Page 14 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

On the fourth day they came over the final ridge and the valley opened below them.

Fez lay across the valley floor, walls the color of pale sand, smoke rising in slow threads from a hundred rooftops, and beneath all of it, faint and constant and carrying clean across the distance, the call to prayer.

Torstein sat his mule at the top of the rise and was quiet for a long moment. He had spent years imagining some version of this. The thing itself was something else entirely.

Behind him, he heard Mathias draw a slow breath and let it out.

"Merchants," Torstein said, and rode down into the valley.

***

Chapter 7

1048 - Fez, Morocco

Samira woke with a jolt and sat upright trying to catch her breath. It was another dream, another vision. She'd been plagued by strange visions: boats, men with golden hair, swords and blood. Lots of blood. But in the midst of it all a figure, ever rising from the dunes, a man with eyes of the deepest, darkest blue. He seemed to be speaking to her but his words were always lost on the wind. She recognized him as Viking.

Samira rubbed her chest and ran her hands through her hair, thinking perhaps she had been dwelling too much on Ibn Fadlan's tales.

She wrapped a cloak around her and ran outdoors and upstairs to sit on the rooftop. The dream was so vivid now, she even saw large fields made of frozen ice.

Her birthmark had been irritating her even more lately so she went to the one place she felt grounded enough to gather her thoughts.

The rooftop in the early morning, before the heat had settled into the stone, was where she could sit and watch the city wake. That sense that something or someone was coming was strongest again. As she watched the city she took comfort in the familiar. From this vantage point she could see if there were threats, or a change in the air.

Fez woke in layers. The call to prayer first, then the smoke from the bread ovens, then the sound of the souks preparing for the day ahead.

Her father said she watched the city as though she were planning to defend it. She had pointed out, the last time he said it, that she had been taught by her mother's kin, the Sahrawi, desert people. She had learned to read landscape, the direction of wind, rumblings in the ground and signs across the sky. The feeling burned even stronger that something inescapable was headed her way. Call it destiny or the will of God written before she was born, it was about to be fulfilled.

And yet she did not know whether to dread it or welcome it. The blue-eyed man came to her wrapped in slaughter, and she did not know if Allah sent him as a warning of what would descend upon her, or as the very thing she was meant to run toward. A blessing and a reckoning could wear the same face. She had learned that much from the desert.

Below her, the fountain in the courtyard started up, brought by craftsmen from Córdoba when Samira was a child, and the scent of jasmine growing along the southern wall scented the morning air.

She looked northward and pressed her hand flat against her sternum, where something had been stirring for months now. Waiting. Watching.

She whispered to the dark, "Who are you?"

The pre-dawn sky held its silence.

She sent a silent prayer, "Bismillah. Guide me and keep me, and let me know Your will when it comes to me," that whatever was hidden would make itself known, and then Samira pushed off from the parapet and went back inside to begin her day. She had one more transaction to make for her saffron and this time would be sneaking out of the compound alone.

***

Fez, Morocco

THE SOUK WAS LOUD. It was layered, dozens of tongues braided together, spice and smoke and animal and dust.

Mathias had stopped at a leather stall. Njal had gone with them. Torstein had drifted along, following a narrower street away from the main marketplace.

He turned into a narrow passage between two tall buildings, where lines of drying laundry created a patchwork of shade and fading sunlight. He kept one hand casually resting on the hilt of his curved dagger as he scanned his surroundings.

The sounds came first. Shuffling footsteps, a muffled curse, the unmistakable thud of a body hitting a wall. Then a woman's voice, low and threatening, speaking rapid Arabic.

Torstein edged toward the alley entrance, keeping to the shadows. The scene that greeted him stopped him cold.

A woman stood with her back to him, facing three men in dark cloaks. Their faces were wrapped. Not against dust, he thought. Against being recognized.

But she was far from helpless. She was dressed in loose trousers gathered at the ankles and a long tunic belted at the waist. A scarf that had likely covered her hair had fallen to her shoulders, revealing a thick braid of dark hair that swung with her movements.