Page 35 of Orc’s Hex

He gives her a second.

He gives her three, which is more than he’s given anything that threatened her in six days.

She raises her head.

“The curse shifted vectors.” Level voice. He knows what level is costing her. “The possession threads—when I severed the last one, it didn’t dissipate. It redirected. The sigil found the next available target.”

He knew what she was going to say before she stopped exhaling.

“It hit me,” she says. “The Bondmark flagged me as heir-adjacent. When the possession channel collapsed it needed somewhere to go and it⁠—“

She stops.

Starts again.

“It came for me directly.”

He is standing two feet from her. His hands are at his sides. The curse in his chest is doing what it always does when she is within reach of him—reaching back, pressing at the fracture line—and he is not going to let it do what it wants to do, not in front of Garrok and three recovering warriors, not here.

The sigil found a new target.

She absorbed it.

The distance between two feet and zero is nothing, and he knows it, and she knows it, and the curse has decided it knows it too.

“How bad.”

“I absorbed it before it did damage. I’m a curse-eater—this is what I do. But it’s in me now.” She meets his gaze. “And the sigil knows it can reach me directly. Not through you. Not through the Bondmark. Directly.”

Drazhul looks at the courtyard floor.

The foundation stones. Dark basalt that has been here longer than the fortress, and has now added her to the list.

He looks back at Ziva.

“Come inside.”

Not a request. She knows it and doesn’t argue. She nods and moves and he falls in beside her.

She looks straight ahead.

He says nothing.

Not at first.

They take the long corridor rather than the short one—neither of them chooses it out loud, but they both take the turn that adds two minutes to the walk, and he understands why without needing to ask. The short corridor passes the courtyard windows. Neither of them wants to look at that floor again for a while.

“You should be resting,” he says finally. “Not walking me to the archive.”

“You should be strapped and lying down. We’re both doing the opposite of what we should.”

“I don’t rest well.”

“Neither do I. Not after this.” She keeps her eyes forward, the same clinical focus she gives everything, except he can hear something under it now that wasn’t there five days ago—a thinness to the control, the sound of someone holding a line that’s costing more than it used to. “The sigil reached into me through a channel I didn’t build. That’s not exhaustion. That’s something else.”

“Say what it is.”

“I don’t have the word for it yet.”