A FTER THE BIZOGOTS returned in triumph to the Leaping Lynxes’ village, Hamnet Thyssen took Trasamund aside and said, “This can’t go on much longer.”
“What? Why not, by God?” The jarl had a skin of smetyn clenched in his big fist instead of a sword hilt, but he hadn’t started drinking yet. “We’ll drive the stinking buggers mad.”
“That’s why,” Hamnet answered. “They won’t let us get away with it much longer. Either they’ll bring more men down from beyond the Gap—”
“If they’ve got ’em—” Trasamund broke in.
“If they have them,” Count Hamnet agreed. No one on this side of the Glacier knew how many Rulers there were or how wide a territory they ruled. Too cursed many and too wide were the only sure answers. But Hamnet went on, “If they don’t, they’ll bring their army up from the Empire to deal with us—or a good piece of it, anyhow. And don’t you think a good piece of that army could do the job?”
Trasamund scowled. “Not if Marcovefa’s magic puts the flyblown fornicators to rout, the way it’s supposed to.”
“There’s only one of her,” Hamnet reminded him. “I hope she can deal with their wizards. I don’t know if she can deal with all of them, but I hope so. If you think she can deal with the wizards and the warriors, you may be asking too much.”
“Then we deal with them.” Trasamund thumped his own chest. “We! The Bizogots! The hero-folk!” He broke into rolling verse.
Hamnet Thyssen wanted to bash him in the head with a rock and let in some sense. Unfortunately, he didn’t see any suitable bashers close by. “Stop that!” he said when Trasamund showed no sign of letting up. “We don’t have that many Bizogots here—not enough to beat a real army.”
Instead of answering, Trasamund pulled the stopper from the skin, raised it to his mouth, and drank a long draught. “Ahh!” he said, smacking his lips, when he finally came up for air. “I needed that.”
“Why won’t you worry about what’s going to happen, curse it?” Count Hamnet demanded.
“I can’t make more Bizogots,” Trasamund said reasonably. “Well, I can, but no matter how willing the women are, the brats need twenty years before they’re worth anything in a brawl, and we don’t have that long.” Hamnet snorted. Ignoring him, the jarl of the Three Tusk clan went on, “So why are you nattering at me to fix something I can’t do anything about?”
“They are going to hit us.” Hamnet clung to the rags of his temper by main force. “What will you do—what will we do—when that happens? Run away? Where will we go? How will we keep the Rulers off us once we get there?”
“You have more frets than a mammoth has fleas,” Trasamund said, and took another swig from the smetyn skin. “Whatever comes will come, and God will see to it that it all turns out all right.”
“The way he has so far?” Hamnet inquired, acid in his voice.
“Go away. Bother me later.” Trasamund drank deep again. “I want to get drunk. I want to screw my brains out.”
“What brains?” Hamnet asked, more sardonically still.
“Go howl,” the Bizogot told him. “I’ll worry about your worries, but when I feel like worrying about them. Not now!”
“When you were too late coming back to your clan from Raumsdalia, that was just one of those things that happen. It wasn’t your fault,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “But if you’re too late getting ready for trouble any fool can see coming, who’s left to blame but you?”
He thought the only way to get Trasamund to listen to him was to be brutal. He turned out to be righter than he’d guessed. The jarl dropped the precious skin of smetyn and charged him, bellowing like a bull woolly mammoth. Hamnet was a big man, Trasamund bigger still. They grappled, cursing and punching. Count Hamnet managed not to get thrown under Trasamund, but pulled the Bizogot down beside him onto the ground. Hamnet did his best to knee Trasamund in the groin, but the jarl twisted and took the blow on the hip.
“Well, this is sweet.”
Ulric Skakki’s light, ironic tones didn’t prove enough to get Hamnet and Trasamund to stop pounding on each other. Then a bowstring thrummed. An arrow stood thrilling in the ground only a few inches from the fighters’ faces.
“Enough!” Ulric’s voice got sharper. “If I shoot again, my aim may not be so good—or so bad, depending on how you look at things.” He reached over his shoulder for another shaft.
Cautiously, Hamnet pushed Trasamund away from him. The Bizogot let him do it. Neither was sure Ulric wouldn’t shoot them to make them stop fighting. Such drastic measures were very much his style.
