Page 22 of Orc’s Harvest

Half its throat is gone, ruined past anything that should still carry a voice.

It speaks anyway, in my voice. My exact voice, pulled from some stolen fragment of memory and worn like a mask over whatever’s underneath.

“You should have stayed at the Keep.”

Kalthor goes utterly still beside me, axe already rising, and the thing collapses into ash mid-swing, gone before either of us gets an answer out of it. The ash doesn’t even hold a shape long enough to bury.

No time is left to wonder what it meant.

In the distance, past the burning fields, past the tree line, Ashmoor’s warning beacons ignite one after another, spreading fire-point by fire-point across the horizon in a pattern that only means one thing. I count them without meaning to — one, two, three, all the way down the ridgeline, the same drill I’ve run a hundred times from the other side of that wall.

The Keep is under attack.

FIFTEEN

ZALIE

The western gate stands wide open when we ride in, and there’s no enemy anywhere in sight, which turns out to be so much worse than if there had been.

Warriors are fighting each other in the middle of the courtyard — real steel, real blood, two men I recognize from Kalthor’s own guard locked in a grapple that ends with one driving a blade into the other’s gut before either of us can shout a warning that means anything. A supply cart lies overturned nearby, grain spilled across mud already churned dark with more than rain.

“Stop!” Kalthor’s off his horse before I’ve finished processing what I just watched, hauling the two apart hard enough to bruise, with no gentleness left in his grip. “Look at me. Both of you, look at me.”

Neither man lowers his blade at first; both breathe hard, eyes darting between Kalthor’s face and each other’s like neither trusts what they’re seeing anymore.

The winner — bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts, eyes wild — stares at Kalthor like he doesn’t recognize him either. “He’s not Bram. Bram died in that wheat field days ago. I don’t know what that is wearing his face, but it isn’t⁠—”

He stops. Looks down at the man dying under his own blade. Whatever conviction drove him a second ago drains from his face all at once, replaced by a horror that’s going to live in him long after tonight. Kalthor doesn’t have time to comfort him. None of us do. No one has a spare hand in this whole courtyard tonight, and there won’t be until sunrise at the earliest.

Word spreads fast once we’re properly inside. They came in three ways at once — through the granary passage nobody’s fully sealed since Rua first told me to send for a clanlord I hadn’t met yet, disguised among the last wave of refugees the gate let through without proper checking, and worst of all, wearing the actual faces of guards harvested clean during earlier patrols. Men who died weeks ago are apparently still walking these halls, and nobody inside the walls has any reliable way left to tell who’s real.

I try the pollen test on the first three Hollow Men we corner in the barracks corridor, and it fails completely — they’ve coated themselves in real blood, human blood, enough of it that my gold dust reads every one of them as flesh instead of straw. One of them even laughs at me as it dies, a low, wet sound that has no business coming out of something built from straw and stolen names. Somebody taught them exactly how to beat me.

“It’s not going to work anymore,” I say to Kalthor between fights, wiping useless powder off my hands onto my leggings. “Whatever’s doing this learned my trick. The only way to stop this now is the conduit itself. Cut the source, not the symptoms.”

Kalthor doesn’t argue with me about going down there myself. That, more than anything else tonight, tells me exactly how much has changed between us these last few days.

“Jazine, Darrow, and two of my ward-trained people go with you.” He’s already moving toward the granary gate we found earlier tonight, checking the latch himself before he lets any of us near it. “I hold the courtyard and the tower. If the conduit’s really the source, cutting it should thin what’s fighting me up here too. Warning stones stay on both of us the whole way down — one pulse if it’s clear, three if it isn’t, and I’ll hear it through stone same as I’d hear a shout.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll have bought you the time you need regardless.” Flat, like a plain fact instead of a sacrifice, which lands harder for how little he seems to think of it as one.

Varok jogs up beside us, blood already drying dark on one sleeve. “Whatever the two of you are planning, plan it faster. We’ve got maybe a dozen more of these things loose between here and the barracks, and I’d rather not be the one explaining to Ashmoor why the clanlord got philosophical during a siege.”

“Hold the eastern approach.” Kalthor doesn’t look away from me. “I’ll be at the tower stairs.”

Varok’s already moving before the sentence finishes — answer enough on its own.

We trade the rest of it fast — where he’ll be standing if I need to find him by sound alone, which corridors stay clear for the wounded, the signal for full retreat if the granary’s worse than either of us is guessing. Neither of us tries to talk the other out of the plan.

He grips my hand hard before I go, quick and deliberate, the way you’d strike a spark back to life in banked coals rather than the slower, softer way either of us has done it after a fight’s already won. Whatever’s left of what the Circle opened between us flares warm for one clean second under the contact, and I feel him check it the same way I do — making sure the thread holds, making sure I don’t disappear completely once I’m underground.

He kisses me then, hard and fast, more promise than romance given the circumstances, and when he pulls back there’s nothing soft left in his stare at all.

“After this.” My voice won’t quite settle enough to say it gently. “I am done letting monsters and collapsing buildings interrupt us. I mean it.”

“Agreed.” The word comes out immediately, absolute, with an intensity that leaves no doubt anywhere near it. “Whatever it takes.”