most ordinary way imaginable, sat there smiling and watching her do it. Gudrid muttered to herself. Hamnet thought she wanted to tell Marcovefa to look away but didn’t have the nerve. He doubted whether he would have had the nerve himself.
More than a little apprehensively, Gudrid took the new piece of meat over to the closest fire. It didn’t burst into white flame. It burst into searing green flame instead. Gudrid squalled and soothed her hand with snow—although, again, the real damage seemed small.
“How am I supposed to eat?” she asked again, plaintively this time. Marcovefa . . . smiled.
MARCOVEFA SEEMED TO gain strength far faster than finally getting enough to eat again could account for. By the end of her first day awake, she wasn’t far from where she had been before the Rulers wounded and enchanted her. So it seemed to Hamnet Thyssen, anyhow. “Did you enjoy making Gudrid squawk?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly. “Did you enjoy it, too?”
“Some.” Hamnet felt uncomfortable admitting it, but he would have felt more uncomfortable lying.
“Good. She should leave you alone. If she has not got the sense to do that, she will find out other people will not leave her alone. Me, for instance.” Marcovefa hesitated, something she rarely did. “But maybe I should have just slapped her instead of using a spell, even one that is not so big.”
“What? Why?” Hamnet asked.
“Because the Rulers, curse them, they felt it. I could tell. They know I am awake again,” Marcovefa said.
“Oh.” The small word carried a lot of freight. “They’ll . . . try to do something about that, won’t they?”
“Yes.” Marcovefa’s brief answer was freighted, too. “I am dangerous to them—and so are you.”
“Me? Everybody says so, but I wish I could believe it,” Hamnet said.
“Who woke me? You did!” Marcovefa said. “Could anyone else have done that? I do not think so! Do we have a better chance with me or without me? With me, I think. And you put me back in the fight.”
“That doesn’t make me dangerous. It makes you dangerous,” Count Hamnet insisted. “And you are. You know it, and the Rulers know it.”
“And they know about you, too, and they fear you,” Marcovefa told him.
“The Rulers don’t fear much of anything.” Hamnet despised them, which didn’t mean he didn’t—reluctantly—respect them. Say what you would of them, they made formidable foes.
“They fear us. Not just me. Us.” Marcovefa sounded so certain, she challenged Hamnet Thyssen not to believe her. And then she did something altogether different: she changed the subject. “You know how you got me to wake up?”
“Yes. I finally listened to Trasamund,” Hamnet answered. “That isn’t something you want to do every day, not if you have any sense.”
“This is not what I meant. You should know it is not,” Marcovefa said severely. “You know what you did to make me wake up?”
“Of course I know what I did,” Hamnet said. “If it had been anything else, I would have tried it sooner.”
“I was not awake then. I did not wake up till the morning. I am awake now.” Marcovefa waited with what Hamnet took to be quickly shrinking patience.
A heartbeat or two more slowly than he should have, Hamnet realized why her patience might be shrinking. “Well, then,” he said after the light dawned, “let’s see what we can do about that.”
What they did was what they’d done the night before. As Hamnet had known it would be, it was a great deal better with both of them awake to take pleasure in it. Afterwards, Marcovefa stroked his cheek. “We do all right together.”
That was less than enormous praise, but enough to make Hamnet nod. “How much more can you hope for?” he said. Even managing to keep that much would be better than he’d done with Gudrid or Liv.
As if picking the thought from his mind, Marcovefa said, “I am surprised you did not kill that mouthy woman while I lay asleep. She is like a flea—she bites and jumps away and then bites again.”
“I came close a couple of times,” Count Hamnet admitted. “But people talk if you kill a woman.”
“Let them. She is gone after that, and no one has to listen to her any more,” Marcovefa said ruthlessly.
Hamnet didn’t care to think about that. Thinking about it was too likely to tempt him to do it. He changed the subject instead: “The Rulers’ wizards can sense you’re yourself again?”
Marcovefa nodded. “I said so. I was not spinning fables.”
“They’ll come after you, then. They’ll come after all of us.” Hamnet Thyssen wanted those to be questions. They came out as flat statements.
She nodded again. “It is as we said this morning—I am sure they will. They are not fools. They would not be so much trouble if they were. If I were fighting us, I would come after us once I got such news. Would you not?”
“Too right I would,” Hamnet said regretfully.
“There you are, then.” Marcovefa might have been a schoolmistress going through a proof in geometry. Back in his school days, Hamnet had never imagined lying naked on a mammoth hide with a schoolmistress. Most teachers in Raumsdalia were men. Most of the ones who weren’t were neither young nor attractive. He supposed that rule was bound to have exceptions, but he’d never met one.
