XIII

 

 

 

D ID WE REALLY have to ride toward this?” Hamnet Thyssen asked. Without conscious thought, his hands strung the bow and found an arrow to set on the string.

“To tell you the truth, I would have been glad enough to do without it,” Ulric Skakki replied. He was readying his bow with quick competence, too.

Marcovefa started laughing again. Hamnet and Ulric looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. So did everyone else, which made Hamnet feel a little—a very little—better. In the next minute or so, unless he was luckier than he deserved to be, he was much too likely to end up torn limb from limb.

“Will you share the joke?” he asked.

“They put a mask on an illusion and think it will serve,” she said.

Count Hamnet thought it would serve, too. The sabertooth heading his way was almost close enough to spring. If he didn’t let fly in the next few heartbeats, it would. He had to hope he could hurt it and scare it away. If he didn’t . . .

He preferred not to think about that. Even if he did frighten off the sabertooth, he would have to worry about a lion or a short-faced bear next. He preferred not to think about that, too, but feared he had little choice.

Then Marcovefa pointed once more at the oncoming beasts. Laughing still, she cast another spell—to Hamnet Thyssen’s relief, a brief one. As soon as the spell struck home, Hamnet cried out in astonishment. So did the rest of the Raumsdalians and Bizogots.

Rather than a swarm of ferocious wild beasts, a ragged gaggle of naked Rulers rushed toward them. The invaders from beyond the Gap must have sensed that their covering spell had failed, for they stopped in confusion, looking quite humanly astonished. A man behind them—well out of bowshot behind them—must have been the wizard who’d set the barrier and disguised his countrymen as beasts. He seemed astonished, too: astonished and infuriated. He hadn’t expected to be found out, let alone outdone.

The sabertooth-turned-Ruler would have done better to keep coming. Hamnet shot him in the belly. He said “Oof!” loud enough to let Hamnet hear him clearly. Then he shrieked a good deal louder than that. The Rulers were brave, strong, and stubborn warriors, but hardly any man from any folk could have hoped to stay silent after that kind of wound.

As if the shriek were a signal, most of the other riders let fly. More of the broad-shouldered, burly men went down. The rest turned and ran as fast as they could. The Rulers seldom fled—their stern way of making war frowned on falling back for any reason. But maybe their code of honor or whatever it was granted dispensations when they got caught with their breeches down. Hamnet seldom sympathized with their predicaments, but with that one he did.

Watching them pelt back toward him only made their wizard angrier. He wasn’t naked—he wore the Rulers’ usual fur and leather, decorated with a shaman’s fringes and crystals. Hamnet was busy speeding the departing warriors on their way with arrow after arrow, but he kept glancing at the enemy sorcerer. With the men routed, the wizard was the only danger left.

He must have felt Marcovefa was the only danger to him—and he might well have been right. Even across more than a furlong, Hamnet could see him quiver with rage. The Ruler aimed his finger with as much purpose as Marcovefa had ever shown.

Count Hamnet waited for her to swat his spell aside, the way she had with the concealment and shapeshifting sorceries. Instead, to his horrified dismay, she swayed in the saddle. She might have taken a sharp right to the chin.

She shook herself, the way someone who’d taken a sharp right to the chin might do. The snarl that followed made the efforts of all the Rulers masquerading as beasts seem halfhearted beside it. That made Hamnet Thyssen feel better. Even if she had a foe worthy of her, she didn’t seem downhearted about it.

And the Rulers’ wizard did seem astonished that she still sat her horse—or maybe that she hadn’t burst into flames. Hamnet got the feeling he would be vulnerable to anything Marcovefa did to him.

Before he could find out, Trasamund yelled, “Forward! After them! Kill them all, the stinking dire-wolf turds!” By the way the Bizogots and Raumsdalians spurred ahead, they were every one of them relieved to be chasing naked men and not battling lions and sabertooths. Hamnet understood that. How could he not, when he felt the same way?

But Marcovefa swore in her own dialect. All those men and horses between her and the enemy shaman must have blocked the spell she wanted to cast. She paused and began another one. While she was doing that, the Rulers’ wizard also turned and ran. Like most of his folk, he was short and stocky. He showed a fine turn of speed even so.

