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A mbrose and Emery held their breath, but Saoirse rose from the bed and marched toward the wardrobe.

She flung it open. Ambrose could not have felt less dignified if they’d been caught naked. Emery guiltily leaned away from him.

Saoirse gasped. “What are you doing here?”

The whole cottage had one communal washroom, and Hellebore could be back any moment.

“Not spying on your makeup tutorial, that’s for certain,” Emery said peevishly.

“Are you and your cousin necking in Hellebore’s wardrobe?”

“No!” they said in unison, so violently she took a step back. They’d both forgotten the fictional story of their association.

“Obviously that was a lie,” Emery said, more quietly this time. “He’s my …”

Saoirse’s eyebrows rose and rose. Her smile grew and grew.

“Don’t—”

“You know Hellebore is going to call you ‘cousinfucker’ until the day you die.”

“ He’s not my cousin! ” Emery threw his head back and covered his face. “Look, that doesn’t matter.”

“Agreed. The fact you’re in there at all does. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t go tell Hellebore right now.”

“We came to find out what happens during the second half of Morcant’s initiation rite,” Emery said.

“By snooping through Hellebore’s things? She wouldn’t keep anything like that here .”

“No, with this.” Emery removed the vial of sleepy blue potion from his robes to show her. “I was going to extract the memory from her while she slept.”

“Why is that so important you’d risk getting caught creeping around her dormitory?”

“Because we have good reason to think the ritual has something to do with Morcant’s immortality.”

Saoirse absorbed that impressively fast. She did not seem surprised to hear Morcant was immortal. Perhaps Hellebore had told her, which would mean they were closer friends than anticipated. If Saoirse was too loyal to help, that didn’t bode well.

She said, “So you’re trying to kill him, then? Morcant?”

Emery grimaced, “If I saw another way—”

“I’m in.”

Emery blinked twice. “What?”

“On the condition nothing happens to Hellebore,” Saoirse finished. “I’ll help you if you swear on your life that potion won’t hurt her.”

“No. Not at all. It just extracts a memory.”

“Swear it!”

Emery held up his hands, “On my honor, I swear.”

Ambrose hadn’t seen whether Saoirse used a tithe, but she must have. Magic coursed through the air smelling strongly of hyacinths—her magical signature.

“Then give it to me.” She held out her hand for the potion, waiting.

Emery didn’t hand it over right away, staring at her suspiciously. “Why are you so eager to help?”

“Because Morcant is an evil cunt, and I hate him, and she’d never admit it, but Hellebore does, too.”

“You know, she tried to kill me,” Emery said.

“On whose orders?” Saoirse shot back, then winced.

“Look, obviously that was a bit not good, but she failed. And how do you think Morcant took that? She beat herself up terribly, but you don’t see that side of her.

She gets it in the neck every time you step a toe out of line.

Not blaming you, just saying. She’s his daughter.

” A fiercely sad look drew the corners of Saoirse’s mouth down in a grimace.

“She’s suffered him her whole life. I’d be a worse person in her place. ”

Ambrose never thought he’d find kinship in Hellebore, but the moment Saoirse said it, it struck true.

Emery placed the potion in her palm. “In that case … thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.” Then she added a little sheepishly, “Really, don’t.

I was awful to you, when you were only trying to warn me about Morcant.

I thought you believed I was too weak for the guild.

My stubbornness got me into this mess.” She sighed, glancing sideways at the mirror on the inner panel of the wardrobe door.

She ran a finger under the paint of her lower lip to even it.

“I’m not even sure if I regret it, given what a friend Hellebore’s been.

I guess you have to find something good while going through hell. ”

They heard steps down the hall.

Saoirse said, “Meet me at the hanging tree,” and shut the door, nearly hitting Emery in the face.

Emery rifled through his tithe belt for bone powder and cast a portal onto the inner wall of the wardrobe.

They practically fell through it, landing in the grass a furlough away from a crooked tree, partially fenced off and glimmering with protective wards.

Some of Hellebore’s shoes tumbled out with them, which had to be tossed back through the portal before closing it.

