Page 28 of Orc’s Harvest

I watch her stop fighting the roots and go still inside their grip, and for three full seconds I make the worst mistake of my life believing that stillness means something has already gone wrong beyond repair. Three seconds is long enough to picture every version of the rest of my life without her standing in it, and none of them are worth surviving.

Then a strand of gold light tears loose from the center of her chest, thin and bright, stretching back toward the Heart with a pull that has only one purpose, and every instinct I own recognizes it before my mind catches up.

I don’t reach for my axe. I reach for her.

I get both arms around her and pull, hard, planting both boots and hauling backward against whatever’s trying to hold her, and the strand snaps taut, then simply snaps, gold light scattering into the dark as I haul her clear of the roots entirely. I press my mouth to her temple once, hard, no time for anything gentler than that, already turning her behind me before the stone finishes deciding whether it’s about to fall.

The chamber answers the loss badly. Stone groans somewhere above us, the whole gallery beginning to shed its ceiling in slow, deliberate chunks, alcove after alcove of names and dates crashing down into the abyss below the bridge, and I catch a fallen guard’s spear, switching my grip from the axe without needing to think about why — targeting the joints holding the structure up instead of the threads still hanging thick in every direction, because cutting through a Life Thread down here severs a stolen memory permanently, and I’m not leaving anyone’s stolen name buried under this rubble if I can help it.

Varok and the others fall in around us, shields up, clearing a path through falling stone with a discipline that’s the only reason none of us end up buried alongside every name this chamber’s ever swallowed. Dust chokes the air thick enough to taste.

Zalie comes back to herself somewhere around the third collapsing archway, and the first thing she does with her newly returned consciousness is insist I put her down.

“I can walk.”

“You were unconscious four seconds ago.”

“I’m conscious now.” She’s already pushing against my chest, testing her own footing before I’ve finished deciding whether to let her. “Set me down, Kalthor.”

I hate it. I hate every version of this that isn’t me carrying her clear of a collapsing chamber with both her feet safely off the ground, hate it with an intensity that surprises even me given how little sleep either of us has had. But I made her a promise last night about whose choices get to be hers, and a promise made under easier circumstances doesn’t stop being a promise the second circumstances turn difficult. I’ve broken fewer promises in five years of command than I’ve wanted to break this one in the last ten seconds alone.

I set her down. She stumbles once, catches herself on my arm without asking, and keeps moving under her own power the rest of the way out, chin up the entire time like daring the chamber to try dropping anything else on either of us. I don’t offer to carry her again. I do keep one hand at the small of her back the whole way out anyway, and she doesn’t tell me to stop.

We reach the infirmary in time to watch every harvested patient in the room sit up at once, eyes gone glassy and distant, mouths moving in perfect, horrible unison. Darrow’s among them, sitting bolt upright on his cot with the same borrowed emptiness in his stare as every other body in the room, and the sight of him speaking with a stranger’s voice does something ugly to my stomach I can’t afford to examine right now.

“Surrender the witch.” The voices layer over each other, dozens of throats sharing one sentence, patients who’ve spent days barely conscious suddenly speaking with total clarity, every mouth moving a half-beat out of rhythm with every other. “Give her willingly to the Heart, and every stolen identity in this valley returns whole. Refuse, and the Harvest Moon will empty Ashmoor to the last soul standing in it.”

The infirmary goes dead silent except for that chorus, healers frozen mid-task, Jazine’s hand gone white-knuckled around a bandage roll she’s forgotten she’s holding.

“It doesn’t understand either of us.” I say it loud enough to carry to every corner of the room, loud enough that nobody standing here mistakes this for a decision still being weighed. “Not her. Not me. If it thinks either of us is capable of accepting that trade, it’s spent all this time learning our faces and none of it learning who we actually are. Twenty years of patience, and it still doesn’t know the first thing about either one of us.”

Zalie takes my hand in front of every single person in that room, unwavering, and turns to face the possessed the same way she’d face any threat she intends to outlast. Every healer, every conscious patient, every warrior stationed at the infirmary door watches her do it.

