"What?" Gudrid didn't speak the Bizogot language, but that wasn't all that kept her from understanding. Ulric Skakki translated for her. "What?" she said again. "Take off my clothes for this chit of a girl? No!"
If you didn't take off your clothes for the Ruler, we wouldn't have this worry now, Hamnet thought. He almost said it out loud. To his surprise, he didn't. He liked Eyvind Torfinn better than he’d ever imagined he could, and didn't care to shame the older man.
Liv had no trouble figuring out what No! meant, even if she knew hardly any Raumsdalian. She didn't argue with Gudrid. She just dragged her off her horse. Gudrid let out a startled squawk. Both women thumped down on the dirt. Gudrid tried to fight back, but she'd never really learned how. Liv knew exactly what she was doing. Gudrid screamed and swore, which helped her not a bit. The Bizogot shaman quickly and efficiently stripped the tunic off her—and if she gave her a black eye and a split lip while she did it, wasn't she entitled to a little fun?
Gudrid was bare beneath the thick wool tunic. Hamnet Thyssen set his jaw and looked away. He knew what Gudrid's breasts were like—knew them by sight, knew them by touch, knew them by taste. He also knew he would never touch or taste them again. And he had no interest in seeing them again under such circumstances—or maybe he couldn't stand to look.
Liv seemed to care about as much for Gudrid's charms as she would have for those of a musk ox. She murmured a spell over the tunic. Suddenly, she stiffened. "Here it is!" she said. "Just a little fetish, but it will do."
"What on earth is going on?" Eyvind Torfinn said.
Ulric Skakki and Audun Gilli did the explaining. Despite his regard for Earl Eyvind, Hamnet didn't have the heart—or the stomach—for the job. He also wanted to involve himself with Gudrid as little as he could. She screeched at her husband, but warily. She didn't want him to know what she'd been doing the night before. No one else seemed eager to tell him, but that didn't mean no one would.
Eyvind Torfinn plucked at his beard. "This would have been easier if you'd given the shaman your tunic without kicking up such a fuss, my dear," he said at last.
"But she was rude! She was horrid!" Gudrid said.
Liv, meanwhile, had detached the fetish and was eyeing it with what looked like professional admiration. "An ermine's eye and a young hare's ear," she said. "The spell that animates them is not one I would use, but I am sure it will do the job. Samoth has no trouble spying on us as long as we carry this, no trouble at all. He will know just where we are."
"Are there any more charms on the tunic?" Eyvind Torfinn said in the Bi-zogot tongue. "If there are none, will you please give it back to my wife and let her dress?"
"Oh, very well." Liv, plainly, didn't think Gudrid deserved to wear the tunic. She all but threw it at the Raumsdalian woman. Gudrid pulled it on. The look she gave Liv would have melted lead.
"You may want to be careful," Hamnet Thyssen said in the Bizogot tongue. "You have embarrassed her. She will look for revenge."
"She is welcome to look," Liv said indifferently. "People look for all kinds of things. Whether they find them .. . That is another story."
Audun Gilli came up and examined the fetish. Slowly, he nodded. "Oh, yes. Not one I recognize in detail, but the principle is plain." He scratched his head. As often happened, what started as a thoughtful gesture turned into a hunt. After crushing something between his nails, he went on, "We should not destroy this."
"He is right," Liv said after Hamnet translated. "That Samoth would surely sense it if we did."
Audun Gilli began to whistle. The tune was strange and discordant— hardly a tune at all, Hamnet Thyssen thought till a short-eared arctic fox walked up to Audun. The wizard patted the animal as if it were a dog. It let him touch it; it even wagged its tail. Then he took a rawhide lashing and tied the fetish around the fox's neck. That done, he whistled a different tune. The fox suddenly seemed to realize where it was and the company it was keeping. With a horrified yip, it dashed away.
"Not bad," Liv said. "Not bad at all. The shaman of the Rulers will realize something is wrong when he tries to listen with the hare's ear, but that may take a while. We spoke mostly Raumsdalian here, and he does not know that tongue."
After translating again, Hamnet Thyssen said, "Their wizard does not admit to knowing our tongue, anyhow. Does Roypar speak Raumsdalian, Gudrid?"
"No," she answered automatically. Then she backtracked. "I mean, how the demon do I know whether he does or not?"
"You have a better chance of knowing than any of the rest of us," Count Hamnet said in a voice with no expression at all to it. The glare Gudrid sent him made the ones shed given Liv seem downright loving by comparison.
Eyvind Torfinn looked as if he wanted to ask questions. If he had, Hamnet wouldn't have lied to him, though he knew the older man might not believe everything—or anything—he said. His home truths would have made Gudrid even happier than she was already. But Earl Eyvind seemed to think better of it. Maybe he would question Gudrid in private. Maybe, as he looked to have done before, he would decide he didn't really want to know. Whatever his reasons, he stayed quiet.
The travelers resumed their journey toward the Gap. Samoth could not spy on them any more. Hamnet Thyssen hoped he couldn't, anyhow.
Summer up in the Bizogot country was a brief and fragile flower, one that bloomed late and withered early. Even in and around Nidaros, the Breath of God could blight crops in almost any month of the year. Knowing all that, Hamnet was still shocked by how fast the weather turned—and turned on the travelers—here beyond the Glacier.
Birds streaming south were the first warning. Only a few days after they fled, the earliest snow flurries dappled the plain. The sun came out again and melted the snow, but more fell a couple of days after that. The sun came out once more. This time, though, the snow stuck longer. Hamnet Thyssen could see his breath even at noon. Something in the sky had changed. Leaden was too strong a word, but he could tell at a glance it would not be warm again for a long time.
Trasamund took snow in stride. But even he kept looking north. "We want to get as far as we can before the first blizzard catches us," he said.
"Blizzards!" Gudrid made it into a curse—blizzards did curse this northern country. "Why did I ever decide to come here?"
To drive me mad, Hamnet Thyssen thought. That was not mere sarcasm; he was all too sure he had the right of it. But she'd finally had more discomfort and danger than even tormenting him was worth. She should have thought of that sooner. They were still on the far side of the Gap. She might need to go through quite a bit more before they got back to the Bizogot country, let alone anything resembling civilization.
The travelers had to stop to let a herd of buffalo pass in front of them. As Trasamund had said back in Sigvat's chambers, these were bigger beasts than the ones that roamed the prairies of the Raumsdalian Empire. They were a lighter brown than their—cousins?—on the other side of the Glacier. And their horns, at least three times as long as those of the animals Hamnet Thyssen knew, swept out and forward instead of curling up.
"We don't want to spook them," Ulric Skakki said. His foxy features twisted in distaste. "That could be ... unpleasant."
"They'd squash us flatter than a herd of mammoths could," Trasamund said. "There are a lot more of them."
Packs of wolves trotted along with the buffalo, prowling after stragglers. Again as Trasamund had said, the wolves on this side of the Glacier were smaller than dire wolves. But they seemed quicker and more agile, like woods wolves back home. Hamnet Thyssen also saw a ... a tiger, the Rulers had called it. It might be able to pull down a buffalo all by itself. But it moved aside when the wolves came too close. It could kill several of them, without a doubt. Just as certainly, it was no match for a pack.