Marcovefa held out her hands. The enemy wizard sprang into the air, higher than a man had any business doing. When he came down, he ran even faster. Marcovefa said something that should have scorched his backside all over again. Hamnet realized she’d intended to destroy him, not just singe his breeches.

“Never mind,” Hamnet said. “You broke two masks and you beat him.”

She gave him a look that was anything but satisfied. “These foolish little people! I shouldn’t only beat them. I should make them sorry their mothers ever let them out of the nest.”

She went right on scowling at the corpses of the Rulers who’d been magicked into predators’ shapes. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians also scowled at them. That Count Hamnet understood: how could you steal anything from a naked man? He needed longer to fathom Marcovefa’s annoyance. But then he did—to her, the bodies lying on the ground were wasted meat.

“You want to pick out a plump one, don’t you?” he said.

“We all should,” she said. “They could feed us for a couple of days. You leave so much on the ground, it surprises me your carrion birds aren’t too fat to fly.”

“We don’t eat man’s flesh, not unless we’re starving,” Hamnet said. “Even then, we don’t talk about it later.”

“Up on the Glacier, we are always hungry,” Marcovefa answered. Hamnet nodded; he’d seen the truth of that. She went on, “But the flesh of someone from another clan—that is not man’s flesh, not to us. And these are not just from another clan. They might as well be from another world.”

Hamnet felt the same way about them. But he said, “You have narrow rules for who is a man and who is not. Ours stretch wider. A good thing, too—if they didn’t, what would we do with you?”

“Knock me over the head while I’m sleeping, I expect,” she answered matter-of-factly. “If might be safer for you if you did. Your wizards are even weaker than the Rulers’. That means I can be more dangerous to you than I am to them.”

“Yes, you can be,” Hamnet said. “Do you want to be? Do you want to tell everyone what to do all the time, like the Rulers?” If Marcovefa said yes to that, he wondered if he ought to knock her over the head.

But she shook her head. “No. I don’t want people telling me what to do. Why should they want me doing the same thing?”

“If everybody thought that way, we’d all be better off,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

Marcovefa looked at him as if that were the silliest thing she’d ever heard. “Don’t hold your breath.”

 

ULRIC SKAKKI was more serious than usual—almost painfully serious, in fact. “I want to work this out,” he said, toasting some mutton—definitely not haunch of Ruler—over a fire that night. “I smelled trouble.”

“So you did.” Count Hamnet sounded blurry, even to himself. He had a big mouthful of mutton, too: charred on the outside, bloody on the inside. “I thought you were daft, but Marcovefa didn’t. That’s twice now.”

“Right.” Ulric started to take a bite, then pulled the smoking meat away from his face and blew on it. “Too blasted hot. Where was I? Oh, yes. Marcovefa. She could tell I wasn’t just jumpy, and she could tell where the trouble was, same as she did with the sickness. She’s the reason we went southeast—she knew it was there.”

“Can’t argue with you.” Hamnet didn’t want to argue, anyhow. He wanted to eat.

So did Ulric. He managed to bite the mutton without burning his mouth. But that only made him talk and chew at the same time: “So suppose she wasn’t along. Suppose we went straight south or southwest instead of southeast. We never would have run into those Rulers, and my hunch would have been worth its weight in gold—know what I mean?”

“Hmm.” Hamnet chewed both mutton and Ulric Skakki’s paradox. He found them both tough. At last, he said, “My guess is, if you’d smelled trouble when Marcovefa wasn’t along, or if no one had smelled trouble at all, we would have ridden southeast and run into it. We would have found some reason to do that, and the Rulers would have taken us by surprise.”

“Mm—maybe.” Ulric still didn’t seem happy.

“If you don’t like my answers, go ask Marcovefa yourself,” Hamnet told him.

“By God, I will!” The adventurer jumped to his feet and hurried over to the fire by which Marcovefa sat chatting with Audun Gilli and Liv. Ulric stooped beside her. They spoke for a little while. Then Ulric straightened. His face before a peculiar expression as he came back.

