Runolf laughed. He was older and grayer than Hamnet, and less inclined to brood about things. (As far as Hamnet knew, Runolf had never had a woman betray him, which might or might not have meant something.) “Nah, not me,” he said now. “The Rulers have become close a time or three, but I managed to talk Sigvat out of it.”
“Did you?” Hamnet said, deeply impressed. “More luck than I ever had. How the demon did you pull that off?”
“I told his courier I’d rise against him if he tried to arrest me,” Runolf answered stolidly. “Sigvat must’ve believed me, because he hasn’t given me any guff since.”
“Good for you,” Ulric Skakki said. “Good for you!” He turned to Hamnet. “You see? You’re too loyal for your own good. Sigvat got away with doing all kinds of things to you that he never would have dared to try if he’d been a little bit more afraid of what you’d do to him.”
“Maybe,” said Hamnet, in lieu of admitting that the adventurer had a point. He brought things back to the business at hand: “You popped out of those trees at just the right time, Runolf.”
“Well, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t seen the Rulers all tangled up with your people,” Runolf Skallagrim said. “You mess with war mammoths when you don’t have to, you’re sorry you did. Everybody in Raumsdalia’s found that out the hard way.”
“Everybody up on the Bizogot steppe, too,” Count Hamnet agreed. Trasamund gave what had to be the most reluctant nod he’d ever seen from the jarl.
“Looks like you were in the middle of a straight-up fight with the Rulers,” Runolf remarked. “They didn’t have a sorcerer along? You haven’t got one along yourself?” He shook his head. “That’s not right. I know it’s not. I saw what’s-her-name-Marcovefa-with you.”
“Yes, she’s here,” Hamnet said. “She and the Rulers’ wizards seemed to battle one another to a standstill.”
“Better than what any Raumsdalians have been able to do-that’s for sure,” Runolf said.
“Yes, I know.” Hamnet left it there. Ulric Skakki and Trasamund probably understood why. If Runolf didn’t, Hamnet didn’t feel like spelling it out for him. Up till now, Marcovefa had thrashed almost all the sorcery the Rulers aimed her way. She’d had trouble with the disease they sent against the Bizogots, but she’d won straight-up contests of sorcery-till this one.
Was she weaker than usual? Had the Rulers had an uncommonly strong wizard among the ones facing her? Hamnet Thyssen didn’t know, but he was sure he needed to find out. Marcovefa was the only edge he’d had on the enemy. If he didn’t have that edge, what was he supposed to do next? No-what could he possibly do next?
Marcovefa toasted a chunk of riding-deer liver over a fire. She seemed more interesting in eating than in answering Hamnet’s questions. While she ate, she answered most of them with shrugs.
Hamnet persisted. He always persisted, no matter how little good it did him, no matter how much it irritated people who had to deal with him. Marcovefa scowled at him. When she finished the liver, she said, “I don’t know what all it was. We won. Why worry about it?”
“Would we have won if Runolf Skallagrim hadn’t been there to give us a hand?” Hamnet answered his own question: “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe we would have. I think we would have,” Marcovefa said. “One way or another, I always come up with something.”
“Always?” Hamnet mimed a slingstone bouncing off the side of her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Nothing like that this time,” she said. “A little better magic than usual, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”
Given half a chance, Hamnet always worried, too. “Are they finding better wizards than they did? Are they learning to block what you do better than they did? Will they be able to beat you one of these days?” One of these days soon, he meant, but he managed to swallow the last word.
“They learn a little. Anyone who isn’t very, very stupid will learn a little,” Marcovefa answered. “But they will not beat me. You don’t need to worry about that.” She had her own brand of arrogance. Trasamund didn’t think anybody could beat him sword in hand. Any good warrior felt that way-if he didn’t, wouldn’t he run from any battlefield? Maybe wizards needed that same kind of certainty to do what they did.
“All right.” By the way Hamnet said it, he made it plain it wasn’t.
Marcovefa shook her head. “Do I have to screw you to get you to believe me? I do that if you need it.”
“I want to believe you because you’re telling the truth, not because you’re screwing me. They aren’t the same thing,” Hamnet said stubbornly.
“As long as you believe me, why doesn’t matter,” Marcovefa said.
“Why matters. I’ve believed too many lies before, and I’ve believed them for too long,” Hamnet insisted.
“Believe we don’t lose. It is true,” Marcovefa told him.
“How can you know that?” Hamnet demanded.
“How? Because I am what I am. Because I am who I am,” Marcovefa said.
“How much can you foresee?” he asked her. “You couldn’t tell ahead of time that that slingstone was going to hit you. It could have killed you as easily as not. Then what would have happened to our fight?”
“Then I wouldn’t be here prophesying to you now.” Marcovefa didn’t sound very interested in arguing might-have-beens. “But that doesn’t change anything else.”
Count Hamnet muttered to himself. “By God, why wouldn’t it? How are we supposed to win without you?”
“I don’t know anything about supposed to,” she said. “I know is. I know is not. Those matter. Supposed to? Who cares?”
He kept trying to get answers out of her-yes, he was stubborn. She kept on not giving them. She’d said everything she intended to say, or maybe everything she knew how to say. If he didn’t like it, too bad. He didn’t like it, and he thought it was too bad.
Runolf Skallagrim had about as many Raumsdalians with him as Hamnet did. Hamnet offered to yield command to him. Runolf shook his head. “Keep it and welcome, your Grace,” he said. “The Bizogots’ll listen to you better than they would to me, and our own folk will listen just as well.”
“Or just as badly,” Hamnet said.
“Or just as badly,” Runolf agreed without even blinking. “What have you got in mind doing next?”
“Fighting the Rulers. Keeping ourselves fed. Staying alive, if we can. What else is there?” Hamnet Thyssen answered.
“Not bloody much, not right now,” the other Raumsdalian noble said. “We’re on our own. We don’t have to worry about orders from anybody else, anybody higher. Feels kind of funny, doesn’t it?”
“Feels pretty good, if you want to know what I think,” Hamnet said. “When we got orders from the Emperor, how much good did they ever do? Sigvat could always take a bad situation and make it worse.”
“Well . . .” Baron Runolf sounded uncomfortable. Like Hamnet, he was a man of deep loyalty. He hadn’t had his nose rubbed so deeply in the cost of giving his loyalty to someone who didn’t deserve it.
That thought set Hamnet laughing. Runolf Skallagrim gave him a quizzical look. He didn’t explain. Runolf wouldn’t have thought it was funny. But who could have imagined that Gudrid might be training for Sigvat? They were unfaithful and cruel in different ways, but so what? The infidelity and the cruelty were all that really counted.