“Do you think the captives would give good advice or bad?” Trasamund asked. “They might want to see anyone from this side of the Glacier who gets on a mammoth die. If we have mammoth-riders, too, that gives us a better chance against their brethren.”
“If we were talking about Bizogots or Raumsdalians, I’d say you were right,” Hamnet answered. “But if the Rulers get captured, they’re disgraced. They’re cast out from their own folk. They can never go back – the sin, or whatever they think it is, clings to them.”
“That’s why a lot of them try to kill themselves,” Ulric added.
“It is,” Hamnet agreed. “But it’s also why I think you can rely on what they tell you. In their eyes, they aren’t of the Rulers anymore, because they know their own folk don’t want them back and won’t take them back. If they’re going to live any kind of life at all, they have to do it with us.”
“They’re queer birds, all right,” Trasamund said. “Well, maybe I will talk to them, then. If I like what they say, I’ll try it. And if I think they
The cow mammoth lifted her trunk, bugled once more, and strode off with an air of affronted dignity.
“I’m just glad the Rulers have held off from hitting us as long as they have,” Ulric Skakki said. “If they’d come after the Red Dire Wolves right after they hit the Three Tusk Bizogots, I don’t know how we could have stopped them.”
“My guess is, my brave clan hurt them badly even in defeat,” Trasamund said. “They haven’t pressed farther south because they can’t.”
“It could be.” Hamnet Thyssen doubted it was, but he was willing to let the Three Tusk jarl keep as much pride as he could. “But it could also be that they’re building strength up there, bringing men and mammoths and riding deer down through the Gap and getting ready for a big campaign.” If he were a chieftain of the Rulers, that was what he would have done.
“Makes sense to me,” Ulric said. “I wish we’d had more luck getting the Bizogots to fight as one army and not by clans. If they’re not careful, they’ll all go down separately, one clan at a time.”
“Getting Bizogots to do anything together with other Bizogots is like herding mosquitoes,” Trasamund said. “They fly where they want, they bite where they want, and if they feel like biting the herder, they do that, too.”
“And the swifts and the swallows swoop down and eat them as they please,” Hamnet said. Trasamund sent him a sour stare, but couldn’t very well claim he was wrong. “We need more spies up at the edge of the country the Rulers hold,” Hamnet went on. “I wish Odovacar’s wolves could tell us more, because it’s hard to get men up there without letting the Rulers know.”
“Maybe magic would serve where spies can’t,” Ulric said.
“It had better, by God,” Trasamund said. “Liv and Audun Gilli have been going on for a while now about how their toenails itch, and that means the Rulers have a hangover. Let’s see what they can do when they set their minds to it, and when old Odovacar tosses in whatever he can.”
“If the Rulers’ wizards catch them spying, it may do us more harm than good,” Hamnet Thyssen said. Did he fear what the Rulers’ wizards might do to Liv if they caught her working magic against them? He knew he did.
By the glint in Ulric Skakki’s eye, he knew the same thing. “A goldpiece is no good if it sits in your belt pouch. You’ve got to spend it,” he said. “A soldier is no good if he sits in a tavern pinching the barmaids. He’s got to go out into the field and fight. A wizard’s not worth much if he can’t work magic.”
“That’s all true, every word of it,” Trasamund said. “Let’s see what our shamans can do.”
Count Hamnet wanted to hate both of them. They aimed to send his beloved into danger. But he found he couldn’t, for he knew they were right. And he knew Liv would say the same thing when anyone got around to putting the question to her. And so he nodded heavily, and hated himself instead.
Audun Gilli looked worried, which would have alarmed Hamnet Thyssen more if Audun didn’t look worried so much of the time. Liv looked serious, which again was nothing out of the ordinary. Odovacar looked like a man who wanted a skin of smetyn. But, as far as Hamnet could tell, the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman was sober.
Deciding what the three of them wanted to do hadn’t been easy. Audun Gilli still knew much less of the Bizogot language than Hamnet wished he did. Liv’s temper frayed with translating for him and for Odovacar. And the Red Dire Wolves’ shaman’s deafness meant she had to shout the same thing over and over, which did nothing to make her any happier.
After a lot of shouting – not all of it having to do with Odovacar’s bad ears, by any means – the three sorcerers decided to send a spirit animal to what had been the Three Tusk Bizogots’ lands to see what the Rulers were doing there. Liv’s spirit would make the spearhead of the magic; Audun Gilli and Odovacar would lend her strength and help ward her against anything the invaders tried.
“What can go wrong?” Hamnet Thyssen asked Liv the night before they tried the spell.
She shrugged. “All kinds of things. Shamanry is not a certain business, especially when the enemy’s shamans fight against what you do.”
That much the Raumsdalian noble knew for himself. “What’s the worst that can happen?” he asked.
“Maybe they can kill me,” Liv answered. “Maybe they can kill my spirit and leave my body alive without it. Which is worse, do you think?” She sounded as if it were an interesting abstract question, one with nothing to do with the rest of her life – however long that turned out to be.
“Should you go on with this, then?” Yes, Hamnet feared for her.
“Warriors go into battle knowing they may not see the sun rise again,” Liv said. “You have done this yourself. You know it is so. We need to find out what the Rulers are doing. I’m best suited to look out over the lands that were my clan’s – that
“I don’t want to lose you, either,” Liv said. “You asked for the worst, and I told you. I do not think it will come to that. We are working on our home ground, with spells we know. I may not learn everything I want to, but I should be able to get away again afterward. Does that make you feel better?” She sounded like a mother comforting a little boy who’d had a nightmare.
The way they chose to comfort each other a little later had nothing to do with little boys, though there was some small chance it might have made Liv the mother of one. Afterward, if the old jokes were true, Count Hamnet should have rolled over and gone to sleep. He didn’t. He lay awake a long time, staring up at the darkness inside the mammoth-hide tent. Liv was the one who slipped quickly into slumber. He supposed that was all to the good; she would need to be fresh when morning came.
At last, he did sleep. He wished he hadn’t – his dreams were confused and troubled. He hoped that didn’t mean anything. He was no wizard, no foreteller. All the same, he wished they were better.
Liv broke her fast on meat and marrow. Through the winter, the Bizogots ate little else. She showed a good appetite. Hamnet Thyssen had to force his food down. “It will be all right,” she said again.
“Of course it will,” he answered, and hoped he wasn’t lying.
The weather should have cheered him. It was bright and sunny, and not far below freezing – after what they’d been through, it felt like spring. The equinox couldn’t be far away; the sun spent more time above the horizon every day. But even after winter formally died, the Breath of God would go on blowing for another month, maybe even six weeks. Only then would the snow melt, the land turn to puddles, mosquitoes and midges start breeding in mad and maddening profusion, and the landscape go from white to flower-splashed green.
Breathing didn’t feel as if Hamnet were inhaling knives. Getting out of the stuffy, smelly tent was a relief to the nose, too. If any air was fresher and cleaner than that which came down off the Glacier, the Raumsdalian couldn’t imagine what it might be.
He looked north. There stood the Glacier, tall as any other formidable mountains. He wished the Gap had never melted through. Then the Rulers would still be walled off from the Bizogot country – and from the Raumsdalian Empire to the south.
But if the Gap hadn’t melted through, Trasamund wouldn’t have come south to Nidaros looking for help
