Chapter 10
The house was in an uproar when they returned. Servants were being questioned about how a water carrier had come so close to harming Samira, and Dawud and a guardsman were giving rapid orders to the household and securing the perimeter.
Zohra was kneeling on the floor of the long room. She had a shard of the broken cup in her fingers. She raised it to her nose and breathed in slowly.
"Poppy," she said.
Dawud closed his eyes.
"Enough to drug but not to kill." Zohra rose and crossed to Samira and took her bandaged hand.
She looked at the binding, then at the strip of material it had been torn from, then at Torstein.
Whatever she thought of it, she kept to herself.
"They did not mean to kill you, habibti. They meant to carry you away."
Zohra gave a command and a woman appeared with a healing basket.
She immediately went about seeing to Samira's wound with a healing salve and proper bandage. Once she had finished, Dawud turned to his steward.
"Clear the room. All of the servants. Every guard to the gate and the roof. No one comes through that door until I call."
The servants filed out. The door was closed. Their footsteps faded across the courtyard.
Only six people remained in the room. Dawud stood at the head of the table. Zohra stood at Samira's shoulder. Njal and Mathias kept to the wall by the door, as they would have in the jarl's hall. Torstein stood across the table from Samira and could not stop looking at the bandage on her hand.
"I think," Dawud said heavily, "we have had enough of courtesy for one day. You have something for me, Torstein Hagansson."
Torstein retrieved the knapsack he had left beside his cushion and drew out the contents. He unfastened the strap and set the oak box on the table between them.
It was a plain thing, iron-bound at the corners, dark with salt and handling.
Inside lay a bundle of letters tied with a black cord, each one sealed with the Abbess's mark, and among them a drawing of the pendant he had been sent to retrieve.
Beneath them, wrapped in waxed linen, lay a small clay tablet no bigger than his palm, encased in a second shell of dried clay molded close around it.
Into the outer clay a seal had been pressed while it was still soft, a household mark set deep in the surface, so that the tablet within could not be read until the casing was broken open.
Dawud looked at it for a long moment before he touched it.
"And I have something for you," he said.
He turned to a small chest that stood on the side table and unlocked it. From inside he drew a fold of indigo cloth, set it on the table and opened it.
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."
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.
"It seems," she said, very quietly, "I have no choice."
He did not know whether it was bitterness or something else in her voice. He did not think she knew either.
By the door, Njal leaned toward him and murmured, "Well, it seems like she's coming with us after all."
***