XII

 

 

 

O NE DAY, THE wind started blowing cool, down from the north. The Bizogots smiled. Hamnet Thyssen sighed. “Not the Breath of God, not yet,” he said, “but it’s a reminder there is such a thing.”

“Just what we need,” Per Anders said. The courier didn’t seem to have gone up to the Bizogot country till he came after Hamnet and his comrades. “Maybe it will stop blowing every winter once the Glacier finally melts.”

“That would be something,” Baron Runolf said. “Mild all winter long? By God, I’d love it!”

“You think so?” Ulric said. “You go far enough south, you’ll find places where it’s mild all winter long.”

“I’d like that, too,” Trasamund put in.

“Let me finish, if you please,” Ulric said. “Places where it’s mild all winter, you don’t want to be there in the summertime. Either you broil or you boil, depending on whether it’s dry or sticky. If the winter’s warmer, so is the summer—that’s the rule.”

“Well, if that’s the Rule, it must be fit for the Rulers, right?” Runolf Skallagrim said. “What should we do with ’em? Broil ’em or boil ’em?”

“Either one. Both,” Hamnet said. “Talking about it’s easy, though. Doing it takes more work.”

Runolf chuckled. “Ah, well. If you’re going to complain about every little thing . . .” Ulric thought that was funny. Hamnet, again, didn’t. This time, he made himself smile. He could occasionally get away with hypocrisy because no one suspected he would stoop to such a thing.

The Raumsdalians and Bizogots mounted and spread out and rode south, looking for the Rulers—and for food. Coming across a flock of sheep the invaders had somehow missed made everyone happy. Oh, Trasamund said, “When I have a choice, I like musk-ox meat better,” but his heart wasn’t in the grumbling.

“Been a couple of thousand years since musk oxen ranged this far south,” Hamnet said. “In those days, the Glacier covered everything down to just north of Nidaros. No Gap then—not the smallest thought of one. Nothing but ice.”

“Good times, by God,” the jarl said. “Things on the far side of the Gap stayed where they belonged. They didn’t come down and bother honest men.” To put Hamnet in his place, he added, “Or Raumsdalians.”

“Ha! Bizogots are the ones who steal,” Hamnet retorted. “Even a guest-friend can’t go into an encampment and come away with everything he brought.”

“You don’t miss it. You Raumsdalians all have too many things anyhow,” Trasamund said.

“You sound like Marcovefa—only she says the same thing about ordinary Bizogots, too,” Count Hamnet replied.

Trasamund grunted. “Her folk don’t have enough. That is nothing but the truth, by God—not enough. I saw that with my own eyes. And you Raumsdalians have too much. Everybody knows it’s so. We Bizogots, we are just right.” He thumped his chest with his right fist.

“Why was I sure you would say something like that?” Hamnet asked dryly.

“Because down deep, you do have some notion of the truth,” Trasamund said. Runolf Skallagrim couldn’t make Hamnet laugh, but the Bizogot did. That was the silliest thing Hamnet had heard in weeks.

Trasamund got angry because he started laughing. The jarl took himself seriously—he always did. But before he could heat up his argument or start a fight, a horn warned that somebody off to the left had spotted the enemy. When Trasamund reached over his shoulder to grab for his sword, Hamnet knew the Bizogot didn’t intend to use it on him.

Hamnet Thyssen made sure his sword was loose in the scabbard, too. He saw no Rulers, not yet, so it wasn’t time to string his bow. He looked around for Marcovefa. Without her, neither sword nor bow was likely to matter much.

She waved to him. If her confidence was damaged, it didn’t show. That was all to the good. She called out, but he couldn’t catch what she said. He cupped a hand behind his ear.

Marcovefa rode closer. “We’ll fix them. You see if we don’t,” she said.

“Sounds good to me,” Hamnet said.

“The weather is better. I hope it will help my magic.” Marcovefa seemed to think better meant colder. Having lived almost all her life atop the Glacier, she probably did.

When Hamnet did spot the Rulers, they were herding along a swarm of Raumsdalian prisoners. Unlike Marcovefa’s folk, they didn’t eat people not of their blood—or Hamnet didn’t think they did. Whether they slaughtered them for the fun of it, unfortunately, might be a different question.

