Daughter of Fire by Carla Simpson

shook his head. “Only your men who guarded the tent. It was necessary to question if they had seen her.”
    Rorke nodded as he seized a short-bladed knife and slipped it down the inside leg of his boot, then seized his leather gauntlets.
    “No one else is to know she is gone.” He snapped out his orders. “I want no interference from Vachel., and see that William’s tent is well guarded.”
    Tarek assured him, “It is already done.”
    “The horses?”
    “Saddled and waiting just beyond the camp. I have put out the word that we ride in search of Saxon rebels.”
    Rorke’s lips thinned. “That is not far from the truth.”
    Outside the tent, a chill wind stung the skin, whipping smoke from cook fires to sting at the eyes.
    The horses sensed their mood and moved restlessly, heads tossing as they strained their tethers. Rorke seized the reins and vaulted into the saddle.
    “Did anyone see her leave?” he asked, as he controlled the restless stallion.
    Tarek shook his head as he mounted his Arabian mare. “But I found a set of lightly made footprints that could not be made by a soldier’s boot, several hundred yards beyond William’s tent.”
    “How is it,” Rorke asked through his teeth, “that no one saw her leave and that these prints suddenly appear some distance from the tent? Would you have me believe that she sprouted wings and flew from the tent?”
    “I do not know,” Tarek admitted. “You should ask her when we find her.”
    Rorke swore heavily, for it was not like his friend to be uncertain in anything. Never in all the time he had known him, since they met at Antioch—two warriors willing to sell their services in a personal quest, thrown together by fate and the threat of the Turkish sultan—had he ever known the warrior to falter.
    Tarek was the half-caste son of a woman of noble Persian birth and a foreign raider, a Viking whose fleet of ships had laid siege to Antioch and held the city for a fortnight before being driven back. But in that fortnight the Norsemen had laid claim to more than riches of gold and silver. They had laid claim to the daughters of several noble families, one of whom in the ensuing months gave birth to half-caste, blue-eyed Viking child.
    Tarek was the result of such a union, taken from his mother at birth to hide her shame and raised by a merchant and his childless wife. But he carried the shame of his birth and hatred for the man who had sired him and left a young woman with a child in her belly and a gold Norse medallion that Tarek wore about his neck.
    Out of shame, his mother had taken her own life, and Tarek had vowed revenge for her death and his own shameful birthright. Shunning the life of a merchant, he became a warrior, selling his prowess with a blade to the highest bidder. For only with gold and in the service of foreign kings might he find the father who wore the emblem of the dragon head and had abandoned his mother.
    In all of Byzantium, Tarek al Sharif’s skill with a blade was well-known. He was a warrior without peer, until the day by a strange twist of fate, which he believed to be the workings of the Divine One, he found himself under a Norman blade. Spared from death by Rorke FitzWarren, he was in the dubious position of owing a debt of honor to an infidel. But fighting with Rorke FitzWarren rather than against him offered another advantage besides the gift of his life.
    It offered him the opportunity to travel to the western empires, closer to the lands of the Norsemen. Then he received word that a man who carried the badge of a dragon was rumored to be in the far north of Britain and he had thrown in his lot with Rorke FitzWarren and the knights who pledged themselves to William of Normandy’s cause to take the English throne.
    Knowing his friend as he did, and with a profound respect for his skills as a warrior, Rorke frowned. It was for those reasons he had left Tarek to guard William and the girl. For he was certain no one would get past