T HE RULERS RODE along as if they hadn’t a care in the world. There were two or three dozen of them—most on the deer that must have come down from beyond the Glacier, a few riding horses. They didn’t disdain what they found the Bizogots and Raumsdalians using. A war mammoth led the troop.
“Let’s go get ’em,” Trasamund said. Nobody told him no. His force far outnumbered the invaders. By the way the Rulers paraded along south of Nidaros, they expected no enemies in this part of the Empire.
As in so much of life, what they expected and what they got were two different things. Their heads twisted toward the oncoming foes in what couldn’t be anything but horror. Despite that, none of them made as if to flee. Maybe they knew it would do them no good, since riding deer couldn’t outrun horses. Or maybe running never crossed their minds. As Hamnet Thyssen had seen more often than he cared to remember, the Rulers were formidable.
They formed a battle line: riding deer on the wings, horses near the center, and the war mammoth anchoring the whole thing. And then one man on a deer rode out in front of the line. The fringes and animal tails and sparkling crystals adorning his costume declared what he was: a shaman.
“Well, well,” Ulric Skakki said. “No wonder they think they can take us.”
“No wonder at all,” Hamnet said. “But this bastard never ran into Marcovefa.”
He glanced over to her. She probably didn’t notice him: her eyes were on the enemy sorcerer. A lion doubtless eyed a fat sheep the same way. This fellow in his fancy clothes didn’t know he was a fat sheep, but he was about to find out.
With a harsh shout—or maybe it just seemed so to Hamnet’s ears, since he knew little of their language—the Rulers rode forward. Their shaman still held the lead. They started to shoot when they were still well out of range. Or so Hamnet would have thought, but their arrows landed among the Bizogots and Raumsdalians. A Raumsdalian soldier who’d joined Trasamund’s band clutched at his throat and slid from the saddle.
When Trasamund’s men answered the enemy archery, their shafts did fall short. The Rulers’ wizard held up his hand as if defying not only arrows but the whole world.
Then a red-shouldered hawk perched on that outstretched hand. Its talons closed on—and in—the wizard’s flesh. Somehow, his screech of pain resounded over the battlefield. He beat at the hawk with his free hand. Its hooked beak nipped his fingers. It pecked at his face.
Marcovefa laughed. With the shaman distracted, archery went back to normal. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians were well within range of the Rulers now. Men and beasts on both sides began to fall. The mammoth trumpeted in anger and distress when an arrow pierced its sensitive trunk. The Rulers on the great beast’s back managed to keep it under control, though. It was well trained—and they were experienced.
And their shaman proved not the worst of wizards, either. Even though he was bleeding, he managed to make the red-shouldered hawk fly off. A moment later, lightning crashed down out of a clear blue sky not far from Marcovefa’s horse. The beast snorted and reared at the thunderclap. Hamnet hoped she could stay on—she was anything but an experienced rider. She managed—awkwardly, but no equestrian judges stood around doling out style points.
As the horse came down on all fours, Marcovefa laughed again. Count Hamnet wondered why. Then he realized that lightning bolt was intended to blast her black and smoking, and that she’d successfully turned the stroke. Sorcerous judges would have given her as many points as the rules allowed.
The Rulers’ shaman realized the same thing at about the same time as Hamnet. He threw up his blood-splashed hands in what had to be despair. He’d done everything he knew how to do—and it didn’t work. What could he do now but wait for Marcovefa’s revenge?
Hamnet nocked an arrow, drew the bowstring back to his ear, and let fly. The string lashed the leather brace on the inside of his wrist. The shaft caught the shaman in the chest, right between two glittering chunks of crystal. The man threw up his hands once more. He slumped down against the riding deer’s neck.
“I would have given him worse than that,” Marcovefa called.
“He’s dying. What’s worse than that?” Hamnet asked. Marcovefa’s feral smile suggested that she knew several answers. Count Hamnet was just as glad he didn’t know any of them.
He didn’t have time to worry about them, either. Without the shaman to protect the Rulers’ ordinary fighting men, they didn’t last long. Few of them even tried to surrender: they sold their lives as dearly as they could. Hamnet had seen the invaders behave that way more often than not. Say what you would about the Rulers, they didn’t lack for courage.