Hamnet tasted blood. When he spat, he spat red, but no teeth seemed broken. He’d blacked one of Trasamund’s eyes. Dishonors between them seemed even. That dismayed him; he thought he should have thrashed the Bizogot.
“And what were you gentlemen discussing when you decided words weren’t exciting enough to suit you?” Ulric kept an arrow nocked. His words were more piercing, though.
“What to do next,” Trasamund answered, gingerly rubbing at the eye that had met Count Hamnet’s fist. Lucky it wasn’t my thumb, the Raumsdalian thought.
“Our hero here doesn’t want to do anything much,” Hamnet said. “Just sit around and wait for the Rulers to jump on us.”
“Probably better schemes than that.” Ulric Skakki could also sound judicious when he felt like it.
“If I want to know what you think, Skakki, I’ll ask you,” Trasamund growled.
“Well, I don’t think we want to wait that long,” the adventurer said. “We might have things to do in the meantime.”
“You Raumsdalians can joke and eat fat goose and screw your women and take it easy,” Trasamund said. “You already know no true Bizogots will take you seriously. If I say something, though, you’d better believe they’ll hop to it.” He thumped his chest with his fist and struck a pose.
Hamnet Thyssen didn’t strike him, but he came close. “Then why the demon don’t you say something to them?” he snapped. “If you let things drift, the Rulers will call the tune instead.”
“Must be what he has in mind,” Ulric said helpfully. “After we’re dead, the lions and teratorns can make the plans.”
“Bah!” Trasamund stuck his nose in the air and lumbered off.
After spitting again—still red—Hamnet sighed and said, “He reminds me of a bull musk ox in mating season. All he wants to do is bang heads.”
“And screw,” Ulric said. “Don’t forget screwing.”
There had been times when Hamnet wished he could. But that wasn’t what worried him now. “What are we going to do about it?”
“Nothing much we can do that won’t make things worse,” Ulric replied. “If dear Trasamund comes down with a sudden case of loss of life, who takes over for him? Won’t be us. He’s right about that—the Bizogots won’t follow us. And the rest of the men are worse muttonheads—musk-ox heads, if you’d rather—than he is.”
“We’re stuck with him, I’m afraid,” Count Hamnet said mournfully. “And I’m afraid because we’re stuck with him, too.”
A RAVEN FLUTTERED down out of the sky and landed on Marcovefa’s left shoulder. She reached out and scratched its head as if it were a cat. It brought its formidable beak alarmingly close to her eye before it croaked something in her ear. She croaked back. They might have been conversing. For all Hamnet Thyssen knew, they were.
Several Bizogots stared at the spectacle of woman communing with bird. Hamnet didn’t, but only because he’d seen it before up on the Glacier and during the harrowing descent to the Bizogot steppe. At last, one of the mammoth-herders worked up the nerve to ask, “Is that your fetish animal, wise woman?”
“Not the way you mean it.” Marcovefa caressed the raven some more. It croaked again, with obvious pleasure. She went on, “But it still tells me things.”
“Like what?” Hamnet asked.
“Where the carrion is. I don’t have to watch teratorns. And where the carrion is, most of the time the Rulers are, too.”
“Ah.” The Raumsdalian noble nodded. “That is worth knowing, yes. But why hasn’t one come to you for a while?”
She shrugged. “Ravens do what they want, not what you want. If they were only a little worse, they would make fair people.”
A little worse how? Hamnet wondered. Then he wondered if he wanted to know. He ended up not asking. What he did ask was, “Where is the carrion these days? Where are the Rulers?”
Marcovefa croaked at the raven. The big black bird with the shaggy feathers answered. It swung its head to look northwest. Then it swung it again to look almost due south, toward the Raumsdalian Empire. “You see,” Marcovefa said.
“Well, so I do,” Hamnet agreed. “But have the Rulers come out of the woods, then? Have the left the Empire?” If they had, he thought they were stupid. They would have a much easier time feeding themselves inside the Empire than up here. He wondered if they realized the territory they roamed on the far side of the Glacier was more like the Bizogot steppe than the Empire.
Marcovefa and the raven croaked back and forth some more. But all Hamnet got from her was another shrug. “The bird doesn’t know,” she reported. “Why should it care about people who aren’t dead?”
