Page 23 of Orc’s Harvest

The granary passage opens into a chamber I wasn’t prepared for, no matter how many times Koira’s journals tried to describe anything like it.

Hundreds of Life Threads hang suspended in the dark, glowing faint gold, strung between the rafters like a web spun by something with no interest in symmetry at all. They pulse slowly, in unison, all of them feeding down toward a single knotted mass beneath the grain floor — black roots wrapped so tight around each other that I can’t tell where any single thread ends, and the corruption begins. The air down here tastes of old grain and iron, and somewhere beneath both, a low hum vibrates up through the soles of my boots, patient and steady as a heartbeat that’s forgotten it belongs to someone.

Two of Kalthor’s ward-trained warriors take up position at the passage entrance, already alert, weapons ready, faces grim in the low light.

“That’s the knot.” Jazine’s voice is quiet and professional, despite the horror in front of us. “Everything routes through there.”

“Reversing it’s going to take time.” I reach for the nearest thread as I say it, my hands not nearly as steady as I’d like. “And blood. Living blood, willing, same as every working we’ve done since the orchard.”

Darrow steps forward before I finish.

“Use mine.”

“Darrow—”

“I already lost most of what I had to this place.” His voice stays steady, and the steadiness costs him more than shaking would have. “Let it be worth something. Let me be the one who helps take it back instead of just another name on the list of things it emptied.”

There’s no arguing with that, and we both know it.

We start the working with his blood and mine, and the second the threads begin reversing, hundreds of borrowed emotions come loose at once, crashing into me from every direction — grief that isn’t mine, joy that isn’t mine, a soldier’s dying terror tangled up with a child’s laughter tangled up with a woman’s wedding vows, all of it trying to occupy the same space inside my skull at once. I stagger. Jazine catches my arm before I go down entirely, grounding me back into my own body one steady grip at a time.

“Stay with your own hands.” Her voice cuts through the noise, clipped and certain. “Whatever you’re feeling that isn’t fear for the people in this room, it isn’t yours. Let it pass through.”

I hold onto that instruction like a rope in open water, naming my own heartbeat, my own breath, my own two feet planted on grain-dusted stone, until the borrowed grief stops trying to convince me it belongs to me. The threads keep reversing overhead, slow and even, gold light bleeding backward toward wherever each one is trying to go home. Darrow’s face has gone pale and set, jaw locked tight, but his hand stays steady as it braces the working.

I’m still fighting to stay upright inside my own head when the alarm hits — sharp, sudden, not mine at all. Something’s happened to Kalthor. Something’s reached him that shouldn’t have.

SIXTEEN

KALTHOR

She finds me on the tower stairs, and for three full seconds I believe every word.

Her face. Her scent — crushed herbs and bloodroot, warm skin under mud and smoke. Her voice, breathless, frightened in a way I’ve genuinely never heard from her before. Even the clan knife rides high on her thigh exactly where I fastened it myself only hours ago. My whole body reacts before my mind catches up, one hand already reaching to steady her, and that half second of instinct is exactly what nearly costs me everything.

“They took me.” She grabs for my arm, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. “Kalthor, they’ve got me somewhere in the lower halls, this isn’t — I got free, but there are more of them than we thought, you have to pull everyone back, you have to abandon the Keep before⁠—”

That’s the mistake. That’s the exact sentence that unravels the whole performance, because the real Zalie hasn’t, not in these last few days I’ve known her, asked me to sacrifice everyone under my protection without exhausting every other option first. She’d sooner cut her own throat than ask that of me, and something wearing her face just handed me the one line she’d never actually say.

I step back instead of forward. My hand finds the axe at my hip, not her shoulder.

“You have her memories.” I don’t raise my axe yet. I want it to understand exactly what’s about to kill it. “Her face. Her voice. You don’t have the first idea who she actually is.”

It smiles at me with her mouth, an expression I don’t recognize on her at all, and that’s all the proof I need.

I put it through the wall before I put it through the creature — drive the fight backward through my own command tower’s stone with a violence that’s stopped answering to strategy at all, and by the time the false Zalie stops moving there’s a hole in the wall wide enough to see straight through to the courtyard below and nothing left of the thing wearing her face but scattering threads of gold. Dust settles slowly through the gap, and for a moment the only sound is my own breathing and the distant noise of a fortress still fighting for its life below me.

There’s no room yet to sit with what I just did — the next crisis is already demanding my attention.

“Pair up!” I’m shouting it across the courtyard before I’ve fully caught my breath. “Nobody fights alone. Every pair confirms with something only the two of you would know before you trust each other with your back!”

It’s clumsy. It’s slow. It works anyway — Fenn and Bruck trading the name of a dog they both got drunk over three winters back, Varok demanding Sable’s name from a warrior claiming to be him before Varok remembers Darrow’s underground with Zalie and can’t be standing in this courtyard at all. One of the false Fenns nearly gets past the check with a passable guess before Bruck’s blade finds the gap between question and answer. Infiltrators lose their footing fast once real friends start checking each other properly, caught wearing faces they don’t have the shared history to back up.

Then the ground itself seems to exhale, a pulse of gold light rolling up from beneath the fortress floor and out through every hall at once, and I understand without needing to be told that Zalie’s working just succeeded.

Hollow Men collapse mid-swing around the courtyard, threads tearing loose in every direction; some fall still and silent, others thrash and scream as stolen identity rips free before they’ve finished deciding what to do with a body that’s suddenly, violently, becoming only itself again. A warrior wearing a dead guard’s face drops his sword mid-swing and simply weeps, hands over his own borrowed features, until Bruck has the mercy to end it quickly. It isn’t a clean victory. Nothing about tonight has been clean. But it’s a victory, and I’ll take it.

The courtyard goes quiet in stages, the way a storm does — first the worst of it passing, then the smaller aftershocks, then finally nothing but warriors checking each other’s faces one more time out of habit nobody’s ready to break yet. Somewhere near the gate, I hear someone break down sobbing, relief instead of terror this time, and don’t blame them for it in the least.