Page 26 of Orc’s Hex

I lean my forearms on the parapet beside him and look at the valley and I tell him what I haven’t told him yet.

Not the mechanics—he has those. What I give him now is the weight of them. Three hundred years of every protective instinct turned back against the people he was trying to protect. What it cost the people closest to him. What it means that he held two versions of the world simultaneously for a century and never stopped trying to insist on the real one.

I keep my eyes on the valley while I talk. It’s the only accommodation I’m willing to make.

The silence after is different from his usual silences. His usual silences are managed. This one is something he hasn’t gotten to the management stage of yet.

I leave it alone. I look at the valley.

After a while he says: “How did you come to this work.”

It isn’t the question I expected. I expected nothing. He doesn’t ask personal questions.

“Accident,” I say. “I was seventeen, apprenticed to a scholar who specialized in Blood Law theory. Purely academic. She took a commission to document a curse structure in a town three days east of here and I went with her to carry the equipment.” I stop. “She couldn’t finish reading it. The curse had a perimeter response—anyone who started reading it and didn’t complete the analysis got caught in the feedback. She went down. I was the only one there who’d been listening closely enough to continue the read.”

“And you completed it.”

“Badly. I missed three secondary channels and the release nearly took my left hand. But yes.” I look at the valley. “She recovered. I kept the notes. I spent the next two years teaching myself what I hadn’t known that day, and then I took a job doing what I should have been more prepared to do the first time.”

He is quiet for a moment.

“You work alone.”

“I work better alone.” I turn to look at him. “You’re the exception.”

He holds my gaze in the way he holds everything that matters to him—steadily, nothing dismissive in it. Something shifts, very slightly, in how he’s holding himself.

“There was a man who ran the morning drills here before Garrok,” he says. “Named Ossat. He’d been in the hold before I took my clanlord oath. He knew where every wind eddy ran in the training yard and had adjusted the drill rotations accordingly. He did it without being asked.” He looks at the valley. “I never told him it was the right call. I thought he already knew.”

The wind moves between us.

“He left, after the first betrothal ended. Two months later. He didn’t say why. I didn’t ask.” He looks at the valley. “I’ve been not asking, since then. About most things. I got good at it.”

I look at his profile in the gray light—the hard jaw, the old scar, the way he carries what he’s said without performing any feelings about it.

“You’re asking now,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “I am.” The torch between us gutters in a gust and his face goes briefly into shadow and back.

“The four betrothals,” he says. Not a question.

“Yes.”

He is quiet a moment. “The first was named Sera.” He says it the way he says things that cost him—flat, at the valley, no inflection. “She ran. I didn’t blame her for it. I’ve never blamed any of them.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t choose to be alone. I was arranged that way.”

“I know.”

“You chose it.”

“Yes.”

He nods. Just once. The look on his face isn’t pity—he doesn’t produce pity—but it’s something adjacent: the recognition of a person who understands exactly what it costs to prefer your own company because the alternative has too many variables.

“Then we’re both accustomed to it,” he says, “and neither of us is currently doing it.”