“They’ll make us dead if they get the chance,” the Raumsdalian noble said. “But I don’t suppose the raven cares about us while we’re alive, either. Well, maybe about you—a little, anyhow.”
“A little,” Marcovefa agreed. “It thinks I’m interesting because we understand each other some. If we didn’t, it would only want to peck out my eyeballs after I’m gone.”
“You say the most cheerful things,” Hamnet Thyssen told her. The Bizogots were more fatalistic than most Raumsdalians. And Marcovefa was more fatalistic than most Bizogots. Part of that might have been her own character. Part was surely growing to womanhood atop the Glacier. Just as the Bizogots had a harsher life than denizens of the Empire, so Marcovefa’s clan lived in a way that would horrify—had horrified—any Bizogots who saw it.
“Do I tell lies?” Marcovefa asked.
“Not here,” Hamnet said. She grinned, unoffended. He went on, “Do you know any way to make ravens interested in live people? If we had flying eyes, that would help us a lot.” He told her about the Rulers’ wizard who’d turned himself into an owl to spy on the Bizogots and Raumsdalians.
“A raven is a smart bird, but only a bird,” Marcovefa said. “Why should it care?”
Plainly, she didn’t think Hamnet would have an answer for her. But he did: “If we can find the Rulers, we can fight them. If we fight them, the ravens will get plenty of fresh food.” Maybe including us, he thought. He’d run that risk whenever he went into battle. Sometimes, though, it seemed bigger than others.
Marcovefa grinned again, this time in delight. She blew him a kiss. “Yes, that may work . . . if the bird can see so far ahead. Have to find out.” She started croaking at the raven. It made strange, throaty noises back at her. She croaked again and again.
The raven tilted its head to one side. If it wasn’t thinking things over, Count Hamnet had never seen anything, man or beast, that was. What went on behind those bright jet eyes? How much could a bird anticipate? Hamnet was no bird, so he didn’t know. From everything he’d seen, ravens were more clever than most other flying feathered creatures. But could this one understand the promise of more meat down the line if it did something rather than something else?
It said something to Marcovefa. Ravens could learn to speak human words, but this one wasn’t doing that. It had its own way of getting ideas across, one only vaguely connected to human language. Had Marcovefa needed magic to learn it, or had study sufficed?
He couldn’t ask her now; whatever she was using, she needed to concentrate hard to get meaning from the sounds the raven was making. When it finally finished, she said, “It will try. Maybe it will forget. Maybe the other ravens won’t understand what it needs. But it will try.”
“As much as we can expect, I suppose.” Hamnet expected nothing from the raven. That way, he couldn’t possibly be disappointed. Anything he did hear from the bird or its fellows would come as a pleasant surprise.
He looked at life the same way. The view had advantages and disadvantages, as everything did. When things went wrong, he had little trouble accepting it—most of the time—because he’d looked for nothing better. (Where he did look for something better, as with Gudrid and Liv, disillusionment proved doubly bitter.) When things went well, he tried not to show the surprise too much.
“This is right on the edge of what a raven can do,” Marcovefa said. “Maybe over the edge. The bird here is smart, even for a raven. I don’t know if all of them can do what it can.”
She croaked some more at the big black bird. Count Hamnet knew nothing of the language of ravens, and knew he never would. If he had to guess from tone, though, he would have said she was telling this one how bright it was. It preened—literally. Did that mean it understood the praise and accepted it? You would have to be a raven—or Marcovefa—to know.
The bird sprang into the air. Wind whistled out between its wing feathers as it flapped. It wasn’t an arrow with a beak, the way a falcon was. But it could outsoar and outmaneuver a falcon. Ravens harried hawks for the sport of it, then tumbled out of the way in the air to keep the birds of prey from turning on them.
Ravens harried hawks, jays harried ravens, mockingbirds harried jays, kingbirds harried mockingbirds, hummingbirds harried kingbirds . . . and dragonflies probably harried hummingbirds. Hamnet Thyssen looked for a lesson there, but couldn’t find one he liked. Everything large and fearsome had something small and feisty that annoyed it. No, not much of a lesson.
Which didn’t mean it wasn’t true, on land as well as in the air. Right now, the Bizogots seemed small and feisty, the Rulers large and fearsome. That was how things looked if you were a Bizogot or a Raumsdalian up here beyond the tree line, anyhow. The Rulers probably had a different view of it.
