Page 65 of To Tame a Viking Warlord

Samira rounded on Torstein. "Why did you say nothing? You promised me on the road you would always ask."

"I did ask. I asked if you wished to go, and you said yes." His voice gentled. "I did not want you to cross the sea believing you had to hide from me, Samira. But I wanted you to know you could have told me. That I would not have stopped you. I would only have held your hair a little sooner."

She stared at him. Her eyes were suddenly wet.

"You are not angry?"

"Angry?" He crossed the last of the distance between them and laid his hand flat over hers, over their child. "I have been waiting for this for years."

Samira made a sound that was half laugh and half sob, and hit him once on the chest. Then she let him pull her into his arms.

Behind them, Kieran sighed with enormous satisfaction. "Well. At least they didnae kill each other."

"There is still time," said a dry voice from the cloister.

Abbess Murdina stood in the archway with her hands folded, looking entirely pleased with herself.

***

IN MURDINA'S SOLAR, the Abbess set a small bundle on the table and unwrapped it. The pendant lay on the cloth, blue-green stone in old gold.

"Hold it," she said to Samira.

Samira glanced at Torstein. He laid his hand over hers, and she lifted the stone.

It woke at once. Across the table, Naomi gasped and pressed her hand to her breastbone, where something that was no longer there had once hung.

"I feel it," Naomi whispered. "Here. As if it were calling."

"It is," Murdina said quietly. "The stone that finds hidden treasures, and the amethyst that compels the truth. They were made to know each other. And so were the women who keep them."

Samira looked across at Naomi. She remembered the fire beneath the ground on the road to Tarbert, and the warmth of the pendant against her skin, and what she had seen in it that night.

"That is why you sent for us," she said.

"The Brotherhood has not stopped hunting either of you," Murdina said. "One day you may need each other. And one day, your children may too." She looked from one belly to the other, and for once her voice was soft. "I wanted you to meet as friends before you ever had to meet as allies."

Samira did not put the pendant down.

The stone was still warm in her palm, and something in it had not finished with her. She closed her eyes.

"There is a third," she said.

The room went quiet.

"A blade. Long, and old, and buried a very long time." Her brow drew down. "It does not lie alone. There is a stone set beside it, carved over with runes. Row upon row of them."

"Norse runes?" Torstein asked.

"I do not know." She turned her head slightly, as though listening to something behind the wall. "Whatever is written there has not been read in a hundred years. Perhaps longer. There is a curse bound up in the words. In the reading of them."

"Where?" Murdina asked.

"South of here. Inland." Samira frowned harder, and the name came to her the way the others had, from somewhere outside herself. "Kilmarnock. Near Ayr."

Kieran sat forward sharply. "That is Boyd land, or near enough to it."

"Aye," Murdina said. "It is."