The warriors on mammothback charged again and again, but the Bizogots and Raumsdalians simply rode out of their way and kept shooting arrows at them from the sides and rear. After a while, the last enemy soldier slumped down on the mammoth’s back, either dead or too badly hurt to go on fighting. The mammoth itself must have been almost mad from pain; it had nearly as many arrows sticking out of its hide as a porcupine had quills.
“I feel sorry for the poor thing,” Ulric Skakki said as the mammoth lumbered off toward the south. “Not its fault the people who trained it are a pack of dire wolves who walk on two legs.”
“Maybe not,” Hamnet said, “but if my neighbor has a dog that tries to bite me, I’m going to kill it before it can.”
“We ought to kill that mammoth—put it out of its misery,” Ulric said.
“Go ahead,” Count Hamnet told him. The adventurer gave back a reproachful look.
“You want it dead?” Marcovefa said. Before either Ulric or Hamnet could answer, she pointed at the mammoth and chanted something in her peculiar dialect. The huge beast walked along for another couple of strides. Then it fell over. Its sides heaved only once or twice before they stilled. It was, without a doubt, dead.
“Good God!” Hamnet said. “How did you do that?”
“I put—how do you say it?—a clog in its heart,” Marcovefa answered. “Nothing can live with that. Not vole, not fox, not man, not mammoth. It is a very easy spell to make. Can be countered, but easy to make.”
Hamnet Thyssen looked at her. “You can kill anyone you want, whenever you want?”
She shook her head. “No, no, no. Spell takes some time—you saw that. And I have to see the man—or the animal—to use it. And it can be countered. Even one of your puny amulets will stop it most of the time. I didn’t know if the Rulers warded their mammoths that way. They didn’t ward this mammoth. Shall we butcher it? Plenty of meat.”
Some of the Bizogots were already riding over to do just that. Hamnet wasn’t wild about mammoth meat. It was tough and gamy. But it was meat, and it was there. He had a little sausage and some hard bread in his belt pouch. A bellyful of meat—even tough, gamy meat—didn’t sound bad at all.
And it didn’t turn out bad at all. He ate and ate. “You can stuff yourself like a Bizogot, by God,” Trasamund said admiringly.
“I’ve got used to going without,” Hamnet answered. “When there’s plenty, I make the most of it.”
“Here.” A Bizogot used a hatchet to split a bone that had been lying in the fire. “Want some marrow?”
“I won’t say no.” Hamnet scooped some out with a chunk of meat so he wouldn’t burn his fingers. The marrow tasted stronger than any that came from cows or sheep or pigs or horses. But it was good. He suspected even teratorn marrow would be good, though he hoped he never got desperate enough to find out.
“Let me have a bit of that.” Ulric Skakki didn’t worry about whether the marrow was hot. He reached in, grabbed what he wanted, and stuffed it into his mouth. Maybe his fingers and palm were even more callused than Hamnet’s. Maybe he was just hungrier.
Marcovefa sighed and patted her stomach. “Up on the Glacier, we don’t have feasts like this. Unless—” She broke off with a sly smile. “Seems a shame to waste the warriors, but when you have game this big, I suppose I can see why you don’t bother with them.”
“You . . . eat people?” Per Anders didn’t know what things were like up on top of the Glacier.
“Not really people—never anybody from my clan, and those are the only true people,” the shaman answered. She smacked her lips. “But two-legged meat, once you cook it well, is the best there is. Better than mammoth, better than mutton, better than duck, better than anything.”
Per glanced toward Count Hamnet. Was he slightly green, or was it only Hamnet’s imagination? “You can tell her to stop teasing me now,” he said. “No matter how she goes on, I won’t believe her.”
“You’d better,” Hamnet answered. “She means it.”
“Don’t you start!” Per Anders was determined not to believe.
“By God, Anders, I’m not joking,” Hamnet said. Ulric and Trasamund nodded to show Hamnet meant it. Hamnet went on, “They don’t waste anything up there, anything at all. They can’t afford to. And that includes waste the meat that comes off an enemy’s carcass.”