Again, he hauled his thoughts back to the business at hand: “How can we beat them?” But that wasn’t the question he really needed to ask. He asked the one that was: “
“They would not worry so much about us if they did not think we could,” Marcovefa answered.
“How?” Hamnet asked bluntly.
“I don’t know. We will have to find that way.” Marcovefa asked a question of her own: “Do you think you can find the way again?”
Most of the time, Hamnet would have said no—it was too soon, and he not young enough. But he found he could after all, so he did. As he’d seen before, having a shaman for a lover wasn’t the worst thing in the world. No, indeed.
XIX
SUDERTORP LAKE WAS thawing. Spring was in the air. So were countless thousands—millions, more likely—of waterfowl, all bound for the marshes around the lake to breed.
In years gone by, the Leaping Lynxes would have settled in their stone huts to live off the fat of the land as long as it lasted. No more: the Rulers had smashed that Bizogot clan. And Marcovefa didn’t want to go back toward the eastern edge of the lake, where the Leaping Lynxes’ village stood.
“Why not?” Hamnet asked her. So did Trasamund. So did Liv. So did Audun Gilli. So did Ulric Skakki. So did Runolf Skallagrim and everyone else who knew her.
“It is not lucky,” she answered. When people tried to argue with her—and a lot of them did—she added, “Are you the shaman, or am I?”
Liv and Audun had magical talents of their own. Neither claimed talents to match hers, though. Earl Eyvind tried to use logic against her. Logic he had in plenty, though no more sorcerous talents than one of the ducks that dabbled in the chilly lake.
Marcovefa heard him out. She respected logic and knowledge. Having heard him out, she smiled and repeated, “It is not lucky.” After a moment, she continued, “You may go there, if you think you must. If you have no joy of it, do not blame me.”
Eyvind Torfinn spluttered. “That makes no sense!” he complained.
“Then go—you and your wife,” Marcovefa said. “See what happens to you.”
“You sound as if you’d be glad to get rid of us,” Eyvind told her.
“You said it, not me,” Marcovefa replied. Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure how much Eyvind knew about Gudrid’s feuds with practically everyone else. More than the scholarly earl let on, odds were. He was sure Eyvind stopped arguing with Marcovefa. He was also sure neither Eyvind nor Gudrid left the band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians still in the field against the Rulers.
And he was sure the Rulers were moving against that band, though cautiously. Scouts reported squadrons of the invaders, along with their riding deer and war mammoths, both to the north and to the south. For the time being, though, the Rulers didn’t try to close with their enemies. They seemed content to gather strength for the fight once it did begin.
“They won’t fool around when they come after us this time, will they?” Trasamund said grimly.
“Think of it as respect from the enemy,” Count Hamnet told him.
“I’ve been thinking of it that way all along,” Ulric Skakki said. “Even so, I could do without the honor. If you can’t . . . well, in that case you’re foolish in ways I never gave you credit for.”
“Which ways
Ulric answered without the least hesitation: “Well, he’s foolish about women, of course. And he trusts people too bloody much. And there’s his confounded stubborn sense of duty.” He watched the jarl nod eagerly, then continued with a certain relish his voice hadn’t held before: “But for sheer blockheaded stupidity, give me a Bizogot every time.”
Trasamund swore at him. Ulric’s grin was raw impudence. Hamnet Thyssen considered the adventurer’s charges. “You son of a whore,” he said. “I can’t even tell you you’re wrong.”
“I am your servant, Your Grace,” Ulric Skakki replied. “Did I mention your deplorable habit of speaking the truth when a lie would serve you better? No, I don’t believe I did. Well, no matter. Emperor Sigvat would have more to say on that score.”
Hamnet expressed a detailed opinion on what His Majesty could do about it. Sigvat II would have had to be improbably limber to accomplish even a quarter of it. Trasamund guffawed. Ulric grinned again. Hearing Hamnet’s suggestions, Runolf Skallagrim asked, “Who’s that you’re telling off?”
“Nobody important,” Hamnet said. “Only the Emperor.”
Runolf looked troubled. “You really shouldn’t joke like that, Thyssen. Haven’t you seen what happens when you do?”
“Too right I have,” Hamnet said. “But who’s joking?”
“He’s right, you know,” Ulric said. By Baron Runolf’s scowl, he knew nothing of the sort. Sighing, Ulric spelled it out for him: “If Sigvat were important, the Rulers would go after him as hard as they could, right? Are they doing that? Are they doing anything close to that? Not likely! What