“We’ll find another way.” Her voice doesn’t shake. “Every one of you deserves better than being handed a choice that was never fair to begin with, and I’m not accepting a bargain built to sound like mercy when it’s really just the same old system wearing new words. Whatever this costs us, it isn’t going to cost this valley one more person forced to disappear so somebody else can call it peace.”

The patients collapse back into their cots in unison, whatever was speaking through them retreating as suddenly as it arrived, and the infirmary holds its breath for one long moment before anyone remembers how to move again. Darrow’s eyes clear last of all, blinking up at the ceiling like a man surfacing from deep water, and Jazine’s already at his side before the rest of the room finishes exhaling.

Kalthor’s arms close around me the second the room starts breathing again, one hand spread flat between my shoulder blades, and I let myself lean into it a moment longer than strictly necessary before either of us remembers there’s still a war chamber waiting.

The war chamber’s empty when we finally get a moment alone, maps still pinned across the table from a meeting that feels like it happened a lifetime ago instead of yesterday. I sit her down, check the raw skin at her wrists myself, wrapping them with more care than the wound strictly requires, and wait until she’s ready to talk instead of pushing her toward it.

“I saw everything.” Low, steady despite everything the day’s already cost her. “Centuries of it. People giving pieces of themselves because they thought it was the only way to keep everyone else safe. And I understood, standing in the middle of all of it, that I could actually do that. Permanently. My pattern’s close enough to Koira’s that I could anchor the whole network myself and end this the way she always meant to.”

“That possibility means nothing to me if the cost is you.” I don’t soften it. I don’t see a reason to. “I don’t care how neatly it would solve the war. I’m not interested in a version of victory that doesn’t have you standing at the end of it. I’ve buried enough people I couldn’t save. I’m not adding you to that number by choice.”

“I know.” She says it simply, like the matter’s already settled somewhere inside her. “I watched every single person in that memory choose themselves away because nobody ever showed them there was another option. Century after century of it, and not one of them ever got to hear somebody say what you just said to me. I’m not doing that. I’m not going to spend my whole life being the last sacrifice this valley ever needed to make, when I could just as easily be the first person who refused to make one at all.”

She reaches for my hand across the table, threading her fingers through mine with a certainty that settles something in my chest I didn’t know was still unsettled. Outside the war chamber’s narrow window, the sky’s gone the color of a bruise healing, late afternoon light doing its best against a permanent autumn that never quite lets it win.

“I choose to live.” Her stare doesn’t waver. “I choose to fight this beside you instead of ending it alone underground. Whatever I feel for you — and it’s more than I know what to do with most days — I’m not interested in turning it into one more thing this valley demands I give up. I want to build something with you on the other side of this. A farm still standing. A council that doesn’t answer to anyone’s bloodline. Whatever’s left of a life, once this is over. That’s the choice I’m making, out loud, in front of you, so there’s no version of tonight where you have to wonder.”

I don’t need the exact word to understand exactly what she’s telling me. I pull her hand to my mouth and press my lips against her knuckles instead, and it’s an answer enough for both of us — the kind of answer that doesn’t need repeating to still be true tomorrow.

We’re still sitting like that, her hand in mine, when Varok comes through the war chamber door without knocking, a ledger held stiff in both hands as if it might bite him. Whatever’s on his face stops us both cold before he says a single word.

“You need to see this.” His voice has none of its usual dry edge in it at all. “Found it in what’s left of Molgar’s old stores office, behind a false wall nobody thought to check until today. It’s covered in blood that isn’t his, and I don’t have the first idea whose it is.”

He sets it open on the table between us, careful, as the pages themselves might still be dangerous. Every village in Ashmoor valley is listed down the page in Molgar’s own precise hand, each one beside a number I don’t yet understand and already dread. Bouchier Farm’s name sits near the bottom, my own home reduced to a line item in whatever accounting this turns out to be. Rowan Hollow’s name already has a line drawn through it, the number beside it circled twice.