Per Anders looked from one of them to the next. He must have decided they weren’t joking, because he got up shaking his head and walked away from them. Hamnet Thyssen let out a sour chuckle. “See how we win friends wherever we go?” he said.
“He is a foolish man,” Marcovefa said.
“No, he’s just a man who’s never been up on top of the Glacier,” Hamnet said.
“A lucky man, in other words,” Ulric Skakki put in.
Marcovefa sent him a dirty look. “I never knew we were poor. I never knew we were missing so many things. You do not miss what you never had.” She licked her lips. “But I do miss man’s flesh. I had that up there, but it would turn your stomachs if I ate it here.”
“You’re right—it would,” the adventurer agreed. “I’ve eaten a lot of nasty things in my time. You can’t believe some of the things you’ll try if you get hungry enough. I never did turn cannibal, though. I haven’t got a lot to be proud of, but that’s something, by God.”
“Pooh!” Marcovefa said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Man’s flesh isn’t nasty. Man’s flesh is good. Like I say, the best meat there is.”
“Well, you’re welcome to my body—but only after I’m done using it,” Ulric Skakki said.
“You’ve already got my body, but not for stewing, I hope,” Count Hamnet added. Marcovefa thought that was funny. After a moment, so did Hamnet. Winning a skirmish made everything look better.
THEY PUSHED SOUTH, picking up more Raumsdalians who wanted to fight the Rulers. Some of the men from armies the invaders had shattered had gone home. Others had turned bandit. Still others seemed willing to try again as long as they had someone to lead them against the enemy.
“Our own officers ran away,” one man angrily told Hamnet. “What the demon good are they if they won’t stand and fight?”
“They didn’t all run away,” a new recruit said. “But most of the ones who did fight got killed.” He paused, then admitted, “Watching them get killed set some of the others running.”
Count Hamnet made a grinding noise deep in his chest. “I sometimes wonder whether Raumsdalia deserves to live.”
“Who do you suppose appointed the officers?” Ulric answered his own question: “Sigvat did, that’s who. And what did Sigvat do when the Rulers got to Nidaros? He ran away, that’s what. It’s no wonder the officers take after their master.”
The new recruits stared at him. “If one of our captains heard you say something like that, he’d horse whip you,” said the soldier who’d complained that the officers had run.
“He might think so,” Ulric said lightly.
“Oh, he’d do it, all right. He’d . . .” The soldier seemed to take his first good look at the adventurer. He paused, then changed course: “Well, maybe not. He was mighty fond of his own skin.”
“A sensible fellow,” Ulric said. “Of course, if we were all that fond of our own skins, nobody would ever hurt anybody else for fear of what would happen to him. But it doesn’t work that way, worse luck.”
“We’ve both got the scars to prove it,” Hamnet said, and Ulric nodded. Hamnet went on, “Better to dish them out than to wait while they heal up, though.” Ulric Skakki nodded again. So did the Raumsdalian soldiers rejoining the fight.
And so did Trasamund. “Always better to give than to receive,” he said, and reached over his shoulder to touch the hilt of his two-handed sword.
“I have a question,” Hamnet said. Everybody looked at him. He asked it: “How long before the Rulers figure out they’ve got trouble behind them as well as in front of them? What do they do once they realize it?”
“That’s two questions,” Ulric pointed out.
“If you’ve got two answers, I’ll listen to them,” Count Hamnet said.
Ulric made as if to turn out his pockets and go through his belt pouches. Hamnet Thyssen waited. He knew the adventurer was trying to annoy him, and would win a point if he succeeded. When Hamnet just stood there, Ulric said, “My guess is, it won’t be long. And when they do realize it, they’ll turn on us. It’s not like they’ve got any reason to be afraid of Sigvat.”
“Too right it isn’t,” Hamnet said. “And that’s about what I was thinking, too. We’ve better be ready for the worst they can do to us.”
“Why are you telling me? You need to talk to your lady love,” Ulric said. “Without her, the best we can hope for is to hightail it off to some place where the Rulers won’t come for a while.”