Still . . . “They’re nothing but guards—not real warriors,” Hamnet called. “We can beat them!”

The Raumsdalians and Bizogots cheered. Hamnet hoped he wasn’t lying too much. If the Rulers had a wizard along, things might get more complicated. The same was true if they attacked their captives.

Even if they didn’t, he wondered what his followers would do with that flock of Raumsdalians. How would they feed them? How would they house them? People couldn’t stay out in the open forever, not with the Breath of God beginning to stir. Even this far south of Nidaros, winter would be hard. He didn’t want to become a herdsman of people himself.

One thing at a time, he thought. First, beat the Rulers. Then worry about what comes after that.

He knew when the invaders spotted his oncoming warriors. Some of them started shooting into the crowd of captives. Others swung swords. Still others rode out to face his men. One of them, plainly, was a wizard. He held up his hand, palm out, as if ordering the attackers to stop.

Marcovefa laughed. Her left hand twisted in deft passes. Surprise seemed to radiate from the enemy wizard when he discovered his magic didn’t work the way he wanted it to. Marcovefa laughed again, louder.

She reached out toward the Rulers’ wizard—and then she stopped laughing, because whatever spell she aimed at him didn’t work the way she wanted it to, either. He stayed on his riding deer and aimed more magic at the Raumsdalians and Bizogots.

That also failed. He and Marcovefa seemed able to stymie each other, but no more. Hamnet wondered what Marcovefa thought of that. He knew what he would have thought of it: nothing good. How anxious was she about being able to work magic? As anxious as a man who had trouble rising for his woman? That was the only comparison that occurred to the thoroughly unsorcerous Raumsdalian noble. When it did, he wished it hadn’t. Worrying about rising to the occasion only made you less likely to rise the next time.

Then Marcovefa gestured again—this time, Count Hamnet judged, angrily. And the Rulers’ wizard threw up both hands, as if he were shot. He clutched at his chest. A moment later, he fell over. And, a moment after that, all the Rulers’ bows and arrows caught fire. Their swords suddenly seemed as limp as if they would never do their women any good again.

If his weapons failed in his hand, Hamnet knew what he would do: he’d run away. What else could you do, with no hope of fighting back? The Rulers seemed to come to the same conclusion. They rode off toward the south. A few of their captives had the wit and spirit to throw rocks after them, but Hamnet didn’t see that they hit anyone.

As soon as the Rulers were out of rock range, the rescued Raumsdalians turned and welcomed the army that had saved them. The sad irony was that it hadn’t saved all of them, but it had saved most. Here and there, someone wept because a spouse had died or got badly wounded at the last instant before freedom returned. Hamnet didn’t know what he could do about that.

And then his head came up, suddenly and sharply. Someone in the crowd of captives was calling his name. Two someones, in fact: a man and a woman. “No,” he said softly, for the voices were familiar. They called again. They waved, even more insistently than a lot of the other Raumsdalians. They were filthy and haggard and scrawny, but he recognized them anyhow. “No,” he said again, and covered his eyes with the heels of his hands.

Eyvind Torfinn went on shouting and waving. So did Gudrid.

 

“I’LL KISS YOU, if you want me to,” Gudrid said. “By God, I’ll kiss you and I’ll mean it, too.”

“If it please you, Your Grace, I’ll kiss you,” Earl Eyvind added.

“Don’t do me any favors,” Hamnet said—to which of them, he wasn’t quite sure. He was sure he wished he had something stronger than water in the tin canteen he wore on his left hip.

“Aren’t you lucky?” Ulric Skakki murmured.

“No, curse it,” Hamnet answered. “As far as I’m concerned, the Rulers were bloody well welcome to Gudrid. As for Eyvind Torfinn . . .” He shrugged. He couldn’t make himself dislike the scholarly earl, even if Eyvind was married to his former wife.

“There? You see?” Ulric sounded amused. That only made Hamnet Thyssen want to hit him.

“Have you got any food?” Eyvind asked. “Anything at all? We’ve been empty a long time.”

“Horse meat. Venison from riding deer. Maybe a little mutton. Some mammoth meat. It’s not too fresh, but it’s what we have,” Hamnet answered. He tried not to look at Gudrid. It wasn’t easy.

