Chapter 23
The Hidden Men
The birthmark began to burn an hour after Naomi had gone.
Samira stopped on the track above the water. The morning was gray and still. Nothing moved in the trees. Nothing moved on the road below.
She drew the pendant from its pouch and held it in her palm without closing her fingers. She remembered the cold at Loch Awe, and the blood, and Torstein's face when she woke. For a long moment she did not dare.
Then she closed her hand around it.
The light came quick and sharp. She saw a glen with a burn running through it, and a ford where the road crossed the water.
She saw men lying flat in the bracken on either bank with bows across their backs.
She saw four riders coming down the glen at a hard pace, and the one at the front had golden hair.
She tore her hand away before the stone could take more. Blood touched her lip, only a drop, and she wiped it on her sleeve.
Torstein had followed her. And he was riding straight into their trap.
Samira ran.
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."
"I should not have left you without speaking my thoughts clearly," she said. "I was angry. I wanted you to know how it feels to have a decision taken away."
"I know it now."
"The stone did not save you today." She turned his face towards her. "I did. With it."
"Aye. You did."
"I will not carry it alone," she said. "But I will carry it, Torstein. It is mine to carry."
He took her hand, the one with the rose ring on it, and pressed his lips to her knuckles.
"Then I carry it with you," he said.
She leaned into him. He wrapped her in his cloak and his arms, and for a long time neither of them spoke.
"Morag said I would have to endure what comes before," he murmured into her hair.
"And have you?"
"I rode two days not knowing if I would find you alive." His arms tightened. "I think that was enough enduring for any man."
Samira laughed softly against his chest. Then she kissed him, and he kissed her back, and the hidden fire burned low beneath them until morning.
That night they made love in the privacy of the bothy, as quietly as they could. But it was still wild and passionate. They had survived their first earth-shattering fight and this was the wild make-up coupling that came after it.
Samira rode Torstein hard. She straddled him, her palms flat against his chest, and took his hardened length with abandon, and it was the most exquisite feeling.
There was nothing between them but skin and an ocean's worth of love.
Torstein was strong beneath her. He held her tenderly, his hands gripping her sides as he controlled the momentum, all the while surging up into her with powerful thrusts that buried him deep again and again.
Each time he gazed up at her, he looked at her as though she were the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
One hand gripped her side for purchase while the other caressed every part of her skin, his thumb stroking her dark brown areolas, putting enough pressure on her nipple to make her bite her lip and keep from crying out.
Every time Torstein lay with Samira it was with awe and wonder, as if he had struck gold.
She felt sensual, attractive, and loved, and she bloomed under his heated gaze.
He groaned loudly when she tightened above him and gently caressed him deep. She would never get tired of staring into his deep blue eyes.
Torstein was in Valhalla. Surely he must be, for the Valkyrie riding him so hard was a precious beauty.
He groaned and cursed and thrust deep, feeling every part of himself come alive.
Being with his wife was unimaginable pleasure, and he had never known the like before.
But what bound them was something deep and pure, blessed by the gods. Surely it was.
Torstein felt the urge to protect her, to possess her, and to lay down his life for her, all in equal measure. His one regret was that they had been apart at all. That she had suffered alone, without him. That he had not found her years earlier. He would not squander that gift again.
Losing control, he hauled her onto her side and then hovered above her.
He needed to take his woman hard, and he needed to dominate her completely.
So he did. He gazed down at her and saw the same passion and pleasure and wonder returned to him in equal measure.
His eyes caressed every part of her, and not a single part of her was anything but beautiful to him.
He stroked her belly as he thrust within her, knowing that soon his offspring would be nurtured and protected there.
She would bear his children, and he would protect her with his life.
The thought of breeding and nesting had him impossibly hard.
Her moans of pleasure were music to his ears, for he knew his vixen enjoyed him as much as he enjoyed her.
The euphoria and possessiveness were overwhelming, so that when he finally came, it was with a muffled roar against her neck.
Samira's release broke right alongside his, and she bit his shoulder to smother her scream, and Torstein did not mind one bit.
***