Page 12 of Orc’s Harvest

“We decide what’s true about her. Not something wearing her face.” Low, certain, not the voice of a man asking permission.

He’s already moving before he finishes the sentence, axe swinging in a short, brutal arc that catches the false Koira across the chest before it can say another word. It doesn’t bleed. It unravels — threads of memory bursting loose in every direction, and for one fractured second before they scatter, I catch a fragment that isn’t the lie it just fed me: my grandmother, younger, furious, arguing with someone inside a room I recognize as Ashmoor Keep’s council chamber, her voice raised in a way I don’t remember hearing in all my years of knowing her.

The face across from her stays hidden. The memory tears apart before I can chase it further, gold dust scattering into the dark, and then the chamber’s empty except for the two of us and the echo of an argument I’ll never get to finish hearing.

We find the way out through a ravine cut into the chamber’s back wall, narrow and rough and clearly never meant for someone Kalthor’s size, but he doesn’t complain once, doesn’t so much as favor the shoulder I just forced back into its socket, and I don’t offer to help him through it because I already know exactly what he’d say about that. The passage climbs longer than it has any right to, root-choked and dripping, and twice I hear him bite down on a sound his ribs are trying to pull out of him.

Daylight hits us both hard when we finally clear the passage, gray and thin but real, the fog above ground burning off in patches. Kalthor pulls me against him the second we’re both standing on solid ground, one arm banding hard around my back, his face pressed briefly into my hair like he needs to confirm with more than his eyes that I made it out in one piece.

I don’t step away.

I let myself stand there a moment, folded against a chest that shouldn’t feel like safety and does anyway, his heartbeat going hard and fast under my ear. There isn’t room for anything else right now — not with Varok’s patrol still combing the tree line for the rest of us and a whole orchard full of scarecrows we still haven’t accounted for.

That’s when I notice the scarecrows have stopped facing the rows they were planted to guard.

Every last one of them — dozens, scattered the length of the orchard, straw arms slack at their sides — has turned its head toward the two of us at once, wooden faces angled in a silence that feels louder than anything the fog managed all morning. Not one of them moves beyond that single, patient turn, and the stillness of it lands worse than if they’d come at us screaming. One of them, closest to the tree line, lifts a stiff wooden hand and points, slow and deliberate, east.

Toward Ashmoor Keep.

Kalthor’s arm tightens around me. Neither of us says a word. Behind us, the rest of the patrol has gone quiet too, every warrior in earshot turning to follow that single raised hand toward the horizon, Varok’s usual running commentary swallowed whole by the sight in front of them, for once with nothing clever left to say about any of it.

Then, somewhere across the valley, faint enough that I almost convince myself I imagined it, the harvest bells start to ring.

EIGHT

ZALIE

My horse goes lame two miles past the orchard, favoring her left foreleg bad enough that I feel the wrongness of it in my own teeth every time her hoof finds the road. Kalthor doesn’t ask twice before he’s off his own mount and hauling me up onto it instead, settling me in front of him without so much as a question about whether I wanted a say in it.

“I can walk.”

“You can ride.” His arm closes around my waist to catch the reins, solid and immovable, and the rest of my argument dies somewhere between my throat and my mouth. “Faster this way.”

I don’t fight him on it, which surprises exactly no one, least of all me. There isn’t a comfortable way to sit a horse pressed back against seven feet of orc, and I give up pretending otherwise within the first quarter mile — the solid heat of him impossible to ignore at my spine, his arm braced along my ribs to hold the reins, his breath stirring loose hair at the back of my neck every time the road forces the horse to shorten stride. My own magic keeps warming under my skin every time his hold tightens around a bad patch of mud, an involuntary little flare of heat that isn’t about fear at all, and is entirely about a problem I’ve stopped trying to name.

It becomes a very long ride to be this aware of somebody. His hand shifts at my hip whenever the horse stumbles, steadying without asking, and every time it happens I catch myself cataloging the exact width of his palm instead of watching the road the way I ought to be. I’ve spent thirty-one years running a farm without needing a man’s hands anywhere near me for anything, and here I am now, two days into knowing this one, memorizing every callus on his fingers like it’s information I’ll need later.

“Careful up there, Zalie.” Varok’s voice carries back from two horses over, grinning wide enough to hear it. “Man rides like that, you’d almost think he was invested in the outcome.”

“I’ll invest you in a week of stable duty if you finish that thought.” Kalthor doesn’t even raise his voice.

“Already regretting opening my mouth, my lord.” Varok doesn’t sound regretful at all. Darrow, riding drag behind him, makes a sound suspiciously like a laugh he’s trying to swallow.

I bite back a smile of my own and lose the fight almost immediately, which Kalthor, infuriatingly, notices.

The rain’s been coming down steadily since we crossed the tree line out of Ashcroft’s dead orchard, turning the northern road into a long gray ribbon of mud that slows the whole patrol to something barely faster than walking. Wheat rises tall enough on either side to swallow a man standing upright, and I watch the rows anyway, alert for the wrong kind of stillness, for stalks bending against a wind that isn’t blowing.

The chapel appears out of the rain before I expect it, a squat stone shape gone dark with age, roof caved in on one side, doors long since rotted off their hinges. Kalthor calls the halt without being asked, and I’m on the ground and through the doorway before he’s finished dismounting, because if there’s one thing three years of hunting through Koira’s journals has taught me, it’s that ruins like this one rarely go unmarked.

I’m right. The walls inside are covered floor to height in faded murals, paint gone soft and ghostly with age, but the shapes are still legible if I tilt my head and squint through the water dripping off the broken roof. Witches on one side, orcs on the other, moving toward each other across a field of wheat rendered in gold leaf gone dull as old coins. Hands joined at the center. Roots and runes braided beneath their joined palms, growing up into a harvest neither figure could have raised alone.

Rain drips steadily through the gap in the roof, striking the same worn spot on the floor over and over, and somewhere behind me I hear Kalthor’s boots stop against the stone. He’s not looking at the murals anymore.

“These match the symbols in Koira’s second journal.” Quieter than I mean it, the words fighting their way past a feeling uncomfortably close to reverence. “The ones I couldn’t place.”

Kalthor comes to stand behind me, near enough that his breath moves warm against the top of my head when he tips it to study the mural properly. “Bonded pairs.”

“One witch. One orc.” I trace the joined hands without quite touching the wall, half afraid the paint might crumble under my fingers, half afraid of the other thing I’m not ready to name. “Growth magic braided into Blood Law. That’s how the old wards worked before anybody decided ownership was cheaper than partnership.”