“Oh!” She spat at him, but it fell short in the snow. “You are the most hateful man in the world!”
“Now maybe you understand why I always thought we were so well matched,” Count Hamnet returned. Gudrid said something that should have steamed all the snow for miles around. Hamnet bowed, which only made her come back with something hotter yet.
He paid less attention to her than she no doubt wanted him to. Another Ruler on a riding deer came out of the swirling snow. Hamnet’s arrow caught the deer in the neck. Blood fountained, all the redder for being displayed against the white. The deer went down. So did the warrior atop it.
Hamnet Thyssen urged his horse forward, drawing his sword. The Ruler was still scrambling to his feet when Hamnet’s cut caught him just below and in front of the left ear. He let out a bubbling shriek and clutched at the spouting wound. Hamnet slashed again. The Ruler fell, scrabbling in the snow. He tried to push himself upright once more, but crumpled instead.
Satisfied he was out of the fight, Count Hamnet rode back and nocked another arrow. He was glad the bow hadn’t fallen in the snow in his charge.
Runolf Skallagrim was bleeding from a nicked ear. Like scalp wounds, ears bled so much that anything that happened to them seemed much worse than it really was. Runolf might not even have noticed how much blood spattered his mailshirt. “We’ve got to pull back, Thyssen!” he said. “We’re for it if we stand and fight much longer!”
“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?
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.
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
“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 while 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
“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
