Page 36 of Orc’s Harvest

“This is where it happened.” Kalthor’s voice has gone flat, careful, a man walking toward something he already knows is going to cost him. “The exact stone.”

He presses his palm to the crack without asking my permission to do it, blood welling dark where the stone’s edge bites into his skin, and the second contact’s made, his whole body goes rigid and then entirely, terribly still — standing upright, eyes open, and utterly empty of whoever’s supposed to be looking out through them.

“Kalthor?”

Nothing answers. Whatever’s left of him has gone somewhere I can’t follow, and I don’t get more than a handful of seconds to understand that before the field itself starts fighting back.

Wheat stalks rise around us into shapes too solid to be grain anymore — soldiers built from centuries-old battle memory, armor rendered in dust and red chaff, blades that shouldn’t be able to cut and cut anyway. Darrow’s already moving, spear up, shouting formation at the four warriors still able to hear him. One of the echo soldiers wears an orc’s shape and moves like one too, testing Darrow’s guard twice before finding the gap on the third strike, a shallow line opening across his forearm that he doesn’t so much as glance at.

“Guard the stone!” I plant myself in front of Kalthor’s empty body, knife out, because whatever’s happening to him inside that memory, I refuse to let anything reach him from out here while he can’t defend himself. “Whatever you do, don’t let anything touch him!”

I fight two battles at once after that — the physical one in front of me, echo soldiers falling to Darrow’s spear and my own vines in equal measure, and the other one, distant and thin, a thread of Kalthor’s trial reaching me faintly through whatever’s still open between us since the Circle of Seasons.

I catch fragments of it. An ancestor’s voice, cold and reasonable, arguing that sacrificing a column of witches saved thousands of orc lives that would have died in a war nobody could afford to keep losing. Every time I feel Kalthor lean toward that logic, even a fraction, the echo soldiers around me grow faster, stronger, harder to put down. Every time I feel him reject it outright, the pact stone cracks a little further under my boots.

“Betrayal or ruin.” The words rise out of the wheat on every side at once, patient, certain, offering the same trap it’s clearly offered Kalthor a dozen times already inside whatever memory he’s trapped in. “Those are the only choices history ever actually offers a man in his position, clanlord. Choose the ruin his ancestor avoided, and everyone counting on you dies instead. Choose the betrayal his ancestor chose, and you become exactly what you’ve spent your whole life trying not to become. There is no third door in this room.”

I feel his hesitation catch on that logic like a hook finding purchase, and three echo soldiers rise out of the wheat at once, more than Darrow’s line can hold much longer.

I don’t have time for a careful answer. I cut my own palm against the pact stone instead, forcing my voice into whatever’s left of the memory the same way Kalthor’s blood forced him into it.

“That’s not a choice.” I put everything I have left into it. “That’s a trap built by men who only ever profit from you believing there’s no third answer. Break the question, Kalthor. Stop choosing between the two doors he wants you standing in front of, and build one he never thought to offer you.”

Something shifts in the air around the pact stone the instant I finish speaking — a pressure breaking, a held breath finally letting go.

Kalthor’s body moves without his eyes losing their emptiness, hands finding the Blood Law chains rendered solid in the wheat’s memory and tearing them apart without a trace of hesitation, driving straight through the mechanism anchoring the Veil breach itself instead of choosing either door the entity offered him. The echo soldiers around me collapse mid-swing, Hagorn’s memory unraveling from the inside as three centuries of borrowed certainty finally runs out of ground to stand on.

I drive his clan knife into the crack running through the pact stone at the same moment, severing whatever thread’s been anchoring the archers still firing arrows made of dust and old grief from the field’s far edge. The arrows dissolve mid-flight. The soldiers still standing crumble into red chaff and blow away on wind that finally smells like ordinary grain instead of old blood.

The pact stone splits open along its old crack, and beneath the fracture, carved in a hand far older than Hagorn’s crime, an original covenant reveals itself — words worn soft with age but legible enough to read plain: power given willingly, no identity taken without consent granted freely, leadership shared between both peoples, renewed each generation, never made permanent by blood alone.

Kalthor comes back into his own eyes all at once, staggering, and I catch his arm before he goes down entirely.

“I renounce it.” His voice comes out hoarse, immediate, absolute. “Whatever ownership my bloodline claimed over the Harvest Heart, over this covenant, over any of it — I give it back. Effective now, in front of whatever’s left standing to witness it.”

“Then I’ll take the other half.” I mean it as much as he means his. “Stewardship of the witch side of this, on exactly one condition. It doesn’t pass by blood. Not to my children, not to anyone’s. Whoever holds it next earns it the same way we did.”

We sign the covenant in blood, palms pressed flat against stone still warm from three hundred years of buried grief, and the field itself answers before either of us finishes the gesture — red wheat rippling gold and black in a wave that spreads out past sight, names reappearing on Lorn’s End’s empty grave markers one at a time, and somewhere behind us, the vertical seam in the air, unmoved until now, narrows by a visible measure. Somewhere past the tree line, faint and unfamiliar after a morning of silence, a bird finally calls.

Kalthor’s grip stays locked around my hand once the field settles, both of us shaking in ways that have nothing to do with the cold. Around us, the last of the echo soldiers finish dissolving into red dust, and the small escort left standing starts the quiet work of checking each other for wounds without either of us needing to give the order.

“Can you still—” He stops, starts again, more careful than I’ve ever heard him. “You’ve just watched exactly what my bloodline is capable of. What it’s built out of. I need to ask you honestly — can you still love a man whose authority came from that much blood?”

I don’t answer that quickly, because he deserves better than a quick answer to a question that cost him this much to ask.

“I don’t love the authority.” I take his face in both hands, make him look at me instead of the stone. “I never did. I love the man who just gave every piece of it back rather than protect it for one more generation. I love you, Kalthor. Not the bloodline. Not the name carved into that breastplate three hundred years ago. You — the man standing in front of me who chose to break something rather than keep profiting from it, even when breaking it cost him everything he was born believing he owned.”

Something in his stare breaks open at that, raw and unguarded in a way I’ve never once seen from him, and he kisses me like the words just handed him permission to stop holding some part of himself back.

When he finally pulls back, he reaches for the braid at his temple instead — the blood-forged clasp holding it, worked iron passed down through generations he’s just renounced every claim to, the metal still warm from being this close to him all morning.

“This isn’t a Bondmark proposal.” He presses it into my palm, and I fold my fingers closed around it. “I told you I wasn’t letting a war decide that timing, and I meant it. This is a promise instead — that I intend to ask you properly, the way I said I would, once neither of us is bleeding on cursed ground to do it.”

I fasten it to the hilt of the blade he gave me in Rowan Hollow’s mud instead of my own belt, where I’ll see it every time I draw it.

“Then I’ll keep it here.” I hold the knife up between us. “Until you’re ready to ask properly.”

“Not long now.” He tips his brow down against mine, steady, certain. “I promise you that too, for whatever a promise is worth from a man standing on ground like this.”