Much good it did him.
Since his love for Gudrid foundered—no, since her love for him did, if she ever knew any—he hadn't wasted such words on any other woman. He would have sickened himself if he had. Now, with Liv, he could affirm he was her love and she his without wanting to bend down over the snow.
After the travelers got beyond the narrowest part of the Gap, after they returned to the regions Bizogots and Raumsdalians had known since time out of mind, they left the worst of the winter weather behind them, or almost behind them. It was as if they were in the front room of a house where the door wouldn't close all the way. The icy wind gusted and roared at their backs, but ahead of them the sun shone.
"Down in Nidaros, it's hardly even autumn yet," Eyvind Torfinn said wistfully.
"It will be cold enough on the plains, by God." Trasamund's breath smoked as he answered. "Coid enough, yes, but not so cold as this."
"As the Gap widens out, your Ferocity, could we perhaps steer away from the very center of it?" Eyvind asked. "That way, the worst of the blast from the north will pass alongside of us instead of blowing through us." Maybe his shiver was exaggerated for effect; on the other hand, maybe it wasn't. Hamnet Thyssen was cold, too.
But Trasamund shook his head. "By your leave, your Splendor, I'll take a cold breeze on my kidneys. I don't care for that, but I can live with it. If chunks of ice decide to come down, they'll squash me like a louse. The two halves of the Glacier are still too cursed close together—a really big avalanche'll squash us no matter where we are. Still and all, I'd sooner keep the risk as small as I can."
"Makes sense," Ulric Skakki said.
Reluctantly, Eyvind Torfinn nodded. "Yes, I suppose it does. I was hoping for the chance to be warm. Like his Ferocity, though, I should much prefer not to be flat."
Ulric looked back toward the narrowest part of the Gap. It was almost like looking back toward a dragon's mouth, except that what it belched was not fire but scudding clouds and snow. In thoughtful tones, Ulric asked, "Could a big avalanche in the right spot still block the Gap, do you think?"
"Wouldn't be surprised," Trasamund answered. "But I don't think God will give us one. God expects people to solve their own problems. He doesn't go around doing it for them."
Hamnet Thyssen found it hard to quarrel with that. But Audun Gilli inquired, "What good is such a God?"
"Well, I don't know that anyone would say he didn't make the world and all the things in it," Trasamund answered. "It'd be a little hard to get along without this old world, even if your kidneys do get cold."
"Do you suppose God made the Rulers?" Hamnet Thyssen asked, not altogether seriously but more so than he would have wanted.
"If he did, he was having a bad day," Ulric Skakki said. "If he didn't, some demon or other was having a good day. Which choice do you like better?"
"I don't like either one of them," Count Hamnet said.
Ulric Skakki chuckled. "All right, then—which choice do you like less?"
"Both," Hamnet answered, and Ulric laughed out loud.
The Gap slowly widened. Little by little, Hamnet Thyssen lost the urge to push the halves into which the Glacier had split farther apart by brute force. When he looked ahead, he saw the gap between the ice mountains stretched farther and farther apart. It still wasn't hospitable country, being flat and often marshy, but he'd known worse.
However flat and dull the countryside was, it brought a broad smile to Trasamund's face. "This is my homeland!" he boomed when the travelers camped one evening. "This is the land of my clan! We have roamed here forever!" He thumped his fist against his chest to emphasize the words.
"Forever, to him, means longer ago than his grandfather could remember," Hamnet Thyssen whispered to Ulric Skakki behind his hand.
"No doubt," Ulric whispered back. "I'm surprised he doesn't drop his trousers and dump out a pile of dung to mark his territory, the way mammoths will sometimes." They both smiled. But they were careful not to laugh. Trasamund was not a man you wanted to insult to his face unless you were ready to put your life on the line. Parsh had found that out.
Gudrid had different thoughts about dung. "I want to get back to the Empire," she said. "If you knew how sick I was of eating food cooked over turds . . ."
"It may not be pleasant, but when the other choice is not eating at all, you do what you need to do," Eyvind Torfinn said.
Had no one else added anything, it might have rested there. But Trasamund said, "Me, I like meat roasted over a dung fire better than what you get down in the south, where you cook with wood. The flavor's better."
"All what you're used to," Earl Eyvind said with a smile.
But Gudrid screwed up her face into a horrible grimace. "What you mean is, meat roasted over a dung fire tastes like dung. We've been eating dung ever since we left the Empire!"
She wasn't wrong. The same thought had crossed Hamnet Thyssen's mind once or twice. He wished she wouldn't have said it, though. Now he really had to think about it. By the looks that crossed some of the other Raumsdalians' faces, they felt the same way.
"What does she say?" Liv asked. Count Hamnet didn't much want to translate; that made him think about it, too. But Liv only shrugged and said, "Otherwise, we would starve—and fire is clean."
When Hamnet heard that, he nodded. "You have a good way of looking at things," he said. Fire was clean, even if it was fire from ... He shook his head. He didn't want to go down that road. Fire is clean, he told himself, and left it there.
Ulric Skakki shook him awake in the middle of the night. "Sorry to do this to you, your Grace," he said, "but I need my time in the bedroll, too."
"Who says?" Hamnet demanded through a yawn. Ulric laughed. Count Hamnet yawned again. Ulric stayed there by him till he got to his feet. Who hadn't seen a man fall back to sleep instead of going out to stand sentry?
Muttering—and still yawning—Hamnet Thyssen trudged away from the embers of the fire (the dung fire, he thought, and wished he hadn't). Off in the distance, he could see the Glacier on either side of the Gap. It seemed almost magical under moonlight, and made him wonder if it shone from within with a glow of its own. The sensible part of him knew better, but around midnight that part wasn't at its best.
Like all the sentries, he stationed himself north of his sleeping comrades. If trouble came, from where but the direction of the Rulers would it come?
He breathed out fog—the visible warmth flowing from his body every time he exhaled. The landscape was eerily quiet. He could hear the other travelers snoring more than a bowshot away. But for those small noises, there was nothing, so much nothing that before long he could hear the blood rushing in his ears and the beating of his heart.
After a while, someone stirred and sat up, there by the smoldering fire. Was that Liv? Hamnet Thyssen's heart beat faster. Warmth flowed through him instead of flowing out. She got to her feet and walked toward him. A broad smile spread over his face. It still felt peculiar; his muscles just weren't used to shaping that expression.
She kissed him when she got out to where he was standing. But then she said, "Something's wrong," which spoiled his hope for anything more.
"What is it?" he asked. Instead of slipping under her tunic, his hand fell to the hilt of his sword.
"I don't know yet." Moonshadow made her look as troubled as she sounded. "But something."
"Should we wake the others?" Hamnet asked. "Should we wake Audun?" Something that roused foreboding in a shaman was bound to be sorcerous . . . wasn't it?
But Liv shook her head. "If he feels it, too, let him come," she said. "If not.. . not. I would say something different if we could talk together." She switched from her language to Raumsdalian. "Not know enough yet. And Audun Gilli not know Bizogot speech."