“What did she say?” Hamnet asked.

“ ‘Don’t ask foolish questions.’ ” No doubt because he spoke her dialect, Ulric could imitate Marcovefa’s accent in Raumsdalian very well. He also did a good job of mimicking the sniff she could put in her voice.

Caught by surprise, Hamnet burst out laughing. “Well, it’s good advice,” he said when Ulric looked miffed.

“If you don’t ask a question, how are you supposed to know it’s foolish?” the adventurer persisted.

Is that a foolish question? Hamnet wondered. It probably wasn’t. Lately, too many questions that seemed foolish turned out to have answers of life-and-death importance. “Are you turning phi los o pher?” Hamnet asked. “If you are, why did we bother rounding up Earl Eyvind?”

“We didn’t do it on purpose. It just . . . happened,” Ulric said. “I’m sure you were thrilled when we rounded up Gudrid with him.”

“Thrilled. But of course,” Hamnet said tightly. Ulric Skakki gave him an impudent grin. Hamnet hastened to change the subject: “Where do we go from here? What can we do to make sure the Rulers don’t wreck Raumsdalia?”

“Wait till they kill Sigvat, and then beat them,” Ulric answered without the least hesitation. The cynicism in that took Count Hamnet’s breath away. The look on his face must have said as much, because Ulric laughed harshly. “What? Do you think I’m joking?”

“No. I think you’re not. And I think I ought to cry for Raumsdalia because you’re not,” Hamnet said.

“Don’t waste your tears. Do you suppose Sigvat would cry for you?” Ulric Skakki answered his own question: “If you do, you’re a different kind of fool from the one I’ve seen. Sigvat only has tears for himself.”

“And what kind of fool have you seen?” Hamnet Thyssen asked, as dispassionately as he could.

“You’re too stubborn for your own good. You’re too innocent for your own good. And you don’t know enough about women for your own good.” Before Hamnet could say anything to that, Ulric added, “Well, no man knows enough about women for his own good. But you knew even less than most of us poor twits. If you don’t believe me, go ask—”

“Gudrid?”

“I was going to say Marcovefa,” Ulric replied. “If you want to go ask Gudrid, well, you can do that. You want to know what I think, though? If you do, it only proves you’re a fool about women. Anybody who wants to have anything to do with that one . . .” He gave a theatrical shiver.

“Eyvind seems to,” Hamnet said.

“By God, Eyvind’s a fool about women. Even a fool about women like you should be able to see that,” Ulric said. And Count Hamnet nodded, because he could. Ulric patted him on the back. “There. You see? If you can see that, maybe he’s a bigger fool than you are. And they said it couldn’t be done!”

Hamnet got up and walked away from the fire. Ulric’s laughter pursued him.

 

THE QUESTION HAMNET Thyssen had asked Ulric kept gnawing at him. What could they do to beat the Rulers? They didn’t have enough warriors to do it in battle. He’d banked on Marcovefa’s magic to make up the difference in manpower. Now he saw that, while it could make up some of the difference, it would need strange and unusual help to make up all of it.

What that help might be, he unfortunately couldn’t imagine.

Marcovefa didn’t want to talk about it. “Everything will be all right,” she said when he raised the subject.

“Do you know that?” Hamnet persisted. “Does your magic tell you so? If it does, is it bound to know what it’s talking about?”

“Everything will be all right . . . as long as you don’t keep bothering me.” She paused. “If you do keep bothering me like this, you can find someone else to bother. I have listened to as much as I want to hear. Do you understand me?”

He couldn’t very well not understand her. “Yes,” he growled, and swung his horse’s head away so he could ride off by himself. No matter how big a fool about women he was, he could see he was on the edge of losing this one. How much bigger a fool would that make him?

He looked around. Ulric Skakki was out of earshot. That was something, anyhow—not much, but something.

A scout from the rear guard galloped up to the van. “Rulers!” the Raumsdalian shouted. “Rulers coming down from the north!”

“Let’s bag them!” Trasamund said. “They may not even know we’re anywhere close by. If they’re just coming down into the Empire, chances are they think it’s all over down her except the mopping up.”

