Anger seethed in Ashi.
The pulse of the music quickened, the viol joined by the soft percussion of a drum. Baerer stepped forward, slashing right and left in time with the music, then stepped again-and again, crossing the empty floor between Deneith and Darguuls. His footsteps were as light and precise as the movements of his blade. He paused, then dove into a series of acrobatic thrusts and lunges as the music blazed up. Thrusts and lunges became a whirl of motion. Even the Darguuls were caught up in the dance now. Tariic followed Baerer’s movement with undisguised fascination, but even a few of the honor guard were watching, their heads turned as much as discipline allowed.
Ashi’s body twitched with every spin, every thrust. She knew the movements. It should have been her dancing for Lhesh Haruuc’s emissary. Breathe, she told herself. Be calm. Lose yourself in the dance. Baerer had taught her that. The bastard. She pressed her lips tight together. The two rings that pierced her lower lip-rings that had once been bone but had been replaced by gold at Vounn’s insistence-made two spots of pain against her upper lip.
The music slowed. The second part of the dance began. Baerer’s strikes became wide and sweeping, as slow as the music but with a deliberate intensity. He began to use his body more. The dance remained focused on the sword, but now Baerer also incorporated sharp jabs from his empty hand, elbow strikes, and elegant yet powerful kicks. He might just have been working sword forms on a training floor, but the grace of his movements elevated them beyond mechanical posing. Many of the Darguuls stared openly. On the dais, most of the gathered lords and functionaries of Deneith were murmuring to each other and twisting for a better view.
Vounn didn’t move, though satisfaction radiated from her. Ashi glared at the back of her head and, underneath her robe, gripped her sword, imagining it stuck through Vounn’s gray-streaked hair.
Viol and drum rose once more. The murmuring on the dais fell silent as everyone watched Baerer. In spite of herself, Ashi glanced away from Vounn and down at the swordsman-and couldn’t look away.
It was the third part of the dance, the climax. Baerer’s movements became tighter, closer, as if being pressed on all sides. The fight had turned against the warrior. What had been sweeping blows became desperate parries, though no less graceful for it. If anything, Ashi knew, there was even more art in the third part of the sword dance. It was far easier to simulate a believable blow than a believable block. But Baerer did it, and did it well. In her imagination, Ashi could almost see the enemies that surrounded him, unleashing a rain of lethal blows. Faced with the unrelenting assault, Baerer retreated, every step as light as his first passage across the floor, yet at the same time slow and weary.
When he reached the spot where he had begun, Baerer stopped as if unable to retreat any farther. His parries became even more rapid, even tighter and closer to his body. Enemies were all around him, close enough for their hot breath to stir his hair. The drum fell silent and only the viol played on. A long note-the same note that had begun the dance-soared on the air. Baerer’s movements became tighter. Tighter. His sword rose before his stiff, quivering body-
And the note faded away, leaving man and sword once more in silent rigidity. Baerer held the pose for a moment longer, then lowered his sword and bowed low before Tariic.
Vounn spoke into the silence that gripped the hall. “Tariic of Rhukaan Taash, emissary of Lhesh Haruuc Shaarat’kor, in the name of Baron Breven d’Deneith, patriarch of this House, be welcome in the halls of Sentinel Tower.”
Tariic pulled his eyes away from Baerer. “Lady Seneschal d’Deneith,” he said, “Lhesh Haruuc Shaarat’kor sends his greetings.” His voice was deep and rough but pleasant and assured, with no trace of a Goblin accent. He nodded back at Baerer. “Deneith honors us with a performance like nothing I have seen before.” He stood straight and shouted, “Paatcha!”
The goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears of Tariic’s guard burst out in a deafening roar of admiration, made even more deafening by the slapping of gauntleted fists on armored chests and by the screams of one unnerved tiger. Vounn, wearing a barely concealed expression of triumph, turned and made a small gesture to the members of Deneith gathered on the dais. Released from the bonds of ceremony, they added their applause to the din. Baerer bowed and bowed again, his face restrained but his eyes bright with pleasure.
Ashi focused on breathing and not killing anyone before she could get out of the hall.
The chambers she had been assigned were down the hall from Vounn’s suite. Even in private, she couldn’t be away from the lady seneschal. Ashi thrust open the door to the chambers, then slammed it behind herself. Dust that had probably been lodged in the frame for decades or more drifted down over the old wood. Ashi passed through the sitting room and into the bed chamber, tearing off the dancing garments as she went. The veil fell, crumpled, across a chair in the sitting room. The enveloping robe dropped to the floor of the bed chamber. The sword, a light piece of metal intended mostly for show, clattered alongside it. Ashi started to rip at the fitted shirt-a seamstress had all but sewn her into it that morning-then stopped.
There was a gown laid out on her bed. It was deep crimson silk, with full Fairhaven sleeves and a stiff collar of fine gnomish lace. Something inside her stirred and she knew that the cut and color of the dress had been chosen to flatter her height and features-
With a wordless cry of fury, she snatched up the sword and plunged it through the gown, stabbing deep into the mattress beneath. The blade pierced silk, bed-clothes, ticking, and stuffing to jam hard into the wood frame beneath. Ashi released the hilt and staggered away, her lips drawn back. “It’s not supposed to be like this!” she snarled through her teeth.
A year ago she hadn’t known about the cut of gowns or the origins of lace. She’d barely known anything of the world outside of the Shadow Marches. She’d been content as a hunter of the savage Bonetree, one of the most feared of the Marcher clans. She’d dimly been aware of the thirteen dragonmarked houses, knowing them only as distant clans rumored to carry magic in their blood.
Then she’d discovered that she carried that magic, too.
She raised her arms in front of her. Bright blue-green lines traced her skin from the backs of her hands to her shoulders, disappearing under her shirt. The Mark of Sentinel wrapped her in a pattern that covered almost her entire body, from feet to face. Only her fingers and palms and a strip from her cheekbones to just above her eyebrows were unmarked by the power within her. The dragonmark was far larger than the one on Baerer’s shoulder. Larger even than the mark that Vounn carried on the inside of her right arm and that curled over her wrist. The scholars of the civilized world called it a Siberys Mark, rare and powerful.
Sometimes Ashi couldn’t call it anything except a curse. It was the reason she was here, wasn’t it? When the wizard-swordsman Singe had first opened her eyes to the corruption of the Bonetree and the possibility that another clan waited for her beyond the Shadow Marches, she’d actually been afraid that House Deneith might not accept her. All she’d had to prove kinship had been a sword inherited from her grandfather, an outclanner captured and brought into the Bonetree to sire new children. Then she, Singe, Ekhaas, and her other new friends had faced Dah’mir the dragon, and she had, without thinking, reached out with all the force of her will to deny Dah’mir a hold over the kalashtar Dandra’s mind-and succeeded. Dandra had been shielded from Dah’mir’s influence. In the same moment, the dragonmark had drawn itself across Ashi’s skin in a flash of color, undeniable proof that she belonged to Deneith.
But was the mark really a curse? Her anger ebbing, Ashi let her arms fall. The power that the mark granted her to shield a mind from magical influence had not only protected Dandra, it had made the defeat of Dah’mir possible. Even indirectly the mark was a blessing: Deneith’s desire to bring her within its fold had been so strong that she’d been able to barter her willing surrender in return for the use of mercenaries from Deneith’s Blademarks Guild to stop one of Dah’mir’s mad schemes. The fighting men bought by her freedom had saved lives.