Page 95 of Her Orc Healer

There. Across the circle. Raised above the ground.

She was laid out on a stone slab—no, an altar. Vines wrapped around her wrists and ankles, threaded with faintly glowing sigils. Her copper curls were spread across the surface, and her chest rose and fell, shallow, too shallow.

“No.” The word scraped out of me. I staggered toward her. Five steps. Six.

Then I slammed into something hard.

I reeled back, breath knocked from my chest. I reached forward, fingers meeting nothing—and still couldn’t move past it.

A ward. Invisible but solid. Cold against my skin. My pulse spiked.

“No—no, come on—”

I pressed both palms flat to the barrier and pushed. It didn’t give. It didn’t even ripple.

A soft laugh echoed through the stone circle.

Then Drev stepped into view from behind one of the standing stones, her dark leathers catching the cold light. The glyphs stitched into her coat shimmered faintly, silver threading through the black like veins of frost. She looked like she’d been waiting. Not out of patience. Out of certainty.

She was inside the ward.

Inside—with Maeve.

“Still cleaning up after your sister, Ro?” she asked, voice smooth as ever. Familiar and wrong all at once.

I launched myself at the barrier again, shoulder-first this time. It held. I ricocheted back with a choked breath, stumbled, caught myself on my hands. Drev didn’t flinch. She just watched. Hands in her coat pockets. My heart thundered in my chest.

“Let her go.” My voice was raw, scraped clean. “Whatever this is—whatever you want—just let her go.”

She tilted her head, almost thoughtful. “Now there’s a line I didn’t expect so soon.”

I shoved to my feet, hand pressed against the ward. “Take the shop. The coin. The house. Everything. You can have it all. Please.”

"You still think this was about money?" Drev's voice softened, but not with kindness. With something worse—pity. "It was never about coin. Never about ink or land or ledgers. That's not what your sister owed me."

Her face changed then—went quieter. Colder. The mask of casual cruelty slipping to reveal something harder beneath. She turned toward Maeve, and something in her expression made my blood run cold.

"She owed me this." She gestured to my niece's small form on the altar, like she was indicating a prize. A possession.

"She's just a child!" The words tore from my throat, raw and desperate. My fist slammed against the barrier again, though I knew it wouldn't give.

Drev's eyes never left Maeve. "No," she said, voice distant. Clinical. "She's a vessel."

She stepped closer to the altar, and I pressed myself against the ward until my bones ached, desperate to reach through, to stop her, to do anything but watch.

“Finn knew what the ritual required,” Drev said quietly, her fingers suspended above Maeve’s chest. “She agreed to it. She wanted it. Power like that doesn't come without cost, and she said she was willing to pay.”

The truth hit like a physical blow, driving the air from my lungs. "No," I whispered. “She wouldn’t—”

“She did.” Drev didn’t raise her voice. She didn’t need to. “We’d been studying the fragments left after the war. Trying to understand how the corrupted Alder magic worked—why it unraveled some people and not others. They burned most of the records, but we found the old bindings, the failed sigils, the survivor scars. We thought we could make it stable. Safely contained.”

She circled the altar slowly, eyes flicking to the vines, the runes. “The theory was simple. A willing vessel. Anchored. Alive. But when it came time to open herself to it, Finn panicked. She ran.”

Her lip curled—not in anger. In disdain.

“She thought stopping the ritual meant stopping the magic.” Drev turned her head slightly, just enough to meet my eyes. “But you don’t stop a current. You just change the path it takes.”

She looked back to Maeve, her expression unreadable.

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