Page 40 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

"Aye." He crouched down in front of her so that his eyes were level with hers. "Salt water gets into a thing that is nothing and turns it into something that kills you. I have buried men who had nothing wrong with them." A beat. "Give me your arm before I lose what is left of my temper."

She gave him her arm.

***

UNDER THE AWNING AT the stern it was almost warm. A small soapstone lamp burned oil and threw a circle of light about the size of a table.

Torstein pushed her ruined sleeve up past the elbow and turned her forearm toward the lamp. The cut ran a hand's length below her wrist. Not deep. Ragged at one end where the wood had dragged.

"This will burn," he said, and pulled the stopper from a flask.

It burned. She made no sound. He glanced up once when she did not, and then went back to work.

His hands were enormous and they were not clumsy. He took two splinters out with the point of his knife, slowly, the way a man threads a needle. Then he smeared honey along the cut. She could smell a crushed herb mixed into it that she recognized but could not name in Norn.

"Where did you learn to do this?"

"Every man in the north learns some of it. The sea road is long and there is no one else to do it." He began winding a strip of clean linen round her arm. "My mother is better at it than any of us. Runa. She is known for it in Kirkwall. People come up from the shore villages when their own remedies have failed. She taught me what her mother taught her."

"A woman of knowledge, then."

"She would tell you she is a woman of good sense and no patience. She would be lying about the second part." He tied off the linen. "And your mother?"

Samira watched the lamp flame.

"She was Sahrawi. Desert people, from the south. She could tell you three days before a sandstorm came exactly what the sky was going to do, and she was never once wrong, and she could never explain to me how she knew it." A pause. "She taught me the stars. Her people have to navigate across country where there is no landmark of any kind, no tree, no hill, nothing. The sky is the only map they have."

"And she died guarding the stone?"

"When I was young."

"I am sorry."

"So am I," she replied.

Torstein's fingers were still resting against the inside of her wrist where he had finished the knot. Neither of them moved. The ship rolled gently underneath them and the lamp went on burning and somewhere forward a man laughed at something.

"You should get out of those wet clothes," Torstein said.

"So should you."

Neither of them moved.

A shout came down the deck about the split sail. He was on his feet at once and gone.

Samira sat where she was with her arm throbbing and her heart doing something she had absolutely no intention of examining.

***

Chapter 16

Samira came up near midnight and found Torstein at the steering oar.

The sky had washed clean. There was no moon. The stars had come out the way they do at sea with no land near, so many of them that the familiar shapes were hard to pick out from among the rest.

"The men say you saved the ship," she said.

"The men say a great deal." He glanced sideways at her. "It was you who reset the steering oar."