Page 21 of Orc’s Hex

“That’s not going to satisfy him.”

“No.”

“You’re going to have to decide how far you’ll go to protect this.”

It’s the closest Varek has ever come to asking the question outright—not the political question, the other one, the one about what exactly Drazhul is protecting and why the answer matters more than it should for a five-day-old contract. Drazhul looks at him and doesn’t answer it, because he doesn’t have an answer yet that he trusts himself to say out loud.

Varek reads the silence the way he reads everything. Accurately.

“All right,” he says. Which is, from Varek, a kind of promise.

He goes to the door. Stops with his hand on it.

“For what it’s worth,” Varek says, not turning around, “she held her ground in your chambers when anyone else would have run. She’s been in this hold two days and already reads your foundation stone better than your archivist does. If Blood Law’s decided she’s significant, Blood Law isn’t wrong very often.”

He leaves before Drazhul can answer that either.

Drazhul stands alone in his chambers with the morning going gray to pale gold outside the single window. He looks at his own hand. At the mark that isn’t there, on the wrist that isn’t hers.

This is not the same as the first time. She didn’t run.

Then he binds his own arm, because Brynna has enough to do today, and he goes to find out what Brakka intends to say in front of the whole senior council about a mark he had no more choice in than the woman wearing it did.

FIVE

DRAZHUL

He knew about the assembly before Varek told him.

Not because anyone warned him—his senior council doesn’t warn him, they convene and send word and expect him to arrive. But he’d seen the signs building since morning: Elder Brakka moving through the corridor outside the Blood Archive with the deliberate purpose of a man who has arranged something and is satisfied with it. Varek saying nothing when Drazhul asked how the garrison had responded to the night watch report. The Great Hall torches lit higher than usual at noon, the oak tables lined and set, the senior clan seats occupied by midafternoon.

They want her gone.

He’d known that since the floor cracked in front of the whole household the night she arrived.

He finds Ziva in the corridor outside the Blood Archive thirty seconds before he’s due to walk into the Great Hall.

She’s waiting there. Not hiding, not pacing—standing with her back to the wall in the exact posture she uses when she’s reading stone, except there’s no stone here worth reading, which means she’s using the posture to hold herself still for a different reason.

“You know what’s about to happen in there,” he says.

“I know what a challenge looks like in every fortress I’ve ever worked in. Yours won’t be different in the shape of it. Just the stakes.”

“You could leave. Before it starts. No one would fault you for not standing in the middle of a succession argument that isn’t yours.”

She looks at him the way she looks at a curse structure she’s already decided how to dismantle.

“I’m not leaving.”

He looks at her for a long moment. There’s assessment in it—there’s always assessment with him—but that’s not all of it, and hasn’t been for a few days now.

“Good.”

One word. Low and absolute. It’s not much of a thing to carry into a room where his own council is about to try to take a decision away from him, but he finds it’s enough.

Her eyes drop, briefly, to his cracked ribs beneath the shirt, the strapping Brynna put on that morning visible in the way he’s holding himself. She doesn’t say anything about it. She doesn’t need to—he can see her cataloging it, filing it under things that could go wrong in the next ten minutes, and choosing not to voice the concern because voicing it wouldn’t change anything about what he’s about to walk into.

“If it goes wrong in there,” she says, “if Brakka gets the numbers he thinks he has⁠—“