Page 30 of Orc’s Hex

Drazhul’s hand closes around my wrist.

Not the wrist with the Bondmark. The other one. He’s got it in a grip that isn’t gentle—steady, absolute, the grip of someone who has decided where you’re going to be—and his eyes are on the rampart floor, reading the vibration through his boots.

“That wasn’t the sigil pulsing.”

“No.”

“That was structural.”

“Yes.”

His thumb moves across the inside of my wrist. Slow. Deliberate. He knows exactly what he’s doing and he does it anyway, and the Bondmark on my other wrist flares for three full seconds.

I don’t say anything.

He’s looking at me and the last two torches are doing their best against the dark and the space between us is nothing—a breath’s distance, the kind a person could close without deciding to—and neither of us moves toward the other and neither of us moves away.

Neither of us is going to be the first to close it. We’re both too much ourselves for that.

That knowledge does not make the distance feel any larger.

He moves his hand from my wrist to the parapet stone. Steady.

“We go down.”

“The archive⁠—“

“Tonight. After we’ve checked the lower crypt access points.”

He’s not asking. He’s also not wrong.

“With you,” I say. As a decision.

He looks at me once more—the full attention, nothing held back—and then we’re moving.

The corridor down from the ramparts is quiet at this hour, torches burning low, the garrison’s evening rotation just beginning its rounds two levels below us. Neither of us speaks on the way down. There isn’t anything left to say that the last hour hasn’t already said, and some silences are worth just walking through.

The archive first. Varek’s team checked the crypt access points while we were on the ramparts—he sent word through the door when we came down—and found nothing new. The three shelves Isen has flagged won’t wait for morning.

I lose track of time the way I always do when I’m working—Isen and I trading pages back and forth across the reading table, arguing in Old Blood Law script over a marginal notation neither of us can fully parse, the hours falling away the way they always do when the work is good and the problem is real. It’s past the second watch bell before either of us surfaces.

That’s when I feel it.

Not a sound. A weight—someone standing in the archive doorway who hasn’t announced themselves, and I know without looking up whose attention that is, because no one else’s presence registers quite like his does.

I don’t look up immediately. I let myself have three more seconds of not looking up, because I already know what I’ll find and I want to choose the moment I turn toward it rather than have it chosen for me.

Isen, across the table, has gone very carefully back to his own document. He knew before I did. He’s been doing this for six years—cataloging small things about the people who move through this hold—and he’s clearly decided that whatever’s in the doorway is not his business to acknowledge.

I look up.

Drazhul is exactly where I expected him to be, one shoulder against the frame, arms loosely crossed, and he has clearly been there long enough to have watched me lose an argument with Isen about verb tense in a dialect that predates the Shadow War by two centuries. He isn’t smiling—he doesn’t really do that, not with his mouth—but there’s something in his eyes that’s the closest thing to it I’ve seen since I arrived.

“How long have you been standing there.”

“Long enough to learn you lose arguments about grammar the same way you don’t lose arguments about anything else.” His voice carries the dry note I’ve started listening for. “Loudly. And you don’t actually concede.”

“I wasn’t losing. I was letting him finish.”