Her smile didn’t falter. All she said was, “I think you are right. They are also unlikely to stray.” One by one, the Raumsdalians and Bizogots dismounted. They queued up behind Count Hamnet. The horses hardly needed tethering. They seemed content to crop the grass growing outside the wall.
“You’ll be the first one in,” Ulric told Hamnet. “Someday, somebody’ll write your name in a history book.”
“Now tell me something that matters,” Hamnet said. Ulric chuckled. Hamnet walked through the door and into the Golden Shrine.
It was warm in there, not warm as if summer were here, but warm as if the Glacier had never rolled south, warm as if the Breath of God never blew. Some of the plants that grew in the courtyard lived far, far to the south, in lands where the Breath of God didn’t reach. Others Hamnet Thyssen had never seen before, on this side of the Glacier or the other.
He pointed to one of them. “Have those grown here since before the ice began to swell?” he asked.
“You might say so,” the priestess answered. “Or you might not.”
“Why do you talk in riddles?” Marcovefa demanded. “This is the Golden Shrine. This is the place where there should be answers, not more questions.”
“The answers are here,” the priestess assured her. “Whether you can understand them all . . . That, I fear, is one more question.” She smiled to show she wasn’t mocking Marcovefa.
More priestesses and priests came out to greet the awestruck newcomers. Like the first one, they might have been Raumsdalians or Bizogots . . . or they might not have. The one thing Hamnet was sure of was that they weren’t close kin to the Rulers.
As Hamnet had, Eyvind Torfinn pointed to some unfamiliar flowers. “Where do these come from?” he asked.
“Why, they grow here,” the priestess said.
“I see that, yes.” Earl Eyvind nodded. “But where did they come from before they grew here?”
“They grew out in the world before the Glacier came down,” the priestess replied. Her eyes twinkled as she waved to include her colleagues. “So did we. Things outside the Shrine have changed more than they have here.”
“How much more?” Eyvind asked. “Have you yourself been here since before the Glacier advanced?”
Put that way, the question sounded innocuous. What if he’d asked, Are you thousands and thousands of years old? That would have meant the same thing, but it wouldn’t have sounded the same. Oh, no-not even close.
“You had to call us forth,” the priestess said. “If you hadn’t, we would have gone on in near-nothingness till someone else did. A day? A month? A year? A century? Where we were, none of them mattered very much. We noticed-about the way you would notice an itch. After we scratched, it was gone. And once it was gone, it was forgotten.”
“Could the Rulers have, uh, called you forth?” Hamnet Thyssen used her term for it, having no better one of his own.
The priestess frowned. “I do not like to say anything is impossible-the fullness of time often makes a mockery of the word. But I will say, knowing what I know of the Rulers, that the idea strikes me as most unlikely.”
“What do you know of the Rulers?” Trasamund asked. “If you’re so mighty, why didn’t you do something about them?”
“Those are two separate questions,” a priest remarked, coming up beside the priestess who’d done all the talking till now. He had a handsome face and a light, pleasant voice. He didn’t seem dangerous. Hamnet wondered how much that proved. Very little, unless he missed his guess. The man went on, “Which would you rather we answer?”
“Either,” Trasamund said. “Both.”
“No.” Ulric Skakki shook his head. “Tell us why you didn’t do something about the Rulers.”
“How do you know we didn’t?” the priest said, smiling. “They were stronger than you in almost every way. Yet you prevailed. How?”
“Because I found a spell that poured Sudertorp Lake out onto them,” Marcovefa answered proudly.
The priest didn’t lose his smile. “And how do you think that spell came to you?” he asked. “What did you know of lakes, living up atop the Glacier all your life?”
How did he know that? Marcovefa hadn’t said anything about it, not in his hearing. Did he recognize her dialect? That was the only thing that occurred to Hamnet, but it also struck him as unlikely. The Golden Shrine had lain under Sudertorp Lake all the time Marcovefa’s folk lived up there . . . hadn’t it?
Or maybe these priests and priestesses were simply wizards who put not only the rulers but also Marcovefa to shame. Marcovefa might have thought the same thing. “If you can give me that spell without my knowing it, why don’t you rule the world instead of staying under a lake?” she asked.
“Because we have enough sense not to want to rule it,” the priest answered. The priestess beside him nodded.
Hamnet Thyssen hoped the man in the golden robe spoke the truth. If the fellow didn’t . . . Well, what can you do about it? Hamnet asked himself. He didn’t see anything. What could a butterfly do about a mammoth? Try not to be there when its feet came down, that was all.
Ulric Skakki still held a small, tight smile on his face-the smile, perhaps, of a man fighting hard not to be impressed, or not to show how impressed he was. “Now you’re in trouble,” he told the priest. “Now you don’t have ice or water covering you up any more. Now all the cursed fools in the world will make tracks for this place, expecting you to show them how to be wise.” His grin grew even tighter and more self-mocking as he added, “We’re here, after all.”
“They will be disappointed,” the priest said.
“Fools often are,” the priestess agreed. “But not all of you here are fools. If you were, you would not have done what you did.”
Not all of us? Hamnet wondered. He also wondered-and knew he would wonder for the rest of his life-how much they’d really done themselves. He couldn’t know for certain, and he couldn’t blindly accept whatever answers he got here. He knew he was a fool, but he hoped he wasn’t that kind of fool.
“Here is one thing more for you to think about,” the priest said. “No one takes away from the Golden Shrine even a barleycorn more than he brought to it.”
“I knew a verse to that effect,” Eyvind Torfinn exclaimed proudly.
Ulric bowed to the man in the golden robe. One of his eyebrows quirked as he straightened. “You can say that. I may even believe you when you do. But do you think it will do you any good? Do you think fools will pay any attention? If they did, by God, they wouldn’t be fools.”
“Well, we will worry about that when the time comes.” The priest’s voice stayed mild. “It has not come yet.”
Eyvind Torfinn had gone over to another priest and was doing his best to talk the man’s ears off. Hamnet had never seen him so excited. Well, here he had his heart’s desire. With some men, that was one particular woman. With others, it was gold and jewels piled high. All Earl Eyvind had wanted was to find the Golden Shrine. He’d never dreamt he would, but now he had.
Gudrid could also see that women weren’t the first thing on Eyvind’s mind. More particularly, she could see she wasn’t the first thing on his mind, or on anyone else’s. Hamnet could tell she didn’t fancy that. If she wasn’t the center of attention, she had trouble believing she was real.
Liv and Audun Gilli were talking with a priestess. The woman in the gold robe nodded and gestured. Liv looked entranced, Audun astonished. Maybe they wouldn’t take a barleycorn away with them, but Count Hamnet would have bet they were gaining something.