Page 44 of Orc’s Harvest

Golden roots close around us both the instant he finishes speaking, gentle, deliberate, and the chamber falls away behind us in a roar of collapsing stone that never quite catches up to where we’re going.

The passage beneath Ashmoor carries us through something stranger and more intimate than any tunnel has a right to be — walls thin enough in places that I catch glimpses of the valley’s recovery happening in fragments all around us, like the whole world’s decided to heal at once and wanted us to see it happening.

Rua’s hand finds Stone’s face somewhere in the drifting light, affection returning to his eyes in pieces too slow to call whole yet, but real all the same. Darrow laughs with Sable, the sound cracking rough with disuse. Villagers speak their own names out loud beneath a dawn that’s finally, actually real. An old woman kneels in her own ruined garden, weeping over vegetables that survived when nothing else on her street did.

Kalthor drifts in and out against my chest the entire way down, held there without complaint no matter how much my arms protest by the end of it, his breathing slow and steady enough against my collarbone that I check twice to be certain he’s still with me.

“Are you the witch from the wheat?” His voice comes out slurred, uncertain, eyes barely opening.

“Yes.”

“You were difficult.” Something almost fond crosses what I can see of his face.

“You were slow.” I press a kiss to his temple, careless of how filthy we both are. “Took you long enough to catch up.”

Even half-conscious, the banter survives everything the last several days have tried to bury it under.

Bloodroot vines set us down gently in the eastern field at Bouchier Farm as dawn finally breaks clean and whole overhead, and the last thing I remember before exhaustion takes the rest of me is the smell of my own soil under my back for the first time in what feels like a lifetime.

I wake two days later to a farmhouse gone quiet in a way it hasn’t been quiet since this all started, sunlight falling ordinary and warm through my own kitchen window like the world’s decided to be simple again, at least for one morning.

Kalthor’s still unconscious in the guest room — the same room he once gave up for injured warriors instead of sleeping in himself. The Keep’s western half has collapsed entirely, visible even from my kitchen window as a jagged wound against the horizon where a fortress once stood whole. The Hollow Men are gone, every last one disintegrated the moment their stolen identities found their way home. Recovery moves at wildly different speeds across the valley: some people are back to themselves within hours; others still miss pieces that might never come back at all.

I insist on sitting with him myself rather than leaving it to Jazine’s people, and nobody argues hard enough to change my mind about it, not even Jazine, who simply hands me a fresh basin of water and leaves without another word.

I’m three chapters into Koira’s least damaged journal, sitting in the chair beside his bed on the third morning, when his eyes finally open, steady instead of glassy.

“Zalie.” He says my name like he’s testing whether it still fits, and the sound of it steadies me more than anything has since we fell out of that reservoir.

His memory comes back in pieces over the next hour, uneven, out of order — the first battle in the wheat, our first kiss at the Circle of Seasons, the fact that he loves me arriving clear and certain even though the exact moment he first said it stays stubbornly out of reach. He tells me, almost sheepish, that I’ve repeated that he hates boiled turnips to him so many times over the last three days that it’s the one detail that came back whole before anything else did. He reaches for the story of his brother twice and finds only grief without the words that used to carry it, and I watch him decide, quietly, not to force that one before it’s ready.

“I’m sorry some of it’s still missing.” Rough, apologetic, the words clearly hard-won.

“We’ll make new memories while the old ones find their way back.” I catch his hand, hold it, and don’t let go for a long while. “That’s not a tragedy, Kalthor. That’s just what healing actually looks like most of the time.”

“Did we win?”

“The Harvester King’s gone. The Heart’s restored.” I can’t quite keep my voice from wavering. “Your fortress is mostly rubble, and half of Ashmoor’s still deciding what to feel about any of it.”

“I never liked that western tower anyway.” His usual dry humor surfaces, weak but unmistakably his.

I laugh and cry at the same time, ugly and undignified about it, until he pulls me down onto the bed beside him and lets me do both against his chest for as long as I need to.

Three days after that, Ashmoor gathers in the eastern field because the Keep’s no longer safe to meet inside — orcs, farmers, witches, elders, restored victims, refugees, every last community the valley’s got left standing in one place at once, more people than I’ve ever seen gathered anywhere outside a harvest festival.

Kalthor doesn’t let go of my hand the whole way through the crowd to the center, gripping tight enough that more than one person notices, and he never once checks to see if any of them are watching. He’s never once cared who’s watching when it comes to me. He’s not about to start caring now.

Kalthor stands among the crowd instead of above it, refusing the raised platform Varok offers him, and tells the whole truth without softening a single piece of it. The betrayal at Lorn’s End. His own bloodline’s part in every generation of it since. Molgar’s sabotage. Koira’s failed attempt at something better that cost more than it saved. He offers to give up the title of clanlord outright, standing before everyone with nothing left to hide behind.

The gathering refuses him a quick, easy absolution. What forms instead, argued out loud across an entire afternoon by people who’ve earned the right to argue about it, is a provisional Ashmoor Covenant Council — every community represented, no single bloodline holding more than its fair share of the say, seats debated fiercely enough that the sun’s nearly down before anyone agrees on the final terms. Kalthor stays on as field commander, answerable to the council now instead of to inheritance. I become the first Covenant Warden, on fixed terms, with a role that will never pass automatically to whatever children I have.

The restored Heart asks for its first voluntary offering to begin the new cycle before the gathering finishes — no blood this time, no permanent memory, only a temporary emotional impression of what people want this valley to become. Kalthor and I offer our memory of planning his ridiculous rooftop garden, pond and all, laughing about it in front of a valley that’s watching to see whether any of this actually works. The Heart takes it, holds it a moment, and gives it straight back whole. Proof, in front of everyone watching, that the new covenant actually works the way we promised it would.

Black wheat rises from burned soil across the eastern field before the afternoon’s finished.

Kalthor finds me at the repaired wardline that evening, both of us finally alone after a day that never once let up, the last of the day’s light catching gold along the restored stones.

“I nearly asked you for a Bondmark three separate times during the worst of this.” He says it plainly, watching the last light fade over black-and-gold wheat. “Standing in that core. Bleeding out in that reservoir. Every time, I stopped myself, because urgency isn’t the same thing as choice, and I refused to let you say yes to something you might have said no to on any ordinary day.”