With a small shrug, he went on, "If you leave, if you walk away, that woman wins."
Had Ulric called Gudrid by her name, Hamnet Thyssen would have turned his back and gone into the stable, and afterwards much would have been different. As things were, he looked Ulric up and down, a glower that would have annihilated a lesser man, or a less self-assured one. Ulric Skakki withstood it with no external signs of injury.
"As if I care what that woman does," Hamnet said, and then, not at all at random, "Have you swived her, too, the way everyone else has?"
"Good God, no," Ulric Skakki answered. "No scorpion ever hatched anywhere has a sting in its tail to match hers."
That held the unmistakable ring of sincerity. But then, Ulric might well be able to sound sincere when he wasn't. It was a common gift. Even Gudrid had it. For the moment, Hamnet Thyssen chose to assume Ulric meant what he said, and growled, "Well, then, you see what my trouble is. I don't want to be within miles of that woman, let alone riding beside her. And I used to love her, which makes it worse."
"But we need you on the journey. You're the best Raumsdalian we have," Ulric Skakki said. "Eyvind Torfinn is nice enough, but he's an old fool. Audun Gilli is … what he is. They won't do, Thyssen."
"There's you," Count Hamnet said. "Why are you acting so modest? It doesn't seem your natural state."
"It's not," Ulric agreed. "But I'm only a commoner, and I have a strange background-to say nothing of my foreground." Was his chuckle self-conscious? Hamnet had trouble believing it. Ulric went on, "Earl Eyvind won't take me seriously. Neither will Trasamund. You've got the blood they respect."
"Gudrid might want to see it spilled. Otherwise it doesn't much impress her," Hamnet said. "And there are her bodyguards. One of them would likely serve your purpose."
Ulric Skakki shook his head. "Louts. Fools. Chowderheads. The Emperor won't send away men he can't afford to lose. He'll send the ones he doesn't care about-so that's what he's done. I know about these fellows. And I know something else."
"What?" Hamnet asked uneasily; what Ulric said made altogether too much sense.
"I know Trasamund hasn't told everything he knows about what lies beyond the Glacier."
"And how do you know that?" Hamnet inquired in sardonic tones. "I suppose you've gone beyond the Glacier yourself ?"
Ulric grimaced. "Yes, as a matter of fact, I have, though it's worth my life if you say so where a Bizogot might hear. It's likely worth your life, too, so you ought to bear that in mind."
Hamnet Thyssen stared at the younger man. He did not think Ulric was lying; he wished he did. "By God, how did you manage that?" he asked.
"Carefully," Ulric Skakki answered, which had to be the understatement of the year. "Trasamund says he doesn't know if there are men on the far side of the Glacier. Either he's lying or he's not as much of a far-ranger as he'd have us believe. There are." Again, he spoke with great conviction.
"And?" Hamnet asked, as he was plainly meant to do.
"And they're dangerous. To the Bizogots, to us, maybe even to themselves. I am not making this up, Thyssen. I have seen them. We need you there."
"Then send Gudrid back to Nidaros."
Ulric Skakki shrugged sadly. "I'm sorry. I can't do that. I wish I could, but I can't."
"Mmrr." Hamnet made a noise deep down in his chest. "If you lure me on with this, Skakki, if you dangle a wiggling worm in front of me to make me swim after it, I'll kill you. Gudrid's first lover didn't believe me when I said something like that. I'd tell you to ask him if I lied, but he's too dead to give you a straight answer."
"Well, you can try," Ulric Skakki murmured. Count Hamnet sent him a sharp stare. Ulric looked back imperturbably. If Hamnet's words worried him, he showed it not at all. He didn't seem to believe Hamnet could harm him. Maybe that made him a fool. Maybe it meant he knew some things Hamnet didn't, things Hamnet might discover if he tried to make good on his threat. As if it were never made, Ulric went on, "Does that mean you're coming, then?"
The last word Hamnet Thyssen thought he would use came out of his mouth. Hating himself, hating Gudrid, and saving a little hate for Ulric Skakki, too, he said, "Yes."
Weather along the Great North Road seemed to get worse with each passing mile. That had to be Hamnet's imagination. Spring was advancing, the sun staying in the sky longer with each passing day. Things should have got warmer and finer, not darker and gloomier. Odds were that the cloud over the expedition was fixed above his head and no one else's.
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.