Page 5 of Orc’s Bones

Above me, the Cathedral spires held the ghostfire light in bone-stone surfaces, pale and cold, watching the way the whole city watched — without urgency, without judgment, patient in the way of a thing that had been here long before anyone walking under it and planned to be here long after.

I planned the same.

The Archive would tell me what I was working against.

TWO

THRUK

She arrived twenty minutes early.

He’d expected that too.

What he hadn’t expected was the way she moved through the authority chamber — not like someone who’d been away four years, not with the careful inventory-taking that visitors always produced, that half-second hesitation at the threshold where people clocked the space and decided where to put themselves. She walked in like she owned the room and had simply been absent for a while. Head up. Pace even. One sweep of the chamber — pillars, dais, Varek at the left wall — and then her gaze landed on Thruk and stayed.

Not afraid. That was the first thing he registered.

Not performing the absence of fear either, which was more interesting. She stood in his authority chamber like it was hers to stand in, and the quiet he let run didn’t move her.

She’s not going to fill it.

Most people filled it. They offered deference, explanation, a show of ease they didn’t have. She stood with her arms at her sides and her weight even and waited him out like she’d already decided the silence wasn’t pressure.

He came down off the dais.

He stopped close. Close enough that she’d have to actively choose not to step back.

Up close she was sharper than the dossier had suggested. Black hair braided back and out of the way — efficient, not decorative. Pale skin with gray undertones from years inside death magic, the kind that marked you permanently, made you look like you belonged in the same spaces as the dead. Angular face, jaw set, charcoal eyes that held his gaze with a directness that wasn’t aggression. She was collecting data.

He was doing the same thing, and he was doing it slower than he wanted to.

I want to see what she looks like when she finds the thing she wasn’t expecting to find.

Not yet.

She told him what she’d found in the outer districts — twenty minutes in the city, no Archive access, nothing but her hands on the walls and four years of exile that had apparently done nothing to blunt whatever she did with bone resonance. He listened without interrupting.

Varek made a sound from the wall.

Thruk didn’t look at him. She told him it was theoretical. That someone had solved what she hadn’t. He heard that she was certain.

He laid out the terms. She ran them — he could see the brief interior assessment, the same sweep she’d given the room when she walked in — and then: “Acceptable. For now.”

From the wall, Varek’s exhale was sharp enough to count as a statement. Thruk let it sit.

She hadn’t conceded. She’d told him the agreement had a shelf life, which meant she was treating this as a working arrangement rather than a surrender of autonomy. Problem. Also honest. He’d rather have honest problems than dishonest solutions.

He looked at her a moment longer than necessary, then stepped back. “Start in the Archive. Report when you’re done.”

She turned and walked out. No acknowledgment of the dismissal. No backward look. He watched her go and understood, with the same clarity he applied to tactical situations, that the conversation hadn’t ended. It had been deferred. The thread of it ran between them, pulled taut, and it was going to keep pulling.

Mine.

The thought dropped through him without warning, clean and certain, before he could put a border around it. He let it land. Examined it.

The doors closed.

“She said ‘for now.’” Varek’s voice came from the wall — dry, the tone he used when he’d already built his argument and was laying out the opening brick.