Earl Eyvind bowed low. “Whatever you can spare. God knows we aren’t fussy, not now.” A rich noble in Nidaros, he would have had every chance and every excuse to be fussy before. His shudder now said he might have eaten worse things than stale mammoth meat. Eating nothing, for instance, was much worse than that.

Seeing the sorry state the rescued captives were in, Raumsdalians and Bizogots started feeding them. Seeing the sorry state Hamnet Thyssen was in, Ulric handed him a skin and said, “Here. Drink this.”

Expecting sour ale or maybe even smetyn, Count Hamnet did. Smooth, strong wine slid down his throat. He eyed Ulric with respect. “Where did you find this?”

“Oh, somewhere along the way,” the adventurer said airily.

“Do you mind if I—?” Hamnet nodded toward Eyvind Torfinn.

“Go ahead. You do know he’ll give it to Gudrid next, don’t you?” Ulric said.

“Yes, I know that.” Hamnet’s voice was rough as a rasp. He shrugged, as if to say, What can you do? Then he leaned down and handed Earl Eyvind the wineskin. The other noble caught the rich bouquet. A broad, astonished smile spread across his haggard face. It got broader yet after he swigged. Then, sure enough, he passed it to Gudrid.

She eyed Hamnet. “I don’t suppose you’d slip hemlock in there and poison Eyvind just for the sake of getting me,” she said, her tone declaring that she didn’t really suppose any such thing.

“Don’t blame me for the games you’d play yourself,” Count Hamnet replied, even more harshly than before. “If you want to drink, drink. If you don’t, give the skin to someone else who can use it.” Plenty of sorry-looking people were eyeing it with jealous, zealous attention.

Gudrid drank. He’d been sure she would. She tried to provoke him as automatically as she breathed. After blotting the ruby wine from her lips, she handed the skin back to Eyvind Torfinn, as if to claim it for their own. Eyvind had better sense. He gave it to the haggard Raumsdalian hanging over his left shoulder.

“God bless you, friend,” the haggard man said, and drank deep. Then he passed the wineskin to a woman beside him.

Ulric Skakki, meanwhile, gave Earl Eyvind a chunk of meat and Gudrid another. They both tore into it raw. They’d traveled up in the Bizogot country and even beyond the Gap. They could live rough if they had to. They were used to better things, though.

“Where did the Rulers catch you?” Hamnet asked.

Before answering, Earl Eyvind had to gulp down an enormous mouthful of meat. Hamnet was amazed not to see his throat swell like a snake’s when he did it. “South of here,” Eyvind said once the way internal was clear. He took another big bite and choked it down before adding, “We never expected to see you here—not that we’re sorry we did.”

“We’re doing what we can,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “I don’t know if it will be enough, but we’re trying.”

Gudrid was eating as greedily as Eyvind. Wine and meat seemed to distract her from Hamnet, at least for the moment. Just as well ran through his mind.

Per Anders asked Eyvind, “Is the Emperor still safe?”

“Who cares?” Ulric Skakki murmured, but the imperial courier plainly did.

“He was the last time we saw him,” Earl Eyvind replied. “That was . . . some little while ago, though. As far as I know, he isn’t in this sad herd of people.”

Count Hamnet tried to imagine Sigvat II, Emperor of Raumsdalia, shambling along in the midst of so many other captives. He tried to imagine the Emperor sleeping on the ground and grubbing up roots and insects like any other unfortunate. The picture made him want to smile. Maybe he was small-spirited, to relish the idea of someone else’s misfortune. If he was, he would just have to live with it.

“What are you going to do with us?” Gudrid asked after some fairly monumental swallowing of her own.

What she really meant, of course, was, What are you going to do with me? She thought of herself first, last, and always. But Hamnet answered the question the way she asked it: “Anyone who wants to fight the Rulers is welcome to join us. We have a few extra horses and some spare weapons.”

Neither white-bearded Eyvind Torfinn nor decorative Gudrid made a likely warrior. “And the rest?” she persisted.

“I don’t know,” Hamnet said. “I’ll have to talk with Trasamund and Ulric and Runolf and Audun and Liv and Marcovefa.”

