“Are you glad to be coming home?” Kormak Bersi asked Count Hamnet.
The Raumsdalian noble didn’t laugh in the agent’s face, which to his mind only proved his restraint. “This is not my home. I wouldn’t be glad to come here even if I weren’t in hot water with the Emperor,” he answered. “My home, such as it is, is a castle in the southeast, not far from where the woods begin. I wouldn’t mind going there and forgetting about everything else, but I don’t think everything else will forget about me. Sooner or later – likely sooner – the Rulers would end up besieging the place, and I doubt I could fight off the whoresons with my own retainers.”
Kormak stared at him. “You think those barbarous savages can beat our glorious soldiers? For shame!”
“For one thing, our glorious soldiers have never fought lancers on mammothback,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “For another, I’m not really worried about our glorious soldiers. I’m worried about the Rulers’ wizards. Ask . .” He ran down with a growl deep in his throat. He’d started to say, Ask Audun Gilli. Ask Liv. Now he didn’t even want to think about talking to them, though he knew he would have to. Growling still, he went on, “Bizogot shamans couldn’t beat them – couldn’t come close. And neither could our wizard.” He pointed towards Audun. He wasn’t aiming an arrow at the man who’d stolen Liv from him. It only felt that way.
“I don’t think much of the kind of magic Bizogots can muster.” Kormak sounded smug and patronizing. Raumsdalians often looked down their noses at their northern neighbors. They often had good reason to look down their noses at them, too. Here. .
“Their shamans are good enough. And they work magic the same way we do. I’ve heard that from the shamans and from our sorcerers,” Hamnet said. “The Rulers don’t. They have their own way. Not surprising, not when they’ve been separate from us since the last time the Glacier came down, whenever that was.”
Kormak Bersi surprised him by saying, “Since the days when we could go to the Golden Shrine.”
“Yes, that’s right. Since those days, or maybe even longer – who knows where their ancestors were back then?” Hamnet said. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is, their sorcerers are stronger than ours.”
Kormak looked anything but convinced. He had no reason to believe Hamnet – he’d never faced the invaders’ wizardry. Before he could say anything, Marcovefa asked, “What are you going on about?” She was getting ever more fluent in the ordinary Bizogot tongue, but Raumsdalian remained a closed codex to her – except when her sense of understanding spilled out like Hevring Lake after the dam broke down. That didn’t seem to be happening now.
“About the Rulers’ shamans,” Hamnet Thyssen answered in the Bizogot language.
Many a Raumsdalian noblewoman would have envied Marcovefas sniff. “Oh. Them. They’re not so much,” she said.
“Maybe not to you,” Hamnet said. “They’re better than anything we have. They’ve proved that, even if we wish they hadn’t.”
“Too many things,” Marcovefa said impatiently. “You, these Bizogots … Too many things.” She freighted the word with scorn. “You have so many things, you don’t pay enough attention to your shamanry.”
“The Rulers have as many things as the Bizogots,” Hamnet pointed out.
Marcovefa only sniffed again. “They don’t pay enough attention to their shamanry, either. Maybe a little more than these Bizogots, a little more than you Raumsdalians. But not enough. Not close to enough. Up where I come from, they would be nothing. Nothing!” She snapped her fingers to show how much of a nothing they would be.
No one in his right mind wanted to go up where she came from. The clans atop the Glacier had no easy time climbing down, either. Did their poverty in all material things really make them such formidable wizards? Hamnet hadn’t seen that when he was up there himself, but he hadn’t looked for it, either. Down here, Marcovefa did seem uncommonly accomplished. Did that mean she was a powerful shaman, or that she came from a powerful school of sorcery? Hamnet didn’t know, and he wasn’t convinced she did, either.
“Maybe you’ll just have to beat them all singlehanded,” he said.
She looked at him, then back up towards the north. “Maybe I will.”
The badlands ended as abruptly as they’d begun. All at once, the winding road ran straight and true towards Nidaros’ western gate. What had been the muddy bottom of Hevring Lake was now some of the richest cropland in the Raumsdalian Empire. The travelers rode past orchards and fields and meadows finer than any they’d seen to the north and west. The farmers reacted to the sight of so many Bizogots on the road by hiding their livestock and shutting up their houses. They were brave and stupid at the same time: if these Bizogots really were invaders, only fleeing might have saved the locals.
“It would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” Trasamund said. “They haven’t seen raiders in a long time, and they don’t know what to do any more. God help them when they have to find out.”
“First time I’ve heard you sound like you care about Raumsdalians,” Ulric Skakki drawled.
The Bizogot jarl screwed up his face, then let his anger go in a long, loud sigh. “I care about anybody the Rulers hurt,” he said. “Will you tell me I haven’t earned the right?”
Not even Ulric had the crust to claim he hadn’t.
All the Bizogots and Marcovefa exclaimed at the quality of the serai where they stayed that night. The roast pork was better than most, but the serai itself was nothing out of the ordinary to anyone who’d seen Nidaros itself and what the hostels there boasted. Hamnet found his bed wide and soft and inviting – far too much for someone sleeping in it by himself. He tossed and turned all night.
Ulric and Arnora had the room next door. The walls weren’t thick enough to mute their screaming row – or the way they made up afterwards. Hamnet Thyssen plopped his pillow over his head. It didn’t block out the sounds of lovemaking, which did nothing to help him drop off.
He came downstairs the next morning pouchy-eyed and grumpy. Beer and bacon made a good breakfast, but couldn’t get him moving very fast. That Liv and Audun Gilli came down right after him only made things worse. They sat at a table halfway across the taproom – they weren’t trying to torment him, as Gudrid would have – but his eyes kept sliding towards them.
Audun faced him. The wizard was smiling and happy and voluble. Hamnet knew the feeling; he’d enjoyed it himself not long before. He could see only the back of Liv’s head. The way she held it made him sure she was happy, too. Maybe he was imagining things, but he didn’t think so.
Ulric Skakki walked in and sat across from Hamnet. That kept him from seeing Liv unless he peered around the adventurer, which was probably part of what Ulric had in mind. It didn’t help much, though. He didn’t need to see Liv with his body’s eyes to see her inside his mind.
To try to blot out that bright, shining image, he glowered at Ulric and said, “You’re bloody noisy – you know that?”
“Not all my fault,” Ulric said. “Arnora gets her share of the blame. More than her share, to tell you the truth – she enjoys quarreling over nothing, and I don’t.”
“Cursed walls are thin,” Count Hamnet said, sipping from his mug. “By now, I know just about everything she enjoys – and you, too.”
“I told you you needed to get laid,” Ulric said with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “All that stuff is turning sour inside of you. It can’t be healthy. You’ll end up like one of those bull mastodons in” – he snapped his fingers, looking for a word -”what the demon do they call it?”