Mastodons roamed the woods by Hamnet’s castle in southeastern Raumsdalia. They ate acorns and chestnuts and other nuts along with leaves and roots. There wasn’t enough to support them, or the mammoths of the northern steppe, in these northern forests. That made the sight of eight or ten war mammoths coming through the firs and spruces toward him all the more jolting. They don’t belong here! his mind shouted. The Rulers on the mammoths’ backs didn’t care what he thought.
The invaders shouted to one another in their harsh, braying language. First one, then another, pointed straight at him. How they could pick him out from anybody else in the rear guard he didn’t know, but they could.
“You see?” Liv said quietly. She got I told you so into half as many words—not a bad trick.
Hamnet didn’t answer. What could he say? When the Rulers started shooting, all the arrows seemed to head straight for him. Every soldier on every battlefield since the beginning of time had to feel the same way, but Hamnet feared it was literally true this time.
He threw up his shield just in time to deflect one that would have got him in the face. The arrow skipped off the bronze facing and over his head. He breathed a sigh of relief. Then he wondered why he bothered. No matter what Marcovefa thought, whether he lived or died mattered little to him.
But he was too obstinate not to make the best fight he could. He shot a Ruler off a riding deer, then—more by luck than by design—hit a war mammoth in the trunk with another arrow. The woolly mammoth wore armor of leather dipped in boiling wax, as did a lot of the Rulers. It was almost as good as chain mail, and much lighter. But the mammoth’s masters hadn’t tried to armor that sinuous, flexible trunk (Hamnet wouldn’t have wanted to try, either).
And the trunk was as sensitive as a man’s nose, or perhaps as sensitive as his hands. The war mammoth trumpeted in pain and indignation. One of the men on its back patted it—roughly, through the boiled leather. Count Hamnet thought the Ruler meant to show sympathy: more than they were in the habit of doing for any men not of their own kind.
No good deed went unpunished. The mammoth could still use its wounded member. It plucked up the Ruler and threw him down in the snow in front of it. His terrified shriek cut off abruptly as the mammoth’s right foot crushed the life out of him. The great beast left one red footprint out of four for some little while after that. The other warriors who rode on it sat very quietly, trying their best not to remind it they were there.
“Well done!” Liv said warmly.
“It won’t matter much in the long run. We’ve got to pull back any which way,” Hamnet answered. He didn’t want her praising him. It reminded him of what they’d been not so long before. He hadn’t lain with a woman since Marcovefa went down. Wasn’t life complicated enough without fresh temptations?
An arrow zipped past his head, venomously close. He realized what a bad position he was in to be worrying about any kind of temptations, fresh, salted, or pickled.
Then one of the Raumsdalians in the rear guard pointed and exclaimed, “What the demon’s that?”
For a moment, Hamnet Thyssen thought it was nothing but blowing snow. Then he realized that, while it was blowing snow, it wasn’t nothing but blowing snow. It was blowing snow and sorcery. The sorcery packed it together tighter than blowing snow had any right to get, and gave it a shape distinct from the randomly blowing snow all around it. That shape was much too much like a man’s. But it was bigger than a man had any business being, and it had much larger arms.
It also had an awareness to it, an awareness that Hamnet immediately thought of as wolfish. Why, he couldn’t have said, not consciously. The feeling welled up from the place that made his balls want to crawl up into his belly and his hair stand straight on the back of his neck.
Not only that, its awareness centered on him, or perhaps aimed at him. Those long, snowy arms outstretched, it strode purposefully in his direction. It left no footprints, red or otherwise. He might have known all along that it sought his life in particular. Part of him had known all along: the part that made his balls crawl up and his hackles rise.
He nocked an arrow and let fly. It was a shot he could have been proud of—straight through the heart, if a snow dev il had a heart. Evidently not, for it didn’t fall.
It did laugh at him. Its laughter was winter wind congealed: all the cold and emptiness in the world, boiled down to a pint. Count Hamnet had pierced its heart without harming it. The snow dev il’s laughter pierced his heart, too, pierced it and almost froze it shut.
Don’t be foolish, he thought. You did that to yourself years ago.
Before he could even wonder what he meant, Liv started a spell. It was in a dialect of the Bizogot language so old-fashioned, he could hardly follow it. He would rather have tried to gallop away, though he had no guarantee his horse could outrun a thing half made of gale.
Then Liv switched to urgent Raumsdalian: “Quick! Shoot it again!”
“What good will that do? What good will anything do?” Yes, the snow dev il had done its best to freeze Hamnet’s heart, and its best was better than he’d dreamt possible.
“Shoot it!” Liv slapped his face.
His shocked bellow wasn’t so loud or so shrill as the war mammoth’s had been when he shot it, but was no less startled, no less outraged. He almost shot Liv. But instead he drove another arrow through the snow devil—easy now, when it was so close.
As chunks of ice broke to start an avalanche, did they scream? If they did, they surely let out a cry like the one that ripped from the snow dev il when Hamnet’s second arrow struck. This shaft, unlike the one that had gone before it, wounded the sorcerous apparition. No—it slew.
Wind had made the snow dev il coalesce. And wind tore it to pieces in the blink of an eye. One heartbeat, it was about to lay hold of Count Hamnet. What would have happened then, he didn’t know: only that it would have been nothing good. But the snow dev il was gone the next heartbeat, gone as if it never existed.
“Well shot!” Liv yelled.
“Well spelled!” Hamnet yelled back.
Somewhere among the Rulers, a shriek almost as full of torment as the snow dev il’s burst from a man’s throat. Maybe the snow dev il’s throat was meant for such sounds; a man’s assuredly wasn’t. How much of himself had the enemy wizard poured into his sorcerous creation? Enough to ruin him—worse than ruin him—when it was all lost at once.
But for that shriek, Hamnet might have kissed Liv, or she him. With it still echoing inside them, they both fought shy of that. The torment it held put out passion the same way a brass candle-snuffer dampened flame.
A nod sufficed Hamnet, then. “You did what you needed to do,” he told her. She nodded, her face half proud, half horrified at what she’d unwittingly inflicted on the Rulers’ sorcerer.
“I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone—not even one of those people,” Liv said with shudder.
Count Hamnet grunted. “He wouldn’t waste any grief on you.”
“Even so,” Liv insisted. Remembering what the other wizard sounded like after the snow dev il perished, Hamnet decided she had a point.
Another arrow snarled through the air between him and Liv. Maybe the archer who loosed it couldn’t decide which of them he would sooner have killed. Maybe the next bowman wouldn’t have any trouble making up his mind. Or maybe he’d just turn out to be a better shot. “Do you think we’ve given the main force enough time to get away?” Hamnet Thyssen asked.
“Yes. And I think you had better get away,” Liv answered. “That snow fiend or whatever you want to call it only makes things plainer—the Rulers want you dead, and they don’t care what they do to get you that way.”
Hamnet grunted again. He didn’t think he was important in the grand scheme of things, and resented that anyone should think so when he didn’t. Ordering the Raumsdalians and Bizogots with him to fall back meant he didn’t have to dwell on what anybody else thought.