Page 11 of Orc’s Harvest

SEVEN

ZALIE

I wake with Kalthor’s arm still locked around my ribs and his whole body between me and a stone floor that would have cracked my skull open without him there to catch it.

“Don’t move yet.” Low and strained, nothing like the man I’ve come to know. “Give it a second.”

I move anyway, because that’s who I am, and regret it immediately when I see the angle his shoulder’s sitting at — wrong, wrenched hard out of its socket, a bruise already darkening visible through the tear in his shirt where the fall drove stone into his ribs.

“You took the whole fall.”

“You weigh considerably less than I do. Seemed the practical choice.”

“That’s not the flattering explanation you think it is.” I’m already moving, pulling bloodvine from the pouch at my hip before he’s finished arguing. “Sit still. I’m setting that shoulder before it swells any worse.”

“It’ll hold until we’re out of here. The wards⁠—”

“Will still be broken in ten minutes.” I plant a knee against his good side, working the vine into a brace around the joint with hands steadier than I actually feel. “Sit still.”

He sits still. It costs him — I watch the fight leave his jaw one muscle at a time — but he does it, and I get to work in a chamber too narrow for either of us to pretend the space between us is anything but a lie.

The reset itself takes one hard pull and a sound out of him I know he’ll deny making later. I brace my palm flat against his chest to hold him steady through it, feel the muscle under my hand lock tight and then, slowly, unclench, and by the time the joint slides home he’s breathing like a man who’s just finished a fight instead of surviving a fall.

I end up on my knees between his, so close that setting the brace means my forearms brush his ribs with every pass, near enough that when I lean in to check the joint’s angle, his breath moves warm against my temple. The chamber doesn’t help. Six feet of stone on every side, no room to put distance between us even if either of us wanted to, and I’m increasingly certain he doesn’t want that any more than I do.

“Stop looking at my mouth.” Rough, low, not quite an order.

“Stop being so aware of where I’m looking.” I don’t stop. I don’t think either of us expected me to.

He lets it stand instead of arguing. We sit there a beat too long, his shoulder half-set and forgotten, both of us admitting with nothing but silence exactly what we’ve been pretending not to notice since a wheat field two days ago. His stare drops to my mouth again, slower this time, like he’s committing the mistake to memory before he lets himself not make it. There’s no putting it back in the box after that. I finish the brace with hands that aren’t quite as steady as they were a minute ago, and I don’t bother pretending otherwise. He doesn’t either.

With his shoulder set and his ribs wrapped tighter than he’d like, I finally get a proper look at the chamber we fell into, and it isn’t a hole in the ground. It’s a room, carved deliberately and old, walls covered floor to ceiling in the same root-and-rune work I’ve seen half-copied in Koira’s journals. Old sap has gone to amber in the cracks between carvings, and the only light down here comes from a thin vein of gold worked into the mortar, pulsing slowly like it’s forgotten how to stop.

I trace the nearest carving with two fingers. A tree, roots spreading wide beneath it, dozens of small gold threads flowing down into the roots and — this is the part that stops my breath — flowing back out again, spread thin across a field of carved wheat.

“It wasn’t a prison.” The words come slowly, working themselves out as I go. “The orchard ward didn’t take excess life and lock it away. It fed it back. Whatever the Heart couldn’t use, this place turned into food for the land instead.”

“And now?”

“Now the threads only run one way.” I trace the reversed pattern on a newer section of wall, carved rougher, later, angrier. “Somebody flipped it. Made it take instead of give.”

Koira didn’t destroy this ward nearly thirty years ago. She redirected it — kept it feeding the valley instead of feeding whatever’s under the Keep. It worked, for the better part of thirty years, right up until it didn’t.

I don’t get to finish the thought.

“You always did have her gift for reading what she left behind.” The voice comes from the chamber’s far entrance, and my whole body goes cold before I even turn to look, because I know that voice the way I know my own hands.

She stands in the doorway exactly as I remember her — silver braid, dirt-stained apron, the same tilt of head she used right before telling me news I didn’t want to hear. Except her eyes hold too still, and her smile sits wrong on her mouth, borrowed rather than earned, the way a mask fits a face it was never carved for.

“She knew exactly what she was doing when she flipped this ward.” The false Koira’s voice carries no warmth at all despite the smile stretched over it. “She weakened the valley on purpose, granddaughter. Better the wheat starve a little than let the Heart take what it was owed. She traded a slow bleed for a fast one and never told a soul which choice she’d made.”

“That’s not—” Smaller than I want it to sound. “She wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn’t she.” It tilts its head, patient, almost gentle. “You never asked her. You were too busy loving her to ask a single hard question while she was alive to answer it.”

That one lands exactly where it’s meant to. My knees want to fold under it. Three years of missing her, and for one terrible second doubt gets its hook in anyway — I picture her standing in some council chamber deciding my whole valley was worth less than whatever she thought she was protecting.

Kalthor doesn’t step in front of me. He steps up beside me instead, shoulder to shoulder, close enough that I feel his heat without him blocking my view of the thing wearing my grandmother’s face.