“Not so bad as that.” But Trasamund didn’t sound as if he believed it himself.
“We usually say things won’t be so bad when we bump up against the Rulers,” Ulric said. “And they usually aren’t. They’re usually worse.”
Trasamund had brightened till he finished. Then the jarl glowered at him. “Curse it, why can’t you leave that part out?”
“Because I’m trying to tell the truth?” Ulric suggested. “I know Bizogots don’t always understand the word—”
“What do you mean?” Trasamund said indignantly.
“Oh, you know it’s true as well as I do.” Ulric sounded impatient, to say nothing of tired. “What gets you people through the winters up there except lies swapped back and forth? Don’t tell me any different, either. I know better. Anyone who’s passed a winter up on the plains knows better.”
“Those are just for the sport of it. Nobody believes them. Nobody expects to believe them,” Trasamund said. “When we need to tell the truth, we can do it as well as anybody else. I’ve heard plenty of Raumsdalian liars, too.” He fixed Ulric with a significant stare.
“Who, me?” the adventurer said. “If you can prove anything I’ve ever said is a lie, go ahead and do it.”
“How am I supposed to? You talk about places nobody else has ever been to. You’re the only one who knows if there’s any truth in you at all.”
“Hamnet’s been to some of those places,” Ulric said. “He knows whether I’m telling the truth or not.”
Thus prodded, Hamnet said, “I’ve told you before, Trasamund: Ulric hasn’t lied about any places where I’ve been, anyhow. I would have let you—and him—know about it if he had.”
“Huh.” Trasamund didn’t want to believe him, either. “But he talks about places you’ve never seen, too, Thyssen. As far as anybody knows, he’s making all that up as he goes along.”
“I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why,” Count Hamnet said. Trasamund could have looked no more dubious had he practiced in front of a mirror. Ignoring his expression, Hamnet went on, “Here’s why. When we went up onto the Glacier, Ulric could talk with the people we met there. How? Because he’d run into Bizogots who spoke a dialect like theirs way over by the western mountains.”
“He didn’t talk about that before we went up onto the Glacier,” Trasamund protested.
“No, but he’d done it. He’s done some things you haven’t done, Your Ferocity, and seen some things you haven’t seen, and you might as well get used to it,” Hamnet said.
“Oh, don’t tell him that,” Ulric said. “Now I’ll be able to lie as much as I please, and he’ll have to swallow all of it. Where’s the challenge in that? Where’s the sport? Making somebody believe a really juicy lie shouldn’t be easy. You should have to work at it.”
Count Hamnet exhaled through his nose. “You’re not helping, you know.”
“How about that?” Ulric said cheerfully. “Anybody would think I was trying to be difficult or something.”
“Anybody would think you were trying to be Skakki,” Trasamund said. Ulric bowed, as if at a compliment. Trasamund threw his hands in the air.
MARCOVEFA KEPT LOOKING back over her left shoulder so often that Hamnet asked, “Did you get a crick in your neck when you slept last night?”
“No.” She shook her head. “I keep looking to find the way north.”
He pointed out the obvious: “We’re riding south.”
“Not always,” Marcovefa said.
“What does that mean? What do you sense?” Hamnet asked.
“One day, we will ride north again. We will need to know the way.” Marcovefa sounded like most of the shamans and wizards Hamnet had known: she obviously knew what she meant, and she just as obviously had trouble telling him. Or maybe she simply didn’t want to.
He tried his best to make sense of it. “When will we ride north again? How far north will we ride? Back to Nidaros? Back to the woods? Back to the Bizogot steppe?”
“Back to the Golden Shrine,” Marcovefa answered.
That told him both more and less than he wanted to know. “Where is the Golden Shrine? How will we find it?”
“It is where it is. We will find it when we need to find it.” Marcovefa shook her head again. “We will find it when it wants to be found.” She looked back over her shoulder once more, as if she expected it to spring up from the wheatfield they’d just passed, a field that might never be harvested.
“You’re not helping,” Count Hamnet complained, as he had with Ulric.
“I am giving you the best answer I can,” Marcovefa said. “It is true. Do you want me to lie instead?”
