Page 19 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

"She had help." Oger's jaw tightened. "A Norseman."

The singer behind the screen held a long note. Nobody in the room moved.

"A Norseman?" Géraud repeated. "In Fez."

"Big as an ox and quiet as a cat. He came out of nowhere and put Aubert into the wall before any of us saw him."

Aubert touched the bruise on his forehead and said nothing.

Thibault spoke from the lattice. "What Norseman?"

"I saw only the one. But a man like that does not sail this far alone."

Géraud set his cup down so hard that the wine leapt over the rim and ran across the girl's fingers. She did not flinch. She only wiped her hand and waited.

"Norsemen do not come to Fez to buy leather," Géraud said.

"No." Thibault's face had gone hard. "They come because they have been sent. This is that interfering Abbess's doing."

"You cannot know that."

"I know she has had her sisters watching us since Normandy. I know she would not trust this errand to a priest." Thibault leaned forward. "If her Norsemen are here, then they are after the same thing we are. And if they find it first, we are in grave danger."

Rainaud eased himself down onto a cushion, his teeth gritted against the pain in his leg. "The woman is no easier. She has been trained to fight, and to fight well. I have seen soldiers who could not move the way she moves."

"She is a merchant's daughter," Géraud said.

"She is not like any merchant's daughter I have ever seen."

Géraud turned the thought over. "Then we try the front door. Men offer for merchants' daughters every day. A Norman lord with gold and fine manners might be let into the house."

"Her father has turned away every man who has come asking," Thibault said. "He will not hand her to us. And a courtship takes months. We do not have months."

Oger looked up. "And what of the others? The women we took on the road?"

Thibault's mouth thinned. "None of them proved useful."

"None?"

"The fisherman's wife at Asilah had the mark on her shoulder, a crescent turned on its back, just as FitzOsbern described it. But it was a scar from a cooking pot, nothing more. The widow near Sala had a birthmark beneath her eye, shaped like a falling tear. She wept the whole way to Fez and could not tell us one thing we did not already know. And the girl from the Berber camp who was said to have the sight." He shrugged. "She saw nothing. Not even us coming."

"Where are they now?"

"Where they will not be found," Thibault said, and did not say more.

Rainaud frowned. "I still do not understand it. Why go to such trouble over women? Take the pendant and be done."

Thibault turned his head slowly to look at him. "Because the pendant alone is worthless."

"Worthless?"

"In your hand it is a carved stone and nothing more. In mine, the same. It sleeps for anyone who does not carry the blood." Thibault's voice dropped. "But in the hands of one who does, it shows what is hidden."

The room had gone very quiet.

"FitzOsbern learned that lesson once already," Thibault went on. "He held a treasure in his hands and could not make it work, because the blood was not his. He will not make that mistake again. He wants the stone, and he wants the one who can wake it."

Géraud swirled the wine in his cup. "Think what that would mean in the duke's hall. Every whisper, every secret, every man who smiles at William and plots behind his back. The one who holds that stone would hold them all."