Page 2 of Orc’s Hex

I’d been given an estimate. Close to seven feet. Accurate. Drazhul Xorn stands at the edge of the raised platform, and even at the full length of the hall he fills the space between us with the patience of something that has never needed to prove what it is.

Most dangerous things broadcast it. The size, the posture, the stare engineered to make sure you know what you’re standing in front of. He does none of that. He’s simply still. Occupying space without wasting it. War braids wound tight, dark iron chest plate bearing the clan sigil, hands at his sides. His eyes pick me up the moment I cross the threshold and they don’t move.

Not hostile. Not welcoming. Both of those are performances and this isn’t.

Assessment. The look of someone who decides what things are before he allows them to matter.

He’s not testing whether I’ll flinch. He’s testing whether I understand why flinching would matter.

I walk the full length without adjusting my pace. Stop at distance—close enough to speak without raising my voice, far enough that I’m not making a point—and look back at him with the same attention he’s been giving me.

Up close he’s—a lot.

I’ve been assessing dangerous things long enough to know how it works: read it, translate it immediately into professional variables—what it can do, what it will do, how close is too close. I do this with the chest sigil, with curse structures, with the oath stone in the Hall of Oaths. I have been doing it with Drazhul Xorn since I walked into his Great Hall this morning.

The problem is that I keep having to restart the assessment. He’s—not what I expect, at distance. In arm’s reach, he’s even less predictable.

His jaw is hard, a pale old scar running beneath it, tusks chipped at the edges from contact with things that hadn’t wanted to cooperate. The war braids keep the black hair out of his face with the efficiency of someone who stopped caring how it looked about ninety years ago. His knuckles are scarred. Not decoratively. His eyes in the torchlight have too much going on behind them for blank to be the right word. Closed. Contained. Like whatever he’s holding in there would take up considerably more space if he let it.

The hair on the back of my neck rises and it has nothing to do with the stone’s hum.

I don’t flinch. He notes that I don’t flinch. Neither of us mentions it.

“Ziva Stark.” His voice is low. The register of someone who has never needed volume to be heard.

“Clanlord.” I leave it there. He doesn’t want pleasantries and I have none to spare.

He lets the silence sit. Deliberate. Testing what I do with it.

I stand.

“You were given the scope of the problem.”

“I was given surface details. Curse, bloodline, heir-prevention.” I keep my voice even. “There’s a difference between a briefing and an accurate picture.”

He descends from the dais. Unhurried. Nothing this man does happens quickly by accident—he moves with the economy of someone who eliminated anything unnecessary around the time most orcs are barely grown. I track it automatically: his gait, the way he carries his weight, how his hands sit at his sides. When you’re going to work close to something that could end you in three seconds, you learn how it moves before you need that information.

He stops eight feet from me. The torchlight between us is steady.

“The details are not surface. Nothing about this is surface.”

“Then explain what isn’t in the materials.”

Something shifts behind his eyes. He’d expected the standard approach—credentials first, contractual formalities, the professional softening that most witches bring when they’re standing in a clanlord’s great hall. I skipped all of it.

Good. We understand each other.

He talks. Not at length—this is not a man who narrates. He gives me the betrothals in the same voice you’d use to brief a war council: spare, precise, stripped of anything extraneous. Four. Each ended in violence. Partial memories on his end—he says this without elaborating and I don’t push it. Not yet. His face through all of it is a closed door. He’s distilled something extremely bad into the most clinical version available to him, because clinical is survivable.

I listen without interrupting. I’m learning his voice as much as his words.

“Payment,” I say when he finishes.

The torches flicker.

Not from a draft. The hall is sealed too well—the stone too thick for wind at this level. Every iron bracket ripples at once, a coordinated shiver across the whole room, and in the half-second of unsteady light I catch something on Drazhul Xorn’s face he doesn’t allow to last. Not fear. Tighter than fear. The face of someone who recognized what just happened before I did and is waiting to see if I caught it.

I look down.