Page 36 of Orc’s Hex

He believes her. He’s watched her name things precisely for five days—curse structures, oath displacement, the exact temperature of blood in a foundation channel—and the absence of a word from someone who always has one tells him more than the word itself would.

They pass the war chamber. The relief maps are still on the table from their first briefing, mostly undisturbed, and something about walking past that room together—the place where all of this started with him at one end and her at the other, deliberate distance, professional variables—makes the current distance between them, walking shoulder to shoulder without either of them choosing to close it further, feel like the whole span of the last five days compressed into eight feet of corridor.

“When this is finished,” he says. Doesn’t finish the sentence.

“When this is finished,” she agrees, filling the space he left the way she’s started doing—not correcting him, just completing what he’s willing to start and not willing to name outright.

He looks at her. She’s watching the corridor ahead, jaw set, carrying a piece of his curse inside her body now because she put herself in its path without being asked to, and something in his chest that has nothing to do with the sigil and everything to do with the eight feet of stone between his hand and hers makes itself known with an insistence he has spent a century refusing to entertain.

He doesn’t reach for her hand.

Not because he doesn’t want to. Because the corridor still has two watch guards in it, and because she hasn’t reached for his either, and because whatever this is, they’re both still choosing, deliberately, to carry it without naming it in a hallway with witnesses.

They reach the Blood Archive door.

“Ribs first,” she says. “Then the archive.”

“You said Brynna first, five days ago, and I went to the chair.”

“I remember. You were more cooperative that time.”

“I was bleeding less that time.”

“You’re bleeding exactly the same amount, you’re just better at hiding it.” She stops outside the door, turns to face him fully for the first time since the courtyard. “Let Brynna look at you before we go in. Please.”

Please. Not a word she uses often. He’s noticed its absence as much as its rare appearances—she asks for things directly, states them as needs, and reserves please for the handful of moments when something matters to her beyond the professional requirement of the job.

“All right,” he says.

Something in her shoulders eases, fractionally, the way his did on the ramparts when she said the same words back to him.

She goes in first. He follows a half-step behind, close enough to catch her if the redirected curse decides to make itself known again, and neither of them mentions that either.

EIGHT

ZIVA

Isen Crow is already talking when I walk through the Blood Archive door.

He’s been expecting me—has had his materials arranged for two hours, from what he tells me in the first forty seconds. He’s a small orc with the manner of someone who redirected his entire constitution toward his brain and left the physical implications to sort themselves out.

“Six years.” Barely looking at me, moving between the shelves, knowing where everything is by instinct rather than label. “Six years I’ve had the maintenance evidence in the structural analysis and no one with the right background to tell me whether I was reading it correctly. The clanlord—“ a gesture toward the door I came through—“knows Blood Law theory. He doesn’t read Old Script variations.”

“I do.”

“You do.” He sets a stack of bound records on the reading table and looks at me for the first time. His eyes are sharp and dark—adjusted for reading rather than for people. “Sit down. We have a significant amount of work.”

I sit.

Drazhul leans against the archive’s far wall with his arms crossed. He’s here because I asked him to stay and he didn’t argue, which I’m still thinking about.

Brynna comes through the archive door, takes in Isen talking and me sitting and Drazhul standing with his arms crossed and ribs that are visibly bothering him more than he’s acknowledging, and makes her assessments in the same time it takes me to make mine.

“You first.” Brynna to Drazhul.

“The warriors⁠—“

“Are stable and sleeping and have Mira with them. You first.”