“Now tell me something I didn’t know,” Hamnet answered bitterly. “Do you have any notion how much I hate running away from those whoresons again, though? Any notion at all?”
“I probably don’t,” Runolf admitted. “But how do you feel about them murdering the lot of us?”
“I’m against it,” Hamnet said, which jerked a laugh from Baron Runolf. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t run-just that I didn’t like it. And I cursed well don’t.”
“Well, neither do I,” Runolf said. “But I’m with you-I like getting murdered even less. And that’s what’ll happen to us if we stick around much longer.”
“I know.” Hamnet Thyssen hated admitting that, which didn’t mean he had any choice. He asked the most important question he could find: “Is Marcovefa still safe?”
“She is,” Runolf assured him, adding, “Skakki’s got her up onto a horse.”
He didn’t mean mounted; he meant tied aboard a pack horse like a sack of dried peas. All the same, Count Hamnet nodded. “Ulric will know how to take care of it, all right.” An arrow from nowhere hissed through the air between them. Hamnet nodded again, in spite of himself. “Yes, we’d better get moving.”
“About time,” Runolf Skallagrim said, nothing but relief in his voice. “I only hope it isn’t past time.”
It turned out not to be. The Rulers had had as much of the fight as they wanted, at least for the moment. If their pincer claws had worked better . . . It was, Hamnet supposed, ever so slightly reassuring to find they could make mistakes like anyone else.
They didn’t pursue very hard. The forest wasn’t their favorite ground, any more than it was the Bizogots’. At another time, Hamnet would have tried to turn that against them. As things were, he had to content himself with taking advantage of it.
Liv and Audun Gilli and a Raumsdalian soldier who’d been a doctor’s helper did what they could for the injured. They extracted arrows from wounds, bandaged and sutured, and used both leechcraft and sorcery to stop bleeding. Against pain they could offer very little. “Has anyone got any poppy juice?” called the soldier, whose name, Hamnet thought, was Narfi.
No one said anything. After a small silence, Narfi swore. So did the man whose hurts he was tending.
Hamnet Thyssen was too worn and weary and gloomy to swear. He kept looking north. How long before they were out on the Bizogot steppe again? What could they hope to do if the Rulers pushed them out of Raumsdalia altogether? Not much, he thought. Not bloody much. But they’d already spilled too much blood to be able to give up now.
And chances were the Rulers wouldn’t let him give up anyway. For whatever reason, they were convinced he was somehow especially dangerous to them. So was Marcovefa. Hamnet only wished he could see why.
Marcovefa was dangerous to them. He knew that. And they’d found a way to silence her. Only luck no stray arrows in the last fight pierced her. She couldn’t do anything to defend herself against them, not now.
Nobody seemed able to do much against the Rulers. Maybe they would end up holding everything from the Gap down to Raumsdalia. If they ended up knocking Sigvat II over the head, that might almost be worth it.
Hamnet sighed. Almost was one of the cruelest words in the language.
He’d hoped the Rulers would be satisfied with trouncing their foes once and would leave them alone for a while afterward. But he’d also seen how wide the gap between what you hoped for and what you got could yawn.
He kept scouts as far south in the forest as he could, to give warning in case he didn’t get what he hoped for. And he didn’t, as he discovered sooner than he wanted to.
The scouts were all Raumsdalians. The Bizogots, by the nature of things, knew little of woodscraft. One of Runolf Skallagrim’s men rode back to the camp calling, “They’re coming. God help us, they’re all coming!”
“What do you mean, all?” Hamnet asked, hoping the scout meant anything but what it sounded like he meant.
No such luck. “Every Ruler in the world,” the excited man gasped. “War mammoths! Everything! I just saw the front end of it, but there’s got to be a demon of a lot of it I didn’t stick around to see!”
“Have they gone mad?” Trasamund rumbled. “They don’t need all that to squash us. It’s like dropping a musk ox on a mosquito.”
“Maybe the Emperor is dead,” Eyvind Torfinn said. “With Sigvat gone, they’d have nothing to fear in the south, and could concentrate all their power against us. We may be the last force in the field against them.”
