Page 19 of Orc’s Harvest

I kiss her again before I’ve fully talked myself out of the fury, and this one isn’t careful the way the courtyard kiss had to be, brief and public and performed for anyone watching. This one has nowhere to be and no one watching, and it goes slow and thorough, with her walking me backward until my shoulders hit the closed door instead of the other way around.

I stop us both before it goes any further, mostly because warriors are stationed twenty feet down this corridor, and a traitor is still loose somewhere inside these walls, and neither of those facts is going away just because I’d like them to.

“When we finally get privacy.” I let the words land low, forehead resting against hers, both of us breathing hard. “I intend to take my time about it. You should know that going in.”

“Noted.” She doesn’t sound remotely sorry about any of it. “I’ll hold you to it.”

We search the room properly once we both remember there’s a job to do. Black pollen dusts the windowsill, fine and dark, nothing that grows anywhere near the Keep’s gardens. The protection runes carved into the doorframe — old work, older than my own tenure, meant to keep exactly this kind of intrusion out — have been rewritten. Not broken. Rewritten, precise and deliberate, by someone who understood the old Blood Law well enough to edit it rather than simply smash through it.

That list narrows fast, and I don’t like a single name still standing on it. Fewer than a dozen people in this entire fortress could have done this cleanly, and I’ve handed every one of them my back in a fight at some point in the last five years. Whoever this is, I’ve already trusted them with my life. That’s going to make killing them a great deal harder than it should be.

The questions have to wait.

The alarm bell starts ringing somewhere below us, wrong and frantic, three short strikes repeated over and over instead of the long single toll that means fire. I don’t wait to work out what it means — Zalie’s half a step behind me, both of us taking the stairs down toward the courtyard two at a time.

By the time we clear the last landing, a crowd’s already gathered in a loose, frightened ring around the well, nobody willing to get close enough to help and nobody willing to look away either.

We find Dell Harmon — a farmer I’ve known twenty years, harvested clean of half his memory during the first wave of attacks and only recently returned to his family — standing over his own wife with a hay hook raised, screaming that she’s wearing his real wife’s face.

“Get back!” His voice cracks with terror, not rage, which lands worse. “You’re not her. You’re one of them, I know what you are, I’ve seen what you do⁠—”

“Dell.” My voice comes out level despite everything in me wanting to shout, both hands raised as I close the distance slowly. Every part of me wants this over in one motion instead of ten careful words, and I hold it down anyway, because putting him on the ground solves nothing his wife has to live with tomorrow. “Look at me. That’s Mara. That’s your wife.”

“They gave me back pieces and told me they were whole!” He doesn’t lower the hook. “I remember losing her. I remember the funeral. Nobody has a funeral for somebody who’s still standing right in front of them!”

His wife hasn’t moved, hasn’t spoken, standing frozen with both hands raised in front of her like surrender might be the only language left that reaches him.

Zalie’s already moving, pulling dried herbs from the pouch at her hip and crushing them fast between her palms, murmuring something under her breath that raises the hair on my arms. She throws the mixture into the space between Dell and his wife, and pale smoke blooms outward, catching the lantern light silver instead of gray.

“Breathe it in, Dell.” Her voice stays even, calm, and she doesn’t come any closer than she has to. “It won’t hurt you. It won’t let a lie sit comfortably in your chest anymore either.”

He breathes it in because he doesn’t have a reason left to refuse, hook still raised, chest heaving. And then, slow, his whole face crumples — not into rage this time, but grief, raw and immediate, as something false peels itself loose from something true and leaves him standing in the wreckage of both.

“Mara.” His voice breaks entirely. The hook drops from his hand and hits the ground. “Mara, I’m sorry, I don’t — I don’t know what that was, I don’t know why I thought⁠—”

His wife’s already moving, already pulling him down into her arms while he shakes apart, and around them the rest of the courtyard slowly remembers how to breathe. An old woman near the well starts crying in relief instead of fear, and somewhere behind me I hear one of the healers whisper a prayer of thanks that nobody died.

We get Dell settled, get his wife looked at by Jazine’s people, and by the time the courtyard’s quiet again, my hands have stopped shaking from the adrenaline. Whatever’s doing this learned something new tonight. It isn’t just stealing memory anymore. It’s planting lies inside the memories it gives back, precise enough to turn the people we save into weapons against the people who love them.

The walls of this Keep were supposed to mean something. Tonight proved they don’t, not against an enemy that’s already figured out how to walk through them wearing a familiar face.

I find the missing journal’s absence eating at me long after the courtyard clears, and I go back to what’s left of Koira’s collection to see what else might have been taken. I stop by her door first, just long enough to watch her sleep through the gap I leave it cracked at, a guard posted outside this time instead of just good intentions — steady breathing, one hand curled loose against the pillow, nothing about her matching the wreckage this fortress keeps handing both of us. I don’t wake her. I make myself walk away instead, which costs more than it should for something this small. The room’s quiet enough now to hear my own pulse, lantern burning low.

I’m three pages into the least damaged one when the ink shifts under my eyes — not fading, not smearing. Writing itself, fresh and wet-black, across a page that was blank a heartbeat ago.

BRING YOUR BLOOD TO ROWAN HOLLOW.

I go very still, reading it twice to be sure I’m not imagining it. The words don’t disappear. Beneath them, a second line finishes writing itself while I watch, letter by letter, patient as a threat that knows it doesn’t need to hurry.

OR THE WITCH WILL REMEMBER WHY HER GRANDMOTHER DIED.

Whatever wrote across a dying boy’s wound in the rain wanted me obedient. This is quieter, colder, aimed at a different kind of surrender — not my blade arm, but Zalie’s oldest wound, and it knows precisely where that wound sits. That distinction matters more than the demand itself.

THIRTEEN

KALTHOR

Sixty warriors ride behind us toward Rowan Hollow, and I’ve spent the last hour planning this assault the way I’d plan one with any commander whose judgment I trust with my life — because that’s exactly what Zalie’s become, whether either of us has said the word out loud yet or not.