Ulric Skakki stirred, but didn't say anything. He did smile at Hamnet, who nodded back. We know something you don't know, went through Hamnet s head—one of the simple pleasures any man could enjoy.
But Gudrid wasn't mollified. Maybe she really thought they were going in the wrong direction, or maybe she just wanted to be the center of attention. "You're going to get us lost," she said shrilly. "Lost in the middle of all this—this nothing!" Her wave took in the whole world on this side of the Glacier.
"Really, my dear, Trasamund knows more about these things than you do," Eyvind Torfinn said in tones no doubt meant to be soothing.
"You're against me, too!" Gudrid burst into tears.
"What is her trouble? She sounds like she needs a kick in the arse," said Liv, who had a straightforward view of the world even for a Bizogot.
"She thinks we're going in the wrong direction," Hamnet Thyssen said. He didn't think that was Gudrid's only trouble, but it was the only one he felt like talking about.
Liv rolled her eyes up to the heavens. "She couldn't find her way back to the Gap by herself if someone soaked the path in mammoth fat and set fire to it. She's making noise for the sake of making noise."
Hamnet thought she was doing that, too. He shrugged. "If Eyvind Torfinn wants to calm her down, he's welcome to ay." And good luck to him, too, he added, but only to himself.
Earl Eyvind did his well-meaning but ineffectual best. "Really, my love, I have every confidence in Trasamund's sense of direction. He is right—he knows this terrain better than you do. And he is more familiar with traveling over roadless country in the snow."
"Oh, you're a fine one to talk about a sense of direction," Gudrid said in a deadly voice. "You can't even find up." Her sneer and the way she gestured left no one wondering what she meant—not even Liv, who spoke no Raumsdalian.
Hamnet didn't know what he would have done after an insult like that. Eyvind Torfinn swung his horse away from Gudrid s. "When you can be civilized, perhaps we'll talk some more," he said. "Perhaps." The repetition told how wounded he was.
Gudrid, just then, cared for no one's wounds but her own. "I still say it's wrong!" she cried. "We'll be lost!"
"Enough!" Trasamund thundered. "If you were my wife, it would have been enough a while ago, let me tell you."
"When did you ever get enough?" Gudrid jeered. Trasamund turned the color of hot iron. Hamnet was amazed the snowflakes striking him didn't steam. "If your sense of direction was as bad there as it is here—"
"Why don't you go your own way, if you're so set on it?" Ulric Skakki asked Gudrid before anything worse could happen. "The rest of us can go with Trasamund, and we'll see who gets to the other side of the Glacier first." He smiled as if he meant the suggestion seriously.
The look Gudrid sent him should have sunk him deep underground even though the world up here was frozen solid not far below the surface. Of the travelers, he was, or at least affected to be, most nearly immune to her. "You hate me!" she shouted. "Everyone hates me!" She burst into tears.
Eyvind forgot her gibe and did his best to soothe her. His best wasn't nearly good enough. Hamnet smiled at Liv. She smiled back, a certain knowing look in her eye. She might guess he was thinking she wouldn't throw a tantrum like that. And if she did, she was right.
Audun Gilli, meanwhile, fiddled with his ensorceled needle floating in a bowl of water. Chanting his spell and watching the way the lodestone swung, he nodded to himself. "The magic confirms it," he said. "The Gap is that way." He pointed the way they were riding, the way Gudrid questioned.
She rewarded him with a sneer a mustachioed stage villain in a melodrama would have been proud to claim for his own. "Oh, yes—a lot you know about it," she said. "The last time you tried that spell, you almost ran us straight into the Glacier, if I remember right."
"You do," Audun said steadily. "I've learned where I made my mistake. Can you say the same?"
Now she gaped at him in astonishment mixed with fury. She couldn't have thought he had enough spirit to talk back to her. Since Hamnet Thyssen hadn't thought so, either, he couldn't blame her... for that.
"Enough of this blather," Trasamund declared. "I am riding on toward the Gap. Anyone else is welcome to come along. Anyone who thinks I'm heading in the wrong direction is welcome to go where she pleases, as friend Ulric said." That she made Gudrid scowl all over again. The Bizogot jarl plainly thought no one else thought him misguided.
And he was right. Everyone rode along with him—even Gudrid, though she bit her lip in anger and humiliation. Hamnet wondered what she would do next to show how important she was—and how much trouble it would cause.
The snowstorm didn't seem to want to end. Even this early in the season, it claimed the land beyond the Glacier for its own. Hamnet Thyssen didn't mind. He was used to snow himself, though neither Liv nor Trasamund would have been much impressed with his claims.
That wasn't the only reason he didn't mind so much. He was sleeping warmer of nights than he'd ever imagined he would be. There was little room for privacy in the encampments the travelers set up. Liv didn't mind; there was little room for privacy in a Bizogot camp, either.
He woke up mornings with a smile on his face. He wasn't used to that. It made muscles that hadn't been used much for a long time ache from the unaccustomed exercise.
Ulric Skakki teased him about it, saying, "What have you got that I don't?"
"A lady friend?" Count Hamnet suggested; the idea bemused him, too.
"Well, yes. I know that." Mock indignation filled Ulric's voice—Hamnet hoped it was mock indignation, anyhow. "But why have you got her?"
"For the beauty of my plumage and the sweetness of my song?" Hamnet suggested.
Ulric looked at him, then slowly shook his head. "You haven't just gone around the bend," he said. "You've gone right past it, you have." He steered his horse away from Hamnet as if afraid whatever the noble had was catching.
Hamnet doubted that. In his experience, happiness wasn't contagious.
He certainly hadn't caught much of it himself. Now that he had a little, he kept taking it out and picking it up and looking at it from all angles, as if it were some strange animal that lived on this side of the Glacier but not on the one with which he was more familiar.
Doing that, he discovered something he would perhaps rather not have known—the thing he was examining proved not to be quite perfect after all. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy making love with Liv. A man would have to be dead not to enjoy that. But what they did had something missing compared to what he’d done with Gudrid.
Something ... He worked at that as a man might work at a piece of meat stuck tight between two teeth. Trying to find it almost drove him mad, as the meat would have when it didn't move. Whatever it was, it wasn't the pleasure of the act itself. Liv was at least as good a lover in those terms as Gudrid.
Something . . . Listening to Gudrid bicker with Eyvind Torfinn over roasted deer ribs one evening all at once made Hamnet stare and stare. Gudrid noticed; she usually did. "What's your problem?" she snapped. She could go from scolding her new husband to scolding the one she'd discarded without missing a beat.
"It's nothing, really. I'm sorry," Hamnet Thyssen answered, and looked away. That made Gudrid blink; he shot back more often than not. But, with a shrug that was almost a wriggle, she returned to making life difficult for Earl Eyvind. They weren't really squabbling about anything. They were just going back and forth, the way Gudrid did with any man with whom she was involved.