Page 27 of Orc’s Hex

“No,” I say. “We’re not.”

“And the Bondmark.” Now I do look at him. “The sigil responding to what happened in your chambers this morning—it’s registered me as the most significant threat to the bloodline’s extinction it’s encountered yet. I’m not just close to you. I’m close to you while actively working to end it.”

Drazhul turns.

His eyes in the gray afternoon light, steady on my face with the full attention he gives to things that matter—and I’ve been in this hold long enough to know that attention isn’t a small thing from him.

“I know what this means,” I say. “I know what the escalation looks like going forward—the surges harder and faster, the hallucinations more intense, the risk higher every time we’re in proximity. I know what I’m choosing by staying.”

I hold his gaze.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

He is quiet a long moment. Something in his face settles in the way it settles when a decision is already made.

“Good.”

One word. Low and absolute. The wind takes it almost before I’ve registered it and then it’s gone into the mountain air, but it was there.

Drazhul’s gaze drops to my wrist for a half-second. He knows what he’s looking at. He looks back at my face.

“The mechanism,” he says. “The sigil targeting through attachment.” His eyes move to the middle distance for a moment. “How deep does it go.”

“What do you mean.”

“The targeting threshold. What distance. What degree of—“ He stops. Reframes. “What does close enough mean to it.”

He’s asking what he’s allowed to be. What the curse will reach for and what it won’t.

A hundred and sixty-five years of rationing himself against every person he’s known, and he’s asking me where the line is.

“I don’t know the exact threshold yet. What I know is that it scales—the stronger the attachment, the harder the response. What I also know is that the bond is already marked. The sigil has already registered us as significant. Staying close isn’t going to make that substantially worse.”

He doesn’t fully contain what crosses his face.

Good, that look says. That’s what it says—I’m close enough to read it.

He turns back to the valley.

“Then we stay close. And we work fast.”

“That’s the plan.”

“The personnel records. The archive.”

“Isen has pulled what I need. I’m looking for who’s had consistent lower corridor access in the past year—anyone with Blood Law practitioner training in the household. He’ll have it ready.”

“He will. He’s been waiting for someone to ask the right questions for six years.”

“He told me. Several times.”

Drazhul makes a sound—faint, dry. The closest thing to amusement I’ve heard from him.

This is one of the things his face does when he’s not performing discipline at it: this very small, very dry humor that arrives without warning and without flagging itself. I like it more than is professionally advisable.

The storm front is moving faster than I expected. The sky to the north has gone fully dark. The torch in the nearest bracket is fighting hard and losing. The light between us keeps shifting, his face in and out of shadow.

He’s a difficult face to look away from.