Page 26 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

"You kept getting in my way." Her voice rose. "Every time I moved, there you were blocking my path."

"So?"

"Do not 'so' me." She glared up at him.

Torstein stared at the feisty woman venting her anger at him, and he thought her the most beautiful creature he had ever beheld. So much so that he gave her a stupid grin.

Samira opened her mouth to shout at him. Then her gaze dropped, and she stopped.

"You could have been hurt!" Worry marred her features for a moment.

Torstein shrugged his shoulders. "Are you worried about me?" he asked.

"Never!" she snapped.

He chuckled then.

Behind them, Njal cleared his throat loudly.

"If ye two are finished," he said in Norn, "the merchant's men would like to take his daughter home before any more enemies come over that wall."

***

Chapter 10

The house was in an uproar when they returned. Servants were being questioned about how a water carrier had come so close to harming Samira, and Dawud and a guardsman were giving rapid orders to the household and securing the perimeter.

Zohra was kneeling on the floor of the long room. She had a shard of the broken cup in her fingers. She raised it to her nose and breathed in slowly.

"Poppy," she said.

Dawud closed his eyes.

"Enough to drug but not to kill." Zohra rose and crossed to Samira and took her bandaged hand. She looked at the binding, then at the strip of material it had been torn from, then at Torstein. Whatever she thought of it, she kept to herself. "They did not mean to kill you, habibti. They meant to carry you away."

Zohra gave a command and a woman appeared with a healing basket.

She immediately went about seeing to Samira's wound with a healing salve and proper bandage. Once she had finished, Dawud turned to his steward.

"Clear the room. All of the servants. Every guard to the gate and the roof. No one comes through that door until I call."

The servants filed out. The door was closed. Their footsteps faded across the courtyard.

Only six people remained in the room. Dawud stood at the head of the table. Zohra stood at Samira's shoulder. Njal and Mathias kept to the wall by the door, as they would have in the jarl's hall. Torstein stood across the table from Samira and could not stop looking at the bandage on her hand.

"I think," Dawud said heavily, "we have had enough of courtesy for one day. You have something for me, Torstein Hagansson."

Torstein retrieved the knapsack he had left beside his cushion and drew out the contents. He unfastened the strap and set the oak box on the table between them.

It was a plain thing, iron-bound at the corners, dark with salt and handling.

Inside lay a bundle of letters tied with a black cord, each one sealed with the Abbess's mark, and among them a drawing of the pendant he had been sent to retrieve. Beneath them, wrapped in waxed linen, lay a small clay tablet no bigger than his palm, encased in a second shell of dried clay molded close around it. Into the outer clay a seal had been pressed while it was still soft, a household mark set deep in the surface, so that the tablet within could not be read until the casing was broken open.

Dawud looked at it for a long moment before he touched it.

"And I have something for you," he said.

He turned to a small chest that stood on the side table and unlocked it. From inside he drew a fold of indigo cloth, set it on the table and opened it.