Had he wanted other opinions, he would have asked for them. He rode apart from the other travelers, with them but not of them. Audun Gilli rode apart, too, but Audun Gilli was about as sociable as an old root. Sometimes the noble and the wizard rode side by side, but even then they were apart.
As usual, Gudrid contrived to make the world revolve around herself. The royal bodyguards, Eyvind Torfinn, and Trasamund all danced attendance on her. Ulric Skakki seemed more loosely attached to that group, but attached he was—or so it seemed to Count Hamnet's jaundiced eye, at any rate.
For most of the way north toward the frontier, things went smoothly enough. The travelers stopped at a serai each night. If they didn't have all the comforts Gudrid was used to down in Nidaros, they had most of them. Gudrid played the part of the cheerful voyager as if she'd rehearsed for years. Whatever went on in the nighttime went on without Hamnet Thyssen. He and Ulric Skakki usually shared a chamber. As far as he could tell, Ulric didn't go out of nights, so maybe the other man had given his true opinion of Gudrid.
And if he hadn't, it was his lookout.
The country got flatter and flatter as they went north, till it looked as if it were pressed. And so it was. The Glacier had crushed it till very recently. Countless shallow ponds and lakes marked the slightly—the ever slightly— lower ground. The winds mostly blew warm out of the south, but snow lingered long in the shade of the spruce and fir woods.
This far north, farmers planted their rye and oats and hoped for the best. They didn't count on them, though, not the way they did in lands longer free of the Glacier and in those that had never known its touch. They raised hogs and sheep and horses and musk oxen for meat, and they hunted. Imperial garrisons couldn't hope to live on the countryside, not in this inhospitable clime. Supplies came up by riverboat when the streams were open, and by sledge when the rivers froze.
One day, the travelers found there was no serai when they needed to stop for the evening. The one that should have been there had burned down, and nobody had got around to rebuilding it.
They'd passed a village a few miles back—a small, sullen place where a lot of the people looked to have Bizogot blood. Hamnet Thyssen didn't like the idea of turning back to the south on general principles. He especially didn't like the idea of turning around to pass the night in a miserable hole like that.
Up ahead lay... well, who could say what? He didn't see any village close enough to reach before the sun went down. No cloud of smoke on the horizon foretold chimneys clustered close together.
'We'll just have to spend the night in the open, under the sky,' he said. 'This seems about as good a place as any.'
'So it does,' Trasamund agreed. 'Enough trees to the north for firewood, and enough to shield us if the Breath of God blows hard tonight, too. We may shiver a bit, but we won't freeze.' The Bizogot jarl laughed. 'Next to what we'll see farther north, we might as well still be in a serai.'
Gudrid seemed excited about spending the night in a tent. She put up with chewy smoked sausage over an open fire. She drank beer without making a face, though she preferred mead and wine.
Hamnet quietly fumed. He'd hoped the first taste of rough living would send her scuttling back to the capital. That was one of the reasons he'd chosen to camp out here beside the ruins of the serai. She foiled him again.
He volunteered for the first watch. Owls hooted. Off in the distance, dire wolves howled. The wind did come from the north, from the Glacier. Ragged patches of cloud scudded across the sky, now hiding stars, now revealing them.
Someone came up behind him. He whirled. The sword that had been on his belt was suddenly in his hand. Audun Gilli froze. 'You don't want to try sneaking up on me,' Count Hamnet remarked. 'It isn't healthy.'
'So I see,' the wizard said. 'I am not your enemy, your Grace. I hope I am not. I do not wish to be.'
'No, you are not my enemy—not unless you make yourself so,' Hamnet Thyssen said. 'But what are you doing here, anyway?'
'Something besides lying in a gutter clutching a jar of whatever happens to be cheap and strong,' Audun answered. 'Whatever happens in the north, it has to be better, wouldn't you say?'
'For you, maybe,' Hamnet said. 'For all of us? Who knows?'
Audun Gilli studied him for a while before saying anything. In the starlight and the dim red glow of the embers from the campfire, the wizard was only a shape in the darkness to the noble. Hamnet couldn't have been much more to Audun Gilli... at least, if the wizard was seeing only by the light of the world.
'You are not as hard a man as you make yourself out to be,' Audun ventured at last.
'No, eh? If you’d got a little closer before I heard you, I would have cut you in half,' Hamnet said. 'That would have given you something to grumble about—for a little while, anyway.'
'Maybe,' Audun Gilli said. 'But maybe not, too. I am not everything a wizard ought to be—God knows that's true, and so do I. But I am not nothing as a sorcerer, either.'
Ulric Skakki had also said Audun wasn't a negligible wizard. Count Hamnet was more inclined to believe it from Ulric than from the wizard himself, whether he was negligible or not. Yes, Hamnet remembered those two chattering, bickering mugs. But that was a bagatelle. How Audun Gilli would do if—no, when—they had to rely on his magic .. . was anybody's guess.
Hamnet Thyssen didn't like going into the unknown with a wizard whose true quality was also unknown. Some sort of proper test seemed reasonable—to him, anyway. He said, 'Can you divine for me why Gudrid wanted to come north? Is it just to jab spikes into my liver, or does she have some other reason, too?'
Audun didn't answer right away. When he did, he said, 'Down in Nidaros, she asked me for a divination about you, your Grace.'
'Did she?' Hamnet rumbled. 'What did she want to know? What did you tell her?'
'I told her that, since the two of you were long separated, whatever she wanted to know was none of her business,' Audun Gilli said. 'As for what it was, your Grace,
A wizard with scruples? Hamnet Thyssen would have imagined the breed long extinct. He had a hard time imagining the breed ever existed, in fact. But here he had a specimen before his eyes.
Or did he? Was Audun Gilli a wizard with scruples or only a wizard without strength? 'We'll find something else for you to do, then,' Hamnet said. Audun nodded. If he'd divined what Hamnet was thinking, would he have?
IV
Down in the distant south, where lands were rich, kingdoms and duchies and principalities marked their borders with fortresses and sometimes even walls. The northern frontier of the Raumsdalian Empire wasn't like that. There were occasional customs posts, but that was about all. The Empire didn't so much end in the north as peter out.
Past the point where even the hardiest, quickest-ripening rye and oats wouldn't let farmers put in a crop, past the broad, dark forests that lay beyond the cropland, administering the Empire grew more expensive than it was worth. There weren't enough people to build a wall in the north, and if there had been the Empire wouldn't have been able to feed the soldiers who manned it.
As for a ditch, the northern frontier lay about where the ground started staying frozen all the time. You couldn't dig a proper ditch in soil like that, no matter how much you might want to.
Every so often, then, the Bizogots broke into the Empires northern provinces. Sometimes the Empire mustered an army farther south and drove the barbarians back up onto the frozen plains over which they usually roamed. And sometimes the invading Bizogots realized they hadn't overrun anything worth having and went back to the steppe of their own accord.
When the travelers got to, or at least near, the Raumsdalian frontier— exactly where it lay in those parts was more a matter of opinion than certain, settled knowledge—Eyvind Torfinn pointed north and east and west and said, 'It's just as dreary in every direction.' He wasn't wrong, and it wasn't much less dreary to the south, either.
'It won't get any prettier, either,' Hamnet Thyssen said. Ulric Skakki nodded. So did a couple of the imperial guardsmen who accompanied Gudrid. They'd all been up into the Bizogot country before. None of them seemed