The only view of the Rulers Hamnet wanted was one of their backs as they rode off beyond the Gap once more. He wondered if he would ever get a view like that. He feared he wouldn’t, even if the Bizogots and the Empire somehow beat the invaders. The Rulers would be part of the political landscape from now on. The Gap would be open from now on, too. More Rulers—or even other invaders—could sweep down out of the north. The world had got bigger and more complicated.
When he said as much to Marcovefa, she gave him a wry smile. “This happened to me when I came down off the Glacier,” she said. “Everything new, everything strange, everything—” She threw her arms wide to show how much her world had expanded.
“You’ve done well,” Hamnet told her.
She shrugged. “People are still people. That’s the biggest thing. The world is strange. The animals are strange. But people? No.”
“People are always strange,” Count Hamnet said. Especially women, he added, but only to himself.
Marcovefa smiled again and nodded. “But they’re strange the same way here as they are in my clan up on the nunatak.”
“On the what?” Hamnet said.
“Nunatak,” Marcovefa repeated. “That’s our word for a mountaintop that sticks out above the Glacier.”
“Oh.” Hamnet Thyssen had probably heard the term while he was atop the Glacier himself, and while he was on that mountaintop—that nunatak. If he had, though, it had gone clean out of his mind. He wasn’t surprised. He hadn’t been at his best up there. None of the Bizogots or Raumsdalians had. He thought for a moment longer. “It doesn’t sound like a Bizogot word at all.”
“Maybe it isn’t. Our songs say other folk were up there when our forefathers came,” Marcovefa answered.
“What happened to them?” Hamnet asked.
“We ate them,” she answered calmly.
He didn’t splutter and make disgusted noises, because she so obviously wanted him to do just that. All he said was, “Seems as though you ate some of their words, too.”
“It could be.” Marcovefa’s expression was comically disappointed. Yes, she’d aimed to get more of a rise out of him.
One corner of his own mouth quirked upward. People didn’t get everything they wanted—not even a powerful shaman like Marcovefa. Nobody got everything. Maybe that meant the Rulers wouldn’t.
Or maybe it meant the Bizogots and the Empire wouldn’t. Who from each side got how much . . . would tell the tale till the Glacier melted, and maybe even after that.
TALL, DARK, ANVIL-TOPPED clouds floated ponderously across the sky. The air was hot and muggy, still and sullen. Wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist, Ulric Skakki said, “Whew! This is the kind of weather you’d expect a thousand miles south of here.”
“Yes, and you’d complain about it down there, too.” Hamnet Thyssen had taken off his tunic. His hands and face were tanned dark, but his arms and torso were pale as a Bizogot’s, though the mat of hair on his chest was dark, not golden. Right now, his skin was slick with sweat.
Ulric gave the clouds a dirty look. “If we’re going to have a thunderstorm, I wish we’d have it. It would wash the air clean of this garbage.” He shed his tunic, too.
“That would be good,” Hamnet agreed.
But the thunderheads rolled by, one after another. Count Hamnet did hear thunder once, far off in the distance. No rain fell anywhere nearby. The air remained close and stuffy.
Marcovefa walked by with her tunic off. Hamnet’s jaw dropped. Ulric’s eyes widened. Unless they were bathing, Bizogot women didn’t go bare-breasted in public (neither did Raumsdalians). “What are you doing?” Hamnet managed after a couple of false starts.
“Trying to stay cool, same as you.” Marcovefa mimed a panting fox. “I never knew weather like this up on the Glacier. I feel like I am wading in hot soup.”
“Don’t sunburn your, uh, self,” Ulric said, gallantly not looking at what he was really talking about.
“I be careful,” Marcovefa said, and walked on. Anyone who wanted to tell her to cover up would need to be a braver man than either Raumsdalian.
After she was gone, Hamnet and Ulric eyed each other. They both shrugged at the same time. “Look on the bright side,” Ulric said. “Maybe she’ll start a new trend.”
“Right,” Hamnet said tightly. He wondered what he would have done had Gudrid or Liv acted so scandalously. Odds were he would have pitched a fit, and maybe had a stroke. He wondered why he wasn’t pitching a fit now. Partly because Marcovefa was a law unto herself, no doubt. And, perhaps, partly because he’d already pitched enough—or too many—fits about women.
