Orc’s Gallows (The Veil Lands #13)

Ismerie

ONE

The bell tolls, and my stomach clenches.

Not from fear. From hunger.

I hate that about myself. Hate how my body responds to the deep iron clang rolling across Blackhook City, how my pulse quickens and my mouth goes dry. The enchanted bells send waves of ending magic through the cobblestone streets, rippling outward from the Bell Towers.

The crowd surges toward the Grand Gallows, and I let myself be carried with them. Another body in a sea of bodies. Another citizen eager for the morning’s entertainment.

Gods, I’m going to be sick.

I pull my dark cloak tighter, keeping my gloved hands pressed against my sides.

The sigils tattooed on my palms itch beneath the worn leather—self-inflicted marks designed to help me channel power without losing myself to it.

Without becoming what I feed on. I carved them myself at sixteen, using a knife heated over a candle flame, biting down on a leather strap so my screams wouldn’t wake the neighbors.

The scars healed wrong, the way they always do when you brand yourself with intent.

Now they throb with each execution, reminding me what I am.

The execution square opens before me, a vast stone plaza dominated by the Grand Gallows.

Three stories of iron-and-oak construction rise against the bruised morning sky, rune-carved beams casting long shadows across cobblestones stained rust-brown from generations of blood runoff.

The stains never fully wash away. I’ve watched servants scrub at them after particularly messy hangings, watched the brown slowly creep back no matter how much lye they use.

The city bleeds. It takes its time about it.

The platform floor is stained so dark with old blood that the wood has turned black.

Death wards cover every surface, carved deep into the ancient timber in patterns that make my skin crawl.

They’re meant to contain supernatural activity, to prevent the condemned from using magic in their final moments.

The ropes are braided with witch-hair for the same reason—thick coils that suppress magical resistance, that keep practitioners docile as the noose drops around their throats.

I count the nooses hanging ready. Six today. Only one will be used this morning, but the city likes its options. Blackhook executes efficiently, the pamphlets say. Blackhook maintains order.

The crowd presses closer, and I catch fragments of conversation.

Bets on how long the drop will take. Speculation about whether the condemned will cry.

A vendor pushes through with a tray of meat pies, shouting prices that seem obscene for a hanging.

A woman near me laughs at a companion’s joke, the sound bright and careless in the iron-tinged air.

Two men argue about whether today’s witch is prettier than last week’s.

An old woman clutches prayer beads, her lips moving in silent petition—though whether she prays for the condemned or against her, I can’t tell.

This is entertainment to them. A morning’s diversion before returning to shops and trades and the comfortable rhythms of their ordinary lives.

They’ll go home after and eat their noon meals, maybe tell their families about the hanging over roasted vegetables and fresh bread.

Did you see how she trembled? Did you hear the sound when the rope caught?

Their children will learn that this is normal.

That watching people die is what citizens of Blackhook do on fine mornings.

I should judge them for it. I don’t have the right.

The drums begin.

A ripple runs through the crowd as the Execution Hall doors swing open. Guards emerge first—humans and orcs in matching black armor, their faces blank with professional detachment. Then the prisoner.

She’s young. Younger than me, barely twenty if I had to guess.

Ash-blonde hair hangs lank around a face pale with terror, and her hands are bound before her with suppression chains that glow faintly with active magic.

She stumbles on the cobblestones, nearly falls, catches herself with a grace that speaks of training. A practitioner. A witch.

Like me.

The charges are read from a scroll as the guards march her toward the gallows. Cursing a merchant’s crops. Causing blight through malicious magic. Evidence presented to the satisfaction of the City Council.

The evidence is horseshit. I know because I’ve seen the real curse-worker—an older witch with gray-streaked hair and a permanent sneer, one who paid off the right officials to ensure someone else took the fall.

I watched her leave the courthouse three days ago with a smug smile and a purse considerably lighter than when she’d entered.

The girl climbing the platform stairs didn’t curse anyone’s crops. She’s dying for another woman’s crime, another woman’s malice.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

The Gallows Warden takes his position.

I’ve seen Brannok Redrope a hundred times from this same spot, watched him perform his duties with the same brutal competence he brings to everything. But today my gaze catches on him and holds in a way it hasn’t before.

