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“If you’ll listen, that’s exactly what we came here to do,” Saoirse said.

“You and him?” Windsor jutted his chin to point at Emery.

“Why should we trust what he says?” Dalton agreed.

Saoirse said, “Because you trust me, and I know he isn’t who Morcant made him out to be.”

The initiates looked discomfited but unconvinced. Their gazes strayed to Morcant, bound but still alive and dangerous. Each wore hardened, weary expressions. Ambrose recognized them from battlefronts where spirited soldiers went to war and returned with wounds both bleeding and invisible.

They’d seen how Morcant punished Emery for slights and failed rebellions. How might he respond to this affront?

Looking at them now, Ambrose understood why anyone who had not suffered as they had might not understand why they didn’t fight.

They couldn’t see how things had begun, how slowly Morcant had built their tolerance to his cruelty, how twisted the mental arithmetic leading them to believe if they were good enough, perfect enough, sensitive enough, they could avoid his foul moods and earn a drop of praise, which felt like a wealth of approval and generosity when compared to the dearth they normally subsisted on.

He remembered craving the witch king’s crumbs of affection, never knowing there would be a man centuries later who didn’t ask him to degrade himself for it.

Emery, faced with their doubt and apprehension, didn’t falter.

“Morcant is not the encouraging mentor he styles himself to be.” He had spent years subject to lies and derision.

Morcant had woven a new identity for him, and none of his peers, save for Saoirse, had seen beyond the costume.

Given the opportunity to purge himself of the slander, his voice carried weight in the cavernous space, so that it seemed even the ghosts rose from their graves to listen.

“I’ve known him longer than all of you, barring Hellebore, and look what he’s done to her.

” He gestured to the rune collar. “Subjugated her with a compulsion charm that forces her to do his bidding against her will. He isn’t a teacher or a mentor.

He has no interest in cultivating your talents or helping you reach your true potential.

He’s a greedy lich who tricked us into committing harrowing acts of arcane magic in order to make himself immortal. And I can prove it.”

He slammed the spell jar onto the lid of the central sarcophagus. The magic within made it sound like a rhapsody of shattered glass rather than quartz striking stone.

“My—Ambrose, here …” Emery paused, looking at Ambrose. The word friend felt tentative and wrong. The word lover too personal. But the way it had come out— My Ambrose —that felt right.

Emery gestured to the spell jar. “He pulled this out of me. The rats we sacrificed were people, used to hollow out a spell jar powerful enough to contain a part of Morcant’s soul.

Then he placed them in us during the second initiation rite so we might never find and destroy the thing which makes him so powerful. We helped make him immortal.”

The initiates’ wan faces looked from the spell jar to Morcant, shock turned to revulsion. Windsor clutched his chest, where a rune marked the spot a shard of Morcant’s soul had been shoved into his heart.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Emery said with finality.

He turned to the open corpse door, giving Ambrose a look that asked plainly, Are you ready?

Ambrose answered by walking into the dark, following the dull glimmer of light at the other side of the tomb.

This had been the best and most compelling reason they had to do this here, now. The axe was the only weapon they knew with the power to shatter enchantments.

Its haft made his fingers tingle with the pins and needles of magic. Still there, even after all this time. Even though the witch king should, by all rights, be dead.

He was met with a sharp intake of breath when he emerged holding the weapon.

“Wait, you’re not going to kill him in front of us, are you?” an initiate asked. It was the boy with the burn scar who’d cowered from the torch at Morcant’s fundraiser. Dalton.

Ambrose, rather than correct them, swung the axe down hard on the spell jar. It burst asunder, and at the moment of its destruction, Morcant let out a harrowed scream that even the spell gagging him could not muffle.

His pallid cheeks had a green tinge, his eyes bloodshot and sunken. Inexplicably, he looked to the stairway, as if searching for an escape.

Or a rescue.

Ambrose positioned himself nearer the door in case, but they had to focus on the current task—convincing the initiates to relinquish the phylacteries they carried so each could be destroyed.

“You’ve all been the victim of his ire at one point or another,” Emery said.

“You all know what he’s really like, and he won’t stop.

He has us under his thumb. The secrecy pact keeps us from speaking of this to anyone but each other.

When I tried to get around it, he told me what we’d really sacrificed during our initiation rite and threatened to have me put away for murder.

He has every single dagger we used lined up in there.

” Emery gestured to the tomb behind him.

“This is our best chance to be free of him once and for all.”

“By killing him and getting put away regardless?” Dalton asked. “I’d rather just take my dagger and run.”

“You think he won’t find you?” Saoirse snorted. “There’s a part of him inside you. You want it to stay there?”

She took her own spell jar from her pocket, holding it up for them to see. She set it on the sarcophagus and looked Morcant dead in the eyes.

“This is for all those things you said to me when no one else was listening.”

She took the axe from Ambrose. He helped position her hands apart. She swung it down, missing on the first attempt and striking true on the second. Her phylactery exploded into dust, and Morcant once again howled like an animal.

When he looked up at her, fury made dark shadows beneath his eyes, his shoulders rising and falling with ragged breaths, but he could not speak to defend himself.

The initiates still looked uncertain. They shifted back and forth, regarding Morcant like a rabid dog close to slipping his leash.

They knew what had transpired tonight would not go unpunished.

Rather than finish him, they were most eager to find some way they could avoid that punishment.

Dalton said, “Aren’t we more valuable to him alive, if we have that thing inside us?

” He pointed to the remains of the spell jar.

“If we take it out, and your plan fails, what’s to stop him from killing us?

” Ambrose was no great diplomat. He didn’t know if he could say anything that would add value to their argument.

But he had experience with men like Morcant.

“If you believe you can make yourself indispensable enough that he’ll never turn his wrath upon you, I think you misunderstand what you are to him.

He does not care for you. He does not need an excuse to harm you.

He already has. All you do by changing yourselves to suit him is surrender to the idea that you brought that harm on yourselves. ”

The boy bristled. “What do you know about it? Who are you, anyway?”

“He’s Emery’s friend, and he’s helping us,” Saoirse interjected.

“Look, I understand. You’re afraid Morcant will kill you, but isn’t he doing that already?

” She looked down at her feet. “Sometimes, I say things so mean I don’t even recognize myself anymore.

I never used to. I don’t want to die, but I don’t want to become some loathsome, spiteful monster either.

” She looked around at them all, gathered in the candlelit tomb as if buried there themselves.

“He can’t kill all of us without attracting attention. ”

The initiates said nothing, silently fearful and contemplative. Iris finally stepped forward. “I don’t trust you,” she said to Emery.

“Thanks,” Emery muttered sardonically.

“But I trust Saoirse.”

Ambrose felt himself unwind, a sigh of relief nearly to his lips.

It stoppered at a sound from the stairs.

Footsteps.

What did it mean, when you knew someone so well you could identify his mood by the sound of his approach?

How cursed was this tomb, that twice now a man who should have been dead appeared in that precise place?

Ambrose didn’t know, and didn’t wish to wait and discover he was right.

Before the source of the steps appeared, he made a desperate bid for the axe. He got three paces before a voice—paralyzing in its familiarity despite an age since hearing it aloud—cracked like a whip.

“Stop.”

Ambrose had thrown his tether onto the pyre. He’d watched the bone become a lantern of fire before sundering in the heat.

Yet the collar cinched around his throat. His free will fled him. And he stopped.

Ambrose could not find it in himself to be surprised.

Of course, of course the witch king had returned.

“Hello again, my sweet wolf.”