Have I learned something? he wondered. Or am I just too bloody tired to get upset about things right now?
Ulric Skakki looked around: not in Marcovefa’s direction. The adventurer’s nostrils flared, as if he were a dire wolf seeking a scent. “The air is nasty,” he said.
“Hot and muggy enough and then some, that’s for sure,” Count Hamnet agreed.
But Ulric shook his head. “Not what I meant. It’s bad that way, too. But I don’t like the way it feels. Do you have any notion of what I’m talking about?”
“No.” Hamnet was nothing if not direct.
“Didn’t think so.” Ulric gave him a bow that should have been mocking but somehow wasn’t. “It feels like something horrible is going to happen to us any minute.”
Hamnet Thyssen raised an eyebrow. “Foretelling? I didn’t know you’d gone into the wizard business. Have you talked with Audun Gilli or Liv about this?” He didn’t think he wanted Ulric talking with Marcovefa, not while she was running around without her tunic.
The adventurer’s chuckle said he knew what was going through Hamnet’s mind. But his mirth quickly faded. “I will talk with them, by God. I don’t know if they’ll tell me I’m daft. If they don’t, I don’t know whether they can do anything about it. Better to find out, though.” Lithe as a tumbler, he got to his feet.
With a grunt and a creak, Count Hamnet rose, too, and followed him. Hamnet also tried to feel the air. To him, it felt like . . . air. Hot, sticky air, but air and nothing else but. He thought Ulric was letting his imagination run wild. That wasn’t like the adventurer, but neither was his turning wizard.
Audun Gilli sat in the shade of the hut he shared with Liv. He hadn’t shed his tunic, but looked suddenly thoughtful as Ulric and Hamnet came up to him. Maybe he would before long.
“What’s up?” Audun asked. The look he gave Hamnet was slightly apprehensive. He might have cleared the air, but he knew Hamnet would never love him.
But Ulric did the talking, finishing, “Have I just got the fidgets on account of this beastly weather, or am I feeling something real?”
“Well, I haven’t sensed anything like that,” Audun Gilli answered. Count Hamnet started to give Ulric an I-told-you-so look, but the wizard went on, “Which doesn’t have to prove anything. Have you talked to Marcovefa yet? I’d bet she’s more sensitive than I am.”
“I thought I’d wait till she puts on more clothes,” Ulric said blandly. “She might not be distracted, but I would be.”
“She’s not wearing any less than the two of you,” Audun pointed out—he’d seen her, too, then. He’d seen quite a bit of her, in fact.
“That’s what she told us,” Ulric Skakki said. “It looks better on her, though. And I know better than to argue with a shaman, I do.” His saucy grin dared Hamnet to make something of that. Hamnet ignored him. With a small sigh, Ulric went on, “If you say I ought to talk to her, I guess I’ll go do it.” This time, he wasn’t grinning when he spoke to Hamnet: “You’re welcome to tag along again, Your Grace. I’m not going to talk about anything I don’t want you to hear.”
Not while I’m there, you’re not, Hamnet thought. All he said was, “I want to get to the bottom of this, too.”
The Leaping Lynxes’ village wasn’t very big. Finding Marcovefa didn’t take long. She raised an eyebrow when Ulric and Hamnet came up to her. “Are you two going to try to tell me what to do again?” she asked, an ominous note in her voice.
Hamnet shook his head. “No. This is something else.” He gestured to Ulric Skakki.
Ulric told the story one more time. He looked Marcovefa in the eye while he was doing it. If his gaze slipped farther south, it wasn’t in any obvious way. “So,” he said, “have I got the vapors, or is this something we need to worry about?”
Marcovefa looked as thoughtful as if she were fully clothed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t feel this, but I haven’t looked for it, either.”
“Maybe you should,” Hamnet said.
“Yes.” She nodded, which made her jiggle. Hamnet couldn’t pretend not to notice, but he didn’t dwell on it, either. There was a time and a place for everything. Ulric’s face might have been carved from stone. Marcovefa swung around in a circle, as if she too were casting about for a scent. When she came to the northwest, she stopped, looking startled.
“Something?” Hamnet and Ulric asked together.
“Something,” she agreed. “Something not good. Something very not good.”
