Page 38 of Orc’s Harvest

We have maybe ten minutes alone behind the ritual platform before the working starts, and I spend every one of them exactly where I want to be. Somewhere past the canvas wall, I can hear Jazine running final checks on the anchor lines, Darrow’s voice steady beneath hers.

“If the Heart tries to rewrite who you are in there.” Quiet, just for her. “I want you to have something true to hold onto that isn’t a memory it can twist. Small things. Things it wouldn’t think to fake.”

“I hate boiled turnips.” She says it immediately, like she’s been waiting for permission. “Koira used to make me eat them anyway, and I’ve hated every single bite since I was old enough to have an opinion about food.”

“Noted.” I almost smile despite everything waiting for us past this platform. “What else?”

“I intend to rebuild Bouchier Farm properly once this is over. Not just patch it. Rebuild it — bigger garden, better roof, room enough that it doesn’t feel like I’m the last one left rattling around in it.” She catches my hand, holds it. “And I love you because you protect people without ever once asking them to become smaller to earn it. That’s not something the Heart could invent about me even if it tried.”

“Then I’ll give you three of my own.” I tip my head down until my brow rests against hers, deliberate. “I’ve never once told anyone the story of my brother’s death the way I told it to you. That orchard was the first time in thirty years I let it be more than a wound I carry alone, and I don’t regret a second of it.”

“Second.” My voice roughens despite my best effort to keep it steady. “I intend to give up command of this fortress eventually, once the council’s strong enough to stand without me propping it up, and build something smaller with you instead. A life that isn’t only duty.”

“Third.” I hold her stare, make certain she understands none of it is exaggeration. “I loved you before I understood that wanting a future was different from simply fearing death. Somewhere in that wheat field a week ago, wanting you stopped being about keeping you safe and started being about keeping you, period. I didn’t have the word ready yet. I have it now.”

I kiss her instead of saying anything else, because some things land harder in silence than in a second round of words. She kisses me back like she’s memorizing the shape of it, one hand curled tight at the back of my neck, and by the time our mouths finally part, neither of us reaches for a fatalistic promise the way people do when they’re afraid this might be the last chance.

“We’re both coming back.” She says it like a fact, not a hope. “Not as a maybe. As a plan. I’ve got a farm to rebuild, and you’ve got a garden to plant, and neither of those things happens if either one of us decides to be a hero about this.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” I mean it as more of a vow than an agreement. “Every word of it.”

The three-anchor ritual starts clean — Zalie, Darrow, and a ward-trained warrior named Ellis who’s earned his place in this working the hard way, gold threads rising from the Hollow army in slow, steady columns, memory returning to bodies that haven’t held their own names in weeks. Ellis’s hands shake through the whole first minute, but he doesn’t once break the working, and I make a note to tell him so once this field stops trying to kill everyone standing on it.

Then the wheat at the field’s center starts moving wrong, and the Harvester King finally shows itself, as it’s apparently been waiting weeks to.

Twelve feet of interwoven Hollow Men climb up out of the black stalks, root and bone and harvest blades fused into a single towering shape, faces sliding across its body in an endless, restless procession. It doesn’t announce itself with words. It simply stands, and every Hollow Man still holding position across the basin turns toward it at once, waiting. The ground itself seems to lean toward it, black wheat for a hundred paces in every direction bending low like the whole field’s decided to bow.

I command from the platform because leaving it collapses the entire channel, and it feels wrong to stand still while my people fight without me in the thick of it. I trust Varok’s shield wall to hold the eastern line. I trust Zalie to hold whatever’s coming for the platform itself.

A straw-pale hand closes around the platform’s edge less than a minute later, one of them having crawled the whole distance on its belly under the noise of the larger fight, and I put my axe through its skull without breaking my grip on the ritual anchor, one-handed, before it finishes hauling itself over the rail. Two more come the same way inside the next few minutes. Neither gets further than the first did.

A Hollow Man breaks from the tree line, moving differently than the rest—graceful, precise, vines already curling up out of the ground around it before it finishes closing the distance to the platform.

“It’s wearing a witch’s magic.” Zalie’s voice carries a fury I haven’t heard from her before, watching roots answer to a stolen version of her own gift. “Somebody I might have known. Might have trained under, even.”

She doesn’t hesitate fighting it anyway, botanical magic meeting botanical magic in a duel that looks less like combat and more like two gardeners arguing over the same plot of ground with lethal stakes attached, vines lashing and countering in patterns only someone who actually understands the craft could follow. Thorned roots snap toward her throat twice before she reads the rhythm underneath the attack and starts answering half a beat ahead of it instead of behind.

A third root catches her across the ribs before she can turn fully clear of it, thorns tearing through leather and skin both, and I watch her stumble, blood already soaking dark through her shirt, before she plants her feet and keeps fighting instead of giving the thing a single second to press the advantage.

She wins by out-thinking it rather than out-fighting it, reading the stolen magic’s patterns faster than whatever’s controlling it can adapt, and puts it down with a blade through the one place botanical magic can’t regrow fast enough to matter, one hand pressed hard against her own bleeding side the entire time.

Molgar reappears at the platform’s edge before I finish tracking the last of the Hollow witch’s collapse, more stolen flesh than man now, barely a third of him still recognizable as the precise, unbothered steward who once ran Ashmoor’s ledgers without a hair out of place. The journal’s held in a hand that’s mostly root and black bark, fingers grown too long, too jointed, to belong to anything born rather than assembled.

“You’ve built something clever.” His voice carries no anger, just that same maddening calm. “Let me show you how easily clever unravels.”

He reverses the ritual from a hidden override buried somewhere in the platform’s foundation; threads that were rising suddenly pull backward instead, and Darrow drops to his knees mid-work, gold light tearing loose from him faster than it should.

“Reduce the flow!” I don’t hesitate to give the order. “Now! I don’t care what it costs the timing; I’m not sacrificing him for efficiency!”

Jazine adjusts the working fast, hands moving sure despite the panic written plain across her face, gold light slowing its retreat, and Darrow stays upright, shaking, whole enough to keep anchoring what’s left of the ritual.

The Harvester King uses the opening Molgar’s created to reach directly into whatever’s still open between Zalie and me, and the intrusion hits as ice water poured straight into my skull.

A false future unspools behind my eyes — Zalie dying on this exact field, my hands too slow, too late. I know it’s false even as it lands. I feel it anyway, the way a nightmare still costs something even once you understand you’re dreaming.

“I can preserve this. Permanent, untouchable by death or fear ever again.” It has no single mouth to speak from and doesn’t need one. “All I require is that you stop insisting on staying separate to keep it.”

“We remain ourselves.” I put everything I have left into the thought, aimed straight back at whatever’s trying to claim otherwise, and across the platform I feel Zalie answer the same way in the same breath. “Both of us. Exactly as we are. You don’t get either of us by offering to erase the parts that make us worth wanting in the first place.”