“If they do, they’re wrong,” Runolf Skallagrim declared. “Yes, let’s welcome them to Raumsdalia.”

Swinging about and heading north again was a matter of minutes. Hamnet stayed away from Marcovefa instead of asking her what she would do. Maybe he could learn. Maybe.

Since he didn’t talk to her, she rode over and talked to him. That was bound to be a lesson of one kind or another. Which kind, Hamnet wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Shall we look like them?” Marcovefa said. “Will that surprise them and make things easy for us?”

“What do I know?” Hamnet answered. “Talk to Trasamund and Ulric and Runolf. If they think it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it.”

Marcovefa talked to the others. “They say to go ahead,” she told Hamnet. “So I go ahead. The Rulers will see the spell. Not us. We do not see anything out of the sameness.”

“Out of the ordinary, you mean,” Hamnet said.

“Do I? I suppose I do.” Marcovefa shrugged and got busy with her magic. She didn’t explain it, the way she often did. She simply went ahead with the spell. Hamnet Thyssen looked at his comrades. They didn’t look like Rulers to him. She’d told him they wouldn’t. He felt obscurely disappointed even so.

There were the Rulers. They were on mammoths and deer, and rode through the Empire as if they had not a care in the world. When they spied the Bizogots and Raumsdalians in front of them, they waved cheerfully. Their foes looked like friends to them, anyhow.

The two bands had got quite close to each other before one of the real Rulers called out something in their incomprehensible language. Hamnet and a few others had learned tiny fragments of that tongue. No one he led spoke it well enough to fool someone for whom it was a birth-speech. The men on his side did the best they could: they kept their mouths shut.

Frowning, the broad-shouldered, curly-bearded man repeated himself. Hamnet recognized the same syllables over again. He also caught the annoyance in the—chieftain’s?—voice. Whatever the Ruler said, he expected some kind of answer, and he wasn’t getting it. Which meant . . .

“Let’s hit ’em!” Hamnet, Trasamund, and Runolf all shouted the same thing at almost the same time. Ulric wasted no time on chatter. He simply drew his bow and shot the man who’d called out to people he thought friends. The Ruler looked almost comically astonished when the arrow sprouted in the middle of his wide chest. He slid off his riding deer’s back.

More Rulers tumbled from their mounts. Count Hamnet cut one down before his foe had even drawn his sword. Doing something like that wasn’t fair, which didn’t mean it didn’t work.

Only a few of the enemy warriors aboard riding deer found much chance to fight back. Bizogot and Raumsdalian archers also did everything they could to shoot the Rulers on the war mammoths, and to shoot the mammoths themselves as often as they could. If the beasts went wild with pain, they wouldn’t do what their masters wanted them to.

But a mammoth plucked a Raumsdalian trooper out of the saddle with its trunk and threw him to the ground. His terrified shriek cut off abruptly when the mammoth’s forefoot crushed the life from him. From everything Hamnet had seen, even large animals didn’t like stepping on people. Like it or not, the mammoth did it, as other war mammoths had before. Maybe the Rulers had some training trick to get the best of their reluctance.

“The illusion is broken,” Marcovefa called.

“Get back out of slingstone range!” Hamnet yelled at her. She made a face, but for once did as he asked without arguing. Almost getting her skull smashed before made her less than eager to risk it again.

Another Ruler yammered nonsense at Hamnet. It wasn’t nonsense to the man from beyond the Gap, of course, but it meant not a thing to the Raumsdalian noble. “Give up!” Hamnet shouted back. The Ruler either didn’t understand or didn’t want to.

Their swords would have to speak for them, then. Iron rang against iron. Sun-bright sparks flew. Hamnet wondered whether two swordsmen fighting in dry grass or on dry moss had ever started a fire. Then, as he beat the Ruler’s blade aside the instant before it would have ruined his face, he wondered if he would live through this.

A Bizogot’s arrow caught his opponent in the ribs. The Ruler grunted and then screamed. Hamnet finished him with a stroke to the neck. Body contorting in death spasms, the invader crashed to the ground.

