Orc’s Oath (The Veil Lands #3)

Chapter 1 Kielyne

ONE

KIELYNE

The smell hits me first. Copper and char. Burning grain and something sweeter underneath—the stench of opened bellies cooking in the midday sun.

I step over a dead man’s hand, fingers still curled around a broken sword hilt, and scan the wreckage of the supply convoy.

Three wagons, two overturned and one still smoldering.

Bodies scattered between them like discarded toys.

Carrion birds circle overhead, patient. They know the feast is coming.

My boots squelch in the mud. Not mud. I stopped thinking about what that particular texture actually is years ago.

The Bloodscar Plains stretch endlessly around me, pale grass bleached by sun and salted by old blood, whispering in the hot wind.

Rusted siege engines jut from the earth in the distance like the ribs of buried giants.

This land remembers every death that’s happened on it.

Thousands of fathers. Thousands of sons.

All of them rotting into the same indifferent soil.

I crouch beside the first body that matters—a wagon driver, middle-aged, arrow shaft protruding from his shoulder. His chest rises. Falls. Rises again.

Still alive.

My satchel is already open, hands moving with the efficiency of too much practice.

Snap the shaft. Pack the wound. Ignore his screaming.

The sound fades into background noise, same as the flies buzzing, same as the distant caw of the birds.

I’ve done this so many times, my fingers work without my brain’s permission.

“Hold still.” I press a poultice of yarrow and comfrey against the ragged flesh. “Stop squirming or you’ll bleed out before I can stop it.”

He whimpers something about his wife. They always do. I tie off the bandage, check his pulse—thready but present—and move on.

Three more survivors among the humans. I work through them methodically: a boy barely old enough to shave with a gash across his ribs, a merchant woman who took a club to the skull and won’t wake up no matter how much I call her, a guard sergeant whose leg is bent at an angle that legs aren’t meant to bend.

I set the bone while two other survivors hold him down.

His screams echo across the empty plain and nobody comes to investigate.

Nobody ever does.

The sun beats down, relentless. Sweat plasters my shirt to my back, mingles with the dried blood crusting under my fingernails.

My waterskin is nearly empty. My herb pouches are running low.

I’ve been out here for three days, following the trail of a skirmish that turned into a rout that turned into this particular massacre, and I’m reaching the end of what I can do alone.

Then I see him.

Green skin. Broad frame built like a war machine. Tusks jutting from a slack jaw, one of them cracked and weeping blood.

An orc.

He’s sprawled behind an overturned wagon, half-hidden by a tangle of spilled crates and torn canvas. Someone left him for dead. Judging by the amount of blood soaking the ground around him, they had reason to think he would be.

I approach slowly, one hand on the knife at my belt. Not that a knife would do much against an orc warrior, even a wounded one. They’re faster than they look, stronger than they have any right to be, and even half-dead, they can tear a human apart before the human realizes they’re in danger.

But his chest is moving. Barely. The wheeze of punctured lungs, the rattle of blood where blood shouldn’t be.

Life is life.

Marta’s voice, rising unbidden from fifteen years past. I was twelve, hollow-eyed and starving, and she was pulling me out of a root cellar full of ashes and the memory of screaming.

We don’t get to choose whose life matters, girl. Flesh tears the same. Hearts stop the same. You learn to save them or you learn to live with the ghosts of everyone you didn’t.

I crouch beside the orc. His armor is torn open across his left side, ribs visible through the mess of tissue and crusted gore. Someone took an axe to him. The wound is deep but clean—no fragments, no poison. Just brutal trauma that should have killed him hours ago.

His skin burns hot under my fingers, even for an orc. Fever setting in. Bad sign.

I work fast. Thread the needle with catgut. Pour grain alcohol over the wound and ignore his unconscious flinch. Start closing the gaping edges of flesh, pulling them together with tiny, precise stitches while flies buzz around my head and the sun tries to cook us both.

He’s gray-green, skin mottled with what looks like old pox scars. Built like a boulder—shorter than most orcs but twice as wide, all muscle and bone. His left hand is missing three fingers. Old wound, long healed. This one knows how to survive damage.

Forty-three stitches. I count them as I go, the way I count everything—bodies, breaths, heartbeats. The rhythm keeps me focused. Keeps me from thinking about what I’m actually doing, kneeling in orc blood on a human battlefield, saving an enemy while my own people rot around me.

Traitor. The word surfaces unbidden. Collaborator. Orc-lover.

