Page 28 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

He turned to his daughter. "The parcel is you, Samira."

Silence fell over the room.

Torstein did not move. He was not sure he was breathing. He heard Mathias, by the door, make a small, strangled sound.

"What?" Samira said.

Nobody answered her.

She shook her head. "No. It cannot be. Father, I can guard this myself. I have been trained for nothing else my whole life. Zohra has seen to that. We can keep it here. I do not need to be carried across the sea like a bolt of silk."

"No one thinks you are a bolt of silk, habibti," Zohra said quietly.

"Then let me guard it here! In my own city, in my own house."

"You cannot." Dawud did not raise his voice. He did not need to. "Your mother tried. She is in her grave."

Samira flinched as if he had struck her.

Dawud's face softened, but he did not stop. "Hear me. The prophecy that came down to your mother's order was clear. When the stone woke again, it would leave the sands. It would travel to the lands of ice and snow, and there it would answer to its own kin, far from here." He touched the clay tablet. "The Abbess writes the same. Her sisters have kept the other half of that prophecy for longer than our family has kept the stone. The time has come."

"Its kin," Torstein said slowly. "What kin?"

"She does not say. Only that it waits in the north." Dawud turned back to his daughter. "And its guardian must go with it. It cannot be kept here any longer. Not by you. Not by me. Not by anyone."

"Because of those who covet it?" Samira asked.

Dawud glanced at Zohra, and she gave him the smallest nod. "Yes. The Brotherhood came from the north, but they are not the only ones who have heard of what we keep. It was only a matter of time before they attacked al-Qarawiyyin. There are men in this city who want the stone as badly. The Banu Ifran have been at war with our emir for as long as you have been alive. Think what a pendant that shows every hidden thing would be worth to them."

Samira had gone very pale.

"And there is talk from the south," Dawud went on. "Of a preacher in the desert who gathers warriors to him. Men who would call such a stone a thing of the old gods and smash it or use it for foul means. Whichever faction takes it first will not stop until they have you as well. If you remain in Morocco, it will never end. Not for you. Not for this house."

"Then I will hide," Samira said. "I will go to my mother's kin in the desert."

"Habibti. I have turned this over many times. I have looked for another way until my eyes ached. There is none. You must go north. To the Abbess and her sisters, and then to wherever the stone leads you."

Samira turned to Zohra. "Zohra. Tell him."

Zohra did not look away from her. "Your father is right, habibti. It is you who must see this through. And neither I nor Tiziri can go with you."

"You would never let me go alone. The law would shun me traveling without a khādima."

"It is not mine to choose." Zohra touched the clay tablet on the table. "The prophecy says the keeper must leave all her sisters behind and cross the sea alone, so that she is given wholly to the new land and to whoever stands guard over her there."

Samira stood very still. Torstein watched her understand it. He watched every argument she might have made rise in her face and fall away again, one after another, until there was nothing left.

At last she turned and looked at him.

It was not the look of a woman who had found her destiny. It was the look of a woman who had just been handed to a stranger and was deciding whether she would ever forgive anyone for it.

"You knew," she said to him.

"I did not," Torstein said. "I swear it. I am learning as you are. I thought I had come for a pendant alone."

He thought of the night before, on the gallery of the funduq. Once we have the parcel, that gives me time to hunt for my woman. He had thought the gods had set her in his path. He had not dreamed they had sent him across the whole of the sea to fetch her.

Samira held his gaze for a long moment. Then she looked down at her bandaged hand, at the strip of material wrapped around it.