Page 38 of Orc’s Hex

“High Witch of House Mervyn. Seat of the Second Covenant. The coven positioned at the Veil’s eastern breach during the Shadow War—the position that Korvak Xorn’s betrayal of the Covenant of Nine left exposed.”

I know the history. Every Blood Law practitioner knows the Second Covenant’s fate—it’s in the theoretical texts as the precedent case for Betrayal Sigil law. Nearly a thousand witches stationed at the eastern breach, abandoned when Korvak Xorn withdrew without warning. Fewer than a hundred survived.

Sorvaine Mervyn was not among them.

“She died at the breach,” I say.

“She died at the breach. But she placed the sigil before she marched east. The ceremony is dated three weeks before the battle.” Isen’s voice has the patience of six years—delivering it slow enough to absorb. “She knew what was coming. She knew Korvak Xorn was going to break the Covenant. The records suggest—and this is interpretive—that she was warned.”

I look at Drazhul.

He’s looking at the document. His face is closed. Behind his eyes there’s movement I’d need more than a glance to read.

“She warned him,” I say. “Sorvaine warned Korvak Xorn that she knew, and he broke the Covenant anyway. And she placed the sigil as the Blood Law response.”

“That’s my reading.” Isen looks at Drazhul. “Though I would note that the clan records from that period are incomplete. Korvak Xorn’s records, in particular, were—“ Isen sets the document down with deliberate care. “Edited, at some point after his death.”

He goes very still.

“I edited them.” Flat.

Isen looks at him. “I know.”

“Say what the records show.”

“What the records show,” Isen says, careful and precise, “is that Korvak Xorn received a formal communication from House Mervyn three weeks before the Covenant of Nine broke. The communication has been removed. What remains is the response notation—a single line, in Korvak’s hand, in the outgoing correspondence. It reads: ‘The matter is concluded to my satisfaction.’”

Silence.

He knew. Korvak Xorn received Sorvaine Mervyn’s warning and chose the Covenant’s breach anyway and noted, for the record, that he was satisfied with the outcome.

“Then the sigil is just,” I say.

Isen nods. He knew I’d say that.

“But,” I say.

“But,” he agrees, and he pulls the second document.

The second document is a coven record—House Mervyn’s internal census, compiled in the decade after the Shadow War by the surviving members. Fewer than a hundred names. Isen has annotated it in the margins in his own small, precise hand, tracking each name forward through the centuries.

Most are dead. The coven dispersed across the Veillands in the war’s aftermath and never reformed.

But the maintenance work in the Foundation Crypt—the sub-inscription, the dozens of passes in the same secondary hand—isn’t one person’s natural lifespan. It’s multiple generations, or someone who inherited the work.

“House Mervyn had a bloodline,” I say.

“Sorvaine Mervyn had one daughter. Born before the war.” Isen turns to the third document—a lineage record. “The daughter survived. Continued the coven’s documentation work. Her children continued it. The line runs forward through three centuries with one purpose: maintaining the vigil on the Xorn bloodline.”

“Not just the sigil.” I look up from the lineage record. “They’ve been watching. Every generation, someone from House Mervyn has been watching this bloodline.”

“And maintaining the mechanism that ends it.” Isen looks at Drazhul directly. “Your clanlords have lived with this for three centuries without knowing its origin. The House Mervyn line has known it from the start and not changed the mechanism.”

“Because the grievance hasn’t been addressed,” Drazhul says.

“No.”

“Because Korvak Xorn’s bloodline still carries his blood and no one has ever acknowledged what he did and made it right under Blood Law.”