Her grammar was shaky, but Hamnet understood what she meant. “What are those bastards trying to do to us?” he growled. Suddenly even the damp heat of the day seemed suspicious and unnatural. Maybe he was starting at shadows—but maybe he wasn’t. With the Rulers, he couldn’t be sure.
Before Marcovefa could answer, a Bizogot woman named Faileuba came up to the shaman from atop the Ice and said, “I don’t feel good.” She didn’t sound good; her voice was a sickly whine. She didn’t look good, either. Her face had a hectic flush, and she swayed on her feet.
Marcovefa set the palm of her hand on Faileuba’s forehead, then jerked it away again. “Fever,” she said. “Very much fever.”
A big blond man called Eberulf lurched toward Marcovefa, too. “Something’s wrong with me,” he muttered. Before Marcovefa could touch him, he keeled over. He looked the way Faileuba did, only worse.
“Disease?” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Or sending?”
“Sending,” Ulric answered without the least hesitation. “Has to be. Everything fits together too well. And . . . Do you remember the Rock Ptarmigans?”
“Yes.” Hamnet wished he didn’t. The Rulers had destroyed the whole western clan with a sorcerous pestilence the year before. What their dead encampment looked like when Trasamund’s band found it was the stuff of nightmares.
Marcovefa said, “Yes,” too. She nodded to Count Hamnet. “Go get Liv and Audun. I don’t care if they’re screwing—go get them. I need their help. This is as very bad a magic as I have seen from the Rulers.”
“Right,” Hamnet muttered. He didn’t know why Marcovefa had picked him to run her errand—to rub salt in his wounds? But whatever he felt would have to wait . . . unless he wanted to start feeling the way Faileuba and Eberulf did. He hurried back to the hut his former lover and the Raumsdalian wizard shared.
They were both outside it now, looking worried as they tried to tend to a couple of sick Bizogots. “I don’t care what Marcovefa wants—we can’t come right now.” Liv sounded harried. “I don’t know what these poor people have. Whatever it is, it’s nasty.”
“It’s worse than nasty. It’s sorcery from the Rulers,” Hamnet said. “Ulric thinks it’s the same sorcery that wiped out the Rock Ptarmigans. So does Marcovefa. She says she needs your help.”
“Good God!” Audun Gilli exclaimed. Was he shocked by remembering what had happened to the Rock Ptarmigans or by the idea that Marcovefa might need anybody’s help? Count Hamnet wasn’t sure which was more startling, either.
“Well . . .” Liv seemed to think that was a complete sentence. She nodded to Audun. “What are you waiting for?”
“Nothing,” he answered. The Bizogots they were trying to treat protested feebly. Audun spoke to Hamnet in Raumsdalian, which they were unlikely to understand: “Best thing we can do for these poor buggers is block that sorcery . . . if we’re able to. Marcovefa needs help? God!” So that was what was on his mind. Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t pretend he was surprised.
Several Bizogots called out to Liv and Audun as they hurried along. The pangs seemed to be hitting more mammoth-herders. Seeing people around him suffering, Count Hamnet examined himself for symptoms. How could you help doing something like that? He felt fine. A heartbeat later, he felt guilty for feeling fine.
Liv blinked when she saw Marcovefa. Hamnet had forgotten she wore no tunic—and if that didn’t prove the Rulers’ magic had him worried, what the demon would? Ulric Skakki was still on his feet, and seemed fine. Maybe the Rulers were aiming at Bizogots alone. Maybe it was nothing but coincidence.
“What do you need from us?” Liv asked Marcovefa.
“Do you know the yellow stone called lynxpiss?” Marcovefa answered.
“Yes,” Liv said, at the same time as Audun answered, “It isn’t really lynx piss, you know. It’s a stone like any other.”
Marcovefa’s nostrils flared. “I asked of it by its name, not by its nature. Use that lynxpiss stone against the fever. And if you have a lodestone, it will also help ward against perils of death. Quick, now—no time to waste.”
“What will you be doing?” Liv asked.
“I will punish those who send this wicked shamanry,” Marcovefa replied. Then, for one of the rare times since Hamnet had known her, she hesitated. “If I can,” she added. “Here, for once, the Rulers are almost as strong as they think they are. This is shamanry different from anything I ever saw up above the Glacier.”
