“He was the last time we saw him,” Earl Eyvind replied. “That was . . . some little while ago, though. As far as I know, he isn’t in this sad herd of people.”
Count Hamnet tried to imagine Sigvat II, Emperor of Raumsdalia, shambling along in the midst of so many other captives. He tried to imagine the Emperor sleeping on the ground and grubbing up roots and insects like any other unfortunate. The picture made him want to smile. Maybe he was small-spirited, to relish the idea of someone else’s misfortune. If he was, he would just have to live with it.
“What are you going to do with us?” Gudrid asked after some fairly monumental swallowing of her own.
What she really meant, of course, was,
Neither white-bearded Eyvind Torfinn nor decorative Gudrid made a likely warrior. “And the rest?” she persisted.
“I don’t know,” Hamnet said. “I’ll have to talk with Trasamund and Ulric and Runolf and Audun and Liv and Marcovefa.”
“Liv. Marcovefa.” Gudrid didn’t try to disguise either her disdain or her amusement.
“That’s right.” Hamnet did his best to ignore them both. “We have to send you toward a place where you’re likely to get food. Figuring out where to find a place like that may not be easy.”
“You can’t send us away!” Gudrid’s voice went shrill. To Hamnet’s amazement, she came up with a reason he shouldn’t: “Eyvind knows more about the Rulers than anybody else from this side of the Glacier.”
“Well, so he does,” Count Hamnet admitted, deciding he couldn’t very well deny it. “But what’s that got to do with
“Eyvind won’t help you unless I’m with him.” Gudrid turned to her current husband. “Will you?” she asked ominously.
“If ground sloths and glyptodonts rose up against the Rulers, I would gladly help them right now,” Eyvind Torfinn replied.
Gudrid’s jaw dropped—she wasn’t expecting mutiny from that quarter. Earl Eyvind was even more pliable than Hamnet had been back in the days when he was wed to her. Hearing him tell her no almost made her former husband laugh out loud.
“I’m not going anywhere without you,” Gudrid declared when she’d recovered somewhat. “You need someone to take care of you, and you know it.” To Hamnet Thyssen’s disappointment, that held a measure of truth.
“I expect I can manage,” Earl Eyvind said. “Whether you believe it or not, I’m not entirely helpless.”
“That’s what you think.” Gudrid hardly bothered to hide her scorn.
Marcovefa ambled over. Gudrid eyed her the way a bird might eye a snake. Marcovefa paid next to no attention to Gudrid, not at first. She pointed toward Eyvind Torfinn. “We need him.”
“You have me,” Eyvind said.
Hamnet waited for Marcovefa to dismiss Gudrid. He waited, as he knew, with more than a little anticipation. Gudrid had a knack for ignoring him and getting under his skin like a tick. She did not have the knack for outfacing Marcovefa. As far as Hamnet knew, nobody did.
Marcovefa pointed at Gudrid. Gudrid flinched, then made a good, game try at pretending she hadn’t. “We need you, too,” declared the shaman from atop the Glacier.
“What?” Gudrid sounded as if she couldn’t believe her ears.
“
“We need her, too,” Marcovefa said. Then she spoke directly to Gudrid again: “We do need you, too.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t anybody listen to anything any more?”
“
“That’s not what you used to think,” Gudrid said with a smile all the more provoking because it was so sweet.
“Well, I know better now,” Hamnet replied. “You taught me—the hard way.”
Marcovefa ignored their sniping. “I don’t know why we need her. I only know we do.” She eyed Count Hamnet. “Do you want to tell me you know these things better than I do?”
Hamnet wanted nothing more. Unfortunately, he couldn’t. “No, but—”
“But me no buts.” Marcovefa sounded as imperious—and as imperial—as Sigvat II. “If you do not believe me, ask Audun Gilli. Ask Liv. They will tell you the same.”
Asking them was the last thing Count Hamnet wanted to do. No—it was the next to last thing he wanted to do. Keeping Gudrid with them was the last thing, the very last thing. “By God, I will!” he growled, and stormed off.
He found Liv before Audun. That made things worse, but not worst. “What is it?” she asked as he approached with determined stride.
He told her exactly what it was. “Does Marcovefa know what she’s talking about?” he asked. “Can she know? Can’t we get rid of Gudrid?” The last question was the one that really mattered to him.
“Marcovefa . . . knows all kinds of things,” Liv said slowly. “Sometimes she knows without even knowing how she knows. I could do a divination to see if she is right here.”
“Would you?” Hamnet hated how eager he sounded, but couldn’t help it.
“Yes.” Liv gave him a crooked smile. “I suppose I should be grateful you’re not asking whether we can do without me.”
“You hurt me,” Hamnet answered, as steadily as he could. “But you didn’t hurt me because you enjoyed hurting me. There’s a difference. How complicated is your divination?”
