Page 41 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

"Your man lifted it for me."

"Take the compliment. It costs you nothing and it saves me having to say it twice."

She let that sit for a moment. Then she tipped her head back and looked up.

"May I show you something?"

"Aye."

She pointed low, well down toward the southern horizon, at a single very bright star sitting just clear of the water.

"We call that one Suhayl. In the deep desert my mother's people steer by it. There are poems about it. A man coming home from a long journey will say that he has seen Suhayl again, and everyone who hears him knows exactly what he means." She kept her eyes on it. "It is lower tonight than it was three nights ago."

Torstein looked at it. "It would be. We are going north."

"Yes."

"The further north we sail, the lower it will sit. By the time we are off Brittany it will be under the horizon." He said it plainly. "You will not see it again after that. Not at home in Orkney. Never."

"I know." Samira did not look away from it. "I worked out years ago from a table how far north a man must travel before Suhayl fails him. I never expected to be on the ship that proved the table right."

Torstein was quiet for a moment.

"There are others," he said. "Ones you have never seen. There is a thing that happens in the north in winter, green fire that moves across the whole sky, from one side to the other. My people say it is the Bifrost, the burning bridge. I have seen it a hundred times and I still stop what I am doing and look at it."

"Green."

"Green. Sometimes red at the edges."

She considered this. "Then I shall have to trade Suhayl for it."

"That is not a fair trade."

"No," she agreed. "It is not. But nothing about this journey has been a fair trade and I got on the ship anyway."

Torstein said nothing at all to that.

After a while she raised her hand again, higher this time, and traced a shape.

"Those seven. We call them Banāt naʿsh. The daughters of the bier. Those four make the bier, the frame that carries a body to burial. Those three walking behind are the daughters, following it."

"That is Karlsvagn." He traced the same seven stars. "The wagon. The four are the cart and the three are the shaft that the horse pulls it by." He pointed at the middle star of the three. "Now look hard at that one. There is a small one sitting right up against it."

She looked hard. "There is."

"Aurvandil's toe. Thor carried him out of the land of the giants in a basket on his back and his toe was sticking out over the edge and it froze solid, so Thor snapped it off and threw it up into the sky." He shrugged. "We use it to test a man's eyes. If you can see those two apart, you are good enough to stand lookout at the bow."

"Your people looked at those seven stars and saw a frozen toe. My people looked at the same seven and saw a funeral."

"Aye."

"That is either very comforting or very troubling, and I have not decided which."

He laughed. It was the first time she had heard him do it properly. It changed his whole face, and she looked away from it deliberately.

She showed him the two eagles, the swooping one and the flying one, and how you could measure the space between them with your fist held at arm's length and know whether you were holding your northing. He showed her how the wagon swings around the pole star through the night, so that a man who knows where it stood at dusk can tell the hour by where it stands now. He told her about the sun-stone, a crystal the northern sailors carry that finds the sun through thick cloud by the way the light changes when you turn it. She did not believe him until he described exactly how the brightness shifted as the stone rotated, and then she believed him completely and asked four questions about it in a row.

At some point their hands were on the same rail and their forearms were touching from elbow to wrist. Neither of them moved. Neither of them mentioned it.