“Well, you are right two times now,” Marcovefa told Ulric.
“What is it? Do you know? Can you tell?” he asked. Somehow, by not gloating, he sounded more smug than he would have if he’d bragged about how fine his hunches were.
Marcovefa shook her head. “Something, that’s all. Maybe it won’t be trouble now that we know it’s there. Or maybe it will be worse.” Hamnet wished she hadn’t added that.
“Let’s go deal with it, whatever it is,” Ulric said.
“Would we do better running away?” Hamnet asked.
“I didn’t looked for you to play the coward, Thyssen,” Trasamund said.
“I’m not, by God,” Count Hamnet replied. “There’s trouble, and then there’s trouble. Some kinds you can face; others, you’d do better to stay away from. If you run toward one of those, you’ll be sorry afterwards . . . if you’re still around.”
“He’s right,” Marcovefa said, which silenced Trasamund. She looked at Hamnet again. “I don’t know this time. We’ll just have to find out-or else run away without finding out.”
“If we do that, it’ll come after us, whatever it is.” Ulric Skakki spoke with mournful certainty. “I say we need to see what’s what.”
Hamnet didn’t argue any more. He walked over to his horse and swung up onto it. So did the others. He winced when he saw Eyvind Torfinn and Gudrid on horse back. They made him wonder if he wasn’t bringing trouble with him instead of riding toward it. But Marcovefa seemed willing enough to let them ride along. Some people here already thought Hamnet had spoken up once too often. He kept quiet now.
Marcovefa and Ulric leading the way, they rode out. Hamnet Thyssen kept close to Marcovefa, but let her stay in front. She smiled at him over her left shoulder every so often, as if his attentiveness amused her. It probably did. What a warrior could do to keep an accomplished shaman safe . . . Is keep other warriors away from her, Hamnet thought. Spells reached farther than swords, but swords could strike faster.
What they rode through seemed ordinary Raumsdalian countryside. “So many ups and downs,” Trasamund grumbled. The Glacier had never lain this far south, never ground everything flat beneath its massive weight. Hills and dips persisted here, where they’d been leveled up in the lands the Bizogot was used to.
Forests lay well back from the road. Hamnet’s head swiveled from left to right, from right over to left. If the trouble came from either side, he’d be ready for it. He’d see it, anyway. After a moment, he realized that might not be the same thing.
If the trouble came from straight ahead, he’d see it from even farther off. He hoped he would, anyhow. If the trouble was some gigantic pitfall . . . He shook his head. He couldn’t believe Ulric would have sensed such a thing. And it wouldn’t be a danger unless they came in this direction on purpose.
Marcovefa also seemed alert. She was as bright as a songbird: head up, eyes sparkling, nostrils flaring with excitement. Hamnet wondered if he was imagining some of that, but he didn’t think so.
Sure enough, a moment later she started to laugh. “So that’s what this is all about,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“They thought they could set a trap for us.” Marcovefa held up a hand as she reined in. Everyone else stopped, too.
“What kind of trap?” Count Hamnet asked.
“I don’t know-yet,” she said, pointing out toward the peaceful-looking landscape ahead. “Whatever lies beyond that.”
“Beyond what?” This time, Ulric got the question out ahead of Hamnet. It seemed more than reasonable enough to the Raumsdalian nobleman.
Not, evidently, to Marcovefa. Her nostrils flared again-this time, Count Hamnet judged, in exasperation. “Some sort of sorcerous barrier lies ahead,” she said, as if to a group of idiot children. “Whatever is behind it, Ulric Skakki, is the trouble you rightly felt.”
In back of Hamnet, Audun Gilli spoke in a low voice: “I don’t sense anything up ahead.”
“Neither do I,” Liv answered, also quietly. “But her wizardry is stronger than ours. She may be right.”
“I know,” Audun said. “That’s what worries me.”
“What do we do now?” Even Trasamund’s big voice was unwontedly soft.
“We smash the barrier. Then we smash what lies behind it.” Marcovefa sounded as eager as if she were a young girl going to her lover.
“Just like that?” Hamnet said.
“Yes. Just like that.” She aimed a peremptory forefinger at the barrier only she could sense. When she spoke again, she used her own dialect of the Bizogot tongue. Ulric might have been able to follow it, but Hamnet couldn’t.
He also couldn’t deny it had an effect. The peaceful scene ahead wavered, as someone’s reflection in a pool would waver if he dropped a pebble into the water. Then it disappeared, as a reflection would if someone dropped in a handful of pebbles. It had concealed a swarm of sabertooths and lions and dire wolves and short-faced bears. Roaring and snarling, they sprang toward Hamnet and his comrades.
XIII
Did 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 cou
ld 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?
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