“I’m sure it’s worth its weight in gold,” Hamnet said. Ulric started to nod, then broke off with a quizzical expression on his face. Kormak Bersi also looked bemused.
Earl Eyvind waited in the best-appointed study Hamnet had ever seen. It had a lot of books and a desk with a south-facing window. Few houses anywhere in the Empire had a window that looked north. The Breath of God militated against that. Several lamps and candles made the room bright even when the weather turned too harsh to leave the shutters over the window open.
Heaving himself to his feet, Eyvind Torfinn said, “Good to see you, by God.”
“Good to be seen, Your Splendor.” Hamnet Thyssen clasped Eyvind’s hand. “And I think I have a lot to thank you for.”
“My pleasure, Your Grace – please believe me,” Eyvind said.
Kormak coughed. Hamnet introduced him to Eyvind Torfinn. “I also owe you a lot, Your Splendor,” the agent said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Eyvind Torfinn said. “Don’t worry about anything. Are you hungry? Are you thirsty? We can fix it if you are.”
“His Majesty fed and watered us,” Hamnet answered. “Now he’s going to turn me loose against the Rulers. Amazing what getting an army pounded to pieces will do, isn’t it?”
“Possibly. Possibly. I dare hope he would have let you go even absent a defeat,” Earl Eyvind said. “I bent my efforts towards that end, I assure you.”
“I’m grateful,” Hamnet said, “and all the more so because …” His voice trailed away. He didn’t want to talk about Gudrid with her current husband. He never had wanted to do anything like that. Just thinking about it made him acutely uncomfortable.
But Eyvind Torfinn understood what he didn’t say. With some embarrassment, the older man said, “These things happen, you know.” Did he mean his marriage to the woman who had been Hamnet s wife? Or did he mean that Gudrid had hoped Hamnet would rot in the dungeon? Or both at once? That would have been Hamnet s guess.
“Oh, yes. They do indeed,” he said in a voice like stone. Were Audun Gilli and Liv sharing a bedchamber in Eyvind’s home? How could they be doing anything else? And where does that leave me?
Alone.
He knew the answer. He knew it, and he hated it. Spacious though this place was, it would be far more crowded than an inn. And that would only make him feel more lonely, because he would be here without anybody. Next to solitude in the midst of a crowd, going off and fighting the Rulers seemed easy. While he was on campaign, he would have so much time to think, so much time to brood. He could hope he wouldn’t, anyhow.
“Is that woman Marcovefa, the one who speaks the strange dialect… Is she really from a tribe atop the Glacier?” Eyvind Torfinn had naturally noticed her.
“Oh, yes.” Count Hamnet nodded. “Do you understand her?”
“Not so well as I wish I did, but well enough. Some of the Bizogots who live near the western mountains talk the way she does,” the scholarly earl replied. Ulric Skakki had said the same thing, but Ulric had lived among those clans. Eyvind, as far as Hamnet Thyssen knew, had just studied them. However he knew what he knew, he did know it.
“If you can follow her language, can you follow why her magic is so strong?” Count Hamnet asked.
“Well, I haven’t seen much of it with my own eyes, you understand, so anything I know of it is at second hand,” Eyvind answered. “I’d only be guessing, and my guess would be that her sorcery is strong because her folk don’t have much else. If they need to do something up there, they have to do it with spells. I gather they don’t know how to smelt metal any more. They have no crops. They don’t even have large beasts to tame. What does that leave them but wizardry?”
“I had the same notion,” Hamnet said slowly. “In a way, it makes sense. In another way, I wonder if it’s too simple.”
Eyvind Torfinn’s shrug set his jowls wobbling. “It may well be. I said I don’t know enough to be sure. We need more research, if we ever find the chance for it.” He looked unhappy. “We have more urgent worries closer to Nidaros, I fear.”
“You never tried climbing up to the top of the Glacier, either,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Even with the avalanche that made it easier for us, it’s still nothing I’d care to try more than once.”
“I believe you,” Earl Eyvind said. “How does it compare to a stretch in His Majesty’s dungeons?”
“I’ve never tried climbing the Glacier, Your Splendor,” Kormak Bersi said before Hamnet could reply, “but I wouldn’t care to do more than one stretch in a cell.”
“I didn’t care for even one,” Hamnet agreed. “His Majesty is a great many things” – most of which he couldn’t stand -”but an innkeeper he is not.”
“Which, I have no doubt, is an understatement the size of a mastodon.” Eyvind Torfinn smiled to show he’d made a joke. He was a good-hearted man. He was also a man who’d seen a dungeon cell from the outside but never, so far as Count Hamnet knew, from within. Despite that lack – or that luck – he did have a certain grasp on essentials: “Even if the Emperor did give you a meal, I daresay you’ll be thirsty for something better than musty water.”
“Yes, by God!” Again, Kormak spoke before Hamnet could. Hamnet didn’t mind; he couldn’t have put it better himself.
Eyvind Torfinn’s reception hall would not have been too small for the imperial palace. With all the Bizogots guesting at his home, he’d given one servant tapman duty. A couple of dozen Bizogots would be plenty to keep a tapman busy at all hours of the day and night, or so it seemed to Count Hamnet. With beer and wine and mead to choose from in place of fermented mammoth and musk-ox milk, the Bizogots might drink even more than they did up on the frozen plain, too.
Trasamund had a drinking horn – actually, a silver rhyton in the shape of a mountain sheep’s horn – of beer in his hand when he saw Hamnet. “It is you!” the jarl boomed, rushing over to fold Hamnet into an embrace that made him think of a hug from a short-faced bear. “Ulric said Eyvind had got you loose, but Ulric lies the way most people fart – he can’t help himself.”
“I know some people who break wind through the mouth, but I’m not one of em,” Ulric Skakki said with dignity. He sent Hamnet one of his crooked grins. “I hope I’m not, anyhow.” His cup was smaller and plainer than Trasamund’s, but he chose wine to fill it. He could rough it with the best of them, but he didn’t when he didn’t have to.
Liv was also there, and she came up to Hamnet, too. Taking both his hands in hers, she said, “I am glad to free you again. I wish you no harm, no ill – only the best. I am sorry we didn’t end up fitting together the way you hoped. I hoped we could, too. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you wish they would, that’s all.”
How was he supposed to answer that? It was gracious, and he believed it, but it still felt like a sawblade thrust through his liver. “Sometimes things don’t,” he agreed in a voice rough as shagreen. He squeezed her hands once, then let them go.
“That was well done,” Ulric Skakki said quietly. Liv nodded.
For a moment, knowing how useless and how foolish it was, Hamnet hated both of them. “Well done or not…” he said, and made for the tap-man. As he came up, the fellow raised a politely curious eyebrow. “Wine,” Count Hamnet told him. “Whatever you’ve got that’s sweet and strong.”
“Coming up, sir,” Eyvind Torfinn’s servant said as he filled a cup. If Earl Eyvind was making his bountiful cellars available to his guests, Hamnet, like Ulric, aimed to take advantage of them. And wine was stronger than beer and ale and smetyn; even a determined drinker needed to pour down less to make the world go away.
Of course, the determined drinker would still regret it the next morning or whenever he finally sobered up. Right now, the morning seemed a million years and a million miles away from Hamnet Thyssen. The wine in his cup might not have been a great vintage, but it was sweet and it was strong. Hamnet wondered what the southern wine growers got that they thought worth as much as their marvelous elixir. A poet could do something with that conceit, he thought. No poet himself, he made do with savoring the smooth, blood-red richness as it slid down his throat.