They waited for Saoirse to meet them. Dawn’s glow haunted the horizon by the time she came through a portal of her own. She held out the same bottle Emery had given her, only now the dark navy liquid inside held an undulating spool of red light.

“That should be it,” she said.

“Thank you.” Emery took it from her. “I feel like I should give you something back for helping us.”

“Kill Morcant,” Saoirse said. “Just do it properly this time.”

Emery took the potion bottle straight to the cauldron on his stovetop. He emptied the tiny vial, the crimson memory releasing the scent of fungal putrefaction into the kitchen.

Emery held his nose while he stirred in the tithes for psychic transference. “I read the potion’s smell reflects whether it’s a good memory or a bad one. Safe to assume this one’s terrible.”

Whatever they were about to discover about the ritual, it wasn’t likely they’d relish it.

Emery finished throwing tithes into the brew. A gecko’s mummified toe, a shard of sea glass. He ladled it into two cups, took the one with a chipped rim, and gave the other to Ambrose.

It had a flag bearing a skull with heart-shaped eyes designed on the side. It looked like some of the pride flags Emery had taught him about, though this one he didn’t recognize. He couldn’t quite sound out the phonemes.

“Neck-roh?”

“Nec-romantic,” Emery said.

Ambrose snorted.

“I made that one.” Emery looked both sheepish and proud. “You’re getting better at reading.”

“I have a good teacher.”

Emery flushed. “I’m no good with flattery. Should we drink it together?”

Ambrose nodded. Emery clinked their mugs and said, “Cheers.”

It smelled like petrol—an aroma Ambrose had recently been introduced to and did not translate well to drink. It took remarkable constitution to hold his gorge.

Emery pinched his nose before quaffing his own. “That was vile.”

“How long before it takes effect?”

“Not … lo—”

Emery tilted sideways. Ambrose caught his head before it hit the kitchen floor, then the exhaustion hit him, too. The potion did not lull him to sleep so much as hit him over the head with a sleep cudgel. The cold tile under his cheek and Emery’s face snoring softly a foot from his own faded away.

Then he was not in his own memory at all.

He found himself looking down at a pair of hands, connected to him but not his own. They looked fit for playing instruments—long-fingered with short nails in chipped polish the color of steel.

Delicate. Feminine.

His stomach swooped with a familiar repulsion.

Looking down at himself, he wore Hellebore’s body like an ill-fitting suit, reminding him of a time when his real body felt more like meat. Separate, detached, not fit for purpose.

He had to forcibly ignore the sensation. This wasn’t his body—it lay back on Emery’s kitchen floor. This body belonged to Hellebore. This was her memory, and he was experiencing it through her.

Instead of her hands, he focused on what she held. A shard of quartz glowed faintly in her palm. A spell jar.

She looked up, giving him a view of the room around them.

Dimly lit by the quartz and a floating mote of witch light, he made out the tomb where they’d found the grimoire.

There was the wall of weapons, including the axe that killed him.

There was the open sarcophagus in the center.

Morcant stood next to it, speaking softly to a figure sat cross-legged inside.

Emery.

He was younger, a sparse few strands of silver to his hair, eyes bright and heart-crushingly naive. He looked at Morcant as Ambrose had never seen him do before. Eager to learn, eager to please.

Morcant was instructing him. “You must focus inward. Forget your body. Detach from your mind. Embody only the ephemeral. It will open you to the world beyond the veil and make you more sensitive to the spirit world.”

Emery nodded firmly. “I’m ready.”

As he closed his eyes and fell into deep meditation, Morcant gave soft, occasional instruction. “You are neither alive nor dead. You are as the spirits are. Like music. Like light. Sensed but not sensing.”

As he continued, the words became more like a chant. Rhythmic. Unsettling.

“Empty your mind, empty your heart until you feel nothing. Are nothing. You feel lighter and lighter because of how much nothing you contain. You are empty.”

His hypnotic murmurs caught in the cavernous space, echoing like a susurration of dry leaves caressing a stone path. The tiny hairs on Hellebore’s arms stood up, and her heart hammered faster. Ambrose couldn’t hear her thoughts, but he felt her fear.

