Page 20 of Orc’s Harvest

“Two short whistles means fall back to the mill.” She ticks it off on her fingers, riding close enough that our knees nearly touch. “Three long ones means the chapel’s compromised and nobody goes near it. If I go quiet for more than a count of twenty, you come looking. If you go quiet, I’m doing the same.”

“Agreed.”

“And if either of us calls full retreat, the other one moves first and asks questions after.”

“Agreed.” I mean it more than I’ve meant most vows I’ve sworn in front of a council. “Same terms both directions. I’m not ordering you to stay behind these gates like a farmer who’s never held a blade, and I’m not insulting either of us by pretending that’s ever been on the table.”

She doesn’t answer that with words. She answers it by riding easier in the saddle, old tension finally leaving her shoulders now that she’s heard the thing said plainly instead of assumed. Her knee bumps mine on the next stride, and nobody moves to correct the distance for the rest of the ride.

Varok drops back to ride alongside me long enough to mutter that he’s never seen me plan an assault this thoroughly with anyone who wasn’t already wearing my colors. I tell him to keep that observation to himself until we’re through the gates. He grins, already deciding to ignore the order.

We stop a half mile out to let the horses rest and the plan settle, and I use the pause for something I’ve been putting off since we left the Keep.

The knife’s been in my family longer than the fortress has stood in its current shape — black iron, plain hilt, a blade my grandfather carried and his grandfather before him, meant for exactly one purpose across every generation that’s held it: given to whoever a Wildstorm trusted enough to want watching over. I kneel in the mud in front of her and fasten the sheath high on her thigh, my fingers finding skin through the deliberate split cut into every field dress the Keep’s seamstresses make for exactly this kind of work.

“This has to come back to me.” Her voice doesn’t quite hold steady saying it, watching my hands work the strap. “I mean it. Whatever happens in there, that knife comes back.”

“The knife’s replaceable.” I look up at her, still kneeling, and let her see exactly how little I’m joking. “You’re not. Bring yourself back. I’ll take care of the rest.”

She pulls me down into a kiss before I’ve finished standing, both hands fisting in the front of my armor, and there’s nothing careful in it at all — hard, certain, the kind of kiss that isn’t asking either of us to say goodbye because neither of us intends this to be one. I kiss her back the same way, one hand cradling the back of her skull, and when we finally break apart both of us are breathing like we’ve already been fighting for an hour. Somewhere behind us, I hear one of the younger warriors mutter that he’s never seen his clanlord kneel for anyone, and get elbowed into silence by whoever’s standing next to him.

“Try not to die in there.” Murmured against my mouth, more order than request.

“Same to you.”

Rowan Hollow’s western gate stands sealed when we reach it, and that alone says everything about a village that should be throwing every door open at the sight of sixty riders coming to help. Villagers line the wall above it instead, watching, silent, none of them calling down a single question about who we are or why we’ve come.

“They’re not all real.” Zalie’s voice comes low beside me, eyes narrowed on the wall. “Maybe half. The ones standing too still. Watch how the others rock on their feet, and these ones don’t.”

I don’t order the assault my instincts are screaming for. Fifty families lived behind that wall last season, and I won’t be the commander who burns through survivors to save time killing monsters wearing their faces.

“Give me a minute.” Zalie’s already reaching into the pouch at her hip, working bloodroot powder between her palms with the same focus she brings to every piece of magic I’ve watched her work. “This’ll mark the false ones gold. Won’t hurt anyone real.”

She throws the powder high, and it catches the wind, drifting down across the wall in a fine gold haze — and half the figures standing sentry light up like struck matches, skin glowing wrong beneath the powder while the rest stay dark, human, unmarked.

The village answers by setting itself on fire.

Flame catches fast in thatch and dry timber both, smoke rolling thick down every street inside the walls before we’ve even breached the gate, and what comes at us once we’re through isn’t the disorganized swarm I’ve fought a dozen times since this started. These move with purpose — one wielding a spear with a soldier’s exact economy of motion, another shouting my own orders back at my own warriors in my own voice, close enough to the real thing that Fenn nearly breaks formation following a command I never gave.

I put my axe through the one wearing the spearman’s memory before it can turn that precision on Darrow, and what comes apart under the blade this time fights back even as it dies, straw-fingers locking around my forearm hard enough to leave bruises through the leather. I break the grip and keep moving. There isn’t time to stop for anything that isn’t already dead.

“Hand signals only!” I can’t trust my own voice to carry commands anymore, not with something out there wearing it. I cut the air instead — fall back, regroup, hold the square — and watch my people adjust fast enough that I let myself feel one clean flash of pride through everything else currently trying to kill us.

I drive toward the chapel because that’s where the worst of the smoke is rising, axe finding targets through haze thick enough to swallow sound the way Ashcroft’s fog once did. She’s been a second heartbeat to me since the Circle of Seasons, faint under my own, present enough that I stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing your own pulse.

It goes silent between one step and the next.

I stop moving. For one full second, in the middle of a burning street with a Hollow Man’s axe already swinging for my ribs, I stop entirely, and I only survive the swing because Varok’s blade catches it first.

“Kalthor!” His voice, sharp, real, nothing false in it at all. “What happened?”

“I can’t feel her.”

I don’t wait for his answer. I’m already moving again, faster now, axe clearing a path through smoke and straw-pale bodies both, because whatever silence just swallowed the sense of her, I intend to find out exactly what caused it with my own hands wrapped around its throat.

FOURTEEN

ZALIE