Page 3 of Orc’s Harvest

Journals everywhere, stacked on every surface, spilling off shelves my grandmother built too narrow for her own ambition. Dried specimens pinned to warped boards, labels gone brittle with age. Root-system diagrams drawn in ink dark enough to be blood, sprawling and wrong in a way I feel in my back teeth before I understand why.

I don’t stop to grieve. She’d skin me alive for wasting daylight on sentiment with a valley full of trouble waiting outside the door. I start pulling journals down and reading fast, lantern held too close for comfort.

Most of them are useless. Pages torn clean out, whole sections gone, her handwriting cutting off mid-sentence as though she changed her mind partway through about finishing the thought. One torn half-sheet has slipped loose between two ledgers, ink faded but still legible, and my own name jumps off the page before I’ve even finished pulling it free:

— if she reads this before I’ve told her myself, I am sorry. Zalie was never meant to carry —

The rest is torn away, same as everything else. My hands aren’t quite steady when I set it down.

One line survives whole elsewhere, underlined twice hard enough to have torn the page under it:

When the wheat bows without wind, the Hollow Men have begun choosing what the valley can afford to lose.

I want to call that dramatic. I want to be the practical, clear-headed woman half this valley calls when their cattle won’t settle, and their wounds won’t close on their own — not some girl rattled by her dead grandmother’s handwriting before sunrise.

But there’s a flattened wheat ring sitting in my own field with no boot print inside it. A good man down the road who can’t remember his own dead son. And now my own name, torn off mid-warning, in ink she never lived long enough to finish.

Hollow Men. Never heard the term once in my life, and she wrote it down, sure I’d already know exactly what it meant.

I reach for the next journal on the stack.

I don’t get the chance to open it.

A scream cuts the air before I’ve got the cover lifted — high, raw, torn off mid-word as if a hand clamped down over the mouth making it.

I move before I’ve decided to move.

Knife off the workbench, bone handle, my grandmother’s gift the year I turned sixteen. Bloodvine wound three times round my left wrist while I’m already taking the cellar stairs two at a time. No coat. No second-guessing whether this is mine to run toward, because it stopped being anybody else’s problem the moment Rua Zillman came apart in my arms over a son her own husband can no longer name.

Send for Kalthor Wildstorm, Rua had said on her way out of my gate. He rides the outer patrols himself. He’ll come if you ask it.

I’d waved her off without giving it much room. A seven-foot orc with an axe built like a barn door is good for exactly one kind of trouble, and hitting things harder won’t fix whatever’s loose in my valley tonight. I told her as much. I meant every word of it.

I do, uninvited, remember the one time I saw him up close — three years back, at the autumn trade fair, a market gone dead silent the instant he opened his mouth to the council elders, every conversation in earshot cutting out at once as if somebody reached over and turned the whole world down. His voice didn’t even carry that far. Didn’t need to. I remember thinking a man built that large shouldn’t be able to cross a room without a board creaking under him. I remember standing there with a crate of turnips in my arms, with no reason on earth to pay that much attention to a stranger, and being irritated with myself for doing it anyway.

I’m irritated with myself again now, mid-sprint through my own back pasture with a scream still ringing in my ears, for that memory choosing this exact moment to resurface. Not the time. I shove it down where it belongs and keep running.

The scream came from Wrenlow land, the field bordering mine to the east, where the wheat grew taller, thick enough to swallow a grown man whole three steps in. I hit the tree line at a dead sprint, lungs burning, mist soaking cold against bare arms I never stopped to cover.

It comes again — a young woman, somewhere deep in the grain, words too torn apart by panic to make sense of. Lena Wrenlow’s voice, maybe. Fear does strange things even to a voice you’d know anywhere.

Grain closes over my head the second I push past the first row, wet stalks slapping cold across my face. My boot catches on something half-buried in the dirt — a dropped basket, handle snapped clean in two — and I don’t stop long enough to look twice at it. A few feet on, a wide swath of stalks lies crushed flat in a straight line heading deeper into the field, too broad and too even to be one girl running blind. Something walked through here upright, and it walked through here recently. The wheat ripples off to my left, a long slow drag against the grain instead of with it, and I grip the knife tighter and keep moving toward the girl’s voice, because that’s the only direction that makes any sense to run.

“Lena!” My own voice comes back to me flat and swallowed, the wheat eating the sound before it can carry. No answer. Just the wet slap of grain against my shoulders and my own boots in the mud.

One step. Two.

On the third, a voice reaches me from directly behind. Soft. Familiar. Close enough that warm breath ghosts the back of my neck even though nothing living stands there when I spin around to look. My grandmother’s voice — the exact cadence she used the morning she taught me to set my first snare, low and certain and entirely sure of itself.

“Do not follow the first scream.”

I go dead still in the middle of the tall wheat, knife raised, heart slamming hard enough to hurt. Mist curls thick around my ankles as though it means to root me right where I’m standing.

There is no one behind me.

The wheat itself hasn’t so much as trembled since her voice cut through it, every stalk around me frozen in place as though the whole field is listening too.

Ahead, past a stretch of wheat gone suddenly and completely silent, the screaming starts again.