Hamnet looked for someone else to fight. The unfair skirmish was almost over. One of the war mammoths was still fighting even though arrows pincushioned it. A few real Rulers kept up the struggle against the ambushers, but they fell one after another.

“Surrender!” Hamnet shouted in the Rulers’ language—that was a word he’d made sure he learned from the few prisoners his side had taken. Only a handful of the invaders ever did it. Most preferred death in battle to what they thought of as the worst of disgraces.

For his trouble, he got abuse showered on him now. The surviving Rulers made it plain they weren’t about to give up. He couldn’t understand much of what they called him, but he was sure they weren’t tossing him endearments.

“If they don’t want to, they don’t have to,” Trasamund said. He drew his bow, took careful aim, and shot one of the Rulers off the war mammoth still in the fight. The rest of the enemy warriors cheered. They saw nothing wrong with dying. Quitting was another story.

Die they did. Marcovefa tried her heart-stopping sorcery on the mammoth, but it didn’t work. She shrugged. “Warded,” she said. “The spell is easy to block.”

“Too bad. A lot of meat there.” Trasamund shrugged. “Oh, well. We’ll still butcher the deer and the horses that went down.”

“I wish it were easy to put the mammoths out of their misery one way or another,” Hamnet Thyssen said. He imagined himself wandering around with needles and skewers jabbed into his flesh. That had to be something close to what the great beasts were feeling now—and they didn’t even know why it had happened.

“Well, if you want to ride up close and try for a shot in the eye . . .” The way Trasamund’s voice trailed off told what he thought Count Hamnet’s chances were. After a moment, he went on, “Of course, if you miss, the mammoth’ll likely stamp you into the mud.”

“That did cross my mind, yes,” Hamnet said. “Since it was your good idea, you can try it.”

For a heartbeat, he feared Trasamund would. Challenging a Bizogot could be dangerous, because he might feel compelled to meet the challenge no matter how preposterous it was. But the jarl shook his head. “I’ve seen it tried, thanks,” he said. “I’ve even seen it work once or twice. And I’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t.” This time, his pause had a meditative quality to it. “Not pretty.”

“You sure aren’t,” Ulric Skakki agreed. “Or isn’t that what you were talking about?” He had a knack for hearing and responding to the bits of talk that would start the most trouble.

“We were talking about putting mammoths out of their misery.” Trasamund eyed Ulric. “Might be worthwhile doing the same thing to you.”

“Only misery I’m in right now is from the company I keep,” the adventurer said. “I can put myself out of it if I want to—all I need to do is ride away.” He made as if to do just that.

“Hang on,” Hamnet said.

“All right, since it’s you that asks,” Ulric said. “You haven’t insulted me any time lately, anyhow. I don’t quite know why not, but you haven’t.”

“Give me a chance and I’m sure I will,” Hamnet replied. “Where do we go from here? What do we do next?”

Ulric struck a pose. “Do I look like an oracle? Am I the Golden Shrine?” He looked down at himself. “If I am, the architect could have done better. My body is a temple—but not that one.”

“Your body is a—” Trasamund broke off. He was bigger than Ulric Skakki, and thicker through the shoulders, but no one could accuse the adventurer of being soft. “A temple to your foul mouth,” the Bizogot finished, and looked pleased with himself for coming up with something.

“While you’re as pure as snow is black,” Ulric said.

Trasamund started to nod, then almost hurt himself stopping when he heard the whole gibe. He sent Ulric a venomous stare. “I did not believe there really were things like snakes till I finally saw one down here, no matter what some fast-talking Raumsdalian traders said. When I got to know you, though, I understood what they meant.”

“Ah, well.” Ulric gave back an elaborate shrug. “For a long time, your Ferocity, I felt the same way about vultures.”

Trasamund purpled. Before they could turn insults into a brawl, Count Hamnet said, “Now, children . . .” That made them both glare at him, which was—he supposed—better than having them glare at each other. He went on, “The idea is to fight the Rulers—remember? If we fight each other, we help them? We don’t do ourselves any good.”

“But we can have some fun.” Ulric was in no mood to be helpful.

