Page 12 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

They walked. Behind them, patient, keeping to the edge of the crowd, the gray robe followed.

She took them down a different route, not toward the tanners' gate but away from it, into the coppersmiths' din where a person could not hear her own feet. Samira turned again, down a lane hung with dyed wool, and stopped hard against a doorway and drew Tiziri in beside her and waited, one breath, two. The gray robe rounded the corner and checked his stride when he did not see them, and turned his hooded head slowly along the lane, searching, and she knew then past any doubt that it was her he wanted and no other.

She did not wait for him to find them.

"Now," she whispered, and pulled Tiziri out the far side of the doorway into a covered passage, and they went quickly, not running, running would bring every eye in the street around, but quickly, through the passage and a curtained arch and out into a lane she knew and he could not.

This was her city. She had walked these lanes her whole life. She took them through a grain-seller's back room with a coin pressed into the woman's hand, up a stair to a rooftop where washing hung, along the roof and down the far side into a street that doubled back on itself, and at every turn she looked, and at every turn the gray robe was not there, and still the mark on her wrist would not cool.

They came to the tanners' gate by a way no stranger would have found it. Samira did not slow until the laundress's gate was bolted behind them and the sound of the street shut out.

Only then did Tiziri sag against the wall, both hands pressed to her chest. "We lost him. Sayyida, we lost him."

"Yes." Samira stood very still in the cool of the courtyard, the gold heavy in her purse, and listened to her own heart slow. The burning on her wrist had begun, at last, to fade. "Say nothing of this to my father. Nothing. Do you understand?"

Tiziri nodded, still trembling.

But Samira did not move for a long moment. Because losing a man in the lanes told her nothing of how many there had been, or how long they had watched her. Now the caution her father and Zohra had asserted became all the more real. They were hiding something from her, far more than they let on, and Samira would need to remain vigilant.

***

Andalusian Quarter, Fez

THAT NIGHT, SAMIRA'S father, Dawud, waited until the house had gone quiet and his daughter's lamp had guttered out behind her door before he sent for transport and had himself carried down through the Andalusian quarter to the modest house two streets from the tanners'.

Zohra's house sat two streets from the tanners', modest on the outside, though nothing modest lived within it. Carpets from Córdoba, a library that rivaled Dawud's own. The weapons master and ex-royal guard had made a great deal of coin from her skill to afford such a life. But at this moment her first priority was the same as it had been for twenty-four years: the safety of the woman she had mentored in combat since childhood.

She received him in the training room, wiping the last of the oil from a blade with a cloth, her sleeves still pushed back from the forearms of a woman who worked for her living. She did not rise, and she did not stop what she was doing. She did not ask why he had come at such an hour. She had known him thirty years. She knew the weight a man carried by the way he crossed a threshold.

"Someone is watching her," Dawud said. He did not sit. "A man kept your gate today. And there was another at the edge of the souk these past few mornings."

Zohra's hands went still on the blade.

"You are certain it was watching, and not wanting?" she asked. "She is a beautiful woman. Men look."

"I know the difference between a man who covets and a man who counts." Dawud's voice was low. "This one was counting. Her comings, her goings, the doors she uses." He drew the broken document from his sleeve and set it on the table between them, though he did not need to; she could not read the language it was written in, and he knew it. It was the gesture he needed, not the words. "And now this. They have found the trail again, Zohra. After twenty-four years. The Brotherhood has not forgotten what her mother carried out of the desert, and they have not stopped looking for it."

Zohra set the sword down and looked at the document a long moment. Then she looked up at him.

"Then it is as we always knew it would be," she said. "The amulet cannot stay hidden forever. It was never meant to. A thing like that has its own will, Dawud, and its own hour, and I have felt for a season now that its hour draws close."

"The Almoravids press up from the south." Dawud pressed his fingers to his brow. "I could bear that alone. Cities fall and rise; a merchant learns to bend with it. But this, the two of them together, the sword at the gate and the hand at the door reaching for what is hers, I cannot hold both. I am an old man."

"You were never meant to hold it. Only to keep it until the keeping passed to her." Zohra crossed the room and set the blade in its place on the wall. "Everything we have done, you and I, from the day her mother put her in our care, was for this. To see the bloodline survive and the prophecy answered. That is the whole of it. The price of survival was never going to be small. Samira's destiny lies beyond the beyond, Dawud. You have always known this. It was written on her skin before she drew her first breath, and neither your walls nor my blades were ever going to keep her within them. We were only ever meant to make her ready for the road, not to keep her from it."

For a long moment the old merchant said nothing. When he spoke again his voice had thinned.

"I have taught her everything I know. You have taught her the blade. She reads the sky like her mother did and she misses nothing." He shook his head slowly. "And still, I lie awake and wonder if it will be enough. Whether we have prepared her."

"We have prepared her as well as two mortal hands can prepare anything." Zohra's gaze did not waver. "The rest is not ours to decide. We agreed we would wait for the signs before we spoke to her of any of it. Now the signs are here." She was quiet a moment. "One thing has always been certain. The order of things will change. When it changes the pendant cannot stay where it lies. It will have to pass elsewhere for safekeeping, so that the balance of the world holds. That was always the way of it."

"You will show her," Dawud said at last. Not quite a question.

"Yes, it is time. You must give her what is hers. The chest. The pendant. Her mother's things. She cannot walk the road half-blind to what she carries and why they hunt her for it."

"Perhaps we can delay a little longer," Dawud said.

"A truth withheld too long wounds worse than any lie. It is time she knew everything about her mother and what her future holds, and why you never prepared a marriage contract for her."