Page 2 of Orc’s Harvest

“Confused? Grieving bad again?”

“No.” Her nails dig in deeper. “He looked me dead in the eye this morning and told me to quit inventing children who never existed. He wasn’t sad, Zalie. He was furious. Like I’ve been lying to him for years, and he’s only now caught me at it.”

I think of the bloodroot turned west under my window. The circle cut into my own field. The gold thread that handed me a stranger’s fear and dissolved before I could ask whose it was.

“Move.” I’m already running. “Tell me the rest on the way.”

We cut across the wardline at a dead run, mist soaking through my nightshirt, Rua’s breath tearing ragged beside me the whole quarter mile to her own farmhouse. Her boot catches a rut halfway there, and she goes down hard — I’ve got a fistful of her collar before her knees hit the mud, hauling her upright without losing a step, and she doesn’t even thank me, keeps talking like the stumble never happened.

“He used to hum while he worked the forge line. Stopped that this morning. Didn’t even notice he’d stopped.” Her voice cracks clean down the middle. “That’s how I knew before he even opened his mouth about our boy. A man doesn’t lose a habit thirty years deep for nothing.”

“He wasn’t cruel about it,” she gets out between strides. “That’s the part I can’t shake. He sounded so certain, Zalie. Like he was the one being patient with me.”

Stone meets us on the porch, looking every inch a man who hasn’t slept and doesn’t know it. Broad-shouldered, gray threading through hair that used to be dark, steady on his feet. Nothing wrong with him that I can see from the steps. No fever sweat. No shaking hands. No confusion clouding his face. That’s what turns my stomach worse than any of it would. He looks at himself entirely. There’s a hole where part of him used to live, and he hasn’t even noticed the draft.

“Stone.” I keep my voice level, the one I use on spooked horses and grieving neighbors both. “Let me look you over.”

“If it’ll get Rua to stop weeping over some other family’s son, fine by me.”

Flat. Not cruel — genuinely baffled, the way a man sounds correcting a stranger who’s gotten a simple fact wrong. He holds still while I check him anyway, patient as a man humoring a child’s game he doesn’t understand the point of. I hold the lantern up close to his face and watch his pupils shrink, even and steady; nothing wrong with the man in front of me that I know how to name.

Pulse steady as a drum. No shake, no slur, no heat under the skin.

“You and Rua ever have a son?”

“No.” Not a flicker of doubt. “Never have.”

I’ve watched grief hollow a man out slow, over years, giving a family time to grieve each piece as it goes. I’ve watched sickness do the same, faster, with warning signs to brace against. This isn’t either one. Somebody reached in and lifted a single bone straight out of him, clean as a knife through butter, and left every other part of the man standing exactly where they found it.

“How long?” I pull Rua back a few steps while Stone wanders off toward the barn as if it’s any other morning, whistling under his breath, the same crooked tune he’s whistled every morning of his life. Halfway across the yard, he stops whistling, cocks his head toward the eastern tree line like he’s caught a sound underneath the wind, and stands there a moment too long before he shakes it off and keeps walking.

I don’t like that either. I add it to everything else I don’t like tonight.

“Since he woke.” Rua’s hands shred the hem of her apron, knot after knot that will never come loose. “I’ve been trying to describe our boy’s face to him all morning, and I can’t hold onto it myself anymore either. I nursed that child through fever. I know his face. I know it. And every time I reach for it now, it’s water. It won’t stay in my hands.”

Cold drops straight through me, scalp to boots.

“Describe him to me. Right now. Whatever comes.”

She gets as far as — his father’s chin, and that laugh, God, that laugh could carry clean across two fields — before her voice stops dead, gone all at once, and she’s staring at me with a horror too raw even for crying.

Illness doesn’t move that fast. Grief doesn’t either.

This is theft. Plain and simple. And it’s still hungry.

“Don’t just stand there looking at me like I’ve sprouted a second head,” Rua snaps, swiping at her eyes with the back of one wrist, some of the old iron creeping back into her spine even now. “Go. Find out what’s doing this before it comes back for the rest of him. And take that tonic bottle out of my hand before I throw it at something, because God help me, I will.”

I’m halfway to the gate when Stone calls out from the barn door, easy as commenting on the weather. “Bells are ringing early this year, aren’t they?” No bells are ringing. Not one, not anywhere in the valley, not that either of us can hear. Rua’s hand finds my sleeve and grips hard enough to stop my breath.

“Go.” Quieter now, her grip still locked on my sleeve. “Before he says anything else.”

I leave her with a calming tonic and a promise I’ve got no business making — that I’ll find what’s doing this and put a stop to it — and I run home instead of stopping long enough to consider how reckless that promise was.

There’s a door in my cellar I haven’t touched since the funeral. Not locked. Sealed by three years of walking past it every morning and choosing, every time, not to touch the latch.

I touch it now.

The wards know my blood before I even break skin. They hum once, low, and fall open, as though they’ve spent three years waiting for me to finally get around to it. Dust hangs thick enough to look solid. The whole room smells of dried paper and old bloodroot, and underneath both, something colder.