Page 27 of Pumpkin Spiced Orc
Then he smacks my back, gruff.
“You better fight for her,” he mutters. And he means: fight with your silence reversed, your guard lowered, your voice earned.
I walk back through the orchard, the cold turning gradually to bright sameness, petals thawing into shine. I think of Ivy—her curls catching frost, tears hidden in the morning before the Harvest’s hush. I think of the way she mirrored me under that oak—the vulnerability in her spine, the way she let me cradle her fear beneath bark when everything else inside me was stone.
I realize: I’ve been doing what I always do—hiding in quiet, telling everything except the most important truth.
I reach the heart tree again. Petals drift like ashes. The leaves whisper in soft gusts overhead. I trace the glyph spiral I once carved, now smoothed by rain and time. I kneel and press a hand into cool bark until the memory roots under my skin and spreads warmth to my chest.
She appears, moving through the branches silent as breeze. I don’t flinch.
“You talked to him?” she asks.
I nod, careful.
“You told him...?”
“He knew before I did.”
I shut up before I say the wrong thing.
She squats beside me, ripping frost-slick leaves from the sprouting roots, weaving them into little bundles like ritual. “I cried tonight,” she whispers.
I look at her, heart flinching. “Brody told me.”
She nods, eyes bright with tears but fierce. “You ever hear the part where someone breaks your heart and says you shouldn’t blame them because they were scared?”
I close my eyes. “No.”
She looks at me, and the orchard shifts. Light drips through branches, blossoms trembling.
“I forgive you,” she says.
The silence that follows is soft rain.
I lift her hand, press a crooked thumb over her palm.
“I’m sorry,” I say, voice cracked and steady.
She leans into it.
I trace the spiral again. “One truth at a time,” I murmur.
She nods.
The orchard listens, branches bowing.
And I finally feel rooted—not in fear, but in a vow I can keep.
CHAPTER 17
IVY
Fog clings to the orchard this morning, thick enough that even the brightest blossoms seem muted in the gray light, as though they’re waking from some long, fevered dream. I’m halfway down the porch steps before I realize I’m not carrying a plan—just a sense of dread rolling through me like unsettled wind. The air is cold, damp in the way that seeps inside bones, and each inhalation tastes of earth and dust and secrets I don’t want to uncover, but feel compelled to anyway.
I haven’t slept in days, not since Brody’s confrontation. Not since I realized the anger I harbored wasn’t just at Garruk—it was at my father too, the man who built me an orchard and spelled out devotion in root and sap, and never told me what rooted him to that land first.
My feet guide me toward the attic. Cobwebbed and dusty, cluttered with boxes labeledDad’s Tools,Mom’s Dresses,Christmas Decorations, andVanished Things. I pull back a tarp on an old chest in the corner, the wood warped but sturdy, and inside—among letters, a tarnished lantern, a faded photograph of a younger father smiling in the orchard—there’s a thick leather envelope sealed with wax. My name on it, in his handwriting.