“Liv. Marcovefa.” Gudrid didn’t try to disguise either her disdain or her amusement.

“That’s right.” Hamnet did his best to ignore them both. “We have to send you toward a place where you’re likely to get food. Figuring out where to find a place like that may not be easy.”

“You can’t send us away!” Gudrid’s voice went shrill. To Hamnet’s amazement, she came up with a reason he shouldn’t: “Eyvind knows more about the Rulers than anybody else from this side of the Glacier.”

“Well, so he does,” Count Hamnet admitted, deciding he couldn’t very well deny it. “But what’s that got to do with you? We may need him, but how are you going to help us drive the Rulers back through the Gap? The farther away from trouble you go, the better for everybody. You’ll even be safer somewhere away from the fighting. You won’t need to worry so much about starving, either.”

“Eyvind won’t help you unless I’m with him.” Gudrid turned to her current husband. “Will you?” she asked ominously.

“If ground sloths and glyptodonts rose up against the Rulers, I would gladly help them right now,” Eyvind Torfinn replied.

Gudrid’s jaw dropped—she wasn’t expecting mutiny from that quarter. Earl Eyvind was even more pliable than Hamnet had been back in the days when he was wed to her. Hearing him tell her no almost made her former husband laugh out loud.

“I’m not going anywhere without you,” Gudrid declared when she’d recovered somewhat. “You need someone to take care of you, and you know it.” To Hamnet Thyssen’s disappointment, that held a measure of truth.

“I expect I can manage,” Earl Eyvind said. “Whether you believe it or not, I’m not entirely helpless.”

“That’s what you think.” Gudrid hardly bothered to hide her scorn.

Marcovefa ambled over. Gudrid eyed her the way a bird might eye a snake. Marcovefa paid next to no attention to Gudrid, not at first. She pointed toward Eyvind Torfinn. “We need him.”

“You have me,” Eyvind said.

Hamnet waited for Marcovefa to dismiss Gudrid. He waited, as he knew, with more than a little anticipation. Gudrid had a knack for ignoring him and getting under his skin like a tick. She did not have the knack for outfacing Marcovefa. As far as Hamnet knew, nobody did.

Marcovefa pointed at Gudrid. Gudrid flinched, then made a good, game try at pretending she hadn’t. “We need you, too,” declared the shaman from atop the Glacier.

“What?” Gudrid sounded as if she couldn’t believe her ears.

What?” Hamnet Thyssen knew only too well that he couldn’t believe his.

“We need her, too,” Marcovefa said. Then she spoke directly to Gudrid again: “We do need you, too.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t anybody listen to anything any more?”

Why in God’s name do we need her?” Count Hamnet demanded. “She isn’t worth . . . anything.”

“That’s not what you used to think,” Gudrid said with a smile all the more provoking because it was so sweet.

“Well, I know better now,” Hamnet replied. “You taught me—the hard way.”

Marcovefa ignored their sniping. “I don’t know why we need her. I only know we do.” She eyed Count Hamnet. “Do you want to tell me you know these things better than I do?”

Hamnet wanted nothing more. Unfortunately, he couldn’t. “No, but—”

“But me no buts.” Marcovefa sounded as imperious—and as imperial—as Sigvat II. “If you do not believe me, ask Audun Gilli. Ask Liv. They will tell you the same.”

Asking them was the last thing Count Hamnet wanted to do. No—it was the next to last thing he wanted to do. Keeping Gudrid with them was the last thing, the very last thing. “By God, I will!” he growled, and stormed off.

He found Liv before Audun. That made things worse, but not worst. “What is it?” she asked as he approached with determined stride.

He told her exactly what it was. “Does Marcovefa know what she’s talking about?” he asked. “Can she know? Can’t we get rid of Gudrid?” The last question was the one that really mattered to him.

“Marcovefa . . . knows all kinds of things,” Liv said slowly. “Sometimes she knows without even knowing how she knows. I could do a divination to see if she is right here.”

“Would you?” Hamnet hated how eager he sounded, but couldn’t help it.

“Yes.” Liv gave him a crooked smile. “I suppose I should be grateful you’re not asking whether we can do without me.”