Liv and Audun started arguing about where they might have stowed the lynxpiss stone. Audun dashed off. He returned in triumph with a transparent yellow crystal. Liv kissed him. Hamnet Thyssen did a slow burn. Didn’t she have more self-respect than that? His own current lover stood there bare-breasted, but that was different. Hamnet might not have thought so till Liv kissed Audun, but he did from then on.
“A lodestone,” Liv said. “Does anyone have a lodestone?”
“I have a little one,” Ulric Skakki said. “Here.” He pulled a small, rusty-looking stone from a pouch on his belt and tossed it to Liv. The shaman deftly caught it.
“Why have you got a lodestone?” Hamnet asked.
Ulric only shrugged. “Well, they’re fun to play with. And they’re interesting. And you never can tell when something will come in handy. It’s like a holdout knife, you know? You can go for years and years without ever needing a holdout knife. But when you need one, you’ll need it bad.”
Liv and Audun were using the lodestone and the yellow crystal—what was it really? tourmaline?—on a sick Bizogot. The Rock Ptarmigans’ shamans must have tried something like that when their people fell ill. Much good it had done them. Count Hamnet wished that last handful of words hadn’t crossed his mind.
But he couldn’t pay attention to Liv and Audun, or even to his own worries, for long, because Marcovefa said, “Hamnet—I need your help.”
He started. “Whatever I can give you,” he said.
“Your strength. Come stand by me. Set your hand on my bare skin. . . .”Marcovefa suddenly laughed. “There? Well, if you want. It will do. I can draw from you. I try not to take too much.”
What happens if you do? Hamnet wondered. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Maybe, if she took too much, he would just quietly fall over dead. He shrugged. So what? It was an easier end than most of the ones he could imagine.
He could, or thought he could, feel strength flowing out of him and into her. No—out of him and through her. Her right arm speared out toward the northwest. She might have been aiming at an enemy warrior. She might have been, but the range here was far longer and the effort required far more.
Because she was drawing on Hamnet’s strength, he could sense some of what she was doing with it. The link between them was stranger but in a way more intimate than when their bodies joined in the usual fashion. He felt her long-range grapple with the Rulers’ wizards. They were trying to down her with the same sickness that had felled so many Bizogots. In his mind’s eye, he saw the sickness as a greenish miasma. Whether that had anything to do with reality, he couldn’t have said.
Marcovefa herself might have been the sun: not the sun of the Bizogot steppe, not even the sun of Nidaros, but the hot, fierce sun of the southwestern desert where the Manche bandits skulked. If she could burn through that ugly, roiling miasma . . . It would be like a fresh breeze blowing away the nasty, humid air that oppressed the encampment.
He wondered if the vile weather and the vile sickness were connected. One more thing that wouldn’t have surprised him.
But the roiling green stuff he imagined he saw didn’t want to burn away. Indeed, it clung ever tighter to Marcovefa. If it could seize her before she could dispel it . . . He didn’t know what would happen then. He did know it wouldn’t be good.
Without being asked, Ulric Skakki took his left hand. The adventurer’s strength flowed through Hamnet and into Marcovefa. No, the shaman from atop the Glacier wasn’t mocking the Rulers and their wizardry any more. Maybe this wasn’t the fight of her life, but it was the toughest one she’d had since descending to the plains the Bizogots roamed.
Maybe Ulric’s strength tilted the balance. Before, Marcovefa had struggled to hold her own against the Rulers’ sorcery. Now she blazed brighter and brighter in Hamnet’s imagination—if that was what it was. The choking fog surrounding her, clutching at her . . . Did it start to fade, or did it draw back as if in fear of the spiritual glow that came from her? Hamnet had trouble putting it into words, but both amounted to the same thing.
“Ha!” she cried aloud. Across however many miles it was, Hamnet Thyssen felt the Rulers’ wizards flinch away from her. That cry might have been Trasamund’s fearsome two-handed sword, swung with all the furious power the Bizogot jarl had in him. “Ha!” Marcovefa said again. The enemy wizards broke and fled her strength—those who could. In much more mundane tones, Marcovefa told Hamnet, “You can let go of my tit now, thank you very much.”
He did. “You broke them,” he said.
“Yes. I did.” But she didn’t take it for granted, the way she once had. “You gave me good help—both of you did. And I thank you for it.” Her eyes rolled up in her head, and she crumpled to the ground.