Page 5 of Orc’s Harvest

Crushed herbs. Warm skin under all the mud and blood thick in the air. Bloodroot and rain-dark earth, cutting clean through the copper stink of Hollow Men and hitting me harder than the fight around me has any right to. I turn toward it on reflex, axe still dripping, and find her.

A woman alone at the field’s edge, hair torn loose from whatever knot she started the night with, mud to the elbow, shirt soaked through and clinging despite the cold. Vines wound thorned and living up both arms, holding back two of the creatures at once without a flinch at their size. Not screaming. Not running. Furious, focused, entirely unbothered that either one of them could break her in half without slowing down to notice.

Want hits me first, hard enough that I nearly miss how much danger she’s standing in. Fury comes right behind it — no shield ring around her, no formation, nothing between her and two Hollow Men but roots she’s ripped up out of the dirt with her bare hands. Every instinct I own wants to plant myself between her and every single thing still breathing in this field, mine or not. Then she drives a thorned root clean through one creature’s knee, and it drops without a sound, and the fury bends into respect, fast and unwelcome.

I don’t decide to move toward her. My feet are already going.

THREE

ZALIE

Two voices call from opposite ends of the wheat, and one of them’s wrong.

I don’t know how I know it — some instinct my grandmother drilled into me without ever bothering to explain — but the voice off to my right catches on itself half a beat too smooth, too certain, the kind of scream that’s already decided how it wants to end. The one to my left cracks in the middle, ragged, desperate, and entirely unrehearsed.

Do not follow the first scream.

I go left.

Grain slaps my face with every step, and I don’t slow until I find her — Lena Wrenlow, seventeen and shaking, wedged so far under an overturned cart that only her boots show, both hands clamped over her own mouth to keep the sound in now that letting it out clearly hasn’t helped anything.

“Lena. It’s Zalie. I’ve got you.”

She doesn’t move. Doesn’t trust her own ears, maybe, and I don’t blame her — not with whatever’s been calling her name from the other direction in a voice close enough to fool half the valley.

I hear it behind me before I see it. Her voice. Exact.

“Zalie? Zalie, help me, I’m⁠—”

I don’t turn around, fooled. I turn around ready.

The thing wearing Lena’s voice isn’t wearing much else that’s convincing up close — pale, too thin, skin dry as last year’s cornhusks, a face holding her expression like a mask two sizes too large for it. I put my knife straight through its throat before it finishes the sentence.

Wrong move.

The second the blade opens it, someone else’s memory floods straight up my arm and into my skull — a wedding, a stranger’s voice repeating vows into a room full of witnesses I’ve never met — and it costs me. Half a second, maybe less, standing there stunned, a stranger’s happiest day still ringing behind my eyes, while a second Hollow Man closes in from my blind side, straw-fingers already reaching for the back of my neck.

I don’t get the knife back around in time.

A wall of muscle and bad temper gets there first, tearing the thing off me by the throat and hurling it a dozen feet into the standing wheat before I’ve finished registering it as a threat.

I look up. And up.

He’s absurd, this close. Seven feet of scarred olive-gray muscle, a jaw built to take hits and hand worse ones back, tusks that would send most men a step back on instinct alone. Heat comes off him even through the cold — leather, iron, something underneath both that has no business smelling as good as it does in the middle of a massacre. My pulse kicks traitorous and inconvenient, and I decide on the spot to blame it on adrenaline. Black harvest runes carve down an axe he swings as if it weighs nothing, though it looks built for two men to lift.

“Get behind me.” Not a request. He’s already moving to plant his whole body between me and the tree line, big enough to blot out what’s left of the moon.

“I had it handled.”

“You had a knife in a corpse’s throat and a second one about to open your spine.” He doesn’t spare me a glance, already turning to meet the next Hollow Man rising out of the grain, something bright and furious flaring behind his stare like a struck flint. “Behind me.”

“These two are currently tangled in my roots.” I throw a hand out and the vines at my wrist answer, snapping tight around a straw-pale ankle and yanking the creature off balance mid-lunge. “That makes them mine. Find your own.”

He looks at me the way a man looks at a mule that’s started giving directions, and then a laugh cracks loose in his chest, low and startled, gone as fast as it came.

“Fine. Mark them. I’ll do the rest.”

That, at least, we can agree on.