Had she already undergone the same ritual? Had she been the first?

Finally, Morcant took lavender and eggshells from his pocket, his whisper adopting magical intent. The tithes evaporated into smoke, which Emery inhaled on his next breath. He swayed. Morcant caught him as he slumped back, laying him inside the sarcophagus.

Seeing Morcant touch him, conveying him into the coffin like a corpse for burial, drove Ambrose mad. He felt as he had when Emery commanded him to hide, helplessly forced to watch and incapable of intervening.

Morcant turned to face his daughter. “Hellebore.”

Her heart plunged. Quickly, eager to get it over with, she approached the sarcophagus. She clutched the spell jar in her hands so tightly it cut into her fingers.

“Everything’s prepared.” Morcant dropped the soft, soothing tones of hypnosis he’d employed with Emery, now cold and direct. “You know what to do.”

“What if I get it wrong?” Hellebore said.

“You’d best not.”

The shivering anxiety felt like a trapped bird in her chest, but she nodded.

Emery’s robes and shirt had been opened to mid-chest, where a charcoal rune mark had been drawn, just as it was with the initiates Ambrose had witnessed.

Hellebore placed the spell jar over the rune, alongside a black rose.

Emery did not twitch or seem to feel it.

“I’m ready,” Hellebore said.

“Good.”

Morcant took out a dagger. It had a petal-shaped blade, still rusty with stains—the dagger used to kill Craig Kendrick.

Ambrose’s heart lurched. Instinct drove him to try and move, to shout, to wake Emery, but he could no more affect what happened years ago than he could control the changing seasons. Although he felt the pounding of Hellebore’s heart and her shaking hands, he could not force her to stop.

All of this was only an echo of her mind. Something which happened and could not be undone.

She took the dagger. Morcant opened the front of his robes, revealing a sigil of runes over his heart, intricate as lace.

He said, “Stop shaking.”

Hellebore swallowed the lump in her throat and tightened her grip on the dagger. She held it up, but faltered.

“You can’t hurt me,” Morcant said. “Strike true.”

Hellebore tried again. She held the dagger aloft, overhand, staring at the sigil of runes on her father’s chest like a target.

She let out a noise of effort as she brought her arm down but pulled her strike at the last moment. A prick of blood dripped from Morcant’s skin.

He seized her wrist in an iron grip, nearly making her drop the dagger. Her wrist bones ground together in his fist, making her whimper. Ambrose felt it, too.

Morcant didn’t snarl when he spoke. The quiet tone was almost worse. “Coward. Do it properly this time.”

The words wounded more readily than the dagger could. They hurt, but she seemed to use his insults as a whetstone on which to steel herself.

This time, she raised the dagger and plunged it into his chest with enough force it sank to the hilt.

She let out a stifled cry. Blood seeped from between her fingers, encrusting them with red rings.

She held the blade there for a beat, Morcant staring down at it and murmuring an incantation, which seemed to heat his blood until it boiled.

Hellebore wrenched the dagger free in a spray.

Droplets rose in shivering globules as light poured out of his wound.

It seemed to bleach the blood, draining it of color, until it condensed into a single mass. A gray orb of both liquid and light.

Ambrose had felt disconnected from the body he inhabited when first he’d opened his eyes in Hellebore’s mind, but this horror they experienced in tandem.

Morcant held his hands around the orb. The wound in his chest stitched shut, the blood spent in the spell, leaving him looking as though he’d never been harmed. The dagger, too, was clean besides what remained of Craig.

Morcant approached Emery.

Hellebore took several steps back, while Ambrose wanted to rush forward.

He couldn’t. He had to watch as Morcant poured the gray bile of his soul into the spell jar perched on Emery’s chest. The quartz abruptly turned from cloudy white to arterial scarlet.

The black rose wilted, its petals turning brown.

Then Morcant pressed on the spell jar, and it began to sink through Emery’s skin.

Through the rune. Through flesh and bone.

Carving out a space for itself in the open, empty vessel he’d made of Emery’s body.