Page 25 of Orc’s Harvest

We don’t go straight to the bed, though it sits waiting at the center of the room like it’s been holding its breath along with the rest of the fortress. She’s still got soot in her hair from the courtyard fires, dried blood on her hands that isn’t hers, and I want my hands on her clean before I let myself want anything else.

The bathing chamber’s fed by the same heated springwater that’s run through this tower longer than my own bloodline has held it, steam curling soft against old stone, and I work soot loose from her hair one section at a time while she sits on the stone bench with her eyes closed, letting me do it without a single argument, which might be the most unguarded I’ve ever seen her. Her shoulders drop an inch at a time the longer I work, the tension I hadn’t fully registered finally loosening under my hands.

“You’re quiet.” Low, eyes still closed.

“I’m memorizing this.” I don’t see a reason to soften it. “You’re letting me do something for you without fighting me on it first. I intend to remember exactly what that looks like.”

She opens her eyes at that, and whatever she sees in my face gets her moving — turning in the water, reaching for the cloth I’ve set aside, working it over the cuts along my ribs the exact same careful way she stitched them shut the first night I bled in front of her. Except nothing about tonight is restrained the way that night was. Every pass of her hand is a choice instead of a duty, and I feel the difference in it like a change in the weather.

“I’ve never brought anyone up here,” I say it plainly, watching her hands work. “Five years holding this tower, and this room’s belonged to nothing but the job the entire time. Maps on the walls. A locked chest I haven’t opened since my father died. A bed I use for sleeping and nothing else, because there’s never been a single person I trusted enough to want it meaning something else.”

“And now?”

“Now there’s you standing in it wearing my shirt, and I can’t remember the last time this room was anything but duty instead of a place I actually want to be standing.”

She sets the cloth aside, both hands coming up to frame my face instead, and there’s nothing careful left in her stare at all. Firelight from the hearth catches the water still beaded on her collarbone, and I lose the thread of whatever I meant to say next entirely.

“I’m not walking in here as one more obligation you’ve decided to carry.” Her thumbs trace slowly along my jaw. “I want the man underneath all of this. The commander, the axe, the armor — I’ve had those for days already. I want whoever’s left when you put all of it down.”

“I’m not entirely certain who that is anymore.” The admission comes out rougher than he means it to. “I’ve been the clanlord long enough that I’ve stopped checking whether there’s a different man still under it.”

“Then we find out. The two of us. Tonight’s as good a place to start as any.”

She’s the one who moves first, always — fingers curling into the front of my shirt, pulling me down to her mouth before I’ve finished deciding how to answer her, and I let her lead exactly as far as she wants to lead. She walks me backward out of the bathing chamber without breaking the kiss once, water still beaded on her skin, and by the time my legs find the edge of the bed, there’s no version of careful left standing anywhere in this room.

What happens after that isn’t rushed, and it isn’t careful either, not for long. I mean to go slow — conscious of my own size against hers, aware, in a way I’ve never had reason to be before, of how easily I could be too much for someone built on a human scale — but that resolve doesn’t survive her hands finding bare skin, or the sound she makes when it does. Something in me that’s spent twenty years answering to duty stops answering to anything but her, and I stop fighting it the same moment she stops making me. She makes her own opinion of careful clear in the first few minutes too, her grip finding purchase wherever it lands, her voice rough with an impatience that leaves no room for restraint on either side.

I lay her back against sheets that have held no one but me, not once in five years, and take my time learning what she looks like undone by nothing but my own hands — the way her breath catches when my mouth finds the curve of her throat, the sound she bites back and fails to fully swallow when I work lower, learning every place that makes her arch up off the bed instead of lying still beneath me. Her fingers find my hair, my shoulders, the old scars along my ribs, mapping me with the same patient thoroughness she brings to a garden bed, like she intends to memorize every inch before the night’s finished with either of us.

Every place she touches me feels like the first time anyone’s touched me on purpose rather than out of duty or fear, and I tell her exactly that against her throat, low and unguarded in a way I don’t let myself be with anyone else. She answers with my name, breathless, her hips rising to meet mine before either of us has said a word about what comes next, and when I finally sink into her, slow, deliberate, watching her face the entire way, the sound she makes isn’t anything close to careful.

Neither of us stays gentle for long after that. She wraps her legs around me and pulls me deeper with an urgency that’s stopped pretending to be patient, nails dragging down my back hard enough to leave marks I’ll carry into tomorrow, and I give her exactly what she’s asking for — slow at first, deliberate, savoring every catch of her breath and every broken sound of my name, then harder when her hips start chasing mine, when her voice goes rough and desperate and entirely too far gone to bother softening. The two of us spend a long while learning each other by feel — how she fits against me, the sound she makes when I get something right, the way her whole body goes tight and shaking when I finally give her exactly what she’s been asking for, my name breaking apart on her tongue as she comes undone beneath me. I follow her over the edge a handful of thrusts later, buried as deep in her as I can manage, her name the only word left in my mouth by the time either of us finishes.

Whatever’s left of what the Circle opened between us sharpens every point of contact past anything I’ve known with anyone else, heat and awareness doubling back on itself every time her hands find bare skin, without ever quite handing me her thoughts outright. I don’t need the words. I feel exactly how much she wants this in the way her breath catches, in the way she says my name like it’s the only word she’s held onto.

A faint pattern flickers gold across our joined hands at some point — the same shape as the wards carved into standing stone, the same shape as the runes worked into this very floor if either of us were inclined to look at anything but each other right now. We don’t stop for it. Whatever the wards are doing, they’re doing it because of what’s already happening between us, not the other way around, and I intend to prove that to her with everything left in me tonight.

Afterward, I don’t withdraw. I keep her pulled against my chest, her head tucked under my chin, one hand tracing slowly up and down her spine because I’ve apparently lost all interest in not touching her at all. Outside, the fires across the vale have burned down to embers, and the only sound left in the whole tower is her breathing finally slowing to something even.

“This isn’t temporary to me,” I say it into her hair, low, certain. “Whatever comes next, whatever this war costs either of us — this isn’t something I intend to let go of once the crisis passes.”

“I’m not asking you for promises made under a battlefield’s worth of pressure.” She tips her head back to look at me. “I don’t need you to swear anything tonight. I need you to know I’m not interested in pretending this was comfort before a fight and nothing more.”

“I can’t promise you survival. Nobody in this fortress can promise anybody that right now.” I mean every word of what comes next. “But I can promise you this — I will never again decide your future without you standing in the room to argue about it.”

She falls asleep with that promise still hanging in the air between us, and I lie awake a long while after, watching the last of the firelight move across the ceiling, entirely unwilling to close my own eyes and lose a single minute of this. Whatever tomorrow costs either of us, I intend to remember every part of tonight before it does.

EIGHTEEN

ZALIE

Hours later, with the fire burned down to coals and Kalthor asleep with one arm still heavy across my waist, I wake to gold light spreading warm beneath both our skin — not painful, not even startling, just present, tracing the same faint pattern that flickered across our hands earlier tonight, now spreading down through the floor itself like roots finding water.

The stone beneath the bed answers it. Symbols I never noticed carved into the floor stones catch the light and hold it, old work, older than this tower, older maybe than the wards themselves, patterns I don’t recognize from any of Koira’s journals, no matter how many nights I’ve spent poring over them.

And out of the gap between two stones, a black thread I don’t remember seeing before rises slowly into the room.

I freeze. Kalthor wakes the second I do, already reaching for the knife he keeps within arm’s reach even in sleep.