“Aren’t you lucky?” Ulric Skakki murmured.
“No, curse it,” Hamnet answered. “As far as I’m concerned, the Rulers were bloody well welcome to Gudrid. As for Eyvind Torfinn . . .” He shrugged. He couldn’t make himself dislike the scholarly earl, even if Eyvind was married to his former wife.
“There? You see?” Ulric sounded amused. That only made Hamnet Thyssen want to hit him.
“Have you got any food?” Eyvind asked. “Anything at all? We’ve been empty a long time.”
“Horse meat. Venison from riding deer. Maybe a little mutton. Some mammoth meat. It’s not too fresh, but it’s what we have,” Hamnet answered. He tried not to look at Gudrid. It wasn’t easy.
Earl Eyvind bowed low. “Whatever you can spare. God knows we aren’t fussy, not now.” A rich noble in Nidaros, he would have had every chance and every excuse to be fussy before. His shudder now said he might have eaten worse things than stale mammoth meat. Eating nothing, for instance, was much worse than that.
Seeing the sorry state the rescued captives were in, Raumsdalians and Bizogots started feeding them. Seeing the sorry state Hamnet Thyssen was in, Ulric handed him a skin and said, “Here. Drink this.”
Expecting sour ale or maybe even smetyn, Count Hamnet did. Smooth, strong wine slid down his throat. He eyed Ulric with respect. “Where did you find this?”
“Oh, somewhere along the way,” the adventurer said airily.
“Do you mind if I-?” Hamnet nodded toward Eyvind Torfinn.
“Go ahead. You do know he’ll give it to Gudrid next, don’t you?” Ulric said.
“Yes, I know that.” Hamnet’s voice was rough as a rasp. He shrugged, as if to say,What can you do? Then he leaned down and handed Earl Eyvind the wineskin. The other noble caught the rich bouquet. A broad, astonished smile spread across his haggard face. It got broader yet after he swigged. Then, sure enough, he passed it to Gudrid.
She eyed Hamnet. “I don’t suppose you’d slip hemlock in there and poison Eyvind just for the sake of getting me,” she said, her tone declaring that she didn’t really suppose any such thing.
“Don’t blame me for the games you’d play yourself,” Count Hamnet replied, even more harshly than before. “If you want to drink, drink. If you don’t, give the skin to someone else who can use it.” Plenty of sorry-looking people were eyeing it with jealous, zealous attention.
Gudrid drank. He’d been sure she would. She tried to provoke him as automatically as she breathed. After blotting the ruby wine from her lips, she handed the skin back to Eyvind Torfinn, as if to claim it for their own. Eyvind had better sense. He gave it to the haggard Raumsdalian hanging over his left shoulder.
“God bless you, friend,” the haggard man said, and drank deep. Then he passed the wineskin to a woman beside him.
Ulric Skakki, meanwhile, gave Earl Eyvind a chunk of meat and Gudrid another. They both tore into it raw. They’d traveled up in the Bizogot country and even beyond the Gap. They could live rough if they had to. They were used to better things, though.
“Where did the Rulers catch you?” Hamnet asked.
Before answering, Earl Eyvind had to gulp down an enormous mouthful of meat. Hamnet was amazed not to see his throat swell like a snake’s when he did it. “South of here,” Eyvind said once the way internal was clear. He took another big bite and choked it down before adding, “We never expected to see you here-not that we’re sorry we did.”
“We’re doing what we can,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “I don’t know if it will be enough, but we’re trying.”
Gudrid was eating as greedily as Eyvind. Wine and meat seemed to distract her from Hamnet, at least for the moment. Just as well ran through his mind.
Per Anders asked Eyvind, “Is the Emperor still safe?”
“Who cares?” Ulric Skakki murmured, but the imperial courier plainly did.
“He was the last time we saw him,” Earl Eyvind replied. “That was . . . some little while ago, though. As far as I know, he isn’t in this sad herd of people.”
Count Hamnet tried to imagine Sigvat II, Emperor of Raumsdalia, shambling along in the midst of so many other captives. He tried to imagine the Emperor sleeping on the ground and grubbing up roots and insects like any other unfortunate. The picture made him want to smile. Maybe he was small-spirited, to relish the idea of someone else’s misfortune. If he was, he would just have to live with it.
“What are you going to do with us?” Gudrid asked after some fairly monumental swallowing of her own.
What she really meant, of course, was, What are you going to do with me? She thought of herself first, last, and always. But Hamnet answered the question the way she asked it: “Anyone who wants to fight the Rulers is welcome to join us. We have a few extra horses and some spare weapons.”
Neither white-bearded Eyvind Torfinn nor decorative Gudrid made a likely warrior. “And the rest?” she persisted.
“I don’t know,” Hamnet said. “I’ll have to talk with Trasamund and Ulric and Runolf and Audun and Liv and Marcovefa.”
“Liv. Marcovefa.” Gudrid didn’t try to disguise either her disdain or her amusement.
“That’s right.” Hamnet did his best to ignore them both. “We have to send you toward a place where you’re likely to get food. Figuring out where to find a place like that may not be easy.”
“You can’t send us away!” Gudrid’s voice went shrill. To Hamnet’s amazement, she came up with a reason he shouldn’t: “Eyvind knows more about the Rulers than anybody else from this side of the Glacier.”
“Well, so he does,” Count Hamnet admitted, deciding he couldn’t very well deny it. “But what’s that got to do with you? We may need him, but how are you going to help us drive the Rulers back through the Gap? The farther away from trouble you go, the better for everybody. You’ll even be safer somewhere away from the fighting. You won’t need to worry so much about starving, either.”
“Eyvind won’t help you unless I’m with him.” Gudrid turned to her current husband. “Will you?” she asked ominously.
“If ground sloths and glyptodonts rose up against the Rulers, I would gladly help them right now,” Eyvind Torfinn replied.
Gudrid’s jaw dropped-she wasn’t expecting mutiny from that quarter. Earl Eyvind was even more pliable than Hamnet had been back in the days when he was wed to her. Hearing him tell her no almost made her former husband laugh out loud.
“I’m not going anywhere without you,” Gudrid declared when she’d recovered somewhat. “You need someone to take care of you, and you know it.” To Hamnet Thyssen’s disappointment, that held a measure of truth.
“I expect I can manage,” Earl Eyvind said. “Whether you believe it or not, I’m not entirely helpless.”
“That’s what you think.” Gudrid hardly bothered to hide her scorn.
Marcovefa ambled over. Gudrid eyed her the way a bird might eye a snake. Marcovefa paid next to no attention to Gudrid, not at first. She pointed toward Eyvind Torfinn. “We need him.”
“You have me,” Eyvind said.
Hamnet waited for Marcovefa to dismiss Gudrid. He waited, as he knew, with more than a little anticipation. Gudrid had a knack for ignoring him and getting under his skin like a tick. She did not have the knack for outfacing Marcovefa. As far as Hamnet knew, nobody did.