The Golden Shrine

Given half a chance, Hamnet always worried, too. “Are they finding better wizards than they did? Are they learning to block what you do better than they did? Will they be able to beat you one of these days?” One of these days soon, he meant, but he managed to swallow the last word.

“They learn a little. Anyone who isn’t very, very stupid will learn a little,” Marcovefa answered. “But they will not beat me. You don’t need to worry about that.” She had her own brand of arrogance. Trasamund didn’t think anybody could beat him sword in hand. Any good warrior felt that way—if he didn’t, wouldn’t he run from any battlefield? Maybe wizards needed that same kind of certainty to do what they did.

“All right.” By the way Hamnet said it, he made it plain it wasn’t.

Marcovefa shook her head. “Do I have to screw you to get you to believe me? I do that if you need it.”

“I want to believe you because you’re telling the truth, not because you’re screwing me. They aren’t the same thing,” Hamnet said stubbornly.

“As long as you believe me, why doesn’t matter,” Marcovefa said.

“Why matters. I’ve believed too many lies before, and I’ve believed them for too long,” Hamnet insisted.

“Believe we don’t lose. It is true,” Marcovefa told him.

“How can you know that?” Hamnet demanded.

“How? Because I am what I am. Because I am who I am,” Marcovefa said.

“How much can you foresee?” he asked her. “You couldn’t tell ahead of time that that slingstone was going to hit you. It could have killed you as easily as not. Then what would have happened to our fight?”

“Then I wouldn’t be here prophesying to you now.” Marcovefa didn’t sound very interested in arguing might-have-beens. “But that doesn’t change anything else.”

Count Hamnet muttered to himself. “By God, why wouldn’t it? How are we supposed to win without you?”

“I don’t know anything about supposed to,” she said. “I know is. I know is not. Those matter. Supposed to? Who cares?”

He kept trying to get answers out of her—yes, he was stubborn. She kept on not giving them. She’d said everything she intended to say, or maybe everything she knew how to say. If he didn’t like it, too bad. He didn’t like it, and he thought it was too bad.

RUNOLF SKALLAGRIM HAD about as many Raumsdalians with him as Hamnet did. Hamnet offered to yield command to him. Runolf shook his head. “Keep it and welcome, your Grace,” he said. “The Bizogots’ll listen to you better than they would to me, and our own folk will listen just as well.”

“Or just as badly,” Hamnet said.

“Or just as badly,” Runolf agreed without even blinking. “What have you got in mind doing next?”

“Fighting the Rulers. Keeping ourselves fed. Staying alive, if we can. What else is there?” Hamnet Thyssen answered.

“Not bloody much, not right now,” the other Raumsdalian noble said. “We’re on our own. We don’t have to worry about orders from anybody else, anybody higher. Feels kind of funny, doesn’t it?”

“Feels pretty good, if you want to know what I think,” Hamnet said. “When we got orders from the Emperor, how much good did they ever do? Sigvat could always take a bad situation and make it worse.”

“Well . . .” Baron Runolf sounded uncomfortable. Like Hamnet, he was a man of deep loyalty. He hadn’t had his nose rubbed so deeply in the cost of giving his loyalty to someone who didn’t deserve it.

That thought set Hamnet laughing. Runolf Skallagrim gave him a quizzical look. He didn’t explain. Runolf wouldn’t have thought it was funny. But who could have imagined that Gudrid might be training for Sigvat? They were unfaithful and cruel in different ways, but so what? The infidelity and the cruelty were all that really counted.

Climbing up onto his horse and riding south let him stop brooding about that, at least for a little while. The trouble with following the Rulers was that they were as bad as locusts when it came to sweeping up everything in their path. Hamnet almost hoped another battle would come soon. Then his forces could feast on the riding animals that fell in the fighting.

Not much to feast on here. The crops were still growing in the fields. Too many of them were growing untended: the Rulers had either killed or run off the peasants who would have tended them. They weren’t ripe yet. More than a few fields had broad swaths trampled through them where the Rulers had ridden. How much about crops did the invaders understand? Anything at all? Why should they, when nothing like that would grow on the lands they were used to roaming? The Bizogots didn’t—Hamnet had seen as much.

The fields and grass would keep the horses fed till fall, anyhow. That was something. But people? The Rulers might not care about crops, but they’d made close to a clean sweep of livestock. Horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys? Gone. Bones at abandoned campsites told where many of them went.

Maybe some of the farmers had taken some of their animals with them when they ran away from the Rulers. Hamnet Thyssen hoped so, both for their sake and because it would bother the invaders. No matter what had happened to the beasts, though, they weren’t here now to feed his fighters.

Bizogots went on eating meat that was higher than Hamnet cared to stomach. “I’ve done it,” Ulric Skakki said. “It’s nasty, but it’s better than starving.”

“Unless it poisons you,” Hamnet replied. “It’s getting to where it smells pretty poisonous.”

