The Golden Shrine

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.”