The arrow caught the sorcerer square in the chest. He looked absurdly surprised as he clutched at himself. His knees buckled; he slumped to the ground. Ulric Skakki and the Bizogots started shooting right after Hamnet did. Two or three other sorcerers fell, wounded or killed. That meant the lot of them couldn’t concentrate on Marcovefa any more. And she proved more than equal to anything but the lot of them.
They might have paid less attention to the fire one of them had first unleashed. She didn’t. When they shielded themselves against arrows, they left themselves vulnerable to the flames. They screamed when their bone staves caught fire, and screamed again when they did.
They dashed this way and that, trying to quell the flames. Some of them had the presence of mind to plunge into Sudertorp Lake. But not even water quenched the fire. Like sulfurous oil, they went right on burning. Steam rose from the lake.
The fire didn’t touch the Rulers who weren’t wizards. They tried to flee. The Bizogots rode after them. Slaying enemies who ran from them made ever so much better sport than fleeing themselves.
“I thank you,” Marcovefa said, riding up alongside Hamnet. She leaned toward him and brushed her lips across his. “Even for me, a few too many there at first.” Something kindled in her eyes. “Later on, I thank you properly. We have to make do with words right now.”
“Best thing I’ve heard today,” Hamnet answered, deadpan. Marcovefa laughed. He went on, “Why had so many of their wizards gathered here?”
“Better to ask them than me-except I don’t think any of them are left alive.” Her nostrils flared. “And most are too cooked-too charred, that is the word you use-to be worth eating.”
“Yes.” Count Hamnet left it right there. That stink had invaded his nose, too. At least he didn’t confuse it with the smell of roasting pork, the way he had up atop the Glacier. Remembering how he’d hungered for man’s flesh before realizing what it was still raised his hackles.
“Well, these huts are ours now, by God-ours by right of conquest,” Trasamund said proudly. “The Rulers ran off the Leaping Lynxes, and now we’ve run off the Rulers. We may not be a neat, tidy clan of the old-fashioned kind, but we’ll have to do. Times aren’t what they were before the Rulers came, either.”
Ulric Skakki stared at him in artfully simulated disbelief. “A Bizogot jarl admits the times are changing? What is this sorry old world coming to?”
“I don’t know. By the past couple of years, nothing good,” Trasamund said. “But I’m not dead yet, and some more of those maggoty musk-ox turds are. That, I like. And I know the world is changing. Was I not the first man through the Gap?” He struck a pose, there on horse back.
Ulric didn’t tell him no. But the adventurer had gone through the Gap the winter before him. None of the Three Tusk Bizogots knew Ulric had crossed their grazing grounds, and he didn’t want it known.
Trasamund pointed to the wizards’ blackened corpses. “A good thing these burning bastards didn’t start grass fires. That could have been a nuisance.”
“I hadn’t thought about it, but you’re not wrong,” Count Hamnet said.
“Grass fires can be very bad,” Trasamund said. “Not now, but later in the year-at the end of summer and the start of fall, before the first snows. We don’t get much summer rain here, and things dry out. When fires start, they can spread and spread. They can ruin grazing grounds. When that happens, wars follow. You have to have somewhere to take your herds. Or, if the fires catch the animals, you have to grab someone else’s. When it’s that or die, you do what needs doing.”
“I suppose so,” Hamnet said. He’d fought in plenty of wars with less behind them than life and death.
Trasamund pointed to the stone huts. “Let’s make sure we haven’t got any more vermin skulking in there.” A Raumsdalian would have spoken of serpents or scorpions. The frozen steppe lacked a few unpleasant things, anyhow. The jarl of the Three Tusk clan went on, “We can live off the fat-by God, the goose grease-of the land . . . for a while, anyhow. Then things get hard again. They always do, curse them.”
No more Rulers remained. Hamnet Thyssen did wonder why so many wizards had come together. When he wondered out loud once more, Ulric said, “To plot mischief against us. Why else?”
“I can’t think of any other reason, either,” Hamnet replied. “I wish I could.”
“Maybe your lady friends and Audun will figure out what they were up to from the stuff they left behind,” Ulric said.
Hamnet gave him a stony look. “Liv is not my lady friend these days. You may perhaps have noticed.”
“Perhaps.” Nothing bothered Ulric Skakki-or if it did, he didn’t let it show, which served about as well. Still in that blithe vein, he went on, “You don’t have to hate a lover after she leaves you, you know. You can, yes, but it’s not a requirement. Liv’s a lady-no doubt about that-and she makes a good friend whether you’re sleeping with her or not.”
“Do I tell you how to run your life?” Hamnet growled.
“As a matter of fact-yes.”
That caught Hamnet with his mouth open. He closed it before a bug flew in-at this season of the year, a real worry on the Bizogot steppe, not just a way for mothers to scold their children. He feared Ulric was telling the truth. He did like to run other people’s lives, not just his own. Feebly, he said, “Well, I’ll try not to do it any more.”
“No, no. Try to do it less,” Ulric said, which only made his confusion worse.
Compared to proper houses, Raumsdalian houses, the huts the Leaping Lynxes had run up were sorry. Their roofs were thatch over a framework of bones held together with sinew. No one had tended to them since the Rulers ran the Bizogots away from Sudertorp Lake. That left the huts draftier than they might have been. During springtime, though, it wasn’t such a great hardship.
Hamnet and Marcovefa took one of the huts for their own. He threw out the bones and other trash that had accumulated in there. Marcovefa gave him a quizzical look. “Why bother?” she said. “It doesn’t stink or anything.”
“You don’t care much about house keeping, do you?” he said.
“I don’t care any about house keeping,” Marcovefa answered. “Why bother? I save caring for things that matter.”
He supposed that made sense. Lots of people he knew had made sense lately: Marcovefa, Ulric Skakki, even Trasamund. To quote Ulric, what was this old world coming to?
But . . . to stay friends with a woman who’d left you? To stay friends with a woman who’d left you for a weed of a man like Audun Gilli? Hamnet could believe Ulric was friends with a swarm of women in the Empire and on the frozen steppe and likely elsewhere as well. Ulric didn’t take anything or anybody seriously. If he ran into a woman he’d slept with once upon a time-well, so what? He wouldn’t fret about it.
When Hamnet met a woman, though, he always thought she was the woman. And he hated admitting even to himself that he might have made a mistake. If things didn’t work out, then, of course he blamed the woman for the failure. How could you stay friends with someone you blamed?
He glanced over at Marcovefa. If things went wrong between them, would he wind up shunning her, too? He suspected he would. He seemed to work that way, whether Ulric Skakki approved or not.