Page 53 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

"I still do not know which you are," she said softly. "But I have learned in the desert that a blessing and a reckoning can wear the same face."

Torstein drew her closer until her head lay against his chest.

"You gave your word to my faith in Fez. Yet you still call on Odin, and you wed me again beneath a cross."

"I meant the words I spoke to your qadi. I hold my old gods loosely now, and yours I will not mock. If both watch over you, so much the better. Then I will try to be more of a blessing," he said.

Samira smiled against his skin and did not answer.

***

Chapter 21

The Jarl's Chamber

Thorfinn's private chamber sat at the far end of his hall, behind a heavy oak door and two guardsmen.

"Sit," he said. "All of ye."

Torstein took the chair beside Samira. Leif, Mathias and Njal settled along the bench opposite. Thorfinn remained standing by the hearth with his arms folded.

"When Abbess Murdina came to me," he said, "she told me only that a package waited in Fez and that the Brotherhood would kill to have it. I sent ye to fetch it. Now tell me what it cost."

Torstein told it plainly.

"They were in Fez before us. They set upon Samira in the souk, then poisoned her cup in her father's own house. They paid bandits to ambush us on the road to Salé." His jaw tightened. "Then at Thurso, men paid by a Norman churchman tried to drag her off the shore at dawn. They were told she was a thrall who would not be missed."

"The Brotherhood." Thorfinn's eyes narrowed. "At Thurso. That is too close to my own shore." He turned to Samira. "And that is why ye were wed again there."

"Yes, Jarl."

He nodded once, as though that settled it, and went to a chest by the wall.

"There is one more thing," Torstein said. "A day short of Salé we crossed paths with your son."

Thorfinn's head came up. "Kato?"

"Aye. He and Ajani rode down on the men who set upon us, and between us we cleared the road." Torstein allowed himself a grin. "He sends his greetings to you, and to his sister and her bairns. He bade me tell you he is alive and that he has found something worth following. He is hunting rebels along the coast, well paid ones, and he means to find who is paying them."

For a moment the jarl said nothing at all.

He turned toward the fire, and the hard lines of his face changed in a way Samira had not thought them capable of changing. There was a longing in it, and beneath that, plain as day, a father's pride.

"Rebels," Thorfinn said at last. "At his age I was doing the same, and with half his sense." He cleared his throat. "Did he look well?"

"He looked like a man who has not slept in a month and is enjoying himself immensely."

Thorfinn laughed once, low in his chest. "Aye. That is my son."

He stood a moment longer with his back to the room. Then he squared his shoulders and turned around, and the Jarl of Orkney was in his place again.

"Well," he said. "To the matter at hand."

The pendant lay on a fold of dark cloth. Blue-green stone, set in old gold.

"I have looked at it half the night," Thorfinn said. "It is a pretty thing. But I cannae see why men would cross the world for it."

"May I?" Samira asked.