Page 40 of Orc’s Harvest

Grief never let her stop working the problem: alongside everything else, she spent decades afterward chasing fragments of her daughter instead of letting Navy go, and some of what she changed later, driven by grief rather than clear judgment, destabilized the network further than it had ever been before.

That instability didn’t stop at the wardlines. It reached backward too, in the clumsy, grief-blind way Koira’s early repairs always did—pulling at threads she never meant to touch, including the ones holding my earliest memories in place. I was barely two when it happened. Old enough that some part of me should have kept her voice, her smell, some fragment of being held. The network took that along with everything else it was bleeding, and Koira never told me why the space where a mother should have lived in my memory came up empty. She let me believe grief alone accounted for the blank space. It didn’t.

“Why didn’t she tell me?” I ask the memory directly, my voice smaller than I want it to be, echoing off stone that’s heard three hundred years of the same question and answered exactly none of them honestly. “Any of it. All these years, and she let me believe the accident was simply an accident.”

“She wanted you to inherit the farm.” The memory doesn’t dress up the answer. “Not the guilt. She thought silence would spare you both.”

“It didn’t spare me anything.” I have to stop and swallow before I can finish. “It just meant I carried the guilt anyway, without the truth to make sense of carrying it. You can’t protect somebody from a burden by hiding where it came from. You just make them carry it blind.”

I think of the torn half-sheet I found in her cellar the first night this all began, her handwriting cut off mid-warning: Zalie was never meant to carry —. I know how it ends now. I finish it myself, out loud, to nobody but the dead. “Alone. I was never meant to carry it alone. She just never found a way to say the rest of it while she still could.”

The Heart tries its oldest trick next, whispering that I could have both of them back — Navy and Koira, whole, if I simply feed myself into the reservoir the way the system was always meant to be fed. The offer comes soft, patient, dressed up in a voice that almost sounds like relief. I refuse before it finishes making the offer, too tired of watching this valley call consumption mercy to fall for it dressed up as comfort.

The memory leads us instead to a massive black iron mechanism fused directly into the Heart’s roots, wrapped around thousands of trapped Life Threads — Molgar’s override, the machine built to reverse the flow, seal every return channel, and hand the Harvester King direct access to everything this Heart’s ever held. Threads pulse faint gold through the iron in slow, trapped rhythms, each one a name still waiting for a body to claim it. It can’t simply be destroyed without killing what it’s wrapped around. It has to be unmade carefully, thread by thread, the exact kind of patient work I’ve spent my whole life learning how to do in a garden instead of a war.

I don’t get the chance to start.

A door opens in the chamber wall beside the mechanism, shaped exactly like the entrance to Bouchier Farm, warm and gold with a summer light that Ashmoor’s permanent autumn has never allowed. My mother’s voice calls through it, close enough to touch, achingly real in a way nothing false has ever quite managed before.

“Zalie. Come inside before supper burns.”

I step through before Kalthor can stop me, his voice calling my name once behind me before the door seals itself shut, sunlight swallowing the gap where it stood.

The farmhouse kitchen wraps around me exactly as I remember it from childhood, except warmer, sun-drenched, summer pushing gold light through windows that have only ever known copper autumn in my whole life. Koira sits at the table shelling peas, alive, humming something under her breath I haven’t heard in three years. Navy stands at the hearth kneading bread, flour dusting her forearms, turning to smile at me as I’ve simply come home from an ordinary errand instead of a war. The smell hits me before anything else does — fresh bread, woodsmoke, the deep green of bloodroot growing exactly where it’s supposed to grow, every detail so precisely, painfully right that my chest aches just standing in the doorway taking it in.

No Hollow Men. No siege. No Kalthor.

“Stay.” Navy doesn’t ask twice. She holds out both floured hands, warm, solid, exactly as I’ve imagined them for thirty-one years without ever once getting to feel them for real. “You don’t have to fight anymore, sweetheart. Let go of the man out there. Let the Heart hold what’s left of you instead, and all of this can be permanent. No more losing people. No more burying anyone else you love.”

It doesn’t frame it as dying. It frames it as rest, and that’s what makes it dangerous — it’s found my oldest flaw and pressed directly against it. I’ve spent my whole life believing anything can be saved if I simply refuse to stay separate from it. Here’s a whole family, whole and warm and asking so little in return.

I start forgetting things almost immediately. The Keep’s western courtyard blurs first, then the granary, then the exact sound of warning bells over Rowan Hollow. I reach for Kalthor’s face and find the details sliding loose faster than I can hold them, his voice softening and growing indistinct where it used to be certain.

My hand finds the clasp fastened to his clan knife instead—the blood-forged iron he gave me on cursed ground, still hanging at my hip even here—and the second my fingers close around it, memory floods back through the gap the perfect farmhouse left open.

Not the clean version. The true one.

Rain-soaked arguments in my own kitchen. A rooftop garden with an entirely impractical pond he’ll never admit was overambitious. His fear cracking his voice raw the moment I vanished into a burning chapel. Three truths given freely behind a ritual platform, and a fourth one he never had to say out loud because I already knew it. The way he kneels in mud to fasten a knife to someone he intends to keep, and the way he tells the truth even when the truth costs him everything he was born believing he owned. None of it perfect. All of it real, scarred, imperfect, and mine in a way this sunlit kitchen will never manage to be.

“I love you,” I say it to the false Navy, and mean every word of it, more certain of it here than I’ve been of almost anything else in this entire chamber. “But I’m not going to let you become my grave. You’d never have asked this of me. The real you wouldn’t have asked me to disappear for anyone’s comfort, not even your own.”

The kitchen shatters as glass drops on stone, gold light collapsing into the same corrupted dark that’s waited under this Keep since Lorn’s End.

THIRTY-ONE

KALTHOR

She vanishes behind the sealed gate before I get within ten feet, and I don’t have time to make sense of it before Molgar steps out of the surrounding roots to block the only path after her.

Half his face still holds something recognizably human. The other half shifts continuously through faces I recognize — warriors lost at the granary, villagers from Rowan Hollow, and for one gutting second, Zalie’s own features sliding across his ruined cheek before dissolving into someone else’s. His remaining hand still carries fragments of the journal he’s held since the granary, root and paper fused into a single mass that won’t separate.

“She went willingly.” His voice carries no triumph, only that same maddening calm. “She’s finally understood what I’ve been trying to teach this whole valley. Individuality was never anything but loneliness wearing a disguise, clanlord. She’s chosen to stop being lonely.”

I can feel her on the other side of that gate — faint, frightened, and entirely, unmistakably herself. Whatever she’s fighting in there, she hasn’t stopped being the woman who told a monster to its face that love doesn’t require anyone’s disappearance. That certainty is the only thing keeping my hands steady right now.

“You’re lying.” I don’t need proof to know it. “You’ve been lying since before I ever met you.”

Molgar fights like a dozen men in one body, fragments of stolen combat styles cycling through him faster than I can adjust—an orc captain’s spear form, a hunter’s ambush crouch, and underneath both, unmistakably, pieces of my own training. My father’s training, worn like a stolen coat over a stranger’s shoulders, the same footwork Torvak drilled into me before I was old enough to hold a real blade.