Page 76 of Orc’s Hex

I told him I hadn’t.

He told me, without particular ceremony, that his mother used to bring him to the Forge Quarter as a boy to watch the masons work, before she was lost to the curse, two clanlord generations before his own, and that he hadn’t been down here for anything except structural inspection in decades.

I didn’t ask him why he was telling me this.

I understood it anyway. He was giving me something that had nothing to do with the investigation, nothing to do with the curse, nothing to do with any version of him that required managing. Just a boy who used to like watching stone get shaped into something new, standing next to me in the same quarter forty years later, choosing to remember it out loud.

We stood there for two hours.

The masons worked. The light moved across the scaffolding. He told me three more things about his mother I don’t think he’s told anyone else in this hold, and I told him about the Thornwood curse-eater who trained me, and neither of us once mentioned the Betrayal Sigil or the reparation oath or anything that belonged to the job that brought me here.

At one point he laughed.

Not the dry, almost-nothing amusement I’d noted in the first week. An actual laugh, short and surprised out of him by something one of the masons said about a load-bearing calculation gone comically wrong two decades ago, and I found myself staring at him for a full three seconds afterward because I don’t think I’d ever heard the sound before and I wanted to be sure I’d remember it.

It was, I think, the first time since I arrived at Blackscar that either of us spent two hours together being nothing but two people who like each other’s company.

No curse work. No investigation. No mechanism in the foundation deciding what our proximity meant before either of us had a chance to decide it ourselves.

Just stone, and light, and a man telling me about his mother.

I have decided I want considerably more of that.

This morning he found me at the east rampart after drills. His hand in the small of my back steered me left at the junction without asking.

I did not tell him I knew the way.

He kissed me at the parapet before he said anything and I let the hold’s morning business wait.

Now.

The afternoon.

We are at the outer parapet, where we keep ending up, because it is where the hold ends and the world begins.

Drazhul is at my back.

His arms are around me—no urgency, no crisis driving the contact, just the warmth of him against the mountain wind and his jaw near my temple and his hands at my arms. Three weeks of this and it still lands every time.

I look at the valley.

My hand moves to my abdomen.

I notice it before I decide to do it—a reflex, the body registering what the head hasn’t caught up to yet. I hold it there, pressing.

No curse stirs.

The silence where the Betrayal Sigil used to run through this bloodline is not empty.

It is full of what was always supposed to be there. Three centuries of denial. The future the sigil was built to prevent.

And the sigil is gone.

Drazhul doesn’t ask what I’m thinking.

He tightens his arms around me, fractionally, the way he does when he knows I’m working through it—deciding that his job is to be the fixed point while I do.

I turn in his arms.

He looks down at me.

I put my hand on his chest, over the scar, and look up at him.

The hold at my back is alive in ways it has not been in a very long time.

Somewhere below us, Garrok is shouting good-natured abuse at a warrior who’s fallen behind in the drills. Somewhere behind us, Isen is almost certainly still arguing with a document that refuses to agree with him. The whole fortress is simply living, ordinary and unremarkable and entirely its own, and I have never in ten years of moving between other people’s crises felt anything like the specific privilege of standing still inside somewhere that no longer needs saving.

And the man in front of me—his hands at my back, his eyes on mine, the scar warm under my palm—goes very still for one moment.

He leans his face against mine.

His hands pull me closer.

Neither of us speaks.

Below us, in the iron pine forest, green is coming through the dark.