Page 32 of Orc’s Harvest

Kalthor’s beside me before I finish deciding how to answer, one hand finding the small of my back, solid and deliberate, planted where everyone in that crowd can see exactly whose side he’s on.

“No ruler in this valley who feeds an innocent person to a monster deserves anyone’s obedience afterward.” His voice doesn’t rise, doesn’t need to — it carries the length of the yard on its own, flat and absolute. “That includes me. If any of you decide differently, you can leave. Nobody’s stopping you. But you’ll leave knowing exactly what kind of Ashmoor you were willing to build.”

Nobody leaves. The muttering dies fast under that kind of quiet.

I step forward anyway, because Kalthor defending me isn’t the same as the truth getting said out loud, and this valley deserves the truth more than it deserves my comfort.

“I released those threads.” I make sure my voice carries as far as his did. “I didn’t know what it would do. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I predicted this, because I didn’t, and lying about that helps nobody rebuild anything. What I do know is that hiding from the consequences of it helps this valley even less than admitting I got it wrong.”

Nobody argues that either. Something shifts in the crowd instead — the wariness still there, but softer now, edged with something closer to respect than suspicion.

Jazine finds me an hour later while I’m helping settle the wounded, and tells me flatly that whatever just happened in that yard, half of Ashmoor’s stopped calling me “the witch” behind my back and started calling me something else instead. She doesn’t say what. I don’t ask.

Kalthor finds me in the salvaged remains of the war tent an hour later, a fragment of a journal page held carefully between two fingers like it might crumble if he breathes wrong.

“Found this in what’s left of the records office.” He hands it over. “Koira’s hand. I need you to read the whole thing, not just the part that made me come find you.”

The ink’s smudged with water damage, but Koira’s handwriting survives clear enough to read: Names given freely return as strength. Names taken by force become hunger. The Mirefen shrine was built to ask, never to take — if that inscription is ever reversed, everything the marsh has ever swallowed becomes a weapon instead of a memory.

Beneath it, in ink pressed hard enough to tear the page slightly, one more line: If the shrine falls permanently corrupted, nothing taken through it can ever be returned again.

“He’s going there.” I don’t need to ask who “he” is anymore. “After what happened at the granary.”

“He’s going there to finish it.” Kalthor’s already reaching for his gauntlets. “Which means we’re going there to stop him before he does.”

He assembles a force in under an hour — smaller than the one that rode to the granary, faster, every warrior hand-picked for speed over strength. I watch him choose them one by one, and I recognize exhaustion in every face he selects, the same bone-deep tiredness I feel sitting behind my own eyes.

“You don’t have to come.” Low, just for me, his hands checking the strap on my satchel longer than the task requires. “Nobody would think less of you for staying behind after last night.”

“I’d think less of me.” I catch his hand before he finishes with the strap, hold it a moment. “I’m tired, Kalthor. I’m frightened, if I’m being honest, more than I’ve let myself admit to anyone since this started. And I’m still going, because staying behind doesn’t make either of those things less true. It just makes them somebody else’s problem to solve instead of mine.”

He doesn’t reach for hollow comfort — doesn’t insist I’m not frightened, doesn’t pretend I don’t look tired. He just presses a kiss to my temple, brief and certain, and says the only thing that actually helps.

“That’s worth more than pretending you’re invincible. I’d rather ride beside someone honest about being scared than someone too proud to admit it.”

Mirefen Marsh doesn’t announce itself with monsters. It announces itself with voices.

The fog rolls thick and low across standing black water within the first quarter mile, swallowing the horses’ hoofbeats until the whole patrol seems to be moving through silence dressed up as sound. Then the voices start — soft, familiar, coming from every direction the fog can hide a source.

A child’s laugh that isn’t Rua’s son but sounds close enough to make my chest ache anyway. Fenn’s dead mother, according to the look on his face. And underneath all of it, threading through the reeds like it’s been waiting just for me, my own mother singing — not the ritual-fragment voice I heard in the false chapel, but something gentler, half-remembered, a lullaby I couldn’t have told you I knew until I heard it again.

I don’t ask Kalthor to make it stop. I know better by now than to ask for silence when silence just gives the marsh room to work uninterrupted.

“Talk to me.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel, focused on his sound instead of anything drifting out of the fog. “About anything. I need something real to follow.”

He doesn’t hesitate.

“The garden.” His voice, solid, ordinary, deliberately mundane against everything trying to sound like grief around us. “I’ve been thinking about the tower roof properly, and I’ve decided you were right to worry about the wind up there. So I’m reinforcing the whole eastern parapet first. Windbreak stone, waist-high, running the entire length before a single seed goes in the ground.”

“That sounds like a great deal of stone for a garden.”

“It’s not just a garden anymore. It’s a garden with a roofed section for the plants that can’t take the frost, and a bench, because I refuse to stand the whole time I’m supervising something I’ve never grown before in my life.”

“You’re going to supervise a garden.”

“Someone competent has to. You’ll be too busy actually growing things to notice if the whole structure’s about to collapse under its own ambition.” He rubs the back of his neck, almost sheepish. “I may also be planning a small pond. For no reason that serves any practical purpose whatsoever.”

“A pond. On top of a tower.”