Hamnet refused to believe it. “They had nothing to fear in the south with Sigvat alive,” he said. “They proved it, too, again and again. They might need to worry if they did knock the sorry scut over the head. Then they’d run the risk that somebody who knows what he’s doing would take over and start fighting back.”
Earl Eyvind looked sorrowful. Hamnet didn’t care. As far as he knew, Sigvat had never thrown Eyvind into a dungeon for the horrendous crime of being right. Hamnet feared he himself had to plead guilty to that one.
Gudrid, by contrast, lapped up his words with vampire avidity. He knew exactly what that meant. If by some accident the Rulers didn’t slaughter everyone here, and if by some bigger accident Sigvat triumphed in the south, she would tell the Emperor everything Hamnet had said. Then Hamnet would go back to the dungeon, or maybe to the chopping block, and she would have her reward.
At some other time, Hamnet would have hated her for that. He couldn’t afford to indulge himself now. “There’s no chance we can fight them?” he asked the Raumsdalian.
The man shook his head. His eyes were wide and frightened. “I didn’t know there were that many of the buggers around,” he replied.
Clutching at straws, Count Hamnet turned to Liv and Audun Gilli. “Any hope it’s a fancy bluff, with magic blowing up their numbers the way you blow up a pig’s bladder before you put it on a stick?”
Bizogot shaman and Raumsdalian wizard both turned south in the same motion. They made a more natural pair than Hamnet ever had with Liv. He could see as much, however little he relished what he saw. The two of them tasted the frigid air like hunting hounds seeking a scent. Liv’s lips moved as she murmured a spell. Audun’s hands twisted in quick, abbreviated passes.
They both stiffened at the same time. Audun flinched as if someone had slapped him. Liv went nearly as pale as the snow that lay all around. “It’s no bluff,” she said softly. “They really are that strong. They want us to be able to feel how strong they are.”
“God help us,” Audun added.
“What do we do, then?” Hamnet asked.
“Run!” they said together. Liv went on, “If Marcovefa were awake, she might be able to slow them down. Since she isn’t . . .” She shook her head. Even her lips had gone colorless.
“If we run, we’ll likely have to leave the woods-leave Raumsdalia,” Hamnet said.
“Wouldn’t break my heart,” Trasamund said.
“I know. But you aren’t a Raumsdalian,” Count Hamnet said.
“And thank God for that!” the Bizogot exclaimed.
“We do, almost every day.” Ulric Skakki was rarely shy about dipping his oar in the water.
Trasamund glared at him. “Should I be so glad you’re no clansman of mine?” He answered his own question: “You’d best believe I should. You’d make nothing but trouble in among the mammoth-hide tents.”
“I can’t help it if your women like my looks,” the adventurer said blandly, which won him another glare from Trasamund.
“Enough, both of you,” Hamnet said. “Do you think we can fight the Rulers and hope to win?”
Ulric and the jarl looked at each other. Ulric shook his head without the least hesitation. Trasamund’s response was slower and more reluctant, but in the end the same.
Hamnet didn’t think they could fight the invaders, either. He thought they’d have to be suicidal to try. But the others might have disagreed with him. Since they didn’t, he said, “Then let’s get away whi
le we still can.”
“That’s the smartest thing I’ve heard from you for a long time,” Ulric told him.
“I love you, too-but not right now,” Hamnet said. Ulric Skakki’s laugh seemed equal parts scorn and appreciation. He ambled off to see to his horse.
They got moving before the Rulers came down on them. Count Hamnet stayed behind to command the rear guard. “You shouldn’t,” Liv told him. “If anything happens to you, our cause is ruined. Marcovefa said so, and I think she’s right.”
He shrugged. “You can’t go on asking other people to put their lives on the line for you unless you put yours on the line with them every so often. They won’t follow your orders if you don’t, and demons take me if I see why they ought to.”
“Some things are more important than a little fight like this,” Liv insisted. Hamnet shrugged again. The glare she gave him put to shame the ones Trasamund had aimed at Ulric Skakki. Blue, blue eyes blazing, she went on, “All right, then. If you must stay behind, I will, too, and I will keep you alive if I can. You dunderhead.”
“And I’ll stay,” Audun Gilli added.
