelight.

“How do you want to test it out?” Emery looked down at his chest, then looked up again with a sheepish smile. “No offense, but I’d prefer not to be a test subject.”

Ambrose looked mortified.

“Joking.” Emery looked around. “Try to get a mug out of the cupboard without opening it?”

It was as good a test as any. Ambrose got up and touched the panel of the cupboard door.

For a brief moment, as he studied the whorls in the wood grain, he called to his magic, and it did not answer. There was no rotten hunger, no slavering violence, and the wood remained impenetrably solid.

But it was only a brief moment, the lapse of half a second, chalked up easily to the distraction their evening had been. For the next second, his limb came poisonously alive and sank through the cupboard door until the mugs clinked within.

Their efforts weren’t entirely in vain. The roast dinner had been delicious, and Ambrose was well-fed, even if the spell haunting him wasn’t.

Plus, it meant that Emery now spent the evening cuddled up to Ambrose’s side while searching the grimoire for answers, using it as an opportunity to let Ambrose try and read along.

After a cryptic passage about the fallacy of memory, how the stories we tell ourselves about our lives are colored too much by feelings to be truly honest, Emery said, “I don’t know how to break the pact, but I just thought of a way to find out what Morcant does with us during the second half of his initiation rite. ”

Ambrose had never been to Bellgrave’s dormitories. He didn’t particularly relish going to the girls’ ones, but Hellebore would not willingly relinquish the truth about the ritual behind the corpse door, so they would have to take it from her while she slept.

The spell Emery crafted could extract memories. They’d spent the better portion of the day collecting the tithes necessary, and an entire evening bent over the cauldron on Emery’s stovetop brewing the potion.

Now they crossed the moor, where Ambrose remembered jousting competitions taking place, now reserved for “football.” A familiar two-story cottage with a thatched roof came into view ahead.

“The dormitories are in there?” he said.

Emery still didn’t look at him. “Yes. The boys are in the ones on the south side, the girls in the north, but Hellebore’s a senior warden. She’ll be in the central cottage.”

Ambrose shouldn’t have been shocked the cottage still stood. The entirety of Bellgrave had been well preserved, modernity clinging to its carcass like limpets on the side of a beached whale, but he’d never thought he’d return here.

In his time, it had been the king’s summer quarters. A place he’d gone when he wanted a reprieve from duty and responsibility.

Ambrose’s memories of the place sat as uneasily in his gut as curdled milk, but when he tried to identify why, he didn’t know.

He kept his discomfiture to himself as they marched through the dewy grass. Emery had used the last of his gathered tithes to craft the spell for stealth, but he only had enough to last them an hour. They’d need to be swift before the invisibility wore off.

They’d considered waiting for a delivery of more materials, but they couldn’t leave Morcant and the witch king enough time to gather themselves for a counterattack.

Leaving the sanctuary of the wards at all felt risky, but they couldn’t hide forever, and the sooner one enemy was dispatched, the easier it would be to handle the other.

Emery pointed to the first window on the left of the second floor. “That’s Hellebore’s room.”

Ambrose looked. The window was an unlit hollow eye in the building’s face. Good. Hellebore was probably asleep already.

Emery cast the stealth spell over them, his magic settling comfortably around Ambrose’s shoulders.

They approached the door. In the grass next to the stoop was the iron boot scraper Ambrose often used after the witch king went riding.

A strange thing to have endured there for centuries.

The door’s engraved handle, which once bore his seal, had been replaced with one shaped like a rose.

Stickers and rainbow flags pasted in the window surrounded a sign he struggled, but succeeded, to read.

All are welcome.

He doubted that included him, but they passed through the door all the same.

Ambrose’s heart rate ticked faster with every step up the turning staircase. He remembered rushing up them when he’d first arrived at the castle, barely fourteen.

He’d felt so special at the time. The witch king’s youngest knight, tutored by him personally.

Why did it all make him feel sick now? The sting of his eventual betrayal, certainly, but some other memory made its sluggish way to the surface.

Emery led them to a door in the hall and listened for a moment before unlocking it with a muttered spell. He peered through the cracked door, then let it swing the rest of the way inward to reveal a dark room and empty bed.

Hellebore wasn’t here.

That didn’t draw Ambrose’s attention quite like the window.

It looked across the moor onto the castle. Its silhouette still carved the same dark shape out of the sky. A branch from a tree outside the cottage still pointed to the castle like in a painter’s composition.

Ambrose’s throat closed seeing it. He remembered how the wood of the windowsill felt under his palms. Remembered that exact view. He thought he could remember the witch king’s muffled voice from the garden below.

What had he been saying?

It was as if Ambrose could hear the voices again. Two.

Then he recognized them. Sneaking up to the window, he glanced outside. Crossing the green at a clip were Hellebore and Saoirse.

And with them, his memory came back in a rush.

“Shit.” Emery ran to the door and locked it so it wouldn’t appear broken into. “We need to hide until she goes to sleep.”

On the night bandits had murdered Ambrose’s family, someone else had been there.

Another knight. Not Sir Aric, the one Ambrose had spoken to at the jousting competition, a younger man with a bold cant to his chin, who stared into the eyes of the witch king without a speck of obsequiousness.

A man who walked the tightrope between brave and foolish.

He’d been looking at the witch king just the same way as they argued on the green outside that window.

Emery cast around the room for an appropriate spot, but while a nicely proportioned room, it was not fit to host four people, two of whom were invisible.

Ambrose was still reeling as memories came back to him. “The wardrobe,” he said faintly.

He’d only just begun his training. He’d been given this very apartment, a bed so luxurious and clothes more fine than he’d ever known before.

The knight hadn’t liked it.

“He isn’t of noble blood. The lords won’t allow it.”

Ambrose had latched on to that statement. What bearing did his breeding have to do with how well he held a sword?

But as the memory began to crystallize, other facets of detail shone in a new, sharper light.

The door downstairs clicked open.

Emery pushed aside the clothes hanging in the wardrobe, but the bar was too low for them to stand inside.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs.

I know what you asked Sir Aric to do. Are you hoping you can groom this commoner to look past the gruesomeness of that wretched ritual?

“Get in,” Emery hissed.

Those bandits were uncommonly well-armed. Do you expect everyone to believe what happened that night was a tragic accident?

Ambrose sat himself in the bottom of the wardrobe. His hands shook.

My family—I’ve told them. The world will know our liberator has become a tyrant.

Emery hesitated. Perhaps because there wasn’t a lot of room, but more likely because he’d seen the stark terror in Ambrose’s face and knew it had nothing to do with Hellebore coming up the stairs.

His last words had been uttered through a spout of blood as the witch king cast a spell to carve him up like a jack-o’-lantern.

Do you think your new pawn will remain naive forever?

“Oh, hell, Ambrose …” Emery got into the wardrobe with him.