“You hurt me,” Hamnet answered, as steadily as he could. “But you didn’t hurt me because you enjoyed hurting me. There’s a difference. How complicated is your divination?”

“Not very. Questions with yes or no answers usually aren’t.” She took from her pouch a small disk of shining white stone, pierced near the edge. “Moonstone,” she said, threading a thong through the small hole.

“What is the magic?” Hamnet asked.

“I ask whether Gudrid should stay with us, then let the stone fall down over my heart,” Liv answered. “If she should, it will stay close to my skin. If she should not, it will leap away.”

“Seems simple enough,” he said.

She nodded and began chanting in the Bizogot language. She wasn’t exactly asking the question, or not in so many words. Hamnet judged that she was priming the moonstone, so to speak, so it would do the asking for her. Then she put the thong over her head and let the stone fall down between her breasts. Though she showed next to none of herself in the doing, Hamnet had to look away. He still remembered how his head had lain there. . . .

“Well?” he asked roughly.

Liv’s half-smile said she knew he wanted to reach inside her tunic to find out whether the moonstone disk was clinging to her. Gudrid would have worn a half-smile, too, but hers would have been full of sardonic triumph as well. Liv’s was, if anything, sympathetic.

And so was her voice when she said, “I am sorry, Hamnet, but the magic tells me Marcovefa was right.”

“Damnation!” Hamnet Thyssen burst out. “She can’t be! God knows Gudrid is nothing but trouble.”

“Gudrid is trouble,” Liv agreed gravely. “But I would have to say she is not nothing but trouble. If she were, the spell would tell me Marcovefa had made a mistake. I don’t think she has.”

“Damnation!” Hamnet repeated. He turned on his heel and shambled off, feeling almost as betrayed as he had when Liv left him for Audun Gilli. The idea of keeping Gudrid around tempted him to sit down on the ground somewhere and slit his wrists. The certainty that his former wife would laugh if he did was one of the things that kept him from drawing dagger or sword.

Marcovefa had no trouble reading his face when he walked up to her. “You see? We do need the stupid vole after all.”

That made Gudrid splutter, which gave Hamnet a certain somber satisfaction. Ulric Skakki turned away before smiling. Trasamund laughed out loud, which won him a venomous stare from Gudrid. He’d enjoyed her charms in days gone by. She didn’t like it when someone else was as faithless and heartless to her as she was to her former lovers.

Hamnet was too stubborn to give up easily. “Give me one good reason why we need Gudrid,” he said.

“Because I tell you so,” Marcovefa answered. “Somewhere later”—her gesture encompassed all the time from the next instant to the moment when the Glacier melted away for good—“it will be better if we have her than if she is off doing mischief somewhere else.”

“What do you mean, doing mischief?” Yes, Gudrid was irate, too. “I don’t do mischief. I do what I have to do.” Count Hamnet laughed at that. So did Ulric. So did Trasamund, raucously. Gudrid looked daggers at each of them in turn.

“I mean what I say,” Marcovefa told her. “I don’t waste my time and everybody else’s with a pack of lies the way you do.”

Gudrid took a deep breath, no doubt intending to deny it. Something in Marcovefa’s face made her keep her mouth shut. If she lied about lying, Marcovefa could give her the lie. That convoluted logic brought a smile to Hamnet’s face. His smile made Gudrid steam. He’d had things happen that he liked less.

“Well. It is decided then,” Eyvind Torfinn said. Maybe a lot of what had just gone and had flown over his head. Or maybe he was willing to pretend it had for the sake of peace and quiet. And maybe that wasn’t the worst idea in the world. Maybe they all needed to do more of it.

“Yes,” Hamnet said, and he couldn’t help sighing. “It is decided.”

 

ULRIC SKAKKI LOOKED at the trees. He looked at the sky. He looked down at the scarred backs of his hands. Then he looked over at Hamnet Thyssen, who was riding next to him. “Ever have the feeling something’s about to go wrong, but you don’t know what?”

“Now and then,” Hamnet answered. “Not soon enough, usually.”