“No. You go on. The rest will need magic, too, and you’ve got more than any of the others with them,” Liv said.
Audun looked mutinous, which was putting it mildly. He was no hero, but he didn’t want his woman in more danger than he was-and who could blame him for that? No doubt he also didn’t want Liv staying behind with her former lover-and who could blame him for that, either?
But when he tried to protest, she said, “Go. Just go.” She looked as if she would draw her dagger if he said another word. Sometimes all the argument in the world wouldn’t do you a corroded copper’s worth of good. Audun Gilli had the sense to recognize that this was one of this times. He mooched off, kicking at the snow because he could find no better vent for his feelings.
“You don’t have to do this,” Hamnet said to Liv. “Not for my sake.”
“Don’t talk about what you don’t understand,” she answered, a response that almost precluded conversation.
As he waited for the Rulers, he eyed the troop of Bizogots and Raumsdalians who waited with him. They seemed steady enough. If they were impressed that he’d chosen to stay behind, too, they hid it very well. Liv’s glance said, I told you so. She wasn’t his lover any more, though, so he could ignore her without suffering for it later. Audun wasn’t so lucky.
Mastodons roamed the woods by Hamnet’s castle in southeastern Raumsdalia. They ate acorns and chestnuts and other nuts along with leaves and roots. There wasn’t enough to support them, or the mammoths of the northern steppe, in these northern forests. That made the sight of eight or ten war mammoths coming through the firs and spruces toward him all the more jolting. They don’t belong here! his mind shouted. The Rulers on the mammoths’ backs didn’t care what he thought.
The invaders shouted to one another in their harsh, braying language. First one, then another, pointed straight at him. How they could pick him out from anybody else in the rear guard he didn’t know, but they could.
“You see?” Liv said quietly. She got I told you so into half as many words-not a bad trick.
Hamnet didn’t answer. What could he say? When the Rulers started shooting, all the arrows seemed to head straight for him. Every soldier on every battlefield since the beginning of time had to feel the same way, but Hamnet feared it was literally true this time.
He threw up his shield just in time to deflect one that would have got him in the face. The arrow skipped off the bronze facing and over his head. He breathed a sigh of relief. Then he wondered why he bothered. No matter what Marcovefa thought, whether he lived or died mattered little to him.
But he was too obstinate not to make the best fight he could. He shot a Ruler off a riding deer, then-more by luck than by design-hit a war mammoth in the trunk with another arrow. The woolly mammoth wore armor of leather dipped in boiling wax, as did a lot of the Rulers. It was almost as good as chain mail, and much lighter. But the mammoth’s masters hadn’t tried to armor that sinuous, flexible trunk (Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to try, either).
And the trunk was as sensitive as a man’s nose, or perhaps as sensitive as his hands. The war mammoth trumpeted in pain and indignation. One of the men on its back patted it-roughly, through the boiled leather. Count Hamnet thought the Ruler meant to show sympathy: more than they were in the habit of doing for any men not of their own kind.
No good deed went unpunished. The mammoth could still use its wounded member. It plucked up the Ruler and threw him down in the snow in front of it. His terrified shriek cut off abruptly as the mammoth’s right foot crushed the life out of him. The great beast left one red footprint out of four for some little while after that. The other warriors who rode on it sat very quietly, trying their best not to remind it they were there.
“Well done!” Liv said warmly.
“It won’t matter much in the long run. We’ve got to pull back any which way,” Hamnet answered. He didn’t want her praising him. It reminded him of what they’d been not so long before. He hadn’t lain with a woman since Marcovefa went down. Wasn’t life complicated enough without fresh temptations?
An arrow zipped past his head, venomously close. He realized what a bad position he was in to be worrying about any kind of temptations, fresh, salted, or pickled.
Then one of the Raumsdalians in the rear guard pointed and exclaimed, “What the demon’s that?”
For a moment, Hamnet Thyssen thought it was nothing but blowing snow. Then he realized that, while it was blowing snow, it wasn’t nothing but blowing snow. It was blowing snow and sorcery. The sorcery packed it together tighter than blowing snow had any right to get, and gave it a shape distinct from the randomly blowing snow all around it. That shape was much too much like a man’s. But it was bigger than a man had any business being, and it had much larger arms.