His skin is dark green, weathered by years of standing on exposed platforms in all weather, marked with pale scars that coil around his forearms like serpents.

Rope-burn marks, I realize. From executions gone wrong.

From condemned who fought the noose. Every scar tells a story of someone who refused to die quietly, and he wears them without shame.

Badge of his profession. Proof of his experience.

His tusks are polished and fitted with iron caps etched with death wards.

The caps glint in the morning light as he moves, as he takes his position beside the lever that will end a young woman’s life.

His black hair is cropped brutally short, practical for a man who works with rope and trapdoors.

A crimson sash crosses his chest—the symbol of his office, marking him as the city’s chosen instrument of ending. His eyes—

I look away before I can catalog his eyes. I don’t need to know what color they are. Don’t need to notice the way they sweep the crowd with cold assessment, cataloging threats and witnesses with equal dispassion.

He’s the enemy. The hand that pulls the lever. The man who kills people like me for a living.

He’s also keeping me alive.

The thought curdles in my gut.

The girl reaches the top of the platform. Her legs shake so badly I can see the tremor from here, but she doesn’t fall. Doesn’t beg. She’s holding herself with a dignity that twists a knife in me, a composure that suggests she’s accepted what’s coming even as every instinct screams for survival.

She’s braver than I am. She’s going to die for it, and I’ll live—and somehow that makes me the smaller of us.

The Gallows Warden speaks.

“Mira Thornwood. By order of the City Council, you are sentenced to death by hanging for the crime of malicious curse-working. May whatever gods you worship grant you mercy in the hereafter.”

Mira. Her name is Mira.

I didn’t want to know that.

The noose drops around her neck. The Gallows Warden checks the knot, the drop distance, the positioning of her feet on the trapdoor. His hands are massive, scarred across the palms from countless rope pulls, steady as stone.

They’ve never trembled. I’d bet my life on it.

I should act. Speak. Step forward and shout that the charges are lies, that the real curse-worker is walking free while an innocent girl stands on the gallows.

I don’t move. Don’t speak. Don’t do anything except stand in the crowd and wait for the power that will sustain me for another few days.

The drums fall silent.

The Gallows Warden’s hand closes on the lever.

Mira’s lips move in a final prayer—to whom, I can’t tell. Her eyes stay open, fixed on a point beyond the crowd, beyond the city, beyond anything the living can see.

The lever pulls.

The trapdoor opens.

Mira drops.

Power floods through me.

It hits with the force of a winter wave, dark and cold and impossibly sweet.

My veins blaze with sudden energy, my scars throbbing violet beneath my sleeves.

Strength floods my limbs. My spine straightens.

Each breath fills lungs that haven’t drawn this deep in weeks—and the girl on the gallows stops breathing entirely.

The sensation makes me want to vomit. It makes me want to weep. It makes me want to claw off my own skin and scream until my windpipe bleeds raw.

Instead, I stand very still and let the magic sink into my bones. Let it fill the empty spaces. Let it do what it needs to do to keep me breathing.

The rope snaps taut. The crowd exhales. A few people cheer, quickly shushed by their neighbors. The vendor with the meat pies starts calling out prices again, cutting through the returning quiet.

Another death. Another day in Blackhook City.

Then the magic kicks wrong.

A ripple runs through the power I’ve absorbed, an agitation that sets my teeth on edge. The energy I took from Mira’s execution isn’t integrating properly. It’s churning, responding to a presence that shouldn’t exist.

Not the final release that happens after violent death. Not the slow ebb of departing life. This is different.

The body twitches.

Mira’s fingers flex against her bound hands.

The gallows groan. The death wards carved into the timber flare with sickly light.

And Mira’s eyes open.

They’re not her eyes anymore. Whatever looks out from that dead face isn’t the terrified girl I watched climb the platform. This is older. Hungrier. And it’s looking directly at me.

“Sister.” A thousand voices harmonize beneath the words emerging from Mira’s throat. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The crowd explodes into chaos.

On the platform, the Gallows Warden faces the revenant with his blade drawn.