Page 26 of Orc’s Harvest

“Don’t.” My hand closes over his wrist before he can strike. “It’s not attacking. Look — it’s not feeding. It’s showing us something.”

The black thread unspools between us as ink dropped in water, and the room around us dissolves into somewhere else entirely — a council chamber I’ve never stood in but recognize instantly from Koira’s sketches, torchlit, cold stone, banners hanging faded from a ceiling too high to see clearly, three figures arguing in the center of it.

My grandmother, younger than I ever knew her, hair still more brown than silver, standing her ground against two men twice her size.

“The old sacrifice ends.” Koira’s voice, sharper and more certain than I ever heard it in life. “I’ve found the alternative. Voluntary bonded energy between a witch and an orc who choose each other freely — it can replace what the Heart’s been taking by force for a hundred years, and it won’t cost either party a single thing they didn’t choose to give.”

“You’d risk the entire valley on a theory.” The older of the two men — broad-shouldered, gray streaking through black hair, a face I recognize in the lines of Kalthor’s own — folds his arms. Torvak Wildstorm. Kalthor’s father, though he looks nothing like the grieving shadow I’ve heard described since. “On feeling, Koira. On something as unreliable as two people’s hearts holding steady under pressure.”

“It’s not unreliable if it’s chosen properly.” A third man steps forward, thin, precise, younger than I’ve ever pictured him — Molgar Grimjaw, decades before the version who’s apparently been walking these halls plotting against us the whole time I’ve known him. He carries himself even then with the settled certainty of someone who’s already decided he’s the only reasonable person in any room he enters. “Though I’d remind the council that inconsistency is exactly the danger here. People change their minds, Koira. The old system never asked them to keep choosing. That was its entire virtue.”

“Its virtue was that it never had to ask anyone’s permission at all.” Koira doesn’t back down. “I’m done building a system on top of people who never got a choice in the first place.”

The memory shifts before I can hear how the argument ends, jumping forward — the same chamber, transformed now, ward-light bright at its center, and my mother stands there. Younger than the false version that wore her face at Rowan Hollow, real in a way that portrait never captured, dark hair loose, hands steady as she takes her place across from Torvak at the center of the working. She laughs at something someone off to the side said, head tipped back, entirely unafraid of what’s about to happen to her.

There’s nothing between them but the working itself — Torvak already has a wife waiting on him, a young son he talks about twice in the time it takes to set the circle, and Navy touches his forearm once, briefly, the way you’d calm a nervous colleague rather than a lover, before they ever join hands. Chosen for this because an orc clan heir and an unbonded witch made the cleanest possible proof that trust alone could hold the working — nothing more complicated than that, and nothing less deliberate either.

My chest goes tight watching her. I haven’t seen her move once, haven’t heard her actual voice outside of memory-echoes built by things that meant me harm. This is real. This is her.

“I’m ready.” Her voice, warm, certain, achingly familiar even though tonight’s the first time I’ve ever actually heard it. “Begin it.”

The ritual starts clean — gold light, joined blood, the same working I recognize from my own hands at the Circle of Seasons. And then it goes wrong. A shadow reaches through the ward from somewhere outside the chamber’s boundary, dark and hungry, and Molgar’s hands move fast at the edge of the working, closing a channel that should have stayed open.

“Molgar, no—” Torvak’s voice, too late.

Navy’s Life Thread tears loose between one heartbeat and the next, caught between layers of a ward that was never supposed to close on her at all, her cry cut off mid-breath, and the memory doesn’t show me whether Molgar’s hands moved out of fear or calculation before everything goes dark and the vision lets go of us both at once.

I come back to my own body shaking, tears already running before I understand I’m crying at all. As long as I can remember, I’ve wondered what actually happened in that chamber. A lifetime of Koira’s silence, and now I have the truth handed to me by the one source in this whole valley that’s never once told me anything except to hurt me, and it still cost exactly as much as I always feared it would.

Kalthor pulls me into his chest without a word, one arm banded tight across my back like he can shield me from a memory that’s already finished happening. He skips every easy thing people say when they don’t know what else to offer — that it’s over, that I’m safe now, that the worst of it has already passed. He just holds on, steady, until my shaking slows enough that I can breathe around it.

“That’s not proof this only exists because of what the wards decided to make of us.” His voice comes out rough against my hair, like he already knows exactly what I’m about to accuse the night of. “Whatever they recognized between us tonight, they didn’t build it out of nothing. They found something that was already there and gave it a shape to show itself in. That’s not the same thing as manufacturing it, and I won’t let you stand here deciding it is.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I wanted you before any of this started working through us. Before the Circle. Before I understood what any of this magic actually does.” He tips my chin up until I’m looking at him instead of the floor. “Whatever’s happening between us started the day I caught your scent in a wheat field and couldn’t make myself stop looking for you after. The wards didn’t write that. I did, one bad decision at a time, and I’d make every single one of them again.”

I don’t have a name ready to hand him back for what I’m feeling, not yet, not with my mother’s death still raw and reopened behind my ribs. But I know exactly how far past casual I’ve already traveled with this man, farther than I’ve let myself travel with anyone since I buried my grandmother, and I tell him so instead.

“If I lost you now,” I say against his chest, “it would break something in me that three years of losing everyone else never managed to touch.”

That’s as close as I can get tonight. He doesn’t ask for more than that.

The black thread chooses that exact moment to move wrong.

It’s been hanging motionless in the air since the vision ended, forgotten in everything that came after, and now it lunges — fast, sudden, aimed straight for the center of my chest, done showing us anything at all.

Kalthor’s clan knife clears its sheath faster than I can finish flinching, and he severs the thread clean before it closes the last few inches between itself and my skin.

It dies screaming, and for one unwilling heartbeat before the sound cuts off entirely, it drags us both down with it — not into memory this time, but into somewhere far beneath the tower, a vast black chamber cracked open at the bottom of a shaft that shouldn’t exist, root and bone and straw woven into a single towering shape at its center, hundreds of stolen faces sliding across it like reflections that never settle.

It opens its eyes.

The vision snaps shut before I can see anything more, and I come back into my own body gasping, Kalthor’s arms the only thing keeping me upright. His heart is hammering as hard as mine against my back, and nobody says a word for a long moment, both of us still catching up to whatever we just saw.

Somewhere far below us, faint through stone that’s supposed to keep every horror in this valley separated from the people sleeping above it, every harvested patient in the infirmary starts screaming at once.

Kalthor’s already reaching for his boots before the sound finishes rolling through the tower, and I know without either of us saying it that tonight, whatever it was, has ended.