Page 27 of Orc’s Harvest

NINETEEN

ZALIE

Morning finds us descending instead of resting, which tells you everything about how much time this war is willing to grant two people who only finished falling into each other last night.

He kisses me once before we’ve fully found our boots, unhurried, easy the way it only gets once there’s nothing left either of us needs to prove, and then it’s over and we’re moving, because the day’s already closing in around us whether we’re ready for it or not.

Kalthor keeps a hand low on my back the whole way down the hidden stair, not steering so much as staying close enough to catch me if the steps decide to betray either of us. Every few minutes he leans in to ask, quiet enough that only I can hear it, whether I’m sore — not anxious about it, not treating me like I might shatter, just faintly, wickedly amused every time I tell him to mind his own business and keep walking. The stone underfoot’s damp with old condensation, and I catch myself grateful for his hand more than once on the way down.

“I could carry you the rest of the way down.” He says it far too innocently for a man who knows exactly what he’s doing.

“You could also lose a hand.”

“Worth the risk.”

I bite back a smile I don’t quite manage to hide, and the warmth of it — his hand at my back, the easy give-and-take there was no room for days ago — makes what’s waiting at the bottom of these stairs land twice as hard once we finally reach it. Varok falls in behind us at the last landing, two ward-trained warriors flanking him, none of them commenting on the fact that their clanlord hasn’t stopped touching me since we left his chambers. Small mercies.

The stair opens onto a bridge of petrified root spanning a drop I can’t see the bottom of, runes layered so many times into the stone that they’ve stopped being any single language and started being something closer to scar tissue. Thousands of Life Threads hang suspended in the dark below us, more than I’ve seen in every other chamber combined, a whole sky of stolen names with nowhere left to fall. The air down here breathes, slow and warm, in a rhythm I feel through the soles of my boots before I understand what’s making it.

And at the center of it, built from root and bone and straw, dozens of stolen faces churning through each other without ever settling into one, stands the thing my grandmother spent the last years of her life trying not to name directly in her own journals.

I know it anyway. I’ve traced enough of Koira’s hidden diagrams by lantern light to recognize the shape even half-formed and worse than any sketch prepared me for, every warning she ever wrote circling back to this one truth she could never quite bring herself to put in plain words.

“The Harvest Heart.” I manage to keep the words steadier than I actually feel. “It wasn’t built to be this. It was built to take in what the valley couldn’t use and give it back where it was needed — a real system, a fair one, before somebody decided taking was easier than asking.”

“And when Koira pulled the blood sacrifice out of it?” Kalthor’s voice stays low, careful, like he already suspects the answer will cost me something to give.

“She thought she was healing it.” I can’t look away from the thing even as I say it. “She started it starving instead. And whatever’s behind this figured out a long time ago that starving things get easier to control the hungrier they get.”

The Heart opens what might generously be called a mouth, somewhere in the tangle of faces at its center, and my mother’s voice comes out of it — not the false, borrowed version that wore her face at Rowan Hollow, not even the achingly real echo from last night’s vision. Something worse. Something that’s had twenty years to practice the small details.

“You carry her pattern.” It doesn’t ask. It states it, patient, almost kind. “Koira’s blood, Koira’s gift, refined one more generation closer to what this valley actually needs. You could end this permanently, Zalie. One offering, freely given, and no one else in Ashmoor ever has to be afraid again.”

Roots move before I finish understanding the shape of the offer, fast and sure, wrapping tight around both my wrists and hauling me forward off the bridge entirely.

Kalthor’s already moving, axe swinging for the roots wrapped around me, and every strike releases another burst of trapped memory into the chamber instead of cutting me free — a soldier’s death, a mother’s lullaby, a hundred years of stolen grief all screaming out of the wound at once, disorienting him half a step every time. Varok shouts something behind him that gets lost entirely in the noise, and one of the ward-trained warriors staggers, hands pressed to his own skull like the borrowed grief is trying to climb inside it.

“Stop!” There’s no time to explain it properly. “You’re not freeing me; you’re feeding it more to work with. Let me handle this.”

He stops. It costs him everything to do it; I can see that plainly, even with roots dragging me deeper into the dark, but he stops, and that trust is the only reason what happens next has any chance of working at all.

I stop fighting the pull and lean into it instead, letting the roots drag me down into the center of the thing rather than away from it, because the only way through a memory this large is apparently straight into the middle of it.

The chamber dissolves into centuries at once — names and dates and reasons flickering past faster than I can hold onto any single one, voluntary offering, shared famine rite, gift returned at spring planting, and then, generations later, the same phrases curdled into something else entirely: criminal forfeiture, clan enemy, necessary balance, unrecorded witch. I watch a system built on consent rot into one built on convenience, one small compromise at a time, until there’s no difference left between what someone chose and what someone was simply too weak to refuse. I see a boy who can’t be older than seven led to the altar by his own mother, her face carved into the exact same patient calm as every priest who came before her, the word necessary doing more damage across three hundred years than any single act of open cruelty ever could.

And then, threaded through decades of that rot like a single dark stitch, I find him.

Molgar. Younger than the version who’s apparently been walking Ashmoor’s halls for thirty years plotting against everyone in it, standing at the edge of a ward boundary I don’t recognize, speaking low to a shadow that has no business existing on this side of the Veil at all. Even young, even decades before I’ll ever meet him, he holds himself the same precise, unbothered way — a man already convinced of his own reasoning long before anyone else in the room has caught up to it.

“The channel closes when I say it closes.” His voice, precise, patient, exactly as I remember it from Torvak’s council chamber. “You’ll have what you’re owed. I only ask that it looks like an accident when it happens.”

The shadow answers back in a register too low for me to catch a single word of it, something ancient and patient underneath whatever language it thinks it’s speaking, and the memory starts pulling me deeper before I can try again — past this moment, toward the one I already know is waiting, the one where my mother’s Life Thread tears loose between two layers of a ward that should have held.

I don’t get to hear the rest of the bargain. The Heart isn’t showing me anymore. It’s taking.

TWENTY

KALTHOR