Page 48 of Orc’s Harvest

“Noon.” He says it like a man who already knows he’s not going to win this argument, mostly, I suspect, because arguing gives him a few more seconds standing here before the world asks anything else of either of us.

“Dawn.”

He doesn’t need magic to know exactly how this ends. Six months of losing arguments about timing have taught him that much without any mark’s help at all, and he gives up the fight with the resignation of a man who’s decided some battles simply aren’t worth the effort of pretending otherwise.

“Dawn,” he tells the messenger, and the man bows and turns his horse back toward the northern road without another word, already vanishing into the dusk the way news of trouble always seems to arrive faster than it leaves.

Once he’s gone, I take Kalthor’s hand, and our marks catch the last of the sunset light between us, gold and green tangled the way they’ve been tangled since a ward circle sealed them there for good.

Beyond us, black-and-gold wheat moves easy in the evening wind. No stolen voices whisper from the stalks anymore. No Hollow Men wait between the rows for anyone careless enough to wander too close. The land remembers everyone it ever lost, every single name written on a wall three hundred years deep, and it no longer demands anyone new take their place to keep the memory company. Somewhere behind us, the festival’s still going strong, fiddle music carrying faintly across the fields, and somewhere north of here, whatever’s stirring in the Glass Thorn Mountains will have to wait until dawn to find out exactly what it’s woken up.

Kalthor opens the shelter door and gestures me in first, patient, deliberate, the kind of gesture that’s stopped being about command and started being about something closer to devotion, the same instinct that once meant standing between me and danger now meaning something gentler entirely.

I raise an eyebrow at him anyway. “Telling me where to go again?”

“Trying to keep up.” His mouth curves, warm, certain. “Same as always. You set the pace on the first night I met you, and I’ve been running to catch it ever since.”

I pull him inside by the front of his coat instead of answering, because some things deserve a better response than words, and the door closes behind us both.

Outside, Ashmoor celebrates its first free harvest long into the night — a valley finally, fully its own, standing under a sky that owes nothing to any king.

The End