Page 16 of Orc’s Harvest

“She’s not separate from the vale.” I don’t slow down to answer it properly. My axe finds the throat of the thing that spoke and opens it anyway. “She’s part of it. Same as every field, every wall, every person still breathing inside it. I’m not choosing between them. There was never a choice to make.”

“Every commander believes that, right up until the moment he’s asked to prove it.”

“Ask me, then.”

It doesn’t. It laughs instead, a sound built from too many throats to belong to anything that should be allowed to make it, and turns its attention toward the barrier rising up around the altar instead of answering. So do I, because the light coming off it has gone the deep, wet red of a wound instead of gold, and Zalie’s disappeared behind it entirely.

TEN

ZALIE

The wall of light comes up around the altar the second our palms meet stone, blood-colored and solid enough that when a Hollow Man throws itself against the outside of it, the impact doesn’t reach me as sound so much as pressure moving up through the ground under my knees.

We’re sealed in. I can hear the fight going on beyond the barrier — steel, shouting, Varok’s voice barking formations, Kalthor’s axe finding targets I can’t see — and every sound of it comes to me twice over, layered with something that isn’t hearing at all, until I can’t entirely tell which fear belongs to which of us anymore.

“The ritual’s not finished.” Steadier than I feel, but it holds. “We can’t leave the circle until it is.”

“Then we finish it.”

The dark beyond the barrier thickens instead of fighting through it, gathering into a shape too tall and too wrong to belong to anything that was ever born rather than assembled — a shadow built from a hundred stolen faces, sliding across each other like reflections in troubled water, none of them staying still long enough to be recognized before the next one surfaces.

“Your grandmother had the chance to close this wound forever, witch, and chose half-measures instead.” The voice comes from everywhere in the shape at once, patient, almost kind. Then, before I can answer, it turns toward Kalthor instead. “She’ll choose the valley over you, clanlord. Ask her whose safety she thought about first the moment that ward went live.”

I feel exactly what that lie does to him, and it isn’t what the thing clearly expects. He isn’t afraid I’ll choose the valley over him. He’s afraid I’ll choose to disappear into the valley entirely — throw myself at whatever this thing needs to end it. And I understand, in the same breath, exactly what he’s been afraid of the whole time too. Not that I’ll leave him. That he’ll die keeping me from having to.

“You don’t get to use us against each other.” The words go to the shape, to the dark, to every stolen voice trying to wear my grandmother’s grief like a costume. “Not like this. Not ever like this.”

The shape recoils, faces sliding faster across each other like it’s suddenly uncomfortable in its own borrowed skin, and something that isn’t quite fear starts coming off it—nothing I’ve felt from it before now. Uncertainty, maybe. The first crack in a lie that’s worked on everyone else it’s ever been used on, and doesn’t work on us now that nothing’s left between us to hide behind.

Kalthor’s blood-slicked hand finds mine over the altar again, and this time when our palms meet, there’s nothing held back on either side.

The pulse that rolls out of the stones this time doesn’t stop at the clearing’s edge. It doesn’t answer anything either. It simply is, gold and vast and absolute, and I feel it tear through the Hollow Men beyond the barrier the same way I feel my own magic move — Fenn’s shout of surprise, Varok’s bark of triumph, and somewhere in the chaos, a boy’s voice finding words again after hours of silence.

The barrier drops the second the pulse fades, blood-colored light unraveling into nothing, and the clearing beyond it stands empty of anything still moving except our own people picking themselves up out of the mud. Somewhere behind me, I hear Ellis’s voice again, weak but coherent, asking Fenn what in the world happened to him — and whatever fragments of memory the pulse handed back this time, they’re enough to have him arguing already about whether he really fainted in front of the whole patrol.

Kalthor doesn’t let go of my hand.

“I meant what I said by the fire.” His voice comes out rough, stripped of every careful edge he usually keeps around it. “Every word of it.”

“I know.”

I kiss him first, because I’ve spent two days waiting for either of us to stop being careful, and I’m done waiting. He meets me halfway, one hand sliding into my hair, the other still locked around mine like he has no intention of ever letting that part go, and the kiss lands exactly as hungry as two days of pretending otherwise deserves. Whatever the ritual opened between us hasn’t finished closing yet, and it makes the whole thing enormous — I feel my own want reflected back at me, feel his answering want crash into mine until neither sensation has a clear edge anymore, until I couldn’t say whose heartbeat I’m actually feeling if someone put a knife to my throat and demanded an answer. His mouth is unhurried and sure, nothing at all like careful, and every place his hand touches lights up like the ward just did, gold and immediate and entirely too honest to take back.

We stop only when the ground shifts under our knees, one of the standing stones groaning as a fresh crack splits its face.

Kalthor pulls back just far enough to rest his forehead against mine, both of us breathing hard, neither of us in any hurry to put more distance than that between us. Somewhere behind him, I catch Varok pointedly not looking in our direction, which is its own kind of loud.

“We should finish this somewhere less likely to collapse around us.”

“That sounds like an order.”

“It’s a promise.”

He kisses me again before letting me go, shorter this time but no less certain, like he needed to prove the first one wasn’t a fluke either of us imagined.

We help each other up, and it’s Darrow who calls out first, staring down at the ground beneath the altar like it’s grown teeth.

Threads of gold light run visible beneath the whole clearing now, spreading past the standing stones in every direction—the restored ward’s true shape, finally awake enough to show itself. I count six main conduits branching off from the altar, glowing faint and true across the dirt like the roots of something enormous. Five of them run dim, barely holding a pulse, like a wound holding heat right before it starts going cold. The sixth burns brighter than all the others combined, cutting a straight, furious line east through the dark, impossible to look at directly and impossible to look away from either. Even the warriors still catching their breath by the stones have gone quiet, watching it.