Page 74 of Orc’s Hex

“I know.”

“The Hall of Oaths will need re-carving where the channels failed under the reversal. The Blood Archive damage assessment⁠—“

“Ziva.”

“Yes.”

“In the morning.”

The list dissolves. He is right.

His arm tightens around me, brief, then settles.

In the morning.

There will be a morning. There will be many of them.

I close my eyes.

The fire burns.

The mountain is quiet.

NINETEEN

ZIVA

Three weeks later.

The Blood Archive smells different now. Less like urgency.

Isen has organized the research materials into three distinct stacks on the reading table: documentation for the formal Blood Law record, materials for the practitioners’ petition letters I have not yet answered, and everything related to the Foundation Crypt’s structural assessment. He has been working through them with the methodical calm of a man whose work has finally become archaeology rather than crisis management. When I came in this morning he was already arguing with a margin notation from the second shelf. He didn’t stop arguing when I sat down. I didn’t ask him to.

I spent two hours at the table working through the reparation oath’s secondary documentation before the morning’s garrison noise pulled me up to the ramparts.

The scaffolding on the east wall went up in the first week.

The Forge Quarter’s master masons came the morning after to survey the crypt collapse damage while the rest of the hold was still processing what had happened. They did not comment on the nature of the damage or ask what had caused it. They measured. They noted. They went back to the Forge Quarter and came back the next morning with tools.

I watched them the first day from the ramparts.

The crack in the east wall I cataloged at dawn—still covered in blood and stone dust, noting angles and structural compromise—is now bordered by scaffolding on both sides, the masons working it base to top with the care of people who know this stone intimately. Blackscar’s basalt does not behave the way quarried stone does. It behaves the way the mountain wants it to, and the masons know the difference.

The Great Hall floor has been relaid.

Ten days, every mason the Forge Quarter could spare. The old crypt passage under the floor collapsed during the reversal and the floor above it came down in sections. New basalt from the mountain face, fitted and sealed. You can see where the old stone ends and the new stone begins if you know what you’re looking for. I know what I’m looking for. The seam is clean.

The Foundation Crypt itself is sealed.

The Betrayal Sigil is gone, the carved channels dark stone and nothing more. The masons sealed it because Drazhul asked them to, and nobody questioned why, and I did not question it either. Some places earn the right to be left alone.

Setha Mervyn left on the fourth day.

She came to find me in the Blood Archive the morning before she went. She stood in the doorway with the particular stillness of someone who has been carrying a fixed purpose for so long that its absence hasn’t yet registered as lightness—just as an unfamiliar weight. She told me she didn’t know where she was going. She said it without apology and without performance, which is the only way Setha says anything. I told her the post-reversal documentation would name her formally as the House Mervyn signatory of the reparation oath, that the record would stand, and that the grief her line had carried was acknowledged in the stone of the Hall of Oaths and would not be erased again. Under Blood Law, the reparation oath had discharged the Mervyn line’s standing grievance entirely. Whatever she chose to do with her life after Blackscar, it would be hers—unencumbered by the vigil for the first time in her bloodline’s history. She looked at me for a moment with those gray eyes that had inherited three centuries of vigil. Then she nodded, once, and went. The Mervyn line’s business with Blackscar Hold is done. I hope she finds something to do with all that quiet.

Maret was in Brynna’s care for four days after the sigil collapsed.

She had no memory of the occupation. This is not uncommon with body-hopping of long duration, Brynna told me—the host’s consciousness suppressed deeply enough that the gap reads as dreamless sleep rather than stolen time. Maret had no memory of the occupation at all. The last eighteen months were a gap—she remembered arriving at Blackscar, and then waking in the medical ward with Brynna watching her and the hold’s stone quiet for the first time in her tenure here. She was discharged on the fifth day. Varek arranged transport to the nearest town. She took it without asking questions, which suggests she understood more than she let on.