Page 47 of Orc’s Hex

I’ve been watching the advisor chambers for three days.

I asked Setha this morning when she last maintained the sigil before my arrival. She told me: three days before I came. Which means the fresh blood I found in the channels on my second night here—the blood that was still moving when I crouched over it—was not hers. Someone else was in that chamber that night. Someone whose maintenance schedule doesn’t match Setha’s and who knew I was already in the building.

The inconsistencies have been accumulating in the back of my mind the way evidence accumulates when you’re deliberately not pushing at it too hard. Fresh blood at the sigil before my first visit—and not Setha’s, I confirmed that this morning when she told me her maintenance schedule. Blood Law oath displacement patterns in the advisor chambers that read wrong every time I walk past them. Not possession. Not curse contamination. Older and cleaner—a consciousness operating in a borrowed body, leaving traces in the oath stone that a body-hopper would have no reason to know she’s leaving. The friction of two people’s oath-weight inhabiting one body. A signature no Blood Law framework accounts for, unless you know what you’re looking for.

I know what those traces mean. I’ve seen them once before, early in my career, in a practitioner three hundred miles from here who’d been wearing the same body for forty years. The host knew nothing of it. The gap read to her like dreamless sleep.

I’ve known what I was looking for since day four.

I arranged the room before I entered.

What I noticed in the oath stone outside these chambers three days ago—I know now what it was.

The advisor chambers sit on the hold’s third level, east wing—documentation rooms and small assembly space, connected by a corridor that loops back to the main passage. I chose the inner room deliberately: one entrance, no windows wide enough to matter, oath stone in the floor like everywhere else in Blackscar but thinner here, closer to the surface.

Containment marks on the door frame. Absorption vials in my left coat pocket, ritual knife along my forearm, grip accessible.

She knows.

The woman sitting at the writing desk is named Maret—council scribe, sixty-three, six months in Blackscar. She has her pen in hand and a document in front of her and she’s doing an excellent impression of someone who hasn’t noticed me come through the door and draw containment lines on the threshold.

“You can stop.”

Maret’s pen slows.

Stops.

She sets it on the desk with the precise care of someone who has been inhabiting borrowed hands long enough to know they require deliberate management. Then she looks up.

There it is. Maret’s eyes, when she looked at people, had the distracted quality of someone pulled from work they care about. What looks out of them now has no distraction in it at all. Ancient patience. The gaze of someone who has been watching this hold—this bloodline—for a very long time.

“Curse-eater.” Maret’s voice, but the cadence under it is different—ancient and measured in the rhythm of it, chosen carefully. “I’ve been wondering when you’d come to this room.”

“Since day four. I needed more evidence before I made the accusation.”

“Professional of you.”

“I am a professional.”

She almost smiles. It doesn’t reach the eyes—those eyes belong to someone else now. “Yes. That’s rather the problem, isn’t it.”

She rises without urgency.

The body she’s wearing carries itself differently now—straighter, more deliberate, every gesture measured. Maret’s natural posture was slightly hunched, a scholar’s stoop. What stands in front of me now doesn’t hunch.

“You’ll want to know who I am.”

“I already know who you are. House Mervyn—Sorvaine’s line, or what it became. You’ve been body-hopping for three centuries, maintaining the Betrayal Sigil since before anyone in this hold was born. Maret is the latest host. She won’t remember any of this.”

She looks at me the way she looked at the sigil—measuring the depth before committing. “You’ve been thorough.”

“Isen Crow has six years of evidence I confirmed in three days. He’s thorough. I just asked the right questions.”

“The archive boy.” Not dismissive—acknowledging. “He found the maintenance layers?”

“He found the edits to the maintenance layers. Someone has been doing scholarship on the Betrayal Sigil for two centuries, refining its targeting, improving its efficiency. The handwriting across three centuries isn’t the same. You’ve been teaching your successors how to do the work.”

“Not successors. Hosts. My work. The knowledge moves with me.”