“Most of it. For a while,” Hamnet replied.
The man nodded. “About what you can hope for.” He went back to weeding.
Marcovefa eyed Hamnet. “Yes, this is your country. These are your people.”
“I never tried to tell you anything different,” he said.
A shout rolled out from the palisade: “Who comes?”
“Hamnet Thyssen, with friends,” Hamnet answered. “Is everything well, Gris?”
“You’ll see for yourself soon enough,” his seneschal said, and then, not to Hamnet, “Open the gates, by God!”
They creaked open. They’d creaked before Hamnet rode away, too. His retainers stared at his companions. “Are those what they call Bizogots?” a man asked doubtfully. He might have been talking about glyptodonts or other beasts he didn’t look to see in this part of the world.
“We’re Bizogots, sure enough,” Trasamund rumbled. Marcovefa stirred, but she didn’t argue. Her folk sprang from the Bizogots, even if they didn’t think of themselves as belonging to them any more. Mischief in his pale eyes, Trasamund went on, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a Raumsdalian.”
“That’s right,” the man said automatically. His friends realized Trasamund was joking half a heartbeat before he did. They laughed at him. He went red.
Hamnet looked around. Everything looked pretty much the way it had before he rode off to answer Sigvat’s summons. He hadn’t thought he’d stay away so long or do so much while he was gone. As he dismounted, all the time between then and now might have fallen away.
Or it might not have. “How much trouble did you have this past year?” he asked.
“Well, there was some,” Gris admitted. “We heard some new barbarians got loose up in the north. Don’t think we saw any ourselves, but plenty of people running from them came by. They going to cause more trouble?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Hamnet answered.
“Thanks to you,” Marcovefa said, and slipped an arm around his waist. The men and women in the courtyard murmured—more at the gesture, Hamnet judged, than at the news. They wanted him wed, or at least attached. They wanted an heir, so things would stay smooth after he was gone.
He put his arm around Marcovefa’s shoulder. “Thanks more to you,” he said. She nodded. She wasn’t shy about taking praise. The locals murmured on a different note. Hamnet went on, “Sigvat’s off the throne.”
That brought surprised exclamations—the news hadn’t got here, anyhow. “Did you cast him off it?” Gris asked.
“No, not really,” Hamnet replied, and the last couple of words brought fresh muttering. Ignoring it, he continued, “The Golden Shrine had more to do with it.”
Outcry this time. He’d known there would be. He told the story, and spoke the words in the forgotten language he’d delivered to Sigvat II. Marcovefa worked her magic again, so his retainers could get some sense of the power those words had. Gris said, “Who’s Emperor, then, if Sigvat isn’t?”
“How come you’re not?” another man asked Hamnet before he could say anything.
“Because I don’t want the throne. Because I’d rather come home,” he answered. Several of the locals nodded. They understood that urge to return to the familiar. It wasn’t always a good urge—Hamnet thought of the trouble he could have missed if Gudrid hadn’t drawn him like a lodestone for so long—but it was strong. He turned back to Gris. “When we left Nidaros, nobody was on the throne. They’ll likely fight it out to see which greedy fool gets to set his fundament there. But we’re so far from the center of things, I don’t think any civil war will touch us here. Hope not, anyhow.”
The seneschal considered. “Odds are decent,” he said at last. “So what will you do now that you’re back?”
“About what I was doing before,” Hamnet replied. “I liked it well enough, except when . . . things got in the way.” Things. Gudrid. Sigvat’s summons. The Gap, melted through. The Rulers. The invasion. The war. The dungeon. Sudertorp Lake, pouring out as if God were pushing it—and maybe God was. The Golden Shrine.
Things.
“What about you people?” Gris asked Trasamund and Marcovefa. By the way he used the last word, he was giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Trasamund spoke first: “I’ll stay here a while, anyway. I’ve got nothing to go back to up on the plains—the Rulers made sure of that.”
Marcovefa eyed Hamnet as she answered, “I will stay as long as I am happy. If I am not, it will be time to go.”
He nodded. “That’ll do. I hope you stay a long time. I’ll try not to make you unhappy—but you never can tell. If I’ve learned anything since I went away, that’s it. You never can tell.”
“And I will try not to make you too unhappy with me,” Marcovefa said. Hamnet nodded again. That was as close to a promise as he’d ever got from her, and more than he’d come to expect. She looked around. “This is not much like the top of the Glacier, but it is not a bad place.”
“Most of the time, it isn’t,” Hamnet agreed. What more could you say of any place? Not much, not as far as he could see.
“Good to have you back, lord,” Gris said. Heads bobbed up and down in the courtyard. As long as people thought it was good, they would help make it so. Hamnet didn’t know how long he could stay here peacefully—no, you never could tell—but he aimed to make the most of it, however long it turned out to be.
