Page 6 of Orc’s Hex

Counting.

TWO

DRAZHUL

He does not explain himself to people.

He briefs them. There’s a distinction, and he maintains it deliberately—the moment you start explaining yourself, you’ve handed the other person something to argue with. A briefing doesn’t invite argument. It invites action or dismissal. A century of running Blackscar Hold has confirmed this approach is correct.

He takes her to the war chamber the morning after her arrival. Not the Great Hall—the Great Hall is for performance, for the display of authority in front of people who need to witness it. The war chamber is carved into the mountain itself, its walls the mountain, and what happens there stays there. He requires that today.

The relief maps cover the war chamber’s central table—the Blackstone Range, every pass and ridge documented across generations. She positions herself at the near end and looks at the maps without touching them. The watchful stillness in how she holds herself makes the room feel smaller than it is.

He positions himself at the far end. Distance management.

“You’ve read the materials I sent.” He opens with it as confirmation, not a question.

“Four betrothals. Violence in each. Partial memories on your end. No further details.” Her eyes come up from the maps—darker in here than they were in the Great Hall yesterday, the amber turned near-bronze in the war chamber’s low light. “Start with the first one.”

“Why the first.”

“Because the pattern starts somewhere.” She pulls a folded sheet from her coat and sets it on the table without opening it. “I have my own read. I want yours first, before they contaminate each other.”

That gets his attention more than he lets her see.

He tells her.

The first betrothal was eighty years ago. He’d been in his first century, young enough to still believe the problem was a matter of will. The hallucinations—the fractured doubled vision that arrived when he got close to someone—had always been there, but he’d believed he could choose not to act on them. That discipline was enough.

He was wrong. The first betrothal was what forced him to understand what he was dealing with. It was also the last time he made the mistake of believing he could manage it alone.

He tells her there was violence. That he came to with blood on his hands and a woman who’d run and never come back, his memory of the preceding hours fractured—not blacked out, fractured. He’d seen her. He’d seen what the curse showed him she was. Both images simultaneously until the curse’s version drowned out everything else.

He gives her this without embellishment.

She doesn’t write anything down. She listens without reacting.

“Second,” she says.

Second. Third. Fourth. He gives them in the same flat voice and she receives them without the soft sounds of sympathy other people feel obligated to produce. Just attention. Clean and total.

“And between the betrothals.” Her pen taps the table once. “Not betrothals. Anyone you were close to. Warriors. Advisors.”

He’s quiet a moment.

“Two. My guard captain, forty years ago. A senior advisor, fifteen years before that. Both close—both destabilized.”

“Destabilized how.”

“The captain started going wrong at meals. Off his patterns. Left the hold one night—no warning, no clear cause. I haven’t heard from him since.” His hands stay still on the table. “The advisor had what we called at the time a breakdown. Left two months after I noticed he was changing. I haven’t heard from him either.”

He doesn’t say the captain’s name. She notices the absence the way she notices everything—a gap where a fact should sit, deliberately left empty. He has given her dates, roles, symptoms, outcomes. He has not given her the one detail that would make either man real to her instead of two more entries in a pattern.

He remembers the name. He remembers it perfectly. That’s exactly why he isn’t saying it.

She doesn’t ask for it. Some information a person hands over when they’re ready and not one clinical question sooner, and she has learned in less than a day that pushing this man past what he’s decided to give costs more than it returns.

She unfolds her notes. Reads them. He watches the line of her focus move across the page—quick, systematic—and keeps reading her face for something he can use.