“You want fun, go to a brothel,” Trasamund growled. “This is war, curse it. We have to smash the Rulers—smash them, do you hear?”

“Think so, do you?” Ulric wasn’t about to give up his sport. “And here all the time I thought the idea was to hand them flowers when they came by.”

“Flowers, is it?” Trasamund told him what he could do with his flowers. It struck Hamnet as uncomfortable, especially if he used roses.

“You, too,” Ulric said. “Sideways.” He paused for a moment. “We didn’t kill all of them, I don’t think. Some will go on south and tell the rest of the Rulers where we are.”

“That’s part of the idea, eh?” Trasamund said. “We want them to come after us. Then we can deal with them.”

“I wish the Raumsdalian armies down south would give us a little help,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “They haven’t yet, not so far as anybody can tell.”

“Too right they haven’t,” Ulric agreed. “The generals are probably afraid of the Rulers, and we know too bloody well that Sigvat’s afraid of them.”

“We have to do it on our own, then.” Trasamund spoke with a certain lonely pride. Every Bizogot jarl saw his clan as being alone against its neighbors. Trasamund was bound to see this force as alone against the world. He wasn’t so far wrong, either.

“What if we can’t do it on our own?” Ulric Skakki went on trying to get under his skin.

This time, it didn’t work. Trasamund eyed the adventurer with something close to infinite scorn. “Then we die,” he said. “Bravely, I hope.” Not even Ulric found a good comeback for that. Count Hamnet didn’t even try. He didn’t want to die bravely. He wanted the Rulers to die bravely.

And, if such a thing were possible, he wouldn’t have minded seeing Sigvat II die bravely, too.

 

RAUMSDALIANS AND BIZOGOTS turned and moved south again. Hamnet pushed them to move fast. He had his reasons, though he didn’t speak of all of them. If the warriors moved fast enough, maybe they would leave the followers behind. He could hope he would leave Eyvind Torfinn and Gudrid behind, anyhow.

But, no matter what he hoped, it didn’t happen. Gudrid had kept up as they traveled through the Gap and beyond the Glacier. And she kept up now. Every once in a while, she even grinned at him. She knew he didn’t want her around. His not wanting her around had to give her one more reason to stay.

The Rulers took a while, but they proved able to learn from experience. They stopped sending big armies against the band Marcovefa backboned. Instead, they began to put raiders all around them, the way dire wolves would if they were harrying a herd of musk oxen. Now one outriding Bizogot, now two or three Raumsdalians, would go missing. Sometimes they would take enemies with them, sometimes not. But the band began to shrink.

Hamnet didn’t want to push Marcovefa about it. It seemed too small a matter to fuss about, too small a matter to draw the notice of a large talent. After the fourth time a small party of outriders got picked off, he changed his mind. The force needed scouts. If he couldn’t send them out without sending them out to get killed, he had a problem, and so did his little army.

“I see what I can do,” Marcovefa said when he told her what was wrong. “Maybe I ride with some scouts, see if I can lure the Rulers into coming after us. They get a surprise then, yes?”

That made Hamnet wish he’d kept his mouth shut. “We can’t afford to lose you. You know that,” he said.

“Foolishness,” Marcovefa sniffed. “Any shaman who knows anything should be able to beat these foolish Rulers.” Then she sighed. “But your shamans and wizards don’t know much, do they?”

“We used to think so,” Hamnet said. “Now . . . You and the Rulers have taught us some lessons we’d rather not have had.”

“You were like this.” Marcovefa closed one eye and squinted through the other one. “You were all like this, so you didn’t know it. The Rulers are like this.” She opened the one eye a little wider. “You need to be like this.” She opened both eyes very wide. Then she winked at Hamnet.

“You’re bound to be right,” he said, ignoring the wink. “But even if you are, you can’t always stay away from arrows or slingstones. And we can’t do without you, even if you think we should be able to.”

“You have a trouble, a problem. You bring it to me. Now you don’t want me to fix it,” Marcovefa said. “Where is the sense in that?”

“Losing scouts is a problem,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “Losing you is a catastrophe.” Then he had to explain what a catastrophe was: “Worse than a problem. Much worse.”

