Page 15 of Orc’s Harvest

She’s right, which is exactly the problem. I keep my eyes on the road instead of answering, and Varok’s laugh from somewhere behind us tells me he heard every word of it anyway. My knee finds hers anyway a moment later, deliberate, when the road narrows enough to press our horses close, and she doesn’t move hers away.

The Circle of Seasons sits half a mile off the main road, twelve standing stones strangled in black ivy, a cracked altar at the center still growing grain out of stone with no soil anywhere near it to explain the trick. The sky over the clearing stays the color of dusk no matter what hour we arrive, and beneath our boots, faint enough that I only notice it because I’m looking for it, threads of gold light run under the ground like roots made of light instead of wood.

Zalie feels it before I finish looking for it myself. She’s already crouched at the altar’s edge, palm flat against cracked stone, when I catch up to her.

“It’s not dead. Starved.” She doesn’t look up. “Whatever’s fed this ward hasn’t reached it in years. It’s been waiting.”

“For what?”

“For somebody willing to bleed for it properly instead of taking what it needs by force.”

Rain from earlier still drips slow off the standing stones around us, and somewhere past the tree line a warrior murmurs to another about how long the ride out here took, restless with waiting.

She pulls Koira’s second journal from the satchel at her hip, flips to a page she’s clearly marked before, and holds it up against the altar’s carved surface. The symbols match, line for line — the same joined hands from the chapel murals, the same roots braided beneath them.

“This is the one.” Relief threads through the words despite everything still standing between us and finishing this. “Everything else we’ve found has been fragments. This is the whole rite, intact.”

I read Koira’s notes on this three times over before we rode out, and every version says the same thing: the old harvest rites ran on bonded blood, orc and witch giving it freely rather than having it taken, and the ritual doesn’t care about ceremony or vows. It cares about honesty. Two lives offered without holding anything back, or it doesn’t work at all.

“This is going to link us.” Steady despite what the words are clearly costing her to say out loud, Zalie already drawing her ritual knife. “Not permanently. Long enough to finish the working. You’ll feel what I feel. I’ll feel what you feel. There’s no controlling which parts come through.”

“I’ve had worse offered to me with less warning.”

“I’m serious, Kalthor. Once this starts, there’s no dignified way to stop it halfway. Whatever’s sitting closest to the surface in either of us is going to be the first thing the other one finds.” She finally looks up at me, blade steady in her hand, and something in her stare dares me to back out of it. “That’s not a small thing to hand somebody.”

“I’m not asking you to make it small.”

“Do you trust me enough for that?”

She doesn’t need three days to answer it, and the speed of her answer catches me harder than the question itself did.

“Yes.”

No hesitation in it anywhere. Just certainty, plain and immediate, and something settles hard and warm behind my ribs at how little she had to think about it. I’ve had warriors swear oaths to me with less conviction than she just put into one word.

We open our palms over the altar, blade shallow, blood welling dark in the strange dusk-light. When our hands meet and press flat against the cracked stone, the world doesn’t just answer. It floods.

Her fear comes first, vast and constant — worry for a valley she’s carried on her back her whole life, handed to me raw now instead of secondhand. Grief follows close behind it, old and complicated, tangled up with a woman three years dead who she still argues with in her own head more often than she’d ever admit out loud. And underneath both of those, plain and undeniable and entirely inconvenient given where we’re both currently kneeling, want — want that’s been sitting in her chest since a wheat field two days ago, aimed straight at me, with nowhere left to hide. It isn’t polite or careful the way she’s been about it out loud. It’s blunt and physical and leaves no room to pretend I’ve misread anything about the last two days.

There’s no time to do anything with any of it before the ward answers.

The stones light gold all at once, ivy curling back from carved surfaces that haven’t seen daylight in decades, and the pulse that rolls out from the altar doesn’t stop at the clearing’s edge. It keeps going, out past the standing stones, out toward the tree line — and answers back from every direction at once.

They rise out of the dark in dozens, more Hollow Men than I’ve faced in a single field since this began, drawn by a ward that announced itself to every corrupted thread in the valley at once.

“Kalthor—”

“Finish it.” I’m already moving toward the stones, axe clearing its sheath. “I’ve got the rest.”

I fight from the standing stones because it’s the only ground worth holding, funneling them into a line where Varok’s shield wall can actually mean something instead of getting swallowed by numbers. My axe doesn’t stop moving. Neither does the count in the back of my skull, automatic after twenty years of command — twelve down, fifteen, twenty, and still they keep coming out of wheat that shouldn’t hold this many.

Darrow goes down hard under two of them at once near the tree line, and I close the distance without a conscious thought behind it, axe opening one from collarbone to hip while my free hand hauls the boy upright by his collar. He comes up swinging before his feet are properly under him, proof enough that he doesn’t need rescuing twice. “I had it,” he manages, already turning to meet the next one. I don’t waste breath arguing with him about it. Fenn covers the gap on my left without being asked. Varok’s voice cuts through the chaos calling formations that used to be theory and are now the only reason any of us are still standing in a line instead of scattered and dying separately.

Every time one of them gets within ten feet of the altar, something in me stops being tactical and starts being something else entirely. I put a Hollow Man through a standing stone hard enough to crack it rather than let it reach the edge of the ritual circle, and I already know exactly what that says about where my priorities have landed. I’m not interested in arguing myself out of it.

A voice finds me between one swing and the next, dozens of mouths speaking as one out of the dark beyond the firelight.

“All this,” it says, almost gentle, almost fond, “for one woman. When there is an entire vale left to save, clanlord, and you’ve narrowed your whole war down to the width of her shoulders.”