Page 56 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

Torstein looked back along the empty road. "I see nothing."

"Give me the pendant."

He hesitated, and she saw it. Then he handed it to her.

She closed her fingers around it and shut her eyes.

The light came at once, stronger than it had ever come in Thorfinn's chamber. She saw riders two days behind them, cloaked, moving fast. She saw a ship in a gray harbor. She saw something else beyond that, something that pulled at her, deep and cold and it would not let her go.

"Samira?"

She could not answer him. The pull grew stronger.

"Samira!" Torstein shouted.

The stone was torn from her hand. She came back to herself on her knees in the wet grass with Torstein holding her up, and there was blood running from her nose over her lips and down her chin. She tried to speak and the world went dark.

When she woke it was nearly dusk. She was wrapped in every cloak they had, lying by a fire, and Torstein was sitting beside her with a fearful expression on his face.

"Riders," she whispered. "Two days behind us."

"I know. You said it before you fell." He did not take his eyes off her. "You were gone an hour, Samira. You were cold as the loch. I could not wake you."

"I am awake now."

Torstein said nothing. But she saw him put the pendant box back inside his tunic, and she saw his hand stay on it.

***

Loch Fyne, Argyll

THEY CAMPED THE NEXT night at the head of Loch Fyne, in a stand of birch above the water. Mathias built the fire. Njal took the first watch. Leif took one look at Torstein's face and found a reason to see to the horses.

Samira sat by the fire and waited. She had known since Loch Awe that this was coming.

"When we reach Saddell," Torstein said, "I will give the pendant to the Abbess. Her sisters can seal it away somewhere no one will ever find it. Then you and I return home. From this day forward, you will have nothing more to do with it!"

"The jarl said I must remain at the abbey with it."

"I will speak to the jarl."

"And the other relics? The dagger at Kilmarnock? The stone in the mound?"

"Let them sleep. They have slept this long."

"The Brotherhood will not let them sleep." Samira kept her voice level. "You heard Thorfinn. The pendant finds them. If it is sealed away, it is only a stone in a box waiting for someone to come and find the key. And the key is me."

"Then the key stays in Orkney. Behind my walls, with my men on the gate."

"As it stayed behind my father's walls?" Her voice rose. "Behind the walls of al-Qarawiyyin? It did not keep the Brotherhood from my door."

"It bled you!" He was on his feet. "You fell on the ground bleeding and I could not wake you. That stone is harming you and you want to hunt for more of them!"

"It is what I was born for!"

"And it sent your mother to her grave!"

The words hung in the air between them.