It also had an awareness to it, an awareness that Hamnet immediately thought of as wolfish. Why, he couldn’t have said, not consciously. The feeling welled up from the place that made his balls want to crawl up into his belly and his hair stand straight on the back of his neck.
Not only that, its awareness centered on him, or perhaps aimed at him. Those long, snowy arms outstretched, it strode purposefully in his direction. It left no footprints, red or otherwise. He might have known all along that it sought his life in particular. Part of him had known all along: the part that made his balls crawl up and his hackles rise.
He nocked an arrow and let fly. It was a shot he could have been proud of-straight through the heart, if a snow dev il had a heart. Evidently not, for it didn’t fall.
It did laugh at him. Its laughter was winter wind congealed: all the cold and emptiness in the world, boiled down to a pint. Count Hamnet had pierced its heart without harming it. The snow dev il’s laughter pierced his heart, too, pierced it and almost froze it shut.
Don’t be foolish, he thought.You did that to yourself years ago.
Before he could even wonder what he meant, Liv started a spell. It was in a dialect of the Bizogot language so old-fashioned, he could hardly follow it. He would rather have tried to gallop away, though he had no guarantee his horse could outrun a thing half made of gale.
Then Liv switched to urgent Raumsdalian: “Quick! Shoot it again!”
“What good will that do? What good will anything do?” Yes, the snow dev il had done its best to freeze Hamnet’s heart, and its best was better than he’d dreamt possible.
“Shoot it!” Liv slapped his face.
His shocked bellow wasn’t so loud or so shrill as the war mammoth’s had been when he shot it, but was no less startled, no less outraged. He almost shot Liv. But instead he drove another arrow through the snow devil-easy now, when it was so close.
As chunks of ice broke to start an avalanche, did they scream? If they did, they surely let out a cry like the one that ripped from the snow dev il when Hamnet’s second arrow struck. This shaft, unlike the one
that had gone before it, wounded the sorcerous apparition. No-it slew.
Wind had made the snow dev il coalesce. And wind tore it to pieces in the blink of an eye. One heartbeat, it was about to lay hold of Count Hamnet. What would have happened then, he didn’t know: only that it would have been nothing good. But the snow dev il was gone the next heartbeat, gone as if it never existed.
“Well shot!” Liv yelled.
“Well spelled!” Hamnet yelled back.
Somewhere among the Rulers, a shriek almost as full of torment as the snow dev il’s burst from a man’s throat. Maybe the snow dev il’s throat was meant for such sounds; a man’s assuredly wasn’t. How much of himself had the enemy wizard poured into his sorcerous creation? Enough to ruin him-worse than ruin him-when it was all lost at once.
But for that shriek, Hamnet might have kissed Liv, or she him. With it still echoing inside them, they both fought shy of that. The torment it held put out passion the same way a brass candle-snuffer dampened flame.
A nod sufficed Hamnet, then. “You did what you needed to do,” he told her. She nodded, her face half proud, half horrified at what she’d unwittingly inflicted on the Rulers’ sorcerer.
“I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone-not even one of those people,” Liv said with shudder.
Count Hamnet grunted. “He wouldn’t waste any grief on you.”
“Even so,” Liv insisted. Remembering what the other wizard sounded like after the snow dev il perished, Hamnet decided she had a point.
Another arrow snarled through the air between him and Liv. Maybe the archer who loosed it couldn’t decide which of them he would sooner have killed. Maybe the next bowman wouldn’t have any trouble making up his mind. Or maybe he’d just turn out to be a better shot. “Do you think we’ve given the main force enough time to get away?” Hamnet Thyssen asked.
“Yes. And I think you had better get away,” Liv answered. “That snow fiend or whatever you want to call it only makes things plainer-the Rulers want you dead, and they don’t care what they do to get you that way.”
Hamnet grunted again. He didn’t think he was important in the grand scheme of things, and resented that anyone should think so when he didn’t. Ordering the Raumsdalians and Bizogots with him to fall back meant he didn’t have to dwell on what anybody else thought.
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