Page 18 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

He drew a small iron key from beneath his robe, one she had never once seen him wear, and fit it to the lock.

Inside, beneath a folded length of indigo cloth gone soft with age, lay a single object: a key, longer and more ornate than the one Dawud had just used, its bow worked in a pattern of interlocking eight-pointed stars, tarnished dark with time.

Samira stared at it. "A key to what?"

"To a room within the walls of al-Qarawiyyin." Dawud's voice had gone quiet and careful, the voice of a man setting down something he had carried a long distance and was afraid to drop even now, at the end of the journey. "You know its founding, Samira. Every child in Fez does. Fatima al-Fihri built it with her own inheritance, nearly two hundred years past, and made certain from the first stone that a woman's mind would always have a place within those walls, same as any man's. It is why your mother trusted it. It is why I have trusted it, all these years, to hold what I could not."

"What does it hold?"

Dawud looked once more at Zohra before he answered.

"A pendant," he said. "Left there by your mother, before you were born, for safekeeping. She trusted very few people with the knowledge of where it was hidden, and fewer still with why."

"Why would my mother hide a pendant behind a locked door in a scholars' library, rather than simply leave it to me?"

"Because, habibti, some things are not safe to carry until the one who carries them is ready to be hunted for them." He closed his hand briefly around the key before holding it out to her. "And I begin to fear, after tonight, that the waiting is over."

Samira took it. It was heavier than it looked, cold at first and then, strangely, not.

"Who guards this room?" she asked. "Surely a library does not simply hand a stranger the key to a locked chamber and stand aside."

"No one hands anyone anything at al-Qarawiyyin without Sitt Zaynab's word on it." Zohra spoke for the first time since Dawud had begun. "She has kept the western archive for longer than I have kept you alive, which ought to tell you something of her patience. Your mother trusted her with this. I trust her with you." She rose, already reaching for the light shawl she kept by the door. "We go tonight, while the streets are watched less closely than they will be tomorrow. I will not have you walk to that library alone, not after what came at you today."

"Zohra—"

"I did not ask, habibti." Zohra was already at the door. "I have buried one woman I loved who kept too many secrets alone. I do not intend to bury her daughter the same way."

Samira looked down once more at the key in her palm, at the small worn stars catching what little lamplight reached it, and then at her father, who looked, for the first time in her memory, entirely unlike the composed man she had known her whole life.

She followed Zohra out under the cover of darkness.

***

Chapter 8

Dar al-Rumman

For three weeks the Brotherhood had made their home at Dar al-Rumman, the House of Pomegranates.

It stood outside the walls of Fez, where the road bent down toward the river, behind a cedar gate that opened only for men with heavy purses. By day it passed for a lodging house for foreign traders, with storerooms below and sleeping rooms above. By night the storerooms were forgotten. Wine came up from the cellars, women came down from the upper rooms, and the man who owned the place, a soft-spoken Andalusi named Mansur, asked no questions of anyone who paid in gold.

The Brotherhood paid in gold.

Inside, pierced brass lamps scattered light across walls of green and white tile. Musk and orange blossom hung thick in the air. Somewhere beyond a carved screen, a woman sang to the oud, her voice low and slow, meant for men who had drunk too much to care what the words were.

Géraud de Vire lay back against a heap of silk cushions with a cup of dark Andalusian wine in his hand. A young woman with kohl-rimmed eyes and hennaed fingers knelt at his side, filling his cup each time it grew light. He had not asked her name. He did not intend to.

Across from him, Brother Thibault sat upright on a low bench by the lattice. He wore the cloak of the Brotherhood even here, and no woman had come near him all evening.

The curtain at the doorway parted. Three men came in. One held a bloodied cloth to his cheek. One limped, his thigh bound tight with a strip of linen already stained through. The third had a split lip and a bruise across his forehead in the shape of a stone wall.

Géraud did not rise. When he spoke, it was in the French of Normandy, so that none of the women would understand.

"Where is she?"

Oger lowered the cloth from his cheek. "We lost her."

"What do you mean you lost her?"