“Er-right.” The wizard was hangdog and slapdash at the best of times. Since Liv had gone to him from Hamnet Thyssen, this wasn’t the best of times. But he forged ahead: “I don’t want you to be my enemy.”
“I’m not,” Hamnet said, which was . . . partly true, anyhow. He went on, “If you expect me to be your friend, you ask for too much, though.”
“I suppose so,” Audun said. “But I would like to be able to put my head together with yours without worry about its getting bitten off.”
“Would you?” Hamnet Thyssen said. Audun Gilli gave back an eager nod. Hamnet shrugged. “People want all kinds of things they aren’t likely to get.”
“Do you, uh, still want Liv back?” the Raumsdalian wizard asked.
That question was more interesting than Hamnet wished it were. He was contented enough with Marcovefa. She had her quirks, but she was bound to think he had quirks of his own. And even if he was contented with her, that didn’t mean he didn’t want Liv back. It didn’t mean he didn’t want Gudrid back, either, and she was hundreds of miles away, married to Eyvind Torfinn, and despised him to boot. Losing a woman meant something was wrong with you. So it seemed to Count Hamnet, at any rate.
He knew his answer was evasive: “If she doesn’t want me back-and she doesn’t-what difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference.” Audun spoke with doleful conviction. “I didn’t expect this to happen, you know.”
“I’m willing to believe you.” Count Hamnet wished he’d turned his back and walked away when the wizard started talking to him.
Then the hilt of his sword and the hilt of the dagger next to it on his belt started chattering to each other. “He says he believes us.” The dagger hilt’s voice was a high, squeaky version of Audun Gilli’s.
“He says all kinds of things. What do I care?” The sword hilt sounded a little like the way Hamnet had before his voice broke.
He didn’t think he was losing his mind. Audun Gilli had a gift for endowing inanimate objects with sarcastic personalities. It was a small magic, but one that sometimes had its uses. “Well, if he says he believes us, why doesn’t he sound like he believes us?” the dagger hilt asked peevishly.
If Hamnet looked down, he suspected he would see his face on the sword hilt, Audun’s on the dagger. He didn’t look down. The shrill voice that sounded like his said, “He’s not that good a liar, I guess.”
Hamnet Thyssen snorted. He tried to hold it in, but he couldn’t. Then he tried not to laugh out loud, and found he couldn’t do that, either. “Tell my cutlery to shut up, will you, please?” he said to Audun Gilli.
“He wants us to shut up!” The voice that sounded like Audun’s sounded properly indignant.
“He’s got his nerve, he does!” said the voice that sounded like Hamnet himself. “If he thinks I’m going to shut up, he’s-” It cut off.
“Right,” Audun Gilli finished for it.
“You have an interesting way of making your points sometimes,” Count Hamnet said.
The wizard’s narrow shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “People who wouldn’t pay attention to me on a bet start listening when their tools do the talking. I’m not your enemy, Your Grace. I don’t want to be your enemy. We already have the same enemy. All this other business was getting in the way of that.”
After a considerable pause, Hamnet said, “You shame me.”
“I don’t want to do that, either,” Audun answered. “You don’t have to love me-you’re not going to love me, and who could blame you? But for God’s sake will you stop treating me like I’m not there?” Hamnet hit him, not quite hard enough to knock him down. “What was that for?” the wizard squawked.
“Well, you can’t say I was treating you like you weren’t there,” Hamnet answered stolidly.
“No, I can’t-and I bloody well wish I could,” Audun said.
“Hrmp.” Now Count Hamnet seemed affronted. “First you want it one way, then you want it the other.”
“I wanted you to talk to me, not punch me!”
“What should I say to you after you took my woman away? A lot of people talk with their fists after something like that.”
Audun Gilli sighed. “Your Grace, I didn’t take Liv away from you. Nobody can do anything like that with her. If you don’t know I’m telling the truth, you never knew her at all. She decided she didn’t want to stay with you. After that”-he kicked at the dirt-“she took me, not the other way round.”
He hadn’t tried not to get taken-Hamnet Thyssen was sure of that. What man in his right mind would try not to get taken if a woman like Liv decided she wanted him? The wizard wasn’t wrong. The wizard was much too poignantly right.
“You aren’t talking again,” Audun pointed out.
“Afraid not,” Count Hamnet agreed. “Trying to count all the different ways I’m a jackass. There are a lot of them.”
“Welcome to humanity, Your Grace,” Audun said. “I often wonder why God bothered with us in the first place.”
“Maybe we’ll know if we ever find the Golden Shrine.” Hamnet looked out across Sudertorp Lake, as if he expected the legendary temple to rise from its waters. Whether he expected it or not, he didn’t get it.
“You don’t ask for much, do you?” the wizard exclaimed. “We went to the ends of the earth-by God, we went past the ends of the earth-and we never saw a trace or heard a rumor. The Rulers don’t seem to know anything about it.”
“Maybe that means it’s on this side of the Glacier after all.” Count Hamnet shrugged. “Or maybe it means the Shrine was never anything but a pipe dream. I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else does, either-if I had to guess, I’d say nobody ever will.”
“If I had to guess, I’d say you were right,” Audun replied. “We’ll find out-or, more likely, we won’t.”
Hamnet Thyssen nodded. “I imagine men a thousand years from now will still go chasing the Golden Shrine. By then, this will all be forest, and only fragments will be left of the Glacier.” He glanced over to Audun Gilli. “There. I’m talking to you, by God. Are you happier?”
“Yes, Your Grace. Are you?”
“Mm-maybe. Yes, I suppose I am.” Hamnet gnawed at the inside of his lower lip. “If you like, you can tell Liv I’m sorry.”
“You can do that yourself, too,” Audun said.
“I’d rather you did. I might . . . say some other things besides, and chances are that wouldn’t help. Besides, something like that, it won’t matter if it comes from me or from you. Not now it won’t.”
“No, not now,” Audun said. “Earlier . . . Well, no wizard’s ever found a spell to let you fix now what you made a hash of back then. Probably just as well. Things would get knotted up worse than a musk-ox-wool cape knitted by somebody who never learned to knit.”
“Can’t quarrel with you there. And people would make mistakes ‘fixing’ mistakes. . . . What a mess!” Hamnet said.
“Life is complicated enough. Too complicated, sometimes,” Audun Gilli said.
“Can’t quarrel with you there, either.” Count Hamnet turned away. He supposed he could deal with the Raumsdalian wizard. He even thought he might be able to talk to Liv again one of these days, though he didn’t want to do it any time soon. Showing enthusiasm for either prospect was more than he had in him.
“You know what you look like?” Ulric Skakki asked as he and Hamnet rode across the steppe with a band of Bizogots out searching for the Rulers.