I’ve heard them all before. Usually right before someone decides I’m more useful dead than alive.

The orc’s breathing steadies as I finish the last stitch. Still unconscious, still burning with fever, but alive. His pulse thuds steadily under my fingertips when I check his neck—stronger than it has any right to be.

“You’re welcome.” I wipe my hands on a rag that stopped being clean hours ago. “Try not to die. I’m running low on thread.”

I push to my feet, knees aching, back screaming. The sun has shifted. Hours have passed. The shadows grow long, stretching across the corpse-strewn road like grasping fingers.

Time to go.

I gather my supplies, inventory what’s left: three doses of willow bark extract, two of poppy, one roll of bandages, half a pouch of yarrow. Not enough to do much good if I find another battle’s aftermath. But there’s a trading post two days east, and if I walk through the night—

Hoofbeats.

My hand finds my knife before I consciously register the sound. Dust cloud on the eastern ridge, maybe a dozen riders, moving fast. The banner snapping above them is familiar—Eastern Regiment, Third Company.

My old company.

Shit.

I don’t run. Running marks you as prey, and prey gets chased. Instead, I stand my ground beside the overturned wagon, one hand resting casually on my satchel, the other loose at my side. Just a medic doing her job. Nothing suspicious here.

The riders slow as they approach, spreading out to encircle the wreckage. Professional formation. These aren’t fresh recruits—they’re veterans, hard-eyed and efficient, hands resting on weapons.

I recognize their leader before he pulls off his helmet.

Sergeant Torvin. Average height, average build, face like a clenched fist. We served in the same camp for six months, two winters ago.

He watched me set a human soldier’s broken arm and called me competent.

Watched me stitch an orc prisoner’s wounds and called me something else entirely.

“Well, well.” He swings down from his horse, boots hitting the blood-mud with a squelch. “Kielyne Aelwyn. Fancy meeting you here.”

“Torvin.” I keep my voice flat. Neutral. “Convoy was hit this morning. Raiders, from the look of it. I’ve been treating survivors.”

“Have you?” He steps closer, picking his way through the debris. His men dismount behind him, fanning out. One of them moves toward the wagon where I left the unconscious orc.

Don’t look. Don’t react.

“Human survivors, I hope.” Torvin’s smile doesn’t reach those flat, pale eyes. “Or have you been tending to your real patients?”

“I tend whoever’s breathing. You know that.”

“Sergeant!” The soldier by the wagon, his voice cracking on the word. “There’s a greenback here. Alive.”

Torvin’s smile widens. Nothing pleasant in it.

“Alive.” He repeats the word softly, savoring it. “And bandaged, I’d wager. Stitched up nice and neat.” He turns back to me, and there’s nothing friendly left in his face. “Funny thing, that. An orc raider survives an ambush, and there’s Kielyne Aelwyn, standing over him with blood on her hands.”

“I’m a medic. It’s what I do.”

“No.” He’s close now, close enough that I can smell the horse sweat and leather, the sour edge of a man who’s been riding hard for days. “What you do is treason. What you do is aid the enemy while good men—human men—die because you wasted supplies on tusk-faced savages.”

My back hits the wagon wheel. I didn’t realize I was retreating.

“There’s a bounty on you now.” Torvin pulls a folded paper from his belt, shakes it open.

My face stares back at me, rendered in rough charcoal, above a list of crimes I’ve supposedly committed.

“Commander Hadrin himself signed it. Ten gold marks for the traitor medic. Dead or alive.” His grin sharpens. “Though dead pays better.”

I calculate my options. Knife in my boot. Wagon wheel at my back. Twelve armed soldiers in a loose circle, all of them watching me with various expressions of contempt and anticipation.

Bad odds. Very bad odds.

“Torvin.” I force my voice steady. “I saved your lieutenant’s arm. Remember? When the gangrene set in and every other medic said to take it off, I—”

“And then you saved an orc’s leg.” He cuts me off, voice cold. “Same week. Same supplies. You gave our enemy what should have gone to our men.”

“It was a prisoner. He was going to be interrogated. He needed to be conscious for—”

“He was an orc.” Torvin’s hand closes around my wrist, fingers digging into the bone. “And you’re an orc-lover. And now you’re going to pay for it.”

I twist, trying to break his grip. His other hand slams into my cheek, stars exploding across my vision. Copper floods my mouth. My knee comes up, instinct more than strategy, and Torvin grunts as it connects with his thigh—not where I was aiming, but close enough to make him stumble.