Page 24 of Orc’s Harvest

I find her in the granary an hour later, exhausted, bloodied, streaked with grain dust and someone else’s blood both, kneeling beside Darrow where he’s slumped against the wall looking hollowed out in an entirely different way than before. Jazine’s already checking his pulse, murmuring something low and steady that seems to be keeping him tethered. Zalie’s alive. She’s whole. I cross the room without a single word and pull her against me hard enough that she makes a small, surprised sound against my chest.

“You’re covered in someone else’s blood.” My voice doesn’t come out as steady as I’d like.

“Most of it’s Darrow’s. He’s fine. He gave more than he should have, and he’s fine anyway.” She presses her face into my shoulder for one long moment, then pulls back to look at me properly, checking me the same thorough way I’ve just checked her. “You’re bleeding too.”

“Not mine either.”

“That’s not reassuring, given the state of this room.”

She doesn’t laugh, not quite, but something in her shoulders loosens that hasn’t loosened since we rode through the gate.

Neither of us remembers afterward who moved first — fierce and unguarded, fear and fury and relief tangled so completely I can’t separate what belongs to which feeling anymore. Her hands fist in my shirt like she’s checking I’m real, the same way I’m checking she is.

“Did it fool you?” She asks it against my mouth, not quite steady. “The thing wearing my face. Tell me honestly.”

“For about three seconds.” I pull back far enough to see her properly. “It had your face. Your voice. Every memory it could have stolen off you. It didn’t have the first idea how you love, though. That’s not something a thing like that can steal, because it isn’t sitting in a memory somewhere waiting to be lifted. It’s just you. All the way through.”

“How do you know how I love?”

“Because you don’t ask me to save you at the cost of everyone else in this fortress. You never have. That’s not something it could fake, because it doesn’t know you well enough to know it needed to.”

Something passes between us that stays unnamed, not with half the fortress still smoldering outside this room and wounded still waiting on both our hands. She doesn’t ask me to say more than that. I don’t offer more either. But she doesn’t look away, and neither do I, and for tonight that’s an answer enough for both of us.

Nobody in that courtyard will sleep easy again knowing how close it came to working.

She doesn’t go back to her own room that night. Her own room’s still torn apart from the search, mattress slashed, the memory of the intrusion sitting in every corner, and she tells me flatly that she refuses to let whoever did that decide where she sleeps tonight, of all nights.

So she comes to mine instead.

The climb up to the command tower takes longer than it should, both of us slowed by wounds neither of us mentions, as warriors still sweep the lower halls for anything that might have survived the reversal. Nobody stops us. Nobody says a word, though I catch more than one of them watching us go with an expression that isn’t quite surprise. She stops once on the landing to catch her breath, and I use the excuse to tip her chin up and kiss her slow, unhurried, like we have every minute left in the world instead of half a night before duty finds us again.

I haven’t brought anyone up to these chambers in five years of holding this command. Tonight I don’t hesitate over it at all, her hand warm and certain in mine as we climb the last of the stairs, past the narrow window that looks out over miles of black wheat gone dark and quiet under a sky finally clearing of smoke.

She steps through the door ahead of me, and for one full breath, standing in the doorway of a room that’s never belonged to anything but duty before tonight, neither of us says a single word.

I pull the door shut behind us, iron latch falling into place with a sound that should mean safety.

Somewhere far beneath us — three levels down, past stone that’s held for five hundred years — something shifts that has no business shifting at all. Faint. Patient. Gone before I can decide whether I imagined it.

I don’t mention it to her. Not tonight.

SEVENTEEN

KALTHOR

I half expect to find the room empty when I finally get free of the courtyard’s aftermath — wounded settled, Varok posted at the tower door with strict instructions to interrupt for nothing short of the Keep actually falling, every excuse for delay finally exhausted.

She’s not gone. She’s on the balcony instead, wrapped in one of my shirts that hangs to her knees, sleeves rolled past her wrists, looking out over the wheat like she’s been standing in this exact spot her whole life instead of one hour. Firelight from the courtyard below catches loose strands of her hair. She’s infuriatingly at home in a room that’s only ever meant duty to me before tonight, and that undoes me faster and more completely than any calculated seduction could.

I lock the door behind me. The sound of it turns her around, firelight catching along one bare shoulder where the shirt’s slipped loose.

“You’re still here.”

“Where else would I be?” She tosses it off easily, like the question doesn’t deserve a real answer, which it probably doesn’t.

“Are you certain about this?”

“I’ve been certain since the Circle of Seasons.” She crosses the room toward me, bare feet silent on stone that’s never had anyone’s bare feet on it before tonight. “Impatient since the ruined mill. Ask me something I don’t already have an answer for.”