Ignoring her would have been rude, especially since he was a guest in her present husband’s home. Glancing over towards Earl Eyvind, Hamnet thought the older noble awaited this meeting with more than a little apprehension of his own. If there’s a fight, I won’t start it, Hamnet decided. That being so, he bowed to Eyvind Torfinn and to Gudrid and took his seat without speaking to either of them.
Trasamund sat down to his left, Marcovefa to his right. Liv was some little distance down the table, between Ulric Skakki and a Leaping Lynx Bizogot Count Hamnet barely knew. Gudrid never failed to notice things like that. And of course she already knew Liv and Audun Gilli were sleeping together. Her mouth stretched into what looked like a smile of genuine pleasure.
“How does it feel to have lost another woman?” she asked.
“These things happen,” Hamnet said stolidly.
“Oh, indeed.” Gudrid’s smile widened. “Anything can happen to anybody – once. If something happens to someone again and again, though, chances are it’s his own fault.”
You can’t please a woman. She didn’t shout it, not in so many words. She let the guests of her husband’s generosity figure it out for themselves instead. And what she said might well have held a cruel barb of truth. But it was a barb that could also have stung her. Count Hamnet could have made some pointed gibes about her sport of infidelity … if he’d wanted to insult the man who’d got him out of Sigvat’s dungeon. Since he didn’t, he just shrugged.
Gudrid drew in another anticipatory breath. Hamnet Thyssen wondered how long he could go on giving mild answers if she kept baiting him. Not long enough, he feared. But Eyvind Torfinn beat Gudrid to the punch. “That will be enough of that, my dear,” he said in tones that brooked no argument.
Gudrid blinked. She wasn’t used to hearing such tones from her husband – or anyone else. “But he -” she began.
“That will be enough of that,” Eyvind Torfinn repeated. “We are none of us perfect. Reminding one another how we fall short does nobody any good. And the Empire needs Count Hamnet, whether he is perfect or not. You may think what you please, of course, but I will thank you to stay courteous in what you say.”
Servitors began bringing in the meal. Trays of mutton and spicy pork and goose filled the table. An edge sharper and more dangerous than the one on any carving knife filled Gudrid’s voice: “And if I don’t?”
If she intimidated Eyvind Torfinn, he didn’t show it. Waving to one of the servants, he said, “My wife won’t be dining with us after all, I’m afraid. Be so kind as to escort her to her bedchamber.”
“Yes, Your Splendor,” the servant said.
“But I don’t want to go to my bedchamber,” Gudrid said, which would surely do for an understatement till a bigger one came along.
“Will you mind your manners, then?” Earl Eyvind asked with surprising firmness.
“I will do and say whatever I need to do and say,” Gudrid answered, as if no other reply were possible. Plainly, she thought none was.
“Rorik . ..” Eyvind said. The servant touched Gudrid on the shoulder.
She screamed at him, and at her husband. Hamnet Thyssen looked down at the tabletop. He’d seen Gudrid’s temper kindle before. He’d been on the receiving end of it more often than he cared to remember. In a way, he still was. This fracas was about him, even if he didn’t happen to be at the center of it.
Ulric Skakki yawned. “A little politeness would fix everything. Too bloody much to ask for, I suppose.”
Gudrid didn’t intend to be polite. She grabbed a knife. Rorik knocked it away from her before she had the chance to try to stab him. That made Gudrid screech like a dire wolf with an arrow in its rump. For his part, Count Hamnet didn’t blame the servant one bit. His former wife didn’t take kindly to being thwarted by anybody.
“You may stay… if you’ll stay civil,” Eyvind Torfinn told her. “Will you?”
Her eyes blazed. She wasn’t about to forgive her husband any time soon, either. But she nodded and spat out three words: “Oh, all right.”
Earl Eyvind beamed, which struck Hamnet as misplaced optimism. He kept his mouth shut, though. “Thank you, my dear,” Gudrid’s current husband said.
She answered with something low-voiced, something Count Hamnet couldn’t quite make out. If Eyvind Torfinn did hear what it was, he affected not to. A certain amount of forbearance was an asset in any husband – or wife. The earl seemed to grasp that. Gudrid didn’t, and probably never would. As for Hamnet himself.. . He felt he’d used all his forbearance and more besides, trying to stay married to Gudrid. Her opinion of that might have differed.
Gluttony seemed safe here. Gluttony, after the musty water and the small loaves of bad bread in Sigvat’s dungeon, seemed all but obligatory. Hamnet might not have been able to match the Bizogots in his relentless pursuit of a full belly, but he did his level best.
Eyvind Torfinn reminded him of one of the reasons he was feasting so extravagantly, asking, “How soon do you expect to depart for the north?”
“As soon as I can,” Hamnet answered. “As soon as His Majesty gives me orders I can show people, orders that let them know I really do hold command there.”
Though Eyvind nodded, the cynical Ulric Skakki asked, “Will he give you orders like that in writing?”
“I don’t know. I don’t much care, either,” Count Hamnet said. “If he does give me what I need, I’ll go off and do my best with it. And if he doesn’t, I’ll go down to my castle instead – and wait for the Rulers to come to me.”
“What does he say?” Marcovefa asked. Both Ulric Skakki and Eyvind Torfinn started to translate Hamnet’s words into her dialect. Each waved for the other to go on. After a moment, Ulric did. Marcovefa listened, frowning, then said, “Does he really think they can do that?”
She spoke mostly in the usual Bizogot tongue. Hamnet Thyssen had no trouble following that. “You may think the Rulers are easy meat,” he told her, “but, if you do, you’re the only one who does.”
“Too many things down below the Glacier.” Marcovefa said that in her own dialect, but Hamnet had heard it often enough to have no trouble understanding it. Believing it was another story.
Hamnet Thyssen ate for a while. Eyvind Torfinn’s chefs, as always, set a high standard. And, because Hamnet was just out of the dungeon, good food seemed even better to him. After a while, though, he looked across the table and spoke to Gudrid: “May I ask a favor of you?”
Her eyes widened in surprise not, he judged, altogether feigned. “What is it?”
“Don’t ask His Majesty not to give me the orders I need,” he said.
This time, the way she batted her eyelashes was much too familiar. “Why would I do that?” she cooed, as if she didn’t know.
“To stop me. To make me go back to my castle. To make me fail,” Hamnet said bluntly. “We both know that would make you happy. By all the signs, though, I’m more likely to fail if I do go up against the Rulers than if I don’t. But if by some chance I don’t fail, that will be good for the Empire. What happens to me doesn’t matter much, not on that scale of things. What happens to Raumsdalia does.”
Eyvind Torfinn nodded. So did Trasamund. So, rather grudgingly, did Ulric Skakki, who worried about himself ahead of most things. So did Liv, without the least hesitation. And so did Audun Gilli, although Count Hamnet made a point of not looking at him.
Gudrid? Gudrid stared at Hamnet as if he’d started speaking in Marcovefa’s dialect. “Why on earth should I care what happens to Raumsdalia?” she demanded. “I care about what happens to me … and I care about what happens to you.” The way she bared her small white teeth said she didn’t want anything good happening to him.
Eyvind Torfinn took a sip of wine before speaking. The white-bearded scholar didn’t usually have any idea how to control Gudrid. As if anyone does, Hamnet thought. He feared whatever Eyvind said would only make things worse. Appealing to Gudrid’s patriotism was like appealing to a dire wolf’s sense of poetry. You could if you wanted to, but it wasn’t likely to do you any good.