Page 60 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

She went north along the ridge, back the way she had come, faster than she had run through the lanes of Fez. Her lungs burned. Her boots slipped on the wet stone. She did not stop.

She came over the lip of the glen as the riders reached the burn.

From above, the bracken looked like bracken and nothing more. The men beneath it had hidden themselves well. But the pendant was warm against her breastbone, and when she looked down at the slope she could see each of them as plainly as if they stood in the open. Three on the near bank. Two on the far. One further up the glen with his bow already drawn.

He was aiming at Torstein's back.

"Torstein!" she screamed. "Archers! In the bracken, both banks! Behind you!"

Torstein wheeled his horse. The arrow meant for his spine struck his saddle instead.

Then the glen erupted.

The hidden men rose out of the bracken. Leif and Mathias were off their horses with swords drawn before the first of them reached the ford. Njal rode one down where he stood. Samira went down the slope at a run with her koummya in her hand and took the archer on the near bank from behind before he could nock again.

She did not see Torstein cross the burn. She only knew that he was suddenly beside her, and that no blade came near her after that.

One of the Normans lost his hood as he came at them. There was a pale scar across his lip, and a mark on his brow where a bruise had long since faded.

Torstein knew that face. "The water carrier," he said.

The man went for Samira. Torstein put himself in the way, and the water carrier did not rise again.

The rest broke for the south, toward the harbor at Tarbert and the boat that waited there. Njal and Mathias chased them as far as the road and let them go.

The glen fell quiet but for the burn and the breathing of the horses.

Samira's knees gave way at last. Torstein caught her before she reached the ground.

"You came back," he said. His voice was not steady.

"You rode into their trap."

"I rode after my wife."

She looked up at him. There was mud on his face and blood on his sleeve that was not his, and he was looking at her as he had looked at her in the storm.

"You are bleeding," he said, and touched her lip.

"A little. Only a little. I did not hold it long."

He pulled her against his chest and held her there, in the wet bracken, with his men standing about.

***

THEY SHELTERED THAT night in a shepherd's bothy further up the glen. Samira built the fire herself, sunk into the earth with a channel for the air, and Torstein watched her do it and said nothing until she sat back on her heels.

"Where did you learn that?"

"From my mother's people. I taught it to a woman on the road two nights ago." She held her hands to the heat. "She fed me when I had nothing."

He sat down beside her. Then he drew the folded vellum from his tunic and held it in his open hand between them.

"Follow me as your husband, not your keeper," he said quietly. "I read it a hundred times on that road."

She did not answer.

He looked at the fire, not at her. "When you fell at Loch Awe, I thought I was watching you die. I was afraid. I have never been so afraid in my life. And I made that fear your prison."