Page 10 of Orc’s Harvest

“Molgar’s careful. That’s not a crime.” I don’t look back at him. “Careful men keep a valley fed through a bad harvest.”

“Careful men also don’t flinch when you ask a direct question, my lord. Just an observation.”

I don’t answer that one. It isn’t worth arguing about, not today, and Varok lets it go easy enough once the tree line comes into view ahead of us.

The orchard doesn’t so much end as give up. Ashcroft’s rows run twisted and gray for half a mile past the last working farm, apple trees gone black-blossomed and barren, fruit that fell rotten years back still littering the ground in slick, sweet-smelling drifts that turn every step into a gamble. Fog moves in low and thick before we’re a hundred paces past the tree line, swallowing sound whole — Varok’s voice cuts off mid-word like somebody closed a door on it, and when Darrow calls out from somewhere to my left, the answer comes from my right instead, wrong and impossible and close enough to touch.

The rest of the patrol thins out fast in the white, warriors becoming shapes becoming nothing at all, until it’s only the sound of my own boots and Zalie’s breathing to prove either of us still exists. The silence itself sits wrong in my chest, and I don’t have a name for why.

Then a voice finds me that has no business being anywhere near this orchard.

Don’t leave me. Kal, don’t — you said you wouldn’t —

Torin. Eleven years old and eleven years dead, a voice I haven’t heard outside my own skull in three decades, and it’s coming from directly behind me, near enough that turning around should show me a boy’s face instead of fog. I don’t turn. I know better than to turn.

I’ve told exactly no one what happened to my brother. Not Varok. Not my father before he died. Not a single warrior who’s followed me into worse fires than this one. And some rotten piece of magic wearing this orchard like a coat has reached straight into the one drawer in me nobody’s ever been allowed to open.

My hand finds the axe out of habit. There’s nothing here to swing at. The voice keeps calling, younger each time it repeats itself, and my chest tightens until drawing a full breath takes more effort than it should.

Zalie’s fingers close around mine instead.

She doesn’t ask what I’m hearing. Doesn’t ask if I’m all right, doesn’t do any of the things people do when they’ve noticed a man’s gone somewhere they can’t follow. She laces her hand through mine, solid and warm and entirely real against a memory built out of fog and grief, and says, “Follow my voice. Not whatever that is. Mine.”

I follow her voice. I keep her hand in mine considerably longer than the danger requires, and nobody mentions it when the fog starts thinning, and my fingers are still wrapped around hers.

She doesn’t ask the question either, which is somehow worse than if she had. I find myself answering it anyway.

“Raiders took our village when I was fourteen. Torin was eleven.” The words come out low, flat, worn smooth by three decades of never saying them out loud. “My father had me stationed on the northern wall that night, my first real post I’d ever held. Torin begged to come with me instead of staying in the cellar with the rest of the children. I told him no. Told him to stay put, stay quiet, and I’d come get him the second it was over.”

Zalie doesn’t say anything. She just tightens her grip on my hand and lets me keep going.

“The cellar held. Everything above it didn’t. By the time I fought my way back to it, the house was already coming down, and I dug through what was left of it with my own hands until there was nothing left to dig through.” I stare straight ahead into the thinning fog instead of at her. “He wasn’t hurt. Not a mark on him. He just couldn’t get out from under the beam that came down across the stairs, and I wasn’t there to move it in time. I’ve spent thirty years being fast enough for everyone else since. Never fast enough for him.”

“That’s not a debt you get to keep paying forever, Kalthor.”

“I know that.” I finally look at her. “Knowing it and believing it aren’t the same thing yet. Maybe someday.”

She doesn’t offer me anything easy. She just holds on, and for the first time in thirty years, the silence around that particular grief doesn’t feel like something I’m carrying entirely alone.

We find the scarecrow at the center of a dead clearing, and I know before we’re within twenty feet of it that it isn’t decoration.

Most of them stand slack and rotted, dressed in whatever clothes got left behind when Ashcroft’s pickers stopped coming home. This one stands too straight, its straw-stuffed arms spread wide, threads of gold light running through it like veins under skin — dozens of them, thin and glowing, running down through its chest and into the roots beneath its feet.

“It’s feeding something.” Zalie crouches at its base, careful not to touch the roots directly. “Not stealing. Feeding. Look — the threads only run one direction. Into the ground.”

“Somebody’s using this whole orchard as a funnel.” My grip tightens on the axe. “Not hunting here. Harvesting. It’s been feeding on Ashcroft’s missing for longer than eleven days.”

The leaf piles move before either of us finishes the thought.

They drop from the black branches overhead and rise out of drifts of rotten fruit at once, six of them at least, straw-pale and fast in rows too narrow to form a proper line against. I put my axe through the nearest one before it clears the ground, and what comes apart under the blade sprays black residue across both of us, thick and cold and reeking of old sap.

Zalie doesn’t wait for an order. Vines rip up out of the rotten ground at her command, thorned and fast, wrapping one creature’s ankle and hauling it off balance a half second before it would have had her by the throat. She puts her knife through its skull on the way down, already turning for the next one, and I lose half a heartbeat I don’t have watching her do it — the ease of it, the total lack of hesitation, a woman who fights like she’s been doing it her whole life instead of learning it in a season of monsters.

“Behind you!” She’s already moving to cover the gap before I’ve finished the warning, roots snapping up through black mud to block a straw-fingered hand reaching for my ribs. Between the two of us, the clearing empties fast, Hollow Men falling in twos and threes, and for one clean stretch of seconds it feels less like survival and more like something we’re simply good at.

“Move!” I shove Zalie into the next row when the seventh one drops from a branch directly overhead, buying maybe two seconds before the ground under both our boots simply isn’t there anymore.

The ground opens beneath the clearing without warning — root, claw, I don’t have time to know which — and the world drops out from under us both at once. I get one arm around Zalie before we’re falling, twist hard enough that my back takes the landing instead of hers, and the last thing I register before the dark closes over us both is her body coming down safe against my chest and stone meeting my spine like a hammer.