Page 27 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

The pendant lay on the dark cloth. It was a disc of blue-green stone set in old gold, smaller than Torstein had imagined, hung on a fine gold chain worn thin with age. The sign of Tanit was etched into its face, a triangle crowned with a circle and crossed by a single line. Even in the dim light of the room, the lines seemed to catch and hold what little light there was.

So that is what I crossed the world for, Torstein thought.

Dawud broke the wax seal on the first of the letters and began to read. It was written in both Latin script and Arabic, and Torstein guessed that Brother Aiden had done the translating.

Torstein did not watch him. He watched Samira.

She was looking at the pendant, not at him. Her bandaged hand rested on the table close to it. He could see the pulse beating in the side of her throat, fast and hard, and he knew she was as shaken as he was, and hiding it just as badly.

Two days. Twice in two days she had been put directly into his path. The first time in an alley he should never have turned into. The second time at the very table he had crossed the sea to sit at. He was not a man who believed in the fates. He trusted only courage and steel and had said so all his life. But he did not know what else to call this.

A single word rose in him, so fierce and certain that for a moment he feared he had said it aloud.

Mine.

He knew without a doubt that Samira was his destiny. Now he just had to work out how to spirit her away to Orkney when he left.

Across the table, Samira glanced up and caught him gazing at her. She looked away again at once, and the color rose in her cheeks.

***

SAMIRA COULD FEEL TORSTEIN watching her. It was like standing too close to a fire.

She did not know what to do with any of it. The dreams. The dark blue eyes. The way the words it is you had fallen out of her in the alley before she could stop them. And now this man sitting at her father's table, a man who had put himself between her and every blade in that alley and then bound her hand as though it were made of glass.

She was not a woman to be carried away by a pair of eyes and a strong arm.

And yet her heart would not stop racing.

It means nothing, she told herself. He would soon leave and return to his homeland, and in time he would forget her.

That thought sobered her for some reason she could not define.

***

DAWUD FINISHED THE first letter and set it aside. He broke the second, and then the third. Last of all he took up the clay tablet and cracked the outer casing open with the heel of his hand, and lifted the inner tablet free of the broken shell, and turned it to the lamp.

Torstein could see marks pressed into the clay. They were not letters he knew.

Dawud read them twice. Then he set the tablet down on the table.

He nodded slowly to himself. Then he looked up and looked at Samira. It was a strange look, full of sorrow and pride and something that was almost like an apology.

Samira saw it. "Father?"

Dawud looked at Torstein instead.

"You believe you have come for the pendant," he said.

"I have," Torstein said. "My instructions are that I am to carry it north and keep it safe. I will guard it with my life."

"I do not doubt it." Dawud laid his hand flat on the letters. "But the Abbess has written more here than she told you. The parcel you were sent for is not the pendant alone."

Torstein frowned. "Then what?"

Dawud drew a long breath.

"The pendant, and the one who guards it. The one who bears the mark. Together. Safe passage for both. That is the whole of what the Abbess asks, and I have given her my word."