Page 6 of Orc’s Harvest

It shouldn’t work as well as it does. I’ve never fought beside anyone who wasn’t already family, and this man’s a stranger built like a small building, and we move as if we’ve drilled the same fight a hundred times over. Every swing of that axe could fell a tree outright. He handles it with a scalpel’s precision instead, murderous and controlled at once, and there’s an unfair kind of attractive in a creature that size choosing control over chaos every single time. I mark a creature’s chest with a smear of bloodroot sap the second its glowing core flares under the skin, and his axe finds that exact spot without me having to shout the location twice. He drives them back into range of my vines instead of letting them scatter into the dark where I’d lose the thread entirely. Between one breath and the next, we’ve cleared a path wide enough to pull Lena out from under the cart and get her moving toward the others — half a dozen farmers I hadn’t even known were pinned down twenty feet further in, huddled low while two of his warriors hold a shrinking circle around them. Lena’s fingers dig into my sleeve the whole way and don’t let go, not even once we reach the others.

I’m hauling a limping farmhand toward the group when I hear my grandmother’s voice again, close this time. Close enough to touch.

“Zalie girl. Over here. Quickly, before it finds you.”

Every part of me that isn’t currently screaming wrong wants to turn toward it. Three years since I buried her, and some animal part of my chest still lights up at the sound as if she’s standing right there, arms open, waiting to fold me into a hug I haven’t gotten in three winters.

I take one step toward the voice.

An arm locks around my waist from behind and hauls me backward against him, solid as a shut gate, hard enough that the air goes out of me in one startled breath.

“Not that way.” Low. A rasp underneath the certainty that does something unfair low in my stomach, entirely inappropriate for how many monsters are technically still nearby.

I don’t fight him. I should. I don’t.

His arm doesn’t loosen even after I stop trying — if anything, it tightens, like letting go is negotiable and losing me isn’t. For several long seconds neither of us moves — his arm still banded tight across my stomach, my back pressed flush to a heartbeat going hard and fast enough I feel it through two layers of leather and my own soaked shirt, both of us watching the false shape of my grandmother flicker and dissolve back into the treeline the moment it realizes I’m not coming. This isn’t what fear does to me. I know exactly what fear feels like, and this isn’t it.

That’s a problem I’ll examine later, when a battlefield isn’t demanding my attention.

He lets go the second the danger’s gone, steps back like he needs to remind his own hands who they belong to.

By the time the last of them scatter into the dark, three of my outer wardstones have split clean through, cracked white stone scattered through the mud like broken teeth. I feel the break the moment it happens, a low sick lurch behind my sternum, the same place that ached the first time I opened my grandmother’s workroom.

He crosses the field toward me without hurrying, and that’s worse than if he’d run — like the outcome’s already settled and he’s only here to deliver it.

“Your wards are compromised.” He wipes his blade clean on a strip of cloth from his belt, barely winded after everything we just did. “Bouchier Farm isn’t defensible tonight. You’re coming to the Keep.”

“I’m not.”

“That wasn’t a request.”

“Neither was mine.” I fold my arms, plant my boots, and give him the same look I give goats who’ve decided the fence is a suggestion. “My grandmother’s whole life’s work sits in a cellar you don’t have clearance to enter, and I’m not leaving it undefended so you can lock me in a tower for my own good.”

He studies me a long moment, jaw working like he’s chewing through several answers and discarding every one that would start a second fight tonight.

“Then I bring my command here.” Flat. Final — a decision already made, not a negotiation still open. “Warriors in your barn. A war table in your kitchen. Nobody touches that cellar without your say-so — but nobody touches you either, not while those stones stay cracked.”

“You’re inviting yourself into my house.”

“I’m defending it.” Something flickers behind that unblinking stare, not as unbothered as the rest of him looks. “Same thing, tonight.”

I ought to argue harder. I don’t have the strength left, and some small, ungrateful part of me isn’t sorry about the arrangement at all.

“Fine. Barn’s got a bad hinge on the east door. Fix it while you’re loitering.”

He doesn’t step back right away. For one beat too long, we both just stand there, his stare dropping to my mouth and back up again like he’s already decided something he hasn’t said out loud yet, and I catch myself doing the same thing to him before I remember I’m supposed to be angry about the wardstones.

We’re still counting the wounded when the last Hollow Man goes down — the one I put a knife through first, wearing Lena’s voice, finally collapsing under a second strike from one of his warriors. It shouldn’t be able to speak anymore. Its throat’s been opened twice over, and half its chest is gone.

It speaks anyway, dozens of voices layered on top of each other, sharing one mouth that never agreed to any of it.

“The Harvester King remembers the blood that denied him.”

Ice settles low in my gut, colder than the mist ever managed tonight. Beside me, every line of him locks tight — not the calm kind of stillness. The kind that means something’s about to break.

The thing’s ruined head turns, slow, toward him.

“And now he knows what you want.”