Page 35 of Orc’s Harvest

I send half my force back to reinforce the Keep before I’ve fully decided the rest of the plan — Varok leading them, warriors too exhausted to be useful for anything but holding a wall, better spent defending what’s left standing than following me somewhere that swallowed an entire village once already. What remains is small. Zalie. Darrow. Four of my best, chosen for endurance over numbers, none of them the type to ask questions about where a clanlord’s judgment might be bending. Fewer people means higher stakes if this goes wrong. It also means room, finally, for things I haven’t let myself say out loud yet.

We make camp on a ridge overlooking the dark line where the wheat turns from black to red in the distance, one fire, one tent, and nobody pretends there’s a reason to pitch a second one. She settles against my chest once the fire’s built, back to my front, my arms closing around her without either of us discussing whether that’s how tonight’s going to go. It just is.

She cleans a cut along my jaw I didn’t notice taking. I work a splinter free from her palm she’d been ignoring since the shrine, her hand steady in mine even as I feel her wince at the pull. We eat from the same bowl because packing two seemed unnecessary once eating alone stopped appealing to either of us, and somewhere between the fire burning low and the stars finally breaking through cloud cover, the conversation turns toward something we haven’t said out loud yet.

“A Bondmark requires blood, given freely, and a witness who understands what it means.” She says it carefully, testing the words like she’s not entirely sure how I’ll take them. “I looked it up in Koira’s collection weeks ago. I wasn’t going to mention it unless you did first.”

“I’d choose it tonight if you asked me to.” I mean every word of it. “But I won’t let a war decide the timing of something that’s supposed to be a choice, not an emergency measure. When we do this, I want it done because we chose the moment, not because the moment chose us.”

“When this is over.” My hand finds the side of her face, slow, certain. “I intend to ask you properly. Clan witnesses. A blood-forged weapon presented before the whole council, the way it’s supposed to be done. An unreasonably large feast Varok will never let either of us live down.”

“You already gave me a blood-forged weapon.” She catches my hand and holds it against her collarbone a moment, warm and steady, before letting it drop. “Rowan Hollow. Your clan knife. I’ve worn it every single day since, whether either of us said what it meant out loud or not.”

I go quiet, working back through every word I said kneeling in that mud outside the village gates, and understand — slow, complete — that she’s known exactly what that knife meant since the moment I fastened it to her thigh.

“You knew.”

“I’ve known since you told me the knife had to come back to me instead of the other way around.” Her mouth curves, soft, quietly satisfied with herself. “You’ve been halfway to asking since before either of us admitted what we wanted out loud, Kalthor. I just let you get there in your own time.”

Dawn finds us at the edge of Lorn’s End, neither of us properly rested, and the village stops us all cold the second it comes into view.

Doors stand open on homes nobody’s lived in for longer than the valley can measure. Tables inside still hold stone dishes set for meals that never happened. No insects move through the dead gardens. No birds call from the empty rooftops. Even the wind sounds wrong here, moving through buildings like it’s trying not to wake something that’s finally stopped listening for footsteps. Darrow keeps close to the others, jaw tight, the kind of quiet that comes from a man who’s already had enough practice with places that took something and never gave it back.

Beyond the village, the wheat changes color — black giving way to a deep, crimson-black red that has no business belonging to any crop I’ve ever seen grow.

“Orc military markings.” I crouch beside the nearest doorframe, tracing symbols carved deep enough to survive whatever swallowed this place. “And witch sigils. Both, side by side, the same hand carving both sets.”

Zalie reaches for the nearest red stalk before I can stop her, and the second her fingers close around it, we both lock in place at once—the field pulling us into a memory we never asked to witness.

Orc warriors, dozens of them, escorting a column of witches across this same field under banners of peace, promising negotiation, promising an end to a war neither side wanted to keep fighting. The witches walk willingly. Trusting. One of them laughs at something a young orc warrior says, easy, unguarded, the kind of laugh that only happens between people who’ve decided to believe each other. A child runs ahead of the column, chasing something in the grass, and one of the warriors scoops her up laughing, swings her once, sets her back down beside her mother.

Then the chains come out.

Blood Law chains, forged for exactly this purpose, close around wrists that were never expecting betrayal from the men walking beside them. The witches scream. The child’s laughter turns to something else entirely. The orc warriors don’t stop moving, driving their captives toward a black seam in the air that breathes like something alive, ancient shapes waiting beyond it with a hunger that predates every war this valley’s ever fought.

The memory sharpens on one face among the warriors — older, commanding, a crest carved into his breastplate that I’d recognize blind.

Wildstorm.

The wheat itself speaks then, dozens of voices layered into one, patient and ancient and entirely unbothered by the horror it’s showing us.

“Hagorn Wildstorm.” The voice carries no anger, only fact, laid out clean as a ledger. “Your bloodline sold every witch standing in this field to buy peace for orcs alone. You inherited his land. His authority. The Blood Law power that answers to your name today because it answered to his three centuries ago. Tell her the truth of what you’re standing on, clanlord, or I’ll tell it for you.”

I don’t deny it. There’s nothing left to deny once the memory’s already shown her everything the wheat wanted her to see. My hand closes harder around the axe haft anyway, knuckles aching, because there’s nowhere left to aim three hundred years of fury except at a version of myself I never got to meet.

“If Ashmoor survives this.” I have to steady myself before I finish it. “I intend to make every word of that public. Every benefit I’ve ever taken from what my bloodline did here, I’ll surrender it. All of it. The Keep. The Heart. Whatever’s left of my name once the truth’s finished with it.”

Zalie doesn’t rush to tell me it wasn’t my fault. She doesn’t offer the easy comfort I half expect and don’t deserve.

“I’m not going to pretend three hundred years of that crime disappears because you didn’t personally chain anyone to that stone.” Her voice stays steady, careful. “But I’m not going to let you use shame as an excuse to destroy yourself over it either. Those are two different things, Kalthor. Owning what your bloodline did and punishing yourself for existing afterward aren’t the same choice, and I need you to understand the difference before we go any further into this field.”

That lands harder than any absolution could have. I don’t have an answer ready for it, not yet, but I understand exactly what she just handed me, and I intend to hold onto it long after this field’s finished with both of us.

TWENTY-SEVEN

ZALIE

We reach the pact stone at the field’s dead center by midmorning — cracked straight through, ancient orc and witch symbols worn nearly smooth, standing directly above a vertical seam of pure dark that opens and closes slowly, like something breathing in its sleep.