Page 25 of Orc’s Hex

“The household staff,” Drazhul says first. “The Bondmark information didn’t come from the archive. Someone saw her wrist.”

“I’ll find out who.”

“Don’t punish them. Just⁠—“

“I know what to do with it.”

They’ve had this conversation in many forms. Varek’s voice has the same dry note it always does when he’s already three steps ahead of where Drazhul is in the conversation.

“Rhun’s going to need someone with him tonight.”

“Brynna’s already there.”

Varek nods. He goes.

He stands alone in the center of his Great Hall.

He looks at the floor.

The hairline crack from the first night has become a network. Seven distinct lines radiating outward from a central point near the middle of the floor, spreading in arcs toward the walls. The largest runs three full paces toward the main entrance. The deepest is wide enough to see darkness below.

He walks to the nearest crack and crouches. Puts two fingers to the edge.

The floor is warm.

Below his hand, through stone and catacomb and everything this hold is built over, the Betrayal Sigil presses back. Three floors down and it knows his touch.

Three hundred years it’s operated in silence.

Three days since she arrived.

Good.

He stands, and for a moment before he moves, he simply looks at the crack—at what three days of her presence in this hold has already done to a mechanism three centuries old and undisturbed. He has spent a hundred years believing the sigil was a fixed feature of his existence, immovable as the mountain itself. It is cracking under a woman who has been here less than a week.

He finds that he is not afraid of what that means. He examines the absence of fear and finds it doesn’t particularly concern him either.

Goes to find her.

SIX

ZIVA

Ifind him in the corridor outside the Blood Archive, which is where I expected him—close to where the work is, giving me enough time to be there when he arrived. He comes around the corner from the Great Hall direction and his gaze finds me before he’s finished turning, the way it always does, and I push off the wall I’ve been leaning on.

“Ramparts,” I say. “I want open air for this.”

He looks at me for a beat—reading whatever’s on my face—and doesn’t question it.

We go up.

The upper ramparts of Blackscar are built for endurance, not comfort. Stone parapets nearly above my head, the mountain wind through the merlons hard and constant. Nobody comes up here unless they need to. The ramparts belong to the wind and whoever needs to think without walls.

Drazhul stands at the outer parapet and looks at the valley below. The wind moves his war braids. He’s been in the Great Hall managing an assembly and fighting a possessed warrior in the past hour and he has the look of a man who has done what was needed and is done performing it.

The man doesn’t rattle. I’ve been watching him for five days and I’ve only seen him rattle once, and that was because of a curse, not because of anything a person did to him.

I’m about to test that.