“I’m still here,” Ulric said. “Don’t know what that means. Maybe I can eat like a goat, or a teratorn.”

“We’re all starting to stink like goats,” Hamnet said. “God knows I wouldn’t want to stink like a teratorn.”

“Well . . . no. Neither would I,” Ulric admitted. Like smaller vultures, teratorns stuck their bare, wattled heads deep into the corpses of long-defunct beasts—and people. Sometimes you could smell them on the wing.

“It shouldn’t come down to anything like that,” Hamnet said.

“You’re right. It shouldn’t.” Ulric nodded sagely. “So why do you sound like a man who’s whistling to keep the ghosts away?”

“Is that how I sound?”

“That’s about it.”

“I don’t even believe whistling keeps the ghosts away. I’ve never run into a ghost on the loose on its own. Have you? The only ones I know about are the ones the wizards magic up.”

“Hmm.” The adventurer frowned in thought. “No, come to think of it, I haven’t, either. All that whistling must work better than we think.”

Count Hamnet snorted. “Nice to know I’ll be laughing while we starve to death.”

“Glad to be of service, your Grace. If you laugh hard enough, you’ll wear yourself out and starve faster. You should thank me again, for my act of mercy.”

“I should do all kinds of things you’ll never see from me,” Hamnet replied. “You can chalk that up as one more.”

“All right. I will.” Ulric could be most dangerous when he seemed most accommodating. “But will you answer one more little question for me?”

“I don’t know. I’ll try,” Hamnet said cautiously—he recognized, and flinched from, that mild tone. “What is it?”

“Are the Rulers really getting the hang of Marcovefa’s magic, and of how to use their own against her? Against us, I should say?”

“You’d do better asking her,” Count Hamnet said, which wasn’t an answer and wasn’t intended as one.

“I will if I have to,” Ulric Skakki said. “Don’t much want to, though. Questions like that can hurt a wizard’s confidence, and sometimes thinking they can do something is what lets them do it for real. And if anybody but Marcovefa is likely to know, you’re it.” He aimed a forefinger at Hamnet’s broad chest as if it were the point of an arrow.

“If.” Hamnet felt like a target, all right. He muttered under his breath. At last, he said, “I think they may be gaining. There are lots of them and only one of her, after all. The other thing is, she hasn’t been quite the same since that slingstone got her. Close, now, but not the same. What do you think?”

“Mm, you may be right,” Ulric said. “So where does that leave us? What are the odds she’ll get the missing bits back? If she does, when will she do it?”

“That’s more than one question,” Hamnet Thyssen pointed out.

“So it is. Give me an inch, and I’ll take whatever I can get.” Ulric filled a pipe. He had no trouble scrounging tobacco down here in the Empire—the Rulers didn’t think it was worth stealing. He lit the pipe with a twig he stuck in the fire. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke.

“I believe you,” Hamnet said. “A lot of girls have likely believed you, too—and then regretted it the next day.”

“Oh, no. They never regret it the next day,” Ulric said smugly. But he stopped asking questions about Marcovefa, questions Hamnet couldn’t answer, questions he didn’t want to think about.

Once the questions got into his mind, though, they didn’t want to go away. Marcovefa was the best weapon the Bizogots and Raumsdalians had against the Rulers. If she wasn’t weapon enough, what were they supposed to do? Give up? Hamnet ground his teeth till one of the back ones hurt. He was damned if he’d do that.

Or maybe he was damned if he wouldn’t.

Runolf Skallagrim came up to him. “What’s chewing on you, Hamnet?” he asked. “You look like a dire wolf carried off your cub. We won that fight a few days ago, remember? Let your face know it, all right?”

Runolf was an earnest, decent fellow. He came out and spoke his mind. Most of the time, that made Count Hamnet like him better. Not today. “How many more will we have to win?” Hamnet wondered.

“As many as it takes. My knights can wallop the stuffing out of those savages.” Runolf didn’t lack for confidence, either.

“Sure they can—as long as Marcovefa’s able to hold off the Rulers’ magic.” Hamnet wished he hadn’t had to say that. It only made him worry more.

“She will. Just tell her not to stop any more stones with her head, hey?” Baron Runolf thought that was funny.

Hamnet didn’t rise up and clout him, which proved he liked him. But he didn’t laugh, either, and that sent Runolf away in a huff.

XII

ONE DAY, THE wind started blowing cool, down from the north. The Bizogots smiled. Hamnet Thyssen sighed. “Not the Breath of God, not yet,” he said, “but it’s a reminder there is such a thing.”

“Just what we need,” Per Anders said. The courier didn’t seem to have gone up to the Bizogot country till he came after Hamnet and his comrades. “Maybe it will stop blowing every winter once the Glacier finally melts.”

“That would be something,” Baron Runolf said. “Mild all winter long? By God, I’d love it!”