“Me, I’m heading south myself. I’ve had enough of ice to last me a long time,” Ulric said. He’d made noises like that before. Maybe he meant them. Or maybe he aimed to throw any possible pursuers off his trail.
He did ride south, which soon separated him from Hamnet and Marcovefa, who made for the east gate. Hamnet could have gone out the south gate just as well; his keep and the lands surrounding it lay far to the southeast. But Ulric Skakki had it right: breaking apart was how things ended.
Or so Hamnet thought, till somebody let out a deep bass yell behind him. He looked back over his shoulder. Here came Trasamund, bulling his horse through traffic so the locals glared at him. “You won’t get away from me like that,” the jarl boomed. “I guested you as long as I could up on the plains. About time you pay me back, the way a guest-friend should by rights.”
Hamnet laughed and sketched a salute. “At your service, Your Ferocity.”
Trasamund bowed in the saddle and started to laugh himself, but abruptly choked it off. “You may as well forget the title. Without a clan to rule, I don’t deserve it any more. The world’s a miserable place.”
“You’ve seen the Golden Shrine-you’ve gone into it-and you say that? Shame on you,” Marcovefa told him.
“It is,” Trasamund insisted. “We never would have seen the Golden Shrine if the Rulers hadn’t wrecked the Bizogots, and they started with my clan.”
“More to the world than your clan,” Hamnet said. “More to the world than Raumsdalia, too.”
“Oh? Then why aren’t you riding off to God knows where with Ulric Skakki?” Trasamund said. “You’re going back to the one little piece of ground that belongs to you. I’d go back to the tents of the Three Tusk clan, except they aren’t there any more.” He wiped away a tear, whether real or rhetorical Count Hamnet wasn’t sure.
“You’re welcome to come along with us if you care to,” Hamnet said, as a guest-friend should. “My home is yours for as long as you care to stay there.”
The jarl bowed in the saddle again. “Well, I do thank you for that. And, like I said, I’ll take you up on it-for now, anyway. If I wander off one of these days, it won’t be on account of anything you’ve done. I don’t expect it will, I mean. But I don’t know if I can stay in one place the rest of my days.”
“Neither do I,” Marcovefa said.
“Well, neither do I,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “We’ll all find out. As long as I stay away from Nidaros-and as long as Nidaros’ troubles stay away from me-I suppose I’ll get along wherever I am.” He reached out and set a hand on Marcovefa’s arm. “The company is pretty good.”
“Are you trying to sweet-talk me?” she asked.
“Not right this moment,” Hamnet said. “When we stop to rest tonight, we’ll see how I do then.” By the way she laughed, he had a good chance of doing well.
But her laugh cut off as shouts and screams and the clash of blade against blade rang out behind them, from the direction of the palace. “Oh, God!” Trasamund said. “It’s starting already, isn’t it? Cursed fools didn’t waste any time.”
“What happens in a Bizogot clan when the jarl dies and nobody’s set to succeed him?” Hamnet asked. Trasamund grunted: as much of a concession as Hamnet was likely to get.
“What do we do now?” Marcovefa asked. The martial racket was getting louder and coming closer.
“We get out of here, quick as we can.” Hamnet urged his horse up into a trot. “The only thing worse than getting stuck in the middle of a war is getting stuck in the middle of a civil war.”
“That makes more sense than I wish it did,” Trasamund said. He and Marcovefa booted their horses forward, too.
To Hamnet’s relief, nobody at the eastern gate recognized him. “What’s going on back there?” a guard asked, pointing in the direction from which he and his companions had come. “Sounds like the whole world’s going crazy.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Hamnet looked as blank and innocent as he could. “All we want to do is get on our way before whatever it is catches up with us.”
“Smart,” the guard said solemnly.
One of the other soldiers at the gate said, “Somebody who went through a few minutes ago said the Emperor was leaving town again. That doesn’t seem right, does it? I mean, those stupid Rulers or whatever the demon they are haven’t given us so much trouble lately. Why would His Majesty want to leave now, then?”
Count Hamnet, Marcovefa, and Trasamund looked at one another. As if animated by the same puppeteer, they shrugged at the same time. Hamnet Thyssen lied straight-faced: “I don’t know anything about that, either.”
“We’ll all find out, I guess.” The guard eyed his colleagues, who nodded. He waved to Hamnet. “Pass on through.”
“Thanks.” This time, Hamnet was altogether sincere. Probably no one since the Golden Shrine had done him a bigger favor than this gate guard who waved him out of Nidaros. What was liable to happen in the capital over the next few days wouldn’t be pretty.
He and Marcovefa and Trasamund hadn’t got more than eight or ten yards out of the gate before one of the guards howled in dismay. Looking back over his shoulder, Hamnet saw the man had clapped a hand to his forehead: a theatrical gesture, but plainly heartfelt. “Those idiots! Those God-cursed idiots!” the guard cried. “They’ve started a fire!”
That only made Hamnet ride harder. He neither knew who they were nor wanted to find out. Whoever they were, he agreed with the guard: anybody who started a fire inside a city was an idiot.
“At least the Breath of God isn’t blowing,” Trasamund said.
If it were, whatever the Rulers hadn’t ruined in Nidaros might go up in flames. And . . . “I don’t think the maniac with a torch cared,” Hamnet said.
“Somebody ought to cut him in half and leave the pieces where people can see them,” Trasamund said. “That’s what we’d do up on the steppe. Anybody else who gets ideas can see what they’d cost him.”
“I hope somebody does,” Count Hamnet said. “But it isn’t my worry, thank God. Raumsdalia can sort it out without me.” He sat straighter on his horse, as if a heavy weight had lifted from his shoulders. “Have you got any idea how good it feels to be able to say that?”
“You can stay in your castle place for a while,” Marcovefa said shrewdly. “Sooner or later, though, the world will come looking for you again.”
Hamnet Thyssen didn’t argue with her; she was much too likely to be right. He just said, “Later, I hope.” He and Marcovefa and Trasamund rode away from Nidaros, and from the new plume of black smoke climbing above it.
Sweat ran down Marcovefa’s face. “Does it get this hot every summer down here?” she asked.
“Most summers, anyhow,” Hamnet said. He didn’t find the weather especially hot. But then, he hadn’t spent most of his life atop the Glacier.
“How do you stand it?” Marcovefa asked.
“It’s pretty warm, all right,” Trasamund added.
“All what you’re used to.” Hamnet left it there. “People who grow up south of here wouldn’t be able to stand the winters in the Bizogot country.” He didn’t say anything about the winters in Marcovefa’s homeland. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to stand those himself.
“More and more of these broad-leaved trees. I think they look funny.” Suddenly, Marcovefa turned into a connoisseur of forests, although she’d never so much as imagined a tree, broad-leaved or otherwise, till she descended from the Glacier. “What good are they?”