Page 1 of Orc’s Harvest

ONE

ZALIE

I wake to my own name in my grandmother’s voice, and she’s been dead three winters.

Not a whisper. Not a memory playing tricks on a tired woman. A command, sharp enough to yank me straight out of sleep with my heart already slamming: Zalie girl. Wheat’s down. Go look.

I’m out of bed before I’ve decided to be, one boot on, knife belt buckled crooked over my nightshirt. Three years since I buried her under the south oak with rosemary over her chest, and she picks tonight to start talking again.

Then I see the bloodroot.

Deep red blossoms crowd the bed under my window, and every last one of them has turned its face away from where the sun’s about to come up. West. Toward the fields. Bloodroot doesn’t do that for weather. It doesn’t do that for grief, however loud. It turns for blood, for raw magic working close, for danger — and in thirty-one years of watching it, it has never once lied to me.

“Fine.” No one’s around to hear it but the walls. “Let’s see it, then.”

I lace the second boot, stand up, buckle both hip knives out of habit more than fear, grab the lantern I don’t remember filling, and I’m out the back door into cold sharp enough to bite before I’ve thought better of any of it. Three wardstones lean drunk in the mud along my fence line, cracked a little further into the dirt every year nobody gets around to fixing, and tonight I don’t stop to worry about that either. There isn’t time. I can feel it in the back of my teeth, same as the bloodroot feels it in its roots.

The eastern field sits a quarter mile past the orchard, black wheat grown chest-high, three weeks overdue for the scythe if this endless autumn would ever give a straight answer about ending. I could walk this ground blind. I have, plenty of times, trailing my grandmother with a basket too big for my arms while she named every plant we passed — which ones healed, which ones killed, which ones did both if you weren’t careful how much you used.

Somewhere behind me, out past the orchard fence, the Wrenlow windmill stops groaning mid-turn, cut off mid-creak. I don’t care for that half as much as I’m about to not care for what’s waiting in my own field.

I clear the tree line and pull up short.

Something has flattened the whole center of the field into a perfect circle, wide enough to swallow my farmhouse whole. Every stalk inside it lies down gentle as a held breath — no boot prints, no broken stems, nothing dragged, nothing crushed. Laid there, flattened dead flat, not one fingernail dug into the dirt anywhere I can see.

I crouch at the edge and press two fingers into the ground just past the last standing row. Cold. Undisturbed. Not so much as a hoofprint within a mile, and every raven that usually roosts along this fence line has gone somewhere else to be quiet tonight. Even the mist keeps its distance from the ring itself, pooling thick everywhere else and thinning to nothing the moment it reaches the flattened wheat, as if it doesn’t want to touch whatever did this any more than I do.

“Blood magic,” I mutter, mostly to hear a voice that isn’t hers. “Somebody got sloppy with a ritual. I’ll have it sorted by breakfast.”

I don’t believe myself. I never do when I talk that fast.

At the very center hangs a single gold thread, thin as a hair, glowing low and faint, a match somebody forgot to blow out. I’ve never seen a thing like it in my life.

I reach out and close my fist around it anyway. That’s always been my problem.

The second my fingers close, someone else’s whole life dumps straight into mine.

A kid laughing by a bonfire, heat on my face that isn’t my face. A woman’s mouth against a man’s jaw under low orchard branches, his hand fisted carefully at the back of her neck as he’d sooner die than loosen it. An old man’s hands steady on a plow line, decades of the same dirt worn soft under his palms. A soldier’s voice, rough with a promise he means to keep — I’m coming home, wait for me — and underneath all of it, screaming. Not out loud. Inside. Watching yourself get peeled away one thread at a time while you’re still standing there, still breathing, still aware enough to count every piece you lose.

Three seconds. Maybe four.

The thread crumbles to gold dust before I can even swear properly, and I’m left standing alone in a flattened wheat ring with my heart going twice too fast and a stranger’s terror lodged behind my ribs as if it’s moved in for the winter.

“Okay.” I make myself say it steady, though I don’t quite manage it. “Not blood magic.”

I’m still shaking dust off my fingers when Rua Zillman comes tearing across the field toward me, skirts fisted in both hands, gray hair torn loose from every pin she owns.

I’ve known this woman my whole life. She once talked two drunk mercenaries out of looting the grain stores with an old flintlock she didn’t even know how to load, and she did it without raising her voice once. I have never, not one single day, seen Rua Zillman run.

She doesn’t slow down until both hands lock around my arm hard enough to bruise.

“Zalie.” Ragged. “It’s Stone.”

“What about him? If Widow Aldric’s cow got loose in your garden again, I swear to God⁠—”

“Zalie.” Sharper this time, and something in her voice kills the joke before I’ve even finished it. “He doesn’t—” Her jaw works, chewing on the word before she can force it out. “He doesn’t remember our boy.”

I don’t ask which boy. There was only ever the one, four years in the ground, and Rua’s spent every one of those years keeping him so carefully polished that half the valley talks about him as though he only stepped out for the afternoon.