“Well, we can all say that,” Ulric told him. “I’ve got it now—curse me if I don’t. Feels like something crawling on the back of my neck . . . and no, it’s not a stinking louse. It’s more like what I felt up by Sudertorp Lake.”

“I didn’t say it was a louse. But why are you telling me? Tell Marcovefa. Maybe she can do something about it.”

“There you go!” The adventurer laughed cheerily. “You see? You’re not always as foolish as you seem.”

Hamnet bowed in the saddle. “Be careful, or you’ll turn my head, or maybe my stomach, with flattery like that.”

“Maybe both at once, so you can be sick down your own back. I do believe I’d pay money to watch that.” Ulric Skakki raised his voice: “Marcovefa?”

“What do you want, you noisy man?” she asked.

“That’s me,” Ulric agreed, not without pride. “I thought you ought to know I have the bad feeling we’re running into trouble.”

“Oh, you do, do you? Again?” Even though Ulric had been right before, Marcovefa didn’t sound particularly impressed. She wasn’t mocking, but she wasn’t convinced, either. “Why do you say that?”

“Because I do, that’s why,” Ulric answered. “I’m not out of my mind—or I don’t think so, anyhow.”

“How often does a crazy man know he is crazy?” Marcovefa returned.

“More often than you’d think. Look at Hamnet here,” Ulric said.

Marcovefa laughed. Hamnet didn’t. “Kindly leave me out of this,” he said. “It’s your feeling. It’s got nothing to do with me, at least not till we find out exactly how crazy you are.”

“I thought you’d known that for a long time,” the adventurer said.

“If you put it that way, I have,” Hamnet Thyssen returned. “I wasn’t going to come right out and tell you so, though.”

“No, of course not. You’d go and talk behind my back instead. I’ve met people like you before, I have.” Ulric might have been a dancing girl scolding a mercenary who was trying to coax her into bed rather than his usual self. When he shook a finger under Hamnet’s nose, though, the Raumsdalian noble decided he’d gone too far.

So did Marcovefa. “Enough of this foolishness!” she said. “You want me to find out whether you’re right, don’t you?”

“If you can.” Ulric sobered as fast as he’d got silly. “I mean, I know we’ve been in trouble before and we’ll be in trouble again. If we didn’t land in trouble again, it would be because we’ve given up on everything we’re trying now—or else because we’re dead. That’s not what I’m worried about. Something not very far away is going to mean trouble for us pretty soon—or I think it is. The hair at the back of my neck thinks it is.”

“Well, we will see.” Marcovefa took two thin, flat, nearly transparent crystals out of a rabbit-hide pouch she wore on her belt. When she held them parallel to each other in front of her face, they remained transparent. But when she turned one so it was perpendicular to the other, the square where the two of them met became dark.

“How do they do that?” Hamnet asked.

“I don’t know,” Marcovefa answered with a shrug that said she also didn’t care much. “But when I look through the darkness, all I see is what put us into danger.”

Don’t look toward Gudrid, Hamnet thought. He’d already lost that fight—lost it twice, to Marcovefa and to Liv. His chances of winning it now didn’t strike him as good enough to make reopening it seem worthwhile. “What do you see when you look through the . . . the . . . ?” He groped for a word to describe the crystals.

“Spars, we call them—spars from the land of ice,” Marcovefa said, which struck him as an oddly nautical name to come from a mountaintop above the Glacier. “As for what I see . . .” she went on. She slowly turned in a complete circle with that curious darkness held in front of her right eye.

When she started a second revolution, Count Hamnet was sure that whatever Ulric Skakki had imagined was imaginary. When, facing southeast, she suddenly stopped, he was sure that what he’d been sure of a moment before was wrong. Few sensations were more disconcerting than that; it was as if an earthquake had shaken the country inside his head.

“Well, you are right two times now,” Marcovefa told Ulric.

“What is it? Do you know? Can you tell?” he asked. Somehow, by not gloating, he sounded more smug than he would have if he’d bragged about how fine his hunches were.

Marcovefa shook her head. “Something, that’s all. Maybe it won’t be trouble now that we know it’s there. Or maybe it will be worse.” Hamnet wished she hadn’t added that.

“Let’s go deal with it, whatever it is,” Ulric said.

“Would we do better running away?” Hamnet asked.

