Breath of God

balls’d count as one cut or two?”

“I hadn’t worried about it – up till now.” Hamnet spoke the last three words in as shrill a falsetto as he could muster.

He caught Ulric Skakki by surprise. The adventurer’s laugh was high-pitched, too – almost a giggle. “You’re not supposed to do things like that,” Ulric said severely.

The others who understood Raumsdalian were laughing, too. Marcovefa chose that moment to walk into the dining hall. “What is the joke?” she asked. “Why do I always come in right after the joke?”

Some of that was in her own tongue, some in the regular Bizogot language. “Hamnet made it,” Ulric said, and pointed to the newly released nobleman.

“Say it again,” Marcovefa told him.

He did, in the Bizogot tongue this time. It sounded stronger in that language than it did in Raumsdalian. Hamnet wondered why that should be so, but had no doubt it was. Marcovefa laughed and laughed. Pointing to her, he said, “When I do go against the Rulers, I’ll need you beside me.”

She batted her eyes at him, for all the world like a coquette of the kind he couldn’t stand. “Why, darling, I didn’t know you cared,” she murmured in surprisingly good, if still accented, Raumsdalian.

People in the dining hall laughed much harder at that than they had at Count Hamnet’s joke. Ulric Skakki dropped his cup. Quick as a cat, he caught it before it smashed, but wine spilled on the floor. A servant scurried away and came back with a rag. Hamnet groped for an answer, even after the fellow was down on his knees wiping up the wine. Just then, he would sooner have embraced a rattlesnake than a woman, but he could see how Marcovefa might not appreciate that kind of reply.

“I want you for your magic, not for your -” he began, and then broke off again. His mouth seemed determined to land him in trouble whether he wanted to end up there or not.

“Twat?” Marcovefa suggested, in the regular Bizogot language – maybe she hadn’t learned how to say that in Raumsdalian yet.

“Well, yes,” Hamnet muttered, which brought on fresh gales of merriment from the Bizogots – Liv very much included – and Ulric Skakki. Where was Audun Gilli? Count Hamnet didn’t see him, which spared him complete humiliation … but only by the tiniest of margins.

Or so he thought, anyhow, but then Marcovefa leaned up and forward and brushed her lips across his as if they were old lovers. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I promise not to give you anything you don’t want.”

“Ah, but will you give him everything he does want?” Trasamund bellowed. He thought his own sally was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, funnier than whatever had gone before. Hamnet Thyssen had rather a different opinion.

If he showed Trasamund he was angry, he lost. He saw that much. “I want to beat the Rulers,” he said. “I want to drive them out of Raumsdalia. I want to drive them off the Bizogot plains.”

“You do all that, and so many women will want to say thank-you with their legs open, you’ll need a club to keep them off,” Ulric said.

“Maybe not,” Trasamund said before Hamnet could answer. “Maybe the sour look on his face will do it.” He guffawed.

“You’re your own best audience,” Hamnet told him.

“Drive off Rulers? Not so hard,” Marcovefa said. “Everyone makes big fuss about Rulers. Feh! This to Rulers.” She snapped her fingers.

“The reason everyone makes a fuss about them is that they keep beating everyone,” Ulric said. “It’s a reprehensible habit, I know, and one from which they should be discouraged by any means necessary.”

“What is reprehensible?” Marcovefa asked.

“Why, deserving of reprehension, of course,” Ulric answered blandly.

“And what does reprehension mean?” Was her patience wearing thin? Hamnet Thyssen knew his would have been.

But Ulric went right on playing. “Reprehension is that which is reprehensible.”

Maybe Marcovefa would have turned him into a newt. More likely, since there were no newts atop the Glacier, she would have chosen something like a pika instead. Before she could do anything she might – or might not – regret later, Hamnet said, “What Ulric is doing now is reprehensible. It deserves reprehension.”

“Ah. I understand. Thank you,” Marcovefa said.

Ulric Skakki sent Hamnet a jaundiced stare. “You’re no fun.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Hamnet said. “But then, I’ve just come out of His Majesty’s dungeons. The sport down there isn’t everything it might be.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” the adventurer agreed. “I didn’t enjoy the stretch I put in under the throne room, either.”

“You never told me you got jugged.” Count Hamnet didn’t know whether to believe him, either. Ulric had done a lot of things, but he hadn’t done everything … had he?

“I never told you it snowed in the wintertime up in the Bizogot country, either. I never saw the need.” He spoke with exaggerated patience. And then he went on to talk about what things were like in the dungeons. He’d been there; he left Hamnet Thyssen in no possible doubt about that. He knew more about what went on in the bowels of the imperial palace than Hamnet did himself. He knew guards by name and by habit. He knew those cells as if he’d lived in them for years. Maybe he had.

“How did you get out?” Count Hamnet asked when he finished.

“Same way you did,” Ulric answered. “His Majesty found something where he thought I might be useful. As a matter of fact, it was that bit of business we did together six or eight years ago.”

“You didn’t tell me you were just out of the dungeon!” Hamnet exclaimed.

“You didn’t ask me,” Ulric said. “I’d washed most of the stink off, same as you did. I thought you’d get all sniffy if you knew I was coming up for air for the first time in … well, in a while, anyway. I’d say I was right, too.”

Was he? Looking into himself, Hamnet thought he might well have been. “I’m sorry,” the Raumsdalian noble mumbled.

“What? For being what you are? That’s foolish,” Ulric said. “Besides, you’re … a little better now. And you’ve done a stretch yourself, which doesn’t hurt.”

Count Hamnet bowed. “Thank you so much.”

Ulric Skakki also bowed, with a sinuous elegance Hamnet couldn’t hope to match. “My privilege, Your Grace.”

Before Hamnet could take the next step in the politer-than-thou dance, a servant came in and said, “His Splendor requests that I announce a meal is being served. If you will be so kind as to accompany me. ..”

All things considered, Hamnet Thyssen would rather have gone on sparring with Ulric. It wasn’t that Eyvind Torfinn didn’t set an elegant, even an extravagant, table. No, the problem was who would be sitting at it.

And, sure enough, Gudrid waited there when he walked in.

Ignoring her would have been rude, especially since he was a guest in her present husband’s home. Glancing over towards Earl Eyvind, Hamnet thought the older noble awaited this meeting with more than a little apprehension of his own. If there’s a fight, I won’t start it, Hamnet decided. That being so, he bowed to Eyvind Torfinn and to Gudrid and took his seat without speaking to either of them.

Trasamund sat down to his left, Marcovefa to his right. Liv was some little distance down the table, between Ulric Skakki and a Leaping Lynx Bizogot Count Hamnet barely knew. Gudrid never failed to notice things like that. And of course she already knew Liv and Audun Gilli were sleeping together. Her mouth stretched into what looked like a smile of genuine pleasure.

“How does it feel to have lost another woman?” she asked.

“These things happen,” Hamnet said stolidly.

“Oh, indeed.” Gudrid’s smile widened. “Anything can happen to anybody – once. If something happens to someone again and again, though, chances are it’s his own fault.”

You can’t please a woman. She didn’t shout it, not in so many words. She let the guests of her husband’s generosity figure it out for themselves instead. And what she said might well have held a cruel barb of truth. But it was a barb that could also have stung her. Count Hamnet could have made some pointed gibes about her sport of infidelity … if he’d wanted to insult the man who’d got him out of Sigvat’s dungeon. Since he didn’t, he just shrugged.