Maybe Ulric’s strength tilted the balance. Before, Marcovefa had struggled to hold her own against the Rulers’ sorcery. Now she blazed brighter and brighter in Hamnet’s imagination-if that was what it was. The choking fog surrounding her, clutching at her . . . Did it start to fade, or did it draw back as if in fear of the spiritual glow that came from her? Hamnet had trouble putting it into words, but both amounted to the same thing.
“Ha!” she cried aloud. Across however many miles it was, Hamnet Thyssen felt the Rulers’ wizards flinch away from her. That cry might have been Trasamund’s fearsome two-handed sword, swung with all the furious power the Bizogot jarl had in him. “Ha!” Marcovefa said again. The enemy wizards broke and fled her strength-those who could. In much more mundane tones, Marcovefa told Hamnet, “You can let go of my tit now, thank you very much.”
He did. “You broke them,” he said.
“Yes. I did.” But she didn’t take it for granted, the way she once had. “You gave me good help-both of you did. And I thank you for it.” Her eyes rolled up in her head, and she crumpled to the ground.
VII
Only two Bizogots died of the sorcerous plague. Audun Gilli and Liv did all they could; Count Hamnet thought they succeeded better than anyone could have expected. They weren’t satisfied. Wizards seldom were satisfied with anything short of perfection.
Marcovefa was not only dissatisfied, she was also furious-and more than a little frightened. “They could have killed me,” she told Hamnet that evening in the hut the two of them shared. “They should have killed me. If they made their plague strike me first, maybe they kill us all, the way they killed the Rock Ptarmigans.”
He nodded. “That’s what enemies try to do, you know. I’m glad they didn’t think to make you sick first-or maybe they couldn’t at long range.”
“Maybe.” She sounded dubious, and still very angry. “They aren’t supposed to be able to do that to me!”
Hamnet Thyssen sighed. “Everybody except you has been saying, ‘The Rulers are dangerous,’ all along. You’re the one who’s been going, ‘No, no, they’re easy. I can beat them with one hand tied behind my back.’ ”
“And I’ve done it, too!” Marcovefa’s pride flared. “Except when I got hit in the head, I’ve done it every time.”
“A good thing, too. We’d be ruined if you hadn’t,” Count Hamnet said. “But even if you have beaten them every time, it won’t always be easy. There are lots of them, and only one of you. And even if you think they’re bad wizards, they’re better than anyone else down here below the Glacier except you. You need to be careful, the same way you would have up on the Ice. The shamans from those other clans up there were as strong as you were, right?”
“Oh, yes. Some of them were stronger,” Marcovefa said at once. “But they were-are-of my own folk. Not these Rulers. Do you like to think your horse is smarter than you are?”
“Hold on!” Hamnet held up a hand. “The Rulers are the ones who call everybody else ‘the herd.’ They think they can do whatever they want with other people because they think other people are just beasts. I don’t want us to think that way. If we do, how are we any better than they are?”
Marcovefa gave him a sharp-toothed grin. “They are much uglier.”
Stubbornly, Count Hamnet shook his head. “That’s not good enough. Curse it, I’m serious about this.”
“Yes, I see you are. But I wonder why,” Marcovefa said. “Is it that important?”
“I think so,” Hamnet said. “Up on the Glacier, suppose another clan made a great magic by eating some of its own people. Would you use that same kind of sorcery yourself?”
“Eat its own people to make magic?” Marcovefa looked revolted, which made Hamnet sure he’d picked a good example. “No, we would never do that. That would be wickedness itself. It-” She broke off and sent Hamnet a sour stare. “All right. I see what you are saying.”
“Good. I’m glad.” Hamnet Thyssen hoped he didn’t show just how glad he was. If Marcovefa hadn’t seen his point, he would have worried about her almost as much as he worried about the Rulers. She wasn’t quite so alien to the Bizogots and Raumsdalians as they were, but she wasn’t far removed from it, either.
He must not have kept his face as still as he hoped, because Marcovefa laughed at him. “After we beat the Rulers, then you can bash me over the head,” she said.
His ears heated. “The Rulers are a menace because they don’t care anything about our ways and don’t want to learn. You do want to learn-and you follow our customs now that you’re down here with us. You haven’t eaten man’s flesh since you came down from the Glacier.”
Marcovefa mimed picking her teeth. “How do you know?”
“Stop that!” Count Hamnet said. “You’re just sticking thorns in me to make me jump.”
“And why not?” Marcovefa replied. “I did some jumping of my own today. That was more of a magic than I thought the Rulers had in them.”
A warrior with a sword and a helmet and a byrnie could easily beat armorless foes who carried only daggers. If he faced a lot of foes like that, who could blame him for getting careless? But if he stayed careless against an enemy with gear like his own, odds were he’d end up bleeding on the ground. Count Hamnet didn’t know magic worked the same way, but he couldn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t.
He wondered if he ought to point that out to Marcovefa. Reluctantly, he decided not to. If she couldn’t see it for himself, she wouldn’t want the lecture. She might need it, but she wouldn’t want it.
“What did you do to the wizards who were sending the sickness?” he asked instead. That seemed safe enough-and he wanted to know.
“I made them stop,” Marcovefa answered. “Past that, I don’t know. I don’t care very much, either.”
“All right.” Hamnet wasn’t sure it was. Up till now, Marcovefa had thrashed the Rulers’ wizards with monotonous regularity. Well, it would have been monotonous, anyhow, if it hadn’t been so essential. If it got to the point where she couldn’t thrash them like that . . .
If it got to that point, the Bizogots and the Raumsdalian Empire were in a lot of trouble. As far as Count Hamnet knew, Marcovefa was the one effective weapon they had against the Rulers. If she wasn’t so effective-what did they have then? As far as he could see, they had nothing.
“I think I need a slug of smetyn,” he said. “It’s been a hard day.”
“Harder for me, so bring me some, too,” Marcovefa said. She drank cautiously most of the time, being new to smetyn and ale and beer and wine. She’d hurt herself the first couple of times she tried drinking. She hadn’t had any idea what a hangover was. She did now, and respected the morning after . . . again, most of the time.
The way she poured the fermented milk down today said she wasn’t worrying about the next morning. Hamnet didn’t suppose he could blame her. She’d just had a brush with a very nasty death. So had he, come to that. He drank more than a slug himself.
Marcovefa sent him an owlish stare. “What are you sitting there for?” She didn’t slur her words, but spoke with exaggerated precision. “Aren’t you going to screw me?”
“Well . . .” That question had only one possible answer, unless he wanted an unholy row. “Yes.” Some time later, he asked, “Is that better?” He rubbed his left shoulder, then sneaked a look at the palm of his hand. She hadn’t bitten him quite hard enough to draw blood.