“It may be true, but it doesn’t tell me anything,” Hamnet complained.
Marcovefa shrugged. “Before I came down from the Glacier, if I asked you where Nidaros was, what could you have told me? You would have said, ‘It is far to the south.’ If you talked about the Bizogot steppe or the forest or the badlands where Hevring Lake spilled out, what would they have meant? Nothing. Less than nothing. I did not know what any of those things were.”
Count Hamnet thought about that. Slowly, he asked, “Are you telling me I’m still up on the Glacier as far as the Golden Shrine is concerned?”
“Yes, I tell you that.” Marcovefa looked pleased that he’d understood so well. “When you need to know, you will know. Till you need to know, you don’t need to worry about it.”
She might have been pleased, but Hamnet wasn’t. “You make it sound like I’m a little child.”
“When it comes to the Golden Shrine, we are all little children.” Now Marcovefa spoke with what sounded like exaggerated patience. She paused. “Maybe your Eyvind Torfinn is a big child. He know more about the Golden Shrine than most people. But no one is more than a big child. How could it be otherwise? For now, the Golden Shrine is hidden. Who has seen it, to say what it is like? Have you?”
“You know I haven’t,” Hamnet Thyssen answered angrily.
“You might be surprised. But all right, then. Neither have I. Neither has anybody. So what is the point of getting all upset?”
“We need the Golden Shrine,” Hamnet said. “Won’t it help us against the Rulers? Can we beat them without it?”
“We can do whatever we have to do.” Marcovefa was nothing if not evasive.
More slowly than he might have, Hamnet realized she was being evasive on purpose. “You’re not telling me everything you know.”
“You are not a shaman. I am telling you everything you can grasp.” Marcovefa opened and closed her hands. “I am telling you everything I can grasp, too. I know more than I understand. Does that make any sense to you?”
“No,” Count Hamnet said. A moment later, he amended that: “Maybe.” He’d known something was wrong between Gudrid and him before he understood what it was. He didn’t like to think of the Golden Shrine in those terms. It was supposed to be good and pure and holy. Gudrid . . . wasn’t.
“You worry too much,” Marcovefa said seriously.
Hamnet Thyssen burst out laughing. “Now tell me something I didn’t know!” he exclaimed.
“You should not do this.” The shaman from atop the Glacier made not doing it sound easy as could be.
He bowed to her. “How do you propose that I stop?”
“Wait till we camp tonight,” she answered. “I will stop you from worrying—for a while, anyway.”
That gave him something to look forward to. He would have looked forward to it even more if Marcovefa hadn’t kept on glancing north. She always peered over her left shoulder—never over her right. Maybe that meant something sorcerous. Maybe it was just her habit, and he’d never noticed it before. Now he shrugged. He was too proud—and too stubborn—to ask.
And, when they did camp, she kept her promise with an eager ferocity he did his best to match. Sure enough, making love did stop him from worrying . . . for a while, anyway. You couldn’t worry when the world exploded in joy. Afterwards, though? Afterwards was a different story.
But Hamnet didn’t worry long. Sleep claimed him before his thoughts could get all knotted up. Even as his eyelids sagged shut, he sent Marcovefa a suspicious glance. He wasn’t usually one to start snoring right after love. Not usually, maybe—but tonight he was.
He woke before daybreak the next morning. Marcovefa lay beside him, snoring softly. He smiled—and waited for all his worries to come flooding back. They didn’t, though. His mind felt washed clean, almost as if he’d got over a fever that left him out of his head for a while.
Was that magic? Or only a prolonged afterglow? Was there a difference?
When she woke up, he tried to ask her. She didn’t want to listen to him. “Do what you need to do today, whatever it turns out to be,” she said. “Yesterday is gone. You can’t bring it back. You can’t change it. So what difference does it make? Tell me that.”
“I remember it,” Hamnet said stubbornly. “If not for the skirmish yesterday morning, we wouldn’t be eating venison for breakfast today.”
“You never know.” But Marcovefa smiled.
“I wish you could see this country the way it ought to be,” Hamnet said. “Here south of Nidaros, this is the heart of the Empire. But nothing is the same because of the cursed war.”
