Page 8 of Orc’s Harvest

“What do you need to fix it?”

Nobody’s asked me that. Not once, not in three years of carrying this alone, and never from anyone with the authority to do something about the answer. I sit there a beat too long, thrown harder by the question than I want him to see.

“Time.” I count it off. “Access to the sites. And somebody who isn’t going to try taking command of my own grandmother’s research the second we find anything useful in it.”

“You’ll have all three.” The words land like an order already given, not a promise still being made.

I believe him. That unsettles me more than anything the Hollow Men have managed so far.

We don’t get further than the doorway that evening. The sky opens up somewhere past supper and doesn’t let up — rain hard enough to turn the yard to standing water inside an hour, the southern road to the first ward site washed out before midnight according to the rider Kalthor sends to check it. His whole patrol’s grounded here until the water drops, twelve warriors and their horses crammed into my barn with nowhere else to go.

I have one guest room. I give it to Fenn, whose shoulder wound from the wheat field’s gone hot and needs watching through the night, and to Darrow, who took a knock to the skull in the same fight and shouldn’t be left alone either. Darrow tries to argue he’s fine enough to bunk in the barn with the others, right up until he stands too fast and has to catch the doorframe. Fenn doesn’t say a word, just steers him toward the stairs with a hand between his shoulder blades, the kind of quiet that says more about how much he’d have hated losing that boy in the wheat than any speech could. That leaves the rest of the patrol bedding down in the barn on borrowed hay, and it leaves Kalthor with nowhere assigned at all.

“I’ll take the floor by the front door.” Like it’s already decided, which with him it apparently always is. Not the barn with his men. Not the room farthest from mine. The door — close enough that anything coming through it has to go through him first.

“You’ll take my second-best quilt and the good end of the hallway, is what you’ll do.” I pull it down off the shelf before he can argue. “I’m not explaining to Varok why his clanlord slept on my kitchen tile like a dog.”

He lets the point go. When I hand the quilt over, his fingers close around it slower than they need to, brushing mine longer than the exchange strictly requires, and he doesn’t pull back first. I don’t either.

FIVE

KALTHOR

I don’t tell her about the ribs.

Hiding it through the morning isn’t hard — leather laced tight, movement kept economical, and a wound like this doesn’t slow a man who’s had worse and learned not to show it. Hiding it through an entire day spent hauling grain sacks and folded half-double over a worktable built for someone half my size costs more. By the time the house goes quiet and the last of my patrol settles into the barn, the slash along my ribs has soaked clean through two layers of wrapping, and every breath costs more than I’d like to admit to anyone, myself included.

I go to the kitchen because it’s empty. Peeling wet linen off a wound in front of twelve warriors who already worry about the wrong things isn’t worth the fuss it’ll cause. And handing Zalie one more reason to think I can’t be trusted to look after myself, after the morning we’ve already had, isn’t worth the honesty.

I get as far as peeling the linen away and reaching for a clean strip when the kitchen door opens behind me, and every plan I had for handling this quietly falls apart.

“Sit.”

I turn. She’s in the doorway in a robe thrown over her nightshirt, hair loose, staring at the mess along my ribs like it’s personally insulted her.

“It’s not as bad as it⁠—”

“Sit.” She doesn’t raise her voice. Doesn’t need to. “Before I make you.”

I sit. We’re both a little surprised, though I keep it to myself, and so, apparently, does she.

The kitchen’s gone quiet enough to hear the rain start against the shutters, a low patter that hasn’t found its rhythm yet. Firelight from the banked hearth throws everything in the room half-orange, half-shadow, and it catches every old scar on him I hadn’t let myself look at straight on before now — a lifetime of close calls mapped in raised, pale lines across skin that shouldn’t have survived half of what put them there.

She pulls a stool close, closer than strictly necessary, and settles between my knees to get a proper angle on the wound — near enough that I could count the freckles across her collarbone if I let myself, and I make the mistake of letting myself exactly once before I stop.

Her hands are steady. Her magic doesn’t announce itself the way some blood work does — no flare of light, no display, only her fingertips moving light and sure along torn skin while green light knits the wound shut a fraction at a time, warm everywhere she touches. She works in silence for a long stretch, her breath falling warm and even against my throat every time she leans in to check her progress, and I’m aware of every piece of it — the concentration pulling her brow tight, the exact spot her knee presses into my thigh, the fact that reaching for her right now, uninvited, would be the single most dangerous thing I’ve done all day. I killed three things twice my size today without breaking stride.

I don’t reach for her.

Across the room, on the dark windowsill where no sun’s touched anything in hours, the bloodroot blooms open one after another, red against black glass, with no light anywhere near them to explain it.

“Do they always do that?” I nod toward the flowers, mostly to have something to say that isn’t her name.

“Only when they’re irritated.” She doesn’t look up from the wound.

“You’re irritated?”

“I’m concentrating.” Her needle doesn’t slow, precise and deliberate. “They bloom when they detect heat too. Draw your own conclusions.”