Unbidden, a groan slipped through my teeth. Ashwood. Myassigned watchdog. The worst part wasn’t that I detested the thought of the man following me, it was more that I didn’t.
I’d done little else since I was given the guide from Emi but study the language of the Sentry. Each gesture was inked across my thoughts, unforgettable, and it had become a strange sort of obsession to know more.
I recalled Gammal teaching me to read Jorvan and even symbols from her lands across the Night Ledges as a girl. Neither came to me as simply as Roark’s words.
I didn’t understand it, but his hand speak came clearer with every passing day.
Truth be told, it was a little frightening. Almost like a spell cast had captured my mind, I was pulled into his mystery, his violence, and the way he looked at me like he might wish to slit my throat or step a little closer whenever our paths crossed.
Naturally, the hidden pull needed to die a quick death before anyone in Stonegate caught wind. Kael would be one. Gods, he could smell it if I looked twice at a man. But Emi was another. She had a strange relationship with the Sentry, one I still didn’t know.
“Was I not clear enough?” Emi’s voice cut through my wandering thoughts. She placed her hands on her hips, her pale features flushed. “We’re to leave shortly. Get washed. I’m certain it is as frosted over as the Black Fjords in the North.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. The Black Fjords hugged uninhabitable lands that snowed even in the warm months. A place where rapists and thieves and unwanted crooks went to labor until their penance was paid on jagged mountain walls between a distant Dravenmoor border and the cold edges of Jorvandal.
I closed the washroom door, stripped, and bit down on the tip of my tongue to keep from freeing a gasp from the shock of cold. No sense in giving Emi Nightlark more to gloat about.
With haste, I scrubbed my skin, ignoring the clack of my teeth and the gooseflesh dotting my limbs. By the time I emerged, the tips of my fingers were a shade of purple and numb enough I could not fasten my own bodice. A servant who said little braided my hair while Emi ducked into the tall armoire and tossed out boots and satin slippers, hunting for a pair of shoes.
“Don’t you have other duties besides interrupting my mornings?” I glanced at her in the mirror.
“I”—Emi grunted the deeper she dug—“think you are not sincere in your disdain for me.”
“I think that is your hope.”
Emi returned with black ankle boots, polished like the gloss of a raven’s wing. “Darkwin holds no ill will. You could learn something from him.”
“Kael was always the more forgiving one of us.”
Emi scoffed and placed the boots in my lap, shooing away the servant so she could finish my hair. In the mirror, she lifted her bright eyes to meet my gaze. “The Sentry trusts me to be alone with you much more than his men, so me you shall get.”
I picked at a thread of my skirt, annoyed at myself for even wondering if Roark would join the tour today. “You are close with the Sentry?”
“Very.” She spoke the word in a way that left little room for more questions. They weren’t affectionate, but not all lovers were.
From somewhere inside the fortress the bellow of a bell rattled the glass windows.
“Dammit.” Emi looked me up and down once in the mirror. “You’ll do. Hurry. Stonegate is no small place, and Bjorn waits for no one.”
Bjorn Stonehands was a manwho’d earned his name from the thickness of his fingers and the heavy strike of his fists.
While she tugged me through the corridors toward the great hall, Emi offered a few hurried tales of his youth as a Stav Guard. Rumors insisted Bjorn had killed no fewer than five opponents in sparring matches with his bare hands.
He was a towering man with a silver beard that struck his chest and nothing but inked runes over his scalp. A crowd of folk visiting the fortress had gathered in the square beyond the great hall to await Bjorn’s tour. Travelers passing through the vales of Jorvandal on their way to the Myrdan border. People from Myrda visiting their families who took up houses in Damir’s realm. Some were elders with silver-wrapped hair and age carved in the lines of their eyes and cheeks. Others were young, gawking at the towering walls with a look of awe.
Being buried between the rocky cliffs brought rogue gusts of wind, but the square within the palace walls always breathed of fresh basil and lavender.
Emi nudged me aside when a trio of Stav Guard stomped over the cobbled paths. I thought it more for show. They plodded their boots with unnatural force to jangle the buckles on their ankles, and more than one Stav puffed out his chest when a cluster of young ladies traveling for a wedding in the township to the north whispered and snickered and sighed when they passed.
We arrived at the square outside the great hall after the final bell, and the way Stonehands pinned me with his gaze, I feared I might fall to my knees merely to escape his attention.
“Let’s be off, then.” With a grunt Stonehands adjusted a pigskinsatchel on his shoulder and stomped toward the first portcullis leading away from the palace.
“I think he likes you,” Emi muttered.
I turned to frown at her, but caught movement beneath a shadowed arcade.
Roark, dressed in a black Stav tunic with a gray wolf fur cloak over his shoulders, stepped onto the road. The Sentry kept a distance of more than fifteen paces, but moved as though weightless.