Marcovefa shrugged. “It is what it is, that’s all. Every bit of it, even the worst, is better than the mountaintop where my clan lives.” She blinked. “I wonder what will happen when the Glacier melts back and the mountain is part of the rest of the world again. Not in my lifetime, but not so long, either.”
“No, not so long,” Hamnet agreed. If it wasn’t in his lifetime, though, he had trouble worrying about it. He looked south. “I hope your clan doesn’t come down into a world the Rulers are running.”
“Rulers wouldn’t run it once my clan got through with them,” Marcovefa said. Count Hamnet feared she was an optimist. But maybe she knew what she was talking about. Her clansfolk were formidable people. They had to be, to survive at all up on the Glacier. In easier circumstances, they and the other small, thinly scattered clans up there might give anybody a run for his money.
“Come on,” Trasamund said when they emerged from their tent. “We just beat one bunch of those buggers. Let’s ride south and find more of them—lots more.”
Nobody told him no.
NO, NOBODY TOLD Trasamund no. Still, as the Raumsdalians and Bizogots rode away from their camp, Ulric Skakki brought his horse up alongside Hamnet’s and said, “Sometimes God gives you what you ask for—just to show you you’re a fool to ask for it. How many more of the Rulers do you really want to run into?”
“Good question,” Hamnet admitted. “How do you propose to drive them out of the Empire if we don’t run into them, though?”
“Well, that’s a good question, too,” Ulric said. “We’re liable to run into too many of them all at once—that’s what bothers me. They really have swarmed down here, haven’t they? Raumsdalia’s a big, tasty dog, and it draws plenty of fleas.”
“The Rulers are worse than fleas,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “And of course this country is better than the land farther north. Even the Bizogots like it better here than up on their steppe—well, most of them do, anyway.”
“Bread. Beer. Fruit,” Ulric said. “Oh, they’ve got a few berries up there, but that’s about it. Smetyn doesn’t match beer—to say nothing of wine. And without bread . . .” He shook his head, as if to say civilized life was impossible. He wasn’t so far wrong, either.
A large, black plume of smoke rising in the southeast marked some sort of struggle. Pointing toward it, Trasamund said, “We ought to see what that is.”
“He’s been eating meat again,” Ulric Skakki said sadly.
“Mammoth meat and venison,” Count Hamnet agreed. “So have you. Why doesn’t it turn you all bloodthirsty?”
“Because I’ve got more sense than that?” Ulric suggested. That was more polite than saying, Because I’m not a Bizogot barbarian off the frozen steppe, but it amounted to the same thing.
He didn’t have more sense than to keep from following the jarl as Trasamund rode toward the pillar of smoke. Neither did Hamnet Thyssen. The Raumsdalian noble caught Marcovefa’s eye. “Are you ready for more trouble?” he asked her.
“As much as these Rulers can give,” she answered. By the way she said it, she didn’t think that would be much. She’d beaten their wizards again and again. On this side of the Gap, she was the only one who had.
Hamnet thought about the lands on the far side of the Gap. The country the Rulers roamed was nothing special—it reminded him of the Bizogots’ territory. Somewhere over there, though, would be better land, land like Raumsdalia and the realms to the south. What kind of people lived on it? And what kind of wizards did they have there, if they could keep the Rulers penned up on those cold and nearly useless plains? That was a worrisome thought.
It was also a thought he didn’t have time for. Now he could see what was burning: a village just too small to be a walled town. Most of the black, greasy smoke poured from one building. An oil store house? Hamnet wondered.
He didn’t have time to worry about that, either. The Rulers were still sacking the village. They were killing the men who fought back—and some of the ones who didn’t—and amusing themselves with the women. Atrocities didn’t seem to change much from one side of the Glacier to the other.
The Rulers might have laughed when they saw the Raumsdalians and Bizogots riding toward them. More easy enemies to get rid of, they must have thought. A man came out on a riding deer to face the oncoming foes alone. He was either a wizard or a maniac. Hamnet knew which way he would have bet.
