Page 20 of Orc’s Hex

I didn’t authorize this.

DRAZHUL

He stands in the middle of his chambers for a long time after the door closes.

The chest sigil is warm. Not the curse’s warmth—he knows that heat intimately, knows its exact temperature and its exact cruelty. This is different. Lower. Steadier. It sits under his sternum like something settling into a chair it’s decided it likes. The Bondmark on her wrist and the sigil on his chest are speaking to each other through the foundation, two marks made from the same conversation, and neither of them asked his permission and neither of them is going to stop.

He did not choose this. He has spent his entire life organizing around consent, around choosing every risk he takes. He is a man who has spent a century keeping people at a distance he chose. He did not choose this.

A knock. Two raps, not Isen’s precise rhythm—heavier, familiar in a different register.

“Come.”

Varek doesn’t come in so much as arrive, the way he arrives everywhere, already reading the room before he’s fully through the door. He takes in the blood on Drazhul’s arm, the open collar, the untouched bed, the general absence of anything resembling a man who slept.

He says nothing about any of it.

“Assembly’s building,” Varek says instead. “Brakka’s been in the east corridor since sunrise. He’s got four of the senior council with him and he’s not being subtle about it.”

“I know.”

“You know.” Varek doesn’t sit. He never sits in this room unless told to, a habit from decades of reporting rather than visiting. “Ribs?”

“Intact. Arm’s superficial.”

Varek’s eyes go to the cloth, assess it with the competence of a man who has field-dressed more wounds than he’s had full nights of sleep, and decide it can wait. Then his eyes move to Drazhul’s wrist—out of habit, checking for the same thing Brynna would check for—and find nothing, because the mark isn’t on him.

He doesn’t know yet. He’s about to.

“There’s something you should hear from me before you hear it from Brakka,” Drazhul says.

Varek goes still in the way he goes still when he’s decided to listen without interrupting. Thirty years of this. Drazhul has never had to ask him for it.

“The witch has a Bondmark.” He says it the way he says everything difficult—flat, no cushioning, the information delivered the same way he’d deliver a casualty count. “Partial inscription. Formed last night.”

Varek doesn’t move for a long moment.

“How.”

“The curse redirected through this room. She didn’t move.” Drazhul holds his gaze. “The foundation read it as real.”

“Was it.”

It’s not the question Drazhul expected, and it costs him something to answer it honestly, standing here with the mark still forming and the sigil still warm and a man who has never once needed him to perform anything watching his face for the truth instead of the version he’d give the council.

“Yes.”

Varek exhales through his nose—the closest thing to a reaction Drazhul has seen from him in a decade—and looks at the window instead of at his clanlord, giving him the courtesy of a moment that doesn’t have witnesses.

“Brakka’s going to use this,” Varek says finally. “A Bondmark on a hired curse-eater, five days into a contract, with the bloodline sigil actively contested. He’ll call it manipulation. He’ll call her a threat to succession before she’s even finished the job.”

“I know what he’ll call it.”

“You going to let him.”

Drazhul stands. The motion pulls at the cloth on his arm and he doesn’t acknowledge it.

“I’m going to tell him the truth,” he says. “The mark isn’t hers to control and it isn’t mine. Blood Law made a decision three hundred years in the making, and it made it in about four seconds, and no amount of council precedent is going to argue with a foundation this old.”