Page 37 of Orc’s Hex

Drazhul looks at her. She looks back the way she has been looking back at Drazhul Xorn for fifteen years—like it stopped being an obstacle a long time ago.

He moves to the chair she’s pointing at.

She examines his ribs—no Blood Law sensitivity in it, just a healer’s knowledge of how bodies are built and what they sound like when things are wrong. Three ribs bruised significantly. One cracked at the base. She straps it with the efficiency of someone who has done this many times, and Drazhul’s silence during it neither impresses nor alarms her. I suspect that’s one of the reasons he tolerates her proximity better than most.

“Now you.”

I push back my sleeve.

Brynna looks at the Bondmark for a long moment. She reads it through touch first, then visually—her thumb moving along the edge of the mark the same way Drazhul’s had in his chambers. The comparison is not lost on me.

“Partial inscription.”

“Partial. Not complete.”

“The formation rate—“ Her thumb stills on the mark. “This went from nothing to near-complete in under a minute.”

“Blood Law doesn’t take its time when it’s made a decision.”

“The curse in the courtyard.”

“Direct redirect through me. I caught it before it hit the mark.” I watch her face. “But it’s changed what the sigil knows about me.”

She looks at the mark a moment longer. Then she looks at Drazhul, and he looks at the ceiling, and she looks back at me with an expression that has several layers to it.

“The mark itself is stable. Not complete, not active in the way that would require immediate intervention.” She releases my wrist. “But it’s warm. And warm means alive, and alive means it’s in communication with the foundation, and that means⁠—“

“I’m in the sigil’s targeting range directly.”

“Yes.”

Isen, who has been doing an extraordinary job of pretending he isn’t listening, does a slightly worse job of it.

“I need to check your abdomen. The redirection hit you there.”

I let her.

She presses her hands flat against my lower torso, working a slow sweep, looking for oath-mark formation that doesn’t always rise to the skin. She finds none. What she finds instead, she tells me quietly, her voice dropping below Isen’s hearing range.

“The redirection left a trace. Not inscription—residue. The sigil tested whether it could establish a different kind of mark here. It couldn’t, because you absorbed it too fast. But it tried.”

“It tried to mark me as heir.”

“It tried.”

I sit with that as long as I can afford to—four seconds, maybe—and then I set it aside—not gone, just not now—and I turn to Isen.

“What have you got.”

He spreads the first document on the table—a faded ceremonial record in Old Script, ink brown with age but the text intact.

“The Betrayal Sigil in your foundation was not placed by an enemy. It was placed in formal Blood Law ceremony, witnessed and recorded, in the year following the Shadow War.”

“Who placed it.”

He slides the document toward me. I read the name at the bottom—the primary signatory, the one whose blood sealed the ceremony.

Sorvaine Mervyn.