Page 17 of Orc’s Harvest

Toward Ashmoor Keep.

Kalthor tenses beside me, and I don’t need to ask what he’s thinking, because I’m thinking it too.

A Life Thread near my boot — one of the ones the pulse just wrenched free — hangs suspended in the air a moment longer than the others, spinning slow and gold against the dark grass. When it speaks, it speaks in my grandmother’s voice, worn thin and urgent, like she’s been waiting decades to say it to someone who’d finally listen.

“The Harvester King was never locked outside the walls.”

The thread pulses once, dims, and finishes the sentence anyway, the words arriving thin and certain across the whole silent clearing.

“He was invited in.”

ELEVEN

ZALIE

The Keep’s western courtyard has never looked like this in my lifetime, and I’ve been coming here since I was small enough to get lost in the crowds at harvest festival.

Tents crowd every open space that used to hold drill formations. Refugees huddle three families deep around cookfires that haven’t been fed properly in hours, livestock lowing somewhere past the forge, and the healers moving between rows of pallets haven’t stopped since sunrise, from the look of them. A blacksmith hammers dented steel back into shape not ten feet from a woman rocking a baby that won’t stop crying. The whole courtyard smells like smoke and fear and too many bodies crowded too close.

An old man grips my stirrup as we pass, face gray with exhaustion, asking if we’ve seen his granddaughter anywhere on the road. I haven’t. I tell him so as gently as I know how, and watch something in his face give up hoping before I’ve even finished the sentence.

“They hit six settlements at once.” Varok sounds flat, exhausted in a way I haven’t heard from him before. “Same hour we lit that ward. Same exact hour.”

I don’t need him to spell out what that means. We announced ourselves to every corrupted thread in the valley the second that altar went live, and something decided to answer with everyone who couldn’t run fast enough.

Kalthor’s off his horse before it’s fully stopped, already barking orders — get the wounded to the infirmary, get the healers what they need, split Varok’s remaining patrol between the gate and the wall. He’s three sentences into it before he turns, finds me still mounted, and crosses the distance between us like the orders can wait exactly as long as this takes.

He kisses me in front of every single one of them.

It isn’t careful. It isn’t quick either, not really, though it can’t have lasted more than a few seconds — his hand finding my jaw, mine curling hard into the collar of his armor to haul him the rest of the way down to my height, and there’s nothing accidental in any of it, nothing either of us is pretending happened by mistake in front of a courtyard full of witnesses. Relief. Claim. A message aimed at anyone still wondering whose protection I’m standing under. Somewhere behind us, I hear a wounded warrior mutter to another that they’d best start collecting on that betting pool sooner rather than later.

I kiss him back like I mean it, because I do.

“Well.” Varok’s voice carries from somewhere behind him, dry as old bread. “The pool’s officially moved past when you two would finally get around to it. We’re taking wagers on how long before the command tower catches fire instead.”

Kalthor doesn’t even look at him. “Get the gate secured, Varok.”

“Securing it now, my lord.”

He pulls back only far enough to rest his brow against mine for one breath, the same promise from the standing stones sitting unfinished between us, and then duty takes him the rest of the way — back into the noise, back into the crowd, already shouting for a healer to triage the worst of the wounded first. I watch him go, and for once I don’t feel the old urge to follow just to keep him honest about resting when he needs to.

I find Darrow in the infirmary two hours later, sitting upright on a cot with his name tag around his neck like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to the room. The infirmary itself smells like herbs and iron and too much antiseptic trying to cover both, rows of bloodglass vessels lining the far wall, each one holding a thread of gold light waiting for a body that might never come to claim it.

He looks whole. That’s the worst part. No wounds visible, color back in his face, the same crooked half-smile he’s always worn when someone fusses over him too much. His sister’s there too — Sable, a woman maybe five years older, her hands wrapped tight around his, tears running steady down her face like she’s been crying since she got word he was alive. She’s got flour still dusted pale across one forearm, pulled straight from her own kitchen the second the message reached her, and she hasn’t let go of his hand once since she got here.

“He knows me.” Her voice cracks on it. “He said my name the second I walked in. He knows exactly who I am.”

Darrow doesn’t correct her. He just sits there, patient, letting her hold his hand, and there’s nothing behind his eyes that matches the joy on her face at all.

“Sable.” Warm, even, the exact tone he’d use greeting someone at a market he’s pleased to see. “You look tired.”

“I’ve been so worried⁠—”

“You shouldn’t be.” He pats her hand, awkward, like he’s performing a gesture he half-remembers the shape of rather than feeling any need behind it. “I’m fine.”

He believes that. That’s what breaks something in my chest watching it happen — he’s not lying to spare her feelings. He genuinely doesn’t understand why any of this warrants the tears on Sable’s face, because the part of him that would understand hasn’t come back yet, even though his name did, even though her face did, even though every fact about their whole life sits intact and useless in his skull like a book with all its pages present and none of them read.

Sable catches my eye over his shoulder, silent and pleading, like I might have an answer tucked away somewhere I haven’t offered yet. I don’t. I wish I did.