Page 13 of Orc’s Harvest

We don’t say anything else about it. We don’t have to. I can feel it sitting between us anyway, unspoken and entirely too obvious, and when I finally look away from the mural, his stare is already waiting on mine instead of the wall. He doesn’t look away first. Neither do I, not for longer than either of us should probably admit to, and the rain filling the silence between us does nothing to cool it.

We’re back on the road within the hour, and it’s the flooded ditch that saves all our lives.

The refugees come around the bend ahead of us slow and pitiful, a dozen of them at least, mud to the knee and soaked through, herding what might be children between the adults with the careful urgency of people who’ve been walking scared for days. An old woman in front raises both hands the second she spots our column, calling out for help in a voice cracked from shouting into the weather.

Kalthor slows the patrol without stopping it entirely — the same watchfulness that means he’s already counting exits. I don’t blame him. The whole group sits wrong in my chest before I can name why, the same wrongness that flattened my own field into a perfect ring the first night this all began. They move too evenly for people who’ve been running scared — no stragglers, no one favoring an injury, every stride matched to the stride beside it like a single animal wearing a dozen coats.

“Please.” The old woman was near enough now to reach for Kalthor’s stirrup. “Hollow Men, back on the old grain road. We lost half our number getting this far.”

It’s a good story. It’s almost a perfect story, which is exactly what makes the hair on my arms stand up.

I look for a reflection instead of a reason, because reasons lie and water mostly doesn’t. A flooded ditch runs alongside the road, rain-swollen and still enough to hold a mirror between gusts, and the smallest of the “children” stands close enough to its edge that I can see straight down into it.

Nothing looks back. Mud, sky, rain — and no small reflected face where one should be standing plain as day.

“They’re not real.” I don’t shout it. I don’t have to; Kalthor’s already moving before the words finish leaving my mouth, and that fast pretense stops mattering to any of us.

The old woman’s face goes wrong first, skin sliding loose off bone that was never really bone at all, and then the whole column of refugees comes apart into straw-pale, fast-moving horror at once, a dozen Hollow Men that were never hiding anything but patience.

Kalthor’s off his horse and into them before I’ve got my knife clear, axe carving a wide brutal arc through the first two before they’ve finished shedding their borrowed skins, and I throw myself down into the mud and call every root within reach up out of the flooded ditch to buy the patrol room to form a line. It’s ugly, close, mud-slick fighting with no room for anyone’s technique to matter much — I put a thorned vine through one creature’s knee and my knife through its throat before it finishes falling, and somewhere to my left Fenn’s shouting for the wagons to pull back toward the bridge.

The bridge is our mistake. I realize it half a second too late, watching two Hollow Men throw themselves bodily into the stone supports with a strength that has no business belonging to anything built out of straw, and the whole structure groans, cracks, and drops into the swollen river below in a single long collapse that takes half our supply cart down with it.

“Fall back!” Kalthor’s voice cuts through the chaos, final and absolute. “Shelter. Now.”

Warriors scatter toward the tree line at his word, half-carrying the wounded between them, and I go with them because there’s nothing left standing on this side of the river worth staying for.

The shelter turns out to be a one-room roadside watch post half a mile back, stone walls thick enough to hold heat and a single hearth cold since whoever built it last abandoned the road. It’s not built for a full patrol. Warriors crowd the doorway and the lean-to out back, taking turns at watch in the rain rather than fight for floor space, and by the time the fire’s caught and the worst of the wet gear’s been peeled off, there’s exactly one patch of dry stone left by the hearth, one blanket somebody salvaged from the wreck of the supply cart, and no polite way to divide either of them.

Kalthor doesn’t pretend there’s a question about who takes it.

“You’re freezing.” Not quite a question, not quite an order — he’s already settling beside me near enough that our shoulders touch, the blanket pulled wide enough to cover both of us if I stop being stubborn about it.

I stop being stubborn about it. The fire’s doing its best, but rain-soaked wool and the last of the adrenaline leaving my blood have left me shaking hard enough to embarrass me, and there’s no version of pride worth freezing over when the alternative is exactly this — his side warm against mine, his arm settling loose around my shoulders like it’s the most natural thing either of us has ever done.

We sit there a long while without talking, watching the fire eat through wet wood, listening to the rain give way slowly to something quieter outside. It’s Kalthor who breaks the silence first, which surprises me more than it probably should.

“I lost a settlement once.” His voice comes out low, pitched for the two of us even though most of the patrol’s out of earshot already. “Early on. Before I understood what holding a line actually costs the people you’re not looking at while you hold it.”

I don’t say anything. I’ve learned enough about this man in two days to know that filling his silences never gets me anywhere worth going. The fire pops once, sends a curl of sparks up toward the broken roof, and he watches them go before he keeps talking, like he’s decided the flame’s easier to confess to, too.

“Raiders hit a farming village near the western ridge. Small thing, maybe forty souls. My father’s captain ordered the patrol to hold the road instead of breaking to help them — said the raiders were a diversion, said the real threat was coming from the east, and we couldn’t afford to split.” He stared into the fire a beat too long before he kept going, like every word had to be pried loose one at a time. “He was wrong. There was no eastern threat. By the time I got the order rescinded and rode for the village myself, there was nothing left to save. Empty. Burned. I’ve spent twenty years asking myself what forty lives would have cost me if I’d broken formation the second I heard the smoke.”

“You were following orders.”

“I was following orders.” His voice doesn’t change, flat and certain in the way I’ve learned means he’s already run this argument a thousand times and lost every round of it. “Orders I haven’t managed to forgive myself for following, not one day since. There’s no math that makes obedience worth forty people, Zalie. I decided that the day I rode into what was left of that village, and I’ve built every command I’ve given since around never being wrong that way again.”

This is the second grief he’s handed me since the orchard — Torin first, and now forty strangers he’s carried the same way for twenty years — and I think of every time I’ve watched him plant himself between danger and someone who couldn’t defend themselves, every stubborn refusal to let anyone else carry a risk he could carry himself instead, and understand, finally, exactly what all of it’s been built on top of.

“Love doesn’t require blindness.” He turns his head to look at me properly, and there’s something raw in his stare that wasn’t there a minute ago. “I loved my father. I still think he was wrong. Both of those can be true at once. I learned that the hard way, and I’m not interested in watching you learn it the same way I did.”

I know exactly what he’s pointing at, and it costs me something to let him point at it directly instead of pretending I don’t understand.

“My mother died in a ritual.” The fire’s easier to look at than his face while I get the rest of it out. “The first attempt at what Koira thought could replace the old sacrifice for good. The ward failed, and by the time anyone got the channel open again, she was already gone.”

“I know some of it. Not all of it.”

“Koira never forgave herself. She spent the rest of her life trying to build something that would make my mother’s death mean the valley was safer for it, and I spent every year after burying her defending every choice she ever made, because admitting she got one catastrophically wrong feels like—” My throat closes around the rest of it, and I have to start again. “It feels like losing her twice. Once to the funeral. Again to the truth.”