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 man who’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.