Straight across the court was also straight through the massed Darguuls. One of them, a hobgoblin, came to meet her as she approached. “I am Aruget,” he said. Unlike Tariic, he had a heavy Goblin accent that drew out the middle of his words and bit off the end. “I serve Tariic, who serves Lhesh Haruuc. Go around our lines.”
Ashi stopped and glared at him. “I am Ashi d’Deneith. I am angry. Get out of my way.”
Aruget’s eyes were deep brown flecked with orange, and he had the ritual scars across his forehead that Ashi had learned were a sign of the Rhukaan Taash clan. He stared at her and she stared back, neither of them blinking. For a very long moment, the only sound and movement in Venture Court came from the jumping, snapping flames in the big fire bowl.
The hobgoblin was the first to look away, his gaze lifting and going over Ashi’s head. “You may pass,” he growled softly and moved out of her way.
“Ta muut,” Ashi said as she passed. It was a Goblin phrase she had learned from Ekhaas. Roughly translated, it meant “you have honor,” but Ekhaas had explained that it was the proper way to say thank you without implying weakness or debt. She didn’t look back to see Aruget’s reaction to being spoken to in his own language. She kept her eyes on the Darguuls ahead, walking without hesitation. Hobgoblins, bugbears, and goblins stepped aside to let her by. As she passed one knot of goblins, she heard a thin murmuring break out in her wake. She looked over her shoulder, her hand hovering near her sword briefly before falling away. One of the goblins was trying to suppress laughter-not at her, but to judge from the nervous glances of those with him, at Aruget. The hobgoblin’s face darkened, and he bore down on the laughing goblin like a storm, snarling rapid words that made the goblin stop snickering very quickly.
It felt good to see someone else on the receiving end of trouble for a change, Ashi decided. It felt good to have her way in an argument, too. A little of her anger lifted from her, and her step was lighter as she passed into the shadows of the passage on the other side of the court.
No one in the outer zone of Sentinel Tower stopped her or even bothered to give her a second glance. The gate she had chosen was a grubby thing, used mostly for the movement of supplies and mercenary troops into and out of the tower. The higher ranking members of House Deneith almost never came this way. She paused for a moment before approaching the gate and covered up her dragonmark as best she could. Gloves hid the backs of her hands, and a carefully folded and tied scarf masked her forehead and the lower part of her face. Within Sentinel Tower, her Siberys Mark gained her respect. Beyond, it just as often aroused suspicion and superstition. It also identified her. Even covered, she felt a knot in her belly as she walked under the stone arch, half-expecting that word from Vounn might have reached the guards ahead of her and that at any moment they would call out for her to stop.
They didn’t. She left Sentinel Tower and walked out into the city of Karrlakton.
There was little to reveal at first that she had left the tower, aside from open sky and crooked streets instead of straight passages. The area outside the gate was all but an extension of the area inside, bustling with evening trade. There was a sense of greater freedom out of the tower, though, a more relaxed tone in the voices of traders and carters who dealt with the great house but didn’t serve it. The farther she went from the tower and the more evening slid into night, the lighter the traffic in the streets became. The tension between Ashi’s shoulders eased a bit more.
It was impossible to escape Deneith entirely, however. The House didn’t rule in Karrlakton, but it certainly dominated every aspect of the city. As vast as Sentinel Tower was, Deneith’s activities spilled out of it. Training grounds and barracks, workshops and warehouses, even ordinary houses-every third building that Ashi passed bore the crest of Deneith. The roots of Deneith went even deeper, Ashi knew. Warlords who carried the Mark of Sentinel had ruled the area of what would become Karrlakton before the founding of the ancient kingdom of Karrnath, even before the creation of House Deneith proper. The city had grown under the gaze of the House. Parts of it were as old as parts of Sentinel Tower. For many centuries, Deneith money had built roads, walls, and shrines.
Ashi turned toward one of the oldest sections of the city. The sense of history appealed to her. It was soothing to be among things that had stood for centuries, unchanged and unaffected by the small frustrations of everyday life. When she was gone-when Vounn was gone-they would still be there. As old as Sentinel Tower was, she couldn’t feel the same thing there. Everything was too busy, too imprinted with the ordinary. The oldest areas of the tower were forbidden to all but the most senior members of the House, as if the stones held some dreadful secret. The only peace she had found was in the archives, where books replaced stone, and if they weren’t quite as permanent and unchanging, they had even more fascinating stories to tell as her ability to read grew.
She had found her grandfather in the archives. All she’d known of him before she met Singe was that his name had been Kagan and that the hunters of the Bonetree had found him in the Shadow Marches, badly injured and clutching his fine sword. Too deeply wounded ever to fight again, he had been brought into the clan and had fathered many children for the Bonetree over several years-until he’d gone mad and murdered all of them save one, who had become Ashi’s father, before taking his own life.
In the archives of Sentinel Tower, she’d discovered a different man, a hero of the Sentinel Marshals. He had been awarded an honor blade, the same bright sword that rode her hip, for bringing to justice a pair of notorious murderers. The archive’s record ended with his final assignment: the pursuit of one of the pair after her escape. To the best knowledge of House Deneith, neither he nor his quarry had ever been seen again.
After reading the record of Kagan, Ashi had promised herself that she would become a Sentinel Marshal. She’d mentioned the idea to Vounn. The lady seneschal had answered her with a silence that spoke louder than words. Ashi carried the Siberys Mark of Sentinel. She was too valuable to be allowed to roam far from the reach of the House.
She clenched her teeth as she reached Karrlakton’s old quarter. Anger rose in her again, replacing the calm she should have felt in the shadow of the ancient buildings. She was more than her dragonmark, no matter what people might think, whether they were people like Vounn who expected her to use the mark for the profit of Deneith, or people like the anonymous House guard who saw her only as a scion of the house, or people in the street who reacted to a Siberys Mark with superstitious unease, or people like Aruget and the other Darguuls who-
Ashi paused in midstride, breaking her pace as she broke her silent rant. How had Aruget reacted to her? The Darguuls had to know what dragonmarks were-they were dealing with House Deneith-and they must have known that the larger the mark, the more powerful it was. Aruget had recognized her as a lady of Deneith, but it had been her hard stare that had forced him to back down, not the sight of her mark. Maybe her mark didn’t matter to them. No dragonmarks manifested among the goblin races, a mystery that had always puzzled sages who cared about such things. Maybe to goblin eyes, the mark on her face was no more unusual than the piercings in her lip or the scars across Aruget’s forehead.
“Rond betch!” Ashi muttered, for the first time keenly disappointed that she was missing the opportunity to meet Tariic. If he’d reacted as Aruget had, she would have enjoyed watching Vounn’s dismay. Ashi smiled to herself.
If she hadn’t been standing still and her mind hadn’t been, for the moment, clear, she might have missed the quiet, muffled sound of breaking glass. And if she hadn’t immediately and instinctively turned to look for the source of the sound, she would have missed seeing the figure that slipped through a narrow window high on one of the ancient buildings nearby.