“I’m not surprised,” Hamnet said. “It’s a small plant. It grows on trees. I don’t even know whether the Rulers knew about it before they came down into the Empire. Maybe they learned about it from a Raumsdalian wizard, or maybe they found out about it by themselves. I don’t suppose we’ll ever find out. Any which way, they used it on you, and for a long time all the magic we could think of to use didn’t do a thing against it.”
“And you ended up . . . screwing me awake?” Marcovefa laughed. “Why didn’t you think of that sooner?”
“I couldn’t believe it would work.” Hamnet heard the dull embarrassment in his own voice. “Well, I owe Trasamund an apology. I won’t be sorry to give it to him, either.” He muttered something under his breath.
“What is that?” she asked.
“I said, it didn’t seem right to take you when you weren’t there to know what I was doing. Almost like taking an animal.”
That made her laugh again, this time in surprise. “All these big animals you have down here-you could do something like that. I never thought of it before. But this worked, so I don’t mind. And if it didn’t work, I wouldn’t mind then, either, because I wouldn’t know.”
“I finally figured that out for myself,” Hamnet answered. “It was about the last thing we had left to try.”
“Can I get something to eat now?” Marcovefa asked. “With my belly full, I will figure out how to pay the Rulers back.”
“If you can get up, they should have something over at the fires,” Hamnet said. “If you can’t get up, I’ll bring you something. You need to get your strength back-it’s been a while.”
She tried. She plainly didn’t have an easy time of it, but she managed. “How long has it been?” she asked, wobbling. Hamnet told her. She shook her head in disbelief. “And I don’t remember anything after I got hit, not anything at all. I wondered how I came to the tent, not how half a season passed away. But my body tells me half a season did.”
“Well, come on,” Hamnet said. “You’re here again, and a good thing, too. Not having you told us how much we need you, by God.” He hesitated, then added, “And I’ve missed you.”
“I would have missed you,” Marcovefa said. “I didn’t miss anything.”
Hamnet made do with that. He left the tent first, then held out his hand to help Marcovefa. She blinked against the light when she emerged, and swayed like a sapling with the Breath of God blowing. But she stubbornly stayed on her feet.
They’d slaughtered a musk ox the night before. Chunks of the carcass lay in the snow. No worry about keeping meat at this time of year, only about keeping scavengers away from it. Pretty soon, when the sun turned, the weather would warm up-but the scavengers wouldn’t go away.
Ulric Skakki was worrying a couple of ribs off a larger slab of meat. Alert as a lion, he looked up the instant he registered motion out of the corner of his eye. But, while motion didn’t surprise him, one of the people making the motion did. “What have we here?” he said, jumping to his feet and giving Marcovefa a courtier’s bow. “The face is familiar, but the name. . . . It’ll come to me, I’m sure.” Then he raised an eyebrow in Hamnet’s direction. “And?”
One word was plenty. “And Trasamund turned out to be right,” Hamnet said. “Who would have imagined it?”
“Everyone but you thought he might be,” Ulric answered. “You see? You have a magic wand after all.”
That made Marcovefa laugh till she almost fell over. It made Hamnet’s ears feel as if they were on fire. “How much more meat is left on that slab?” he asked gruffly. “Enough for her and me?”
“Oh, I expect so.” Ulric ambled over to toast the ribs he’d taken.
Hamnet cut off two for Marcovefa and then two more for himself. “I could eat these raw,” Marcovefa said. “We would do that every so often, up on the Glacier. Not always enough dried dung for a fire. Raw meat isn’t bad.”
“I’ve done it, too,” Hamnet said. “Go ahead, if you care to. I like them better cooked, though.”
“Well, so do I.” Marcovefa made her way over toward the fire. She still swayed, but she managed. Hamnet followed. He was ready to grab her if she faltered, but she didn’t. He judged she was running more on determination than strength. Well, determination would serve, at least for a little while.
She didn’t cook her meat for very long, but tore at it with strong white teeth. Hamnet let his char a bit more on the outside. He wasn’t so desperately empty as she was. He and Liv had done their best to feed her while she was beyond herself, but he knew they hadn’t done well enough.
“Ha!” Trasamund shouted the moment he saw Marcovefa. The jarl pointed a beefy forefinger at Hamnet Thyssen. “I told you so. Took you long enough to listen, didn’t it?”
“You tell me all kinds of things,” Hamnet said. “I suppose you’re bound to be right every once in a while.” So much for an apology.
Trasamund’s answer was brief, definite, and highly obscene. Had he said it in a different way, Hamnet would have tried to kill him. As things were, he only grinned. Marcovefa giggled. She could do that at the same time as he ate. Anything noisier might have made her slow down.
That shout from the Bizogot made other people stick their heads out of their tents to find out what was going on. “They might be so many marmots when a fox yips,” Marcovefa said. She had an excuse to pause: she’d stripped one rib of meat and was about to start on the other. “I’ll want more after this,” she told Hamnet.
“Nobody will stop you,” he said.
But he wasn’t quite right. Trasamund came over and gave Marcovefa a big, smacking kiss. After he broke away from her, musk-ox grease gleamed on his lips. Liv embraced her. So did Runolf Skallagrim and Audun Gilli. Everybody wanted to make much of her. She wanted to eat, and she did.
Ulric Skakki nudged Hamnet. “Nice to have hope again, isn’t it?” the adventurer said in a low voice.
“Hope.” Count Hamnet tasted the word. In some surprise, he nodded: it seemed even richer and more mouth-filling than musk-ox marrow. “Hope.” He said it again, savoring the taste. “Yes, by God. It is!”
“We’ve been a sad, raggedy lot lately-plague take me if we haven’t. Only the stubborn buggers stuck at all,” Trasamund said. “Well, things will look better soon. You can boil me for an egg if they don’t.”
“You can boil all of us if they don’t,” Hamnet said. The Bizogot jarl didn’t try to tell him he was wrong.
The fuss over Marcovefa finally brought Eyvind Torfinn and Gudrid out of their tent. “Well, well!” the scholarly earl said. “What do we have here? Hale again, are you? What splendid news!”
If Gudrid thought the news splendid, she hid it very well. She glanced over to Hamnet. “Dead in bed, just like you,” she said.
“Not dead-just asleep. And better that than a foe in bed,” Hamnet retorted. They eyed each other with complete mutual loathing. Not for the first time, Hamnet wondered why she didn’t back the Rulers since he opposed them. The only answer he’d ever found was that they likely didn’t want anything to do with her . . . even in bed. She couldn’t care for that. Well, too bad.
“I am hale, yes. I have Hamnet to thank that I am hale,” Marcovefa said to Earl Eyvind. She eyed Gudrid, who suddenly lost her bluster. This side of murder, Hamnet was unlikely to do much to her. Magic offered Marcovefa so many unpleasant possibilities.