“Not very. Questions with yes or no answers usually aren’t.” She took from her pouch a small disk of shining white stone, pierced near the edge. “Moonstone,” she said, threading a thong through the small hole.
“What is the magic?” Hamnet asked.
“I ask whether Gudrid should stay with us, then let the stone fall down over my heart,” Liv answered. “If she should, it will stay close to my skin. If she should not, it will leap away.”
“Seems simple enough,” he said.
She nodded and began chanting in the Bizogot language. She wasn’t exactly asking the question, or not in so many words. Hamnet judged that she was priming the moonstone, so to speak, so it would do the asking for her. Then she put the thong over her head and let the stone fall down between her breasts. Though she showed next to none of herself in the doing, Hamnet had to look away. He still remembered how his head had lain there. . . .
“Well?” he asked roughly.
Liv’s half-smile said she knew he wanted to reach inside her tunic to find out whether the moonstone disk was clinging to her. Gudrid would have worn a half-smile, too, but hers would have been full of sardonic triumph as well. Liv’s was, if anything, sympathetic.
And so was her voice when she said, “I
“Damnation!” Hamnet Thyssen burst out. “She can’t be! God knows Gudrid is nothing but trouble.”
“Gudrid
“Damnation!” Hamnet repeated. He turned on his heel and shambled off, feeling almost as betrayed as he had when Liv left him for Audun Gilli. The idea of keeping Gudrid around tempted him to sit down on the ground somewhere and slit his wrists. The certainty that his former wife would laugh if he did was one of the things that kept him from drawing dagger or sword.
Marcovefa had no trouble reading his face when he walked up to her. “You see? We do need the stupid vole after all.”
That made Gudrid splutter, which gave Hamnet a certain somber satisfaction. Ulric Skakki turned away before smiling. Trasamund laughed out loud, which won him a venomous stare from Gudrid. He’d enjoyed her charms in days gone by. She didn’t like it when someone else was as faithless and heartless to her as she was to her former lovers.
Hamnet was too stubborn to give up easily. “Give me one good reason why we need Gudrid,” he said.
“Because I tell you so,” Marcovefa answered. “Somewhere later”—her gesture encompassed all the time from the next instant to the moment when the Glacier melted away for good—“it will be better if we have her than if she is off doing mischief somewhere else.”
“What do you mean, doing mischief?” Yes, Gudrid was irate, too. “I don’t do mischief. I do what I have to do.” Count Hamnet laughed at that. So did Ulric. So did Trasamund, raucously. Gudrid looked daggers at each of them in turn.
“I mean what I say,” Marcovefa told her. “I don’t waste my time and everybody else’s with a pack of lies the way you do.”
Gudrid took a deep breath, no doubt intending to deny it. Something in Marcovefa’s face made her keep her mouth shut. If she lied about lying, Marcovefa could give her the lie. That convoluted logic brought a smile to Hamnet’s face. His smile made Gudrid steam. He’d had things happen that he liked less.
“Well. It is decided then,” Eyvind Torfinn said. Maybe a lot of what had just gone and had flown over his head. Or maybe he was willing to pretend it had for the sake of peace and quiet. And maybe that wasn’t the worst idea in the world. Maybe they all needed to do more of it.
“Yes,” Hamnet said, and he couldn’t help sighing. “It is decided.”
ULRIC SKAKKI LOOKED at the trees. He looked at the sky. He looked down at the scarred backs of his hands. Then he looked over at Hamnet Thyssen, who was riding next to him. “Ever have the feeling something’s about to go wrong, but you don’t know what?”
“Now and then,” Hamnet answered. “Not soon enough, usually.”
“Well, we can all say that,” Ulric told him. “I’ve got it now—curse me if I don’t. Feels like something crawling on the back of my neck . . . and no, it’s not a stinking louse. It’s more like what I felt up by Sudertorp Lake.”
“I didn’t say it was a louse. But why are you telling me? Tell Marcovefa. Maybe she can do something about it.”
“There you go!” The adventurer laughed cheerily. “You see? You’re not always as foolish as you seem.”
Hamnet bowed in the saddle. “Be careful, or you’ll turn my head, or maybe my stomach, with flattery like that.”
“Maybe both at once, so you can be sick down your own back. I do believe I’d pay money to watch that.” Ulric Skakki raised his voice: “Marcovefa?”
“What do you want, you noisy man?” she asked.
“That’s me,” Ulric agreed, not without pride. “I thought you ought to know I have the bad feeling we’re running into trouble.”
“Oh, you do, do you? Again?” Even though Ulric had been right before, Marcovefa didn’t sound particularly impressed. She wasn’t mocking, but she wasn’t convinced, either.
