Page 7 of Orc’s Harvest

It stops moving. This time, for good.

We stand there without speaking. The wheat around us doesn’t even rustle.

FOUR

ZALIE

I wake to the sound of hammering and come downstairs ready to kill somebody.

My kitchen table’s gone, dragged out to the yard and turned into a map stand with pins stuck through parchment where my good linen used to sit. Three strange horses stand tied to my porch rail. A warrior I don’t recognize is up a ladder reinforcing a shutter I never asked to have touched, and past him, past the fence, my entire yard has turned into a siege camp overnight — tents staked in neat rows, a cookfire burning where my rose bed used to breathe, men and women moving with brisk, practiced purpose, the kind that comes from doing this a hundred times before and expecting to do it a hundred more.

I make it three steps into my own yard before I find him — easy enough, he’s the only thing out here taller than the barn roof — directing two warriors hauling grain sacks toward higher ground like he’s lived on this farm his whole life instead of one night.

“You.” Sharper than I mean it to sound, which is a lie — I mean it exactly that sharp. “What in the hell is this.”

He doesn’t have the decency to look apologetic about any of it.

“Defense.” As if the word alone should explain everything, which — infuriatingly — mostly does.

“This is my farm.”

“I’m aware.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“I didn’t.” Flat. Unbothered. “I decided instead. Faster.”

I open my mouth to tell him exactly what I think of men who decide things on my land without asking, and that’s when I stop long enough to take in what’s been built around me overnight.

The rose bed’s gone, yes — but the thornapple hedge along the north fence is still standing, staked up branch by branch instead of trampled flat the way twelve horses and a war camp should have left it. My bloodroot beds are roped off with real care, little wooden markers driven into the corners so nobody wanders through by accident. The herb garden my grandmother spent thirty years getting exactly right hasn’t lost so much as a sprig of rosemary. Someone’s even moved the hens’ nesting box up onto crates, out of reach of the standing water already pooling along the fence line. Every warrior camped downwind and downhill of it, as if somebody gave an order about which ground got trampled and which one didn’t.

Some of the fury drains out of me despite my best effort to hold onto it. It’s a lot harder to stay righteous about a man trespassing on your land when he’s apparently spent the night worrying more about your chickens than most of my neighbors ever have.

“The Hollow Men will come back.” No inflection in it at all, which lands worse than if he’d shouted. “Tonight, tomorrow, next week. They don’t stop because the sun came up.”

“I’m not leaving.” I fold my arms, root myself to the mud. “My grandmother’s whole life is in that cellar, and I’m not walking away from it because you’ve decided I should be somewhere safer.”

“I never asked you to leave it.” A shift behind his stare, quiet and immediate. “I chose to defend it instead.”

That lands harder than I want it to.

We spend the morning in the cellar, and I learn inside the first five minutes that a room built for one careful woman and her specimens was never meant to hold a man his size.

He has to duck through the doorway. Once inside he can’t stand fully upright without his skull grazing the low beam over the worktable, and the second time it happens he mutters something in Orcish under his breath that I don’t need translated to understand. He ends up half-folded over my grandmother’s journals the entire morning, one shoulder a few inches from mine no matter how either of us tries to angle around it. Every time I reach for a shelf he’s blocking, I have to lean past him, close enough to catch the leather-and-iron smell of him under the mildew and old paper, and he goes very deliberately still every time I do it, like stillness is the only thing keeping his hands where they belong. Every time he reaches for anything on my side of the table, his forearm brushes mine, and nobody mentions it, because mentioning it would mean admitting we’ve both noticed.

We work through the readable journals in order, and slowly what my grandmother spent her life trying to fix starts coming clear out of torn pages and half-finished diagrams. Four ward sites, scattered clean across the valley — the Circle of Seasons out past the orchard, a shrine sunk deep in Mirefen Marsh, Ashcroft’s dying orchard itself, and a field to the west whose name she always underlines twice without fail. Every one of them anchored to the same failing network, every one of them bleeding power into ground that doesn’t hold it anymore.

“Here.” I find the page that turns my stomach and angle the book so he can read it too, his jaw nearly resting against my shoulder to see it. “Thirty years ago. She rewrote the ward system to stop needing blood.”

He goes very still beside me.

“It worked,” I keep going, “for a while. Long enough that nobody questioned it. But look at the dates on the failures — they start right when the wards stop demanding a sacrifice and start needing something else instead. A willing offering, maybe, instead of blood taken by force. What people stopped giving once they weren’t afraid into it anymore.”

“She broke it trying to fix it.”

“She broke it trying to save my mother.” The words come out sharper than I mean them to, edges I didn’t plan on showing him. “There’s a difference, even if the wards don’t care which one it was.”

He doesn’t argue that. He doesn’t do any of the things I’ve braced for — no lecture about recklessness, no cold soldier’s accounting of who’s to blame for two decades of damage. He goes quiet instead, a muscle ticking hard at the corner of his jaw, and when he finally speaks it isn’t about my grandmother at all.