Orc’s Thorns (The Veil Lands #9)

1. Xela

ONE

XELA

The forest wants me dead.

I feel it before I see it—a pressure against my skin, a warning that starts in my gut and spreads outward until even my teeth ache.

Briargrave rises from the flatlands like a wall of black-green fury, its treeline so sharp it looks drawn by a blade.

No gradual thinning of vegetation. No softening at the edges.

Just grass, then nothing, then the dark.

Pre-dawn light bleeds across the sky, gray and cold. I’ve been standing here for ten minutes. Long enough to check my weapons. Long enough to reconsider.

I don’t reconsider.

Three months of tracking have led me to this exact spot.

Three months of following rumors, bribing merchants, sleeping in ditches and barns and one memorable night beneath a bridge while a patrol of Consortium thugs searched for someone matching my description.

The contract on Tharos Blackroot is worth more gold than I’ve earned in five years combined.

Enough to disappear. Enough to become someone else. Enough to stop running.

My fingers find the hilt of my left blade, trace the familiar groove worn into the leather wrapping. The balance is right. The grip is right. Everything about this hunt has been right, except for the part where I’m about to walk into a forest that hasn’t let anyone walk out in four decades.

I check my weapons again. Can’t help it.

Twin blades of good steel, the edges honed sharp enough to split a hair.

Crossbow of dwarven make, compact enough to fire without a brace but accurate at sixty yards.

Sixteen bolts in the quiver at my hip. Four more hidden in my boot.

Knives in my belt, my jacket, the sheath strapped to my thigh.

I’m never unarmed. I’m never comfortable being unarmed.

The world has taught me what happens to people who can’t defend themselves.

Somewhere behind me, the sun threatens to rise.

I don’t wait for it. Dawn won’t make Briargrave any less dangerous, and the contract specifies proof of death.

A head. The orc’s head, specifically, delivered to a drop point three days’ ride south.

Simple work, the Consortium’s handler said when she pressed the sealed contract into my palm.

Find the monster. Kill the monster. Collect the payment.

She didn’t mention the forest eats people.

She didn’t mention the forest remembers.

I step forward. The grass is wet with dew beneath my boots, and then it isn’t—then there’s nothing but bare earth and the first twisted roots of Briargrave’s outer defenses, and the air changes so fast I nearly choke on it.

Heavy. Damp. Thick with rot and a sweeter note underneath. Sap, maybe. Or old blood.

The sounds cut off. One moment, I can hear the distant call of birds in the flatlands behind me. The next, nothing. Not silence—worse than silence. The absence of anything that isn’t the forest.

I move. The undergrowth swallows me whole.

Thirty yards in, I find the first body.

The skeleton isn’t fresh—it’s been here for years, maybe decades. Vines have grown through the ribcage, threading between bones like fingers interlaced in prayer. The skull faces the path I’m walking, jaw hanging open in an eternal scream.

One arm reaches toward the treeline, toward escape.

The arm is still wearing a gauntlet. Good steel, barely rusted. Worth a small fortune to the right buyer.

I don’t touch it.

Cyrilla would have taken it. Would have pried the gauntlet free and stuffed it in her pack, laughing about how the dead don’t need coin. That was before she understood what Briargrave does to thieves. Before she walked into this forest and never came back.

Don’t think about Cyrilla.

I step around the skeleton and keep moving. The path ahead isn’t really a path—it’s more of a gap between the undergrowth, barely wide enough for my shoulders. Thorns catch at my armor, my skin, drawing blood in thin lines that I have to wipe away before it drips.

The forest doesn’t like blood on its floor. I don’t know how I know that. I just do.

The light is wrong here. Not dark, exactly—I can see well enough to navigate.

But the quality of the light has shifted.

Everything has a greenish tint, as if I’m looking at the world through stained glass.

The canopy above is so thick that even the approaching dawn can barely penetrate, filtering down in scattered patches that illuminate nothing useful.

I’ve been in dangerous places before. The Crimson Vale, where the ground itself bleeds if you cut it.

The Ashen Wastes, where magical fallout has turned the sand to glass and the glass to teeth.

I’ve fought things that used to be human and things that never were, taken contracts that other hunters refused, and survived when everyone said I wouldn’t.

This is different.

The trees are watching me.

Not metaphorically. Not the vague half-imagined surveillance of any strange place. The bark on these trees has ridges that split into thorned protrusions, patterned into the suggestion of watching faces.

I walk faster.