Page 4 of Orc’s Harvest

TWO

KALTHOR

Twelve riders trail me south along the patrol road, and every one of them has a name I know without checking a roster. Fenn on the left flank, still favoring the shoulder he wrenched two winters back. Old Bruck riding drag, muttering about the mist same as always. Darrow, youngest of the lot, three horses back and trying too hard not to look proud of the assignment.

Three families were due at the Keep gates by midday. None of them arrived, and midday’s long gone.

I ride at the front because I always ride at the front — not for show, no matter what the council whispers about it, but because I trust my own eyes over anybody’s account of what they saw. Hoofprints veer off the road here, straight into black wheat that should never have swallowed a loaded wagon whole. I follow the tracks in myself, ahead of Fenn’s muttered objection, ahead of good sense. The silence past the tree line already has my teeth on edge — wheat gone dead still while the grass along the road keeps moving.

We find the wagon overturned in a shallow ditch, one wheel still spinning slow on its axle. A farmer stands beside it with his two children, none of them flinching when my horse comes up on them fast. All three breathing. All three staring straight ahead, waiting on a sermon that never starts.

“Sir.” I dismount before the horse’s fully stopped, keep my voice level. “Anyone hurt?”

Nothing. Not even a blink.

I crouch level with the smaller of the two children, a girl no older than six, and ask her name. She gives it clear as a bell. I ask her father’s name.

She looks at me like I’ve asked her to name the moon.

“That’s your da.” I nod toward the man standing three feet from her.

“No.” Not scared. Not confused. Certain. “I don’t have one.”

I’ve buried men who screamed the whole way down. I’ve held dying warriors in my own hands while they talked about their mothers. Nothing in twenty years of command has put ice down my spine the way this child’s flat little voice does, telling me with complete confidence that the man who raised her is a stranger off the road.

I don’t need this explained twice. Riding these three back to the Keep and calling it finished isn’t going to solve whatever’s loose out here.

The wheat moves.

Not with the wind — the wind’s died in the last minute, dead enough I notice it the way you notice a held breath — but against it, rippling toward the wagon from every direction at once, the whole field leaning in for a closer look.

“Formation!” I don’t wait to see who’s fastest. “Fenn, wagon side. Darrow, with me.”

Fenn’s already moving, blade out before I finish the order. Twenty years of riding behind me, and he’s stopped needing the second half of a command.

They rise out of the grain without a sound, and that’s the wrongest part of it. Creatures built man-tall and taller, skin pale and dry as old straw stretched too thin over muscle that moves faster than it has any right to. Their faces don’t hold still. One wears a smile too wide and too soft to belong to anything that’s ever been happy — a child’s grin stitched onto something that towers over children. Another’s expression crumples into an old woman’s grief mid-step, tears running down cheeks that were smooth a heartbeat earlier. A third turns toward me, and its mouth shapes a name I haven’t heard spoken aloud in thirty years, in my dead mother’s exact voice, calling the one name only she ever used for me.

I don’t slow down. I buried that grief once already. I’m not doing it twice for a thing wearing her voice like a stolen coat.

“Shield ring, close it up! Get the family inside!”

Steel and shouting, warriors closing into the rotating wall I’ve drilled into them a hundred times, civilians pressed into the center where nothing’s supposed to be able to reach them. The creatures don’t come at us to kill. They come through every gap in the formation reaching — straw-thin fingers stretching for wrists, throats, the backs of skulls — pulling loose threads of gold light the instant contact’s made, thin as hair and twice as bright.

Darrow’s beside me, spear steady, and then it isn’t. I watch him hesitate mid-swing a heartbeat too long, confusion crossing a face that’s held this exact formation a hundred times without ever once looking uncertain.

“Darrow!”

“I—” His spear dips. “What’s the order? I don’t⁠—”

“Hold the line. You’ve held it a hundred times.” No room to ask what’s wrong with him. I put myself between him and the reaching hand closing on his shoulder instead, and my axe takes the arm off at the elbow before it finishes its grip.

What comes out of the wound isn’t blood.

Dozens of threads burst free at once, gold and glowing, and every warrior close enough gets struck by a memory that was never theirs. I catch the edge of one myself — a wedding I never attended, a hand I’ve never held — gone before I can flinch at it. Fenn staggers. Bruck spits blood and swears in three languages, landing hardest on the one everybody understands. Something old and ugly settles into my chest instead of shock, the kind of anger that doesn’t need to shout to be dangerous.

Stolen lives. Somebody’s been harvesting my people and wearing what they take, and whoever’s behind it is about to learn exactly how little patience I have left tonight.

That’s when the scent reaches me.