“I didn’t looked for you to play the coward, Thyssen,” Trasamund said.

“I’m not, by God,” Count Hamnet replied. “There’s trouble, and then there’s trouble. Some kinds you can face; others, you’d do better to stay away from. If you run toward one of those, you’ll be sorry afterwards . . . if you’re still around.”

“He’s right,” Marcovefa said, which silenced Trasamund. She looked at Hamnet again. “I don’t know this time. We’ll just have to find out—or else run away without finding out.”

“If we do that, it’ll come after us, whatever it is.” Ulric Skakki spoke with mournful certainty. “I say we need to see what’s what.”

Hamnet didn’t argue any more. He walked over to his horse and swung up onto it. So did the others. He winced when he saw Eyvind Torfinn and Gudrid on horse back. They made him wonder if he wasn’t bringing trouble with him instead of riding toward it. But Marcovefa seemed willing enough to let them ride along. Some people here already thought Hamnet had spoken up once too often. He kept quiet now.

Marcovefa and Ulric leading the way, they rode out. Hamnet Thyssen kept close to Marcovefa, but let her stay in front. She smiled at him over her left shoulder every so often, as if his attentiveness amused her. It probably did. What a warrior could do to keep an accomplished shaman safe . . . Is keep other warriors away from her, Hamnet thought. Spells reached farther than swords, but swords could strike faster.

What they rode through seemed ordinary Raumsdalian countryside. “So many ups and downs,” Trasamund grumbled. The Glacier had never lain this far south, never ground everything flat beneath its massive weight. Hills and dips persisted here, where they’d been leveled up in the lands the Bizogot was used to.

Forests lay well back from the road. Hamnet’s head swiveled from left to right, from right over to left. If the trouble came from either side, he’d be ready for it. He’d see it, anyway. After a moment, he realized that might not be the same thing.

If the trouble came from straight ahead, he’d see it from even farther off. He hoped he would, anyhow. If the trouble was some gigantic pitfall . . . He shook his head. He couldn’t believe Ulric would have sensed such a thing. And it wouldn’t be a danger unless they came in this direction on purpose.

Marcovefa also seemed alert. She was as bright as a songbird: head up, eyes sparkling, nostrils flaring with excitement. Hamnet wondered if he was imagining some of that, but he didn’t think so.

Sure enough, a moment later she started to laugh. “So that’s what this is all about,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“They thought they could set a trap for us.” Marcovefa held up a hand as she reined in. Everyone else stopped, too.

“What kind of trap?” Count Hamnet asked.

“I don’t know—yet,” she said, pointing out toward the peaceful-looking landscape ahead. “Whatever lies beyond that.”

“Beyond what?” This time, Ulric got the question out ahead of Hamnet. It seemed more than reasonable enough to the Raumsdalian nobleman.

Not, evidently, to Marcovefa. Her nostrils flared again—this time, Count Hamnet judged, in exasperation. “Some sort of sorcerous barrier lies ahead,” she said, as if to a group of idiot children. “Whatever is behind it, Ulric Skakki, is the trouble you rightly felt.”

In back of Hamnet, Audun Gilli spoke in a low voice: “I don’t sense anything up ahead.”

“Neither do I,” Liv answered, also quietly. “But her wizardry is stronger than ours. She may be right.”

“I know,” Audun said. “That’s what worries me.”

“What do we do now?” Even Trasamund’s big voice was unwontedly soft.

“We smash the barrier. Then we smash what lies behind it.” Marcovefa sounded as eager as if she were a young girl going to her lover.

“Just like that?” Hamnet said.

“Yes. Just like that.” She aimed a peremptory forefinger at the barrier only she could sense. When she spoke again, she used her own dialect of the Bizogot tongue. Ulric might have been able to follow it, but Hamnet couldn’t.

He also couldn’t deny it had an effect. The peaceful scene ahead wavered, as someone’s reflection in a pool would waver if he dropped a pebble into the water. Then it disappeared, as a reflection would if someone dropped in a handful of pebbles. It had concealed a swarm of sabertooths and lions and dire wolves and short-faced bears. Roaring and snarling, they sprang toward Hamnet and his comrades.