“But you won’t lose me,” Marcovefa said. “Don’t think so, anyway.”

“You don’t think so,” Hamnet echoed discontentedly. “Don’t you see? That isn’t good enough. Without you, we’re nothing.”

“You are more than you think you are,” Marcovefa said. “You don’t know how much you are. You have no idea.”

“Do you mean me, or do you mean all of us?” Hamnet’s wave encompassed the ragtag army he’d helped build.

“Yes,” Marcovefa answered, making herself as annoying as if she were Ulric Skakki.

Count Hamnet fumed, but only to himself. “Which?” he asked.

“I mean you, and I mean everyone,” Marcovefa said. “It is not a question with only one answer. If you were not stronger than you think, the Rulers would have won a long time ago. Don’t you see that?”

“Well . . . maybe.” Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure he wanted to see it. He’d got used to looking down on himself. Why not, when everyone else did. That was how his thoughts ran, anyway. Losing first Gudrid and then Liv did nothing to make him feel better about himself, either.

“No maybe,” Marcovefa said. “It is a truth. An important truth, too.”

“Maybe,” Hamnet said again—he didn’t want anyone making him happy against his will. “All I know is, whenever we went up against the Rulers in any kind important fight before we climbed to the top of the Glacier and found you, we lost. The only reason we climbed it was because it gave us one chance in a thousand to get away from the Rulers. If we stayed down on the Bizogot steppe, the mammoth-riders would have killed us all.”

Smiling, Marcovefa shook her head. “Not so simple.”

“No?” Sure enough, Count Hamnet didn’t want to believe anything. “Then what were we doing up there?”

“I think the Golden Shrine sent you.” Marcovefa sounded as matter-of-fact as if she’d said something like I think the Three Tusk clan sent you.

No matter how matter-of-fact she sounded, she made Hamnet Thyssen gape. “How do you know something like that? How can you? Did God tell you?” He didn’t believe God went around doing such things. He was sure God didn’t do them with him. He wished God did.

“God didn’t tell me anything. I don’t know this is true. But I think so. We all need the Golden Shrine now. Maybe never in all the time since it disappeared do we need it more,” Marcovefa said.

How long had the Golden Shrine been lost? Hamnet didn’t know if he’d ever heard a number of years. Eyvind Torfinn would know, if anyone did. What he didn’t know about the Golden Shrine, nobody knew. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t feel like asking him. Dealing with Earl Eyvind was too likely to mean dealing with Gudrid. As long as Hamnet didn’t have to do that, he didn’t want to.

But he couldn’t help wondering how many people down through the ages had been sure their time was the worst one possible. They would have been sure they had to have the Golden Shrine’s help, too. No matter how much they needed it, they wouldn’t have got it. Some would have gone down to ruin without it. Others, he supposed, would have got through on their own.

Clumsily, he tried to explain that to Marcovefa. It seemed very clear inside his own head—much less so when he put it into stumbling words. She heard him out, then said, “Things are worse now.” As before, she sounded very matter-of-fact, very sure.

“How can you know they are?” Hamnet demanded.

“I know what I know. And time is not all strung together in little pieces like beads on a string. Time is. All of it. At once,” Marcovefa said.

Hamnet muttered to himself. That sounded like nonsense to him . . . till he remembered how she’d led the little band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians to the edge of the Glacier, to the very spot where an avalanche would make the descent less steep, less difficult. But the avalanche hadn’t happened yet when they got there. She’d seen it through time, but she hadn’t quite seen it in time. Then the time came round, and they were able to climb down.

“Why don’t you know where the Golden Shrine is, then?” Hamnet asked.

The question didn’t interest Marcovefa. “It is where it is. It is where it needs to be. When it is appointed to show itself, show itself it will.”

Appointed to show itself. Count Hamnet wondered what that meant, and whether it meant anything. Marcovefa must have thought so. He didn’t ask her to explain—he didn’t think what she said would mean anything to him. He couldn’t see, couldn’t conceive of, all time as a single thing. He wondered if his inability was a curse . . . or a blessing.