When the wizard pointed at the incoming arrows, they fell out of the sky. Then, all at once, they didn’t any more. One of them just missed puncturing the enemy shaman. Every line of his body shouted astonishment. He pointed again, as if to say, Listen when I tell you something!
But the arrows, thanks to Marcovefa, didn’t listen. One of them grazed the Ruler’s riding deer. The animal bucked. Hamnet was sure he would have done the same thing. He was also sure he would have been ready for it. It caught the Ruler by surprise, though. Next thing he knew, he was sitting on the ground with Raumsdalians and Bizogots thundering toward him on horse back.
He pointed at a lancer, and the Raumsdalian’s spearpoint missed him. The next attacker’s sword bit. The wizard let out a shrill shriek that seemed to hold more indignation than pain. How could this be happening to him? Weren’t such torments reserved for folk of the herd?
Evidently they had been . . . up till now. No longer. Once the first swordstroke went home, the Ruler’s magic seemed to melt away like snow in springtime. By the time the army swept past him and into the village, he wasn’t good to look at any more.
The Rulers in the village cried out, too, in surprise and dismay. Their wizard hadn’t been used to seeing his magic fail. They weren’t used to going unprotected against their enemies’ magic. But Marcovefa filled them with terror. They couldn’t even fight back with their usual dogged courage. They ran pell-mell, throwing aside their swords to flee the faster.
Killing them as they ran didn’t seem sporting to Hamnet Thyssen. Then he remembered the battle in the woods the year before. When a glancing blow from a slingstone put Marcovefa out of action, the Rulers had used a spell much like this against the Raumsdalian army Hamnet led. They hadn’t been embarrassed to terrify their foes, or to slay them even though they couldn’t fight back.
Marcovefa had held that spell at bay till she got knocked cold. Was sending it back at the Rulers now a measure of revenge? If it was, Hamnet hoped she found it sweet.
Not all the Raumsdalians had been panicked by the Rulers’ magic. So, now, a few of the enemy fought back in spite of Marcovefa’s spell. Hamnet got a stinging cut on the back of his hand from one stubborn warrior. The man lay sprawled in death on the grass—much good his courage did him.
The last thing the villagers had expected was to be delivered from their tormentors. They cheered and capered at the same time as they mourned. Some of the women seemed eager to give their rescuers what the Rulers would have taken by force. Nine months from now, some of the babies would probably have the fair hair and light eyes that marked the Bizogots . . . and their byblows.
“Now this is a welcome,” Trasamund said as he disappeared with a buxom brunette. “I’ll give her something to remember me by.”
Ulric Skakki raised an eyebrow. “And we’ll hope she doesn’t give him something to remember her by.” He mimed scratching furiously at an intimate place.
“You take a chance whenever you lie down with a woman.” Count Hamnet paused, considering. “And I suppose she takes a chances whenever she lies down with you.”
“Of course she does.” Ulric mimed a bulging belly this time.
“Well, yes, that, too, but it isn’t what I meant.” Hamnet hesitated again, wondering exactly what he did mean. Slowly, he went on, “You can wound a lover in ways you can’t wound somebody who isn’t. You take a chance that you’ll get hurt, or that you’ll hurt the other person.”
“Life is full of chances. So you bet—and sometimes you lose,” Ulric said. “If you don’t bet at all, no one notices when you die, because you were hardly alive to begin with.”
Hamnet Thyssen grunted. He’d gone years not betting—not betting his heart, anyway. He’d risked his life again and again. With a hole in the center of it, the chance of losing it hardly seemed to matter. At last, he fell in love again . . . and then he fell on his face again.
“Women are strange creatures. You can’t live with them, but you can’t live without them, either,” he said. “Do you suppose they say the same thing about us?”
“Why are you asking me?” Ulric Skakki returned. “People have called me a lot of different things, but I don’t think anybody ever said I had to squat to piss.”
“Thank you,” Hamnet said. The adventurer raised a questioning eyebrow. Hamnet explained: “If I ever needed a cure for romantic thoughts, you just gave it to me.”
“We aim to please,” Ulric said loftily. “And you don’t need a cure. You just need better aim yourself sometimes.” That gave Hamnet something new to chew on.