Ulric Skakki didn’t overstay his welcome, either. He waited impatiently with Hamnet for grooms to lead their horses out of the stables. “Well, Your Grace, what now?” he asked.
“I’m going home,” Hamnet said simply. “Anybody who tries to drag me out again will have to lay siege to the place . . . if it’s still standing, anyhow.”
“What if it’s not?” The adventurer was as full of annoying questions as ever. His twisted grin said he knew as much.
“God knows, in that case.” Hamnet shrugged. “Maybe I’ll keep on going south, the way I’ve talked about. Or maybe I’ll turn around and go up onto the steppe and see what kind of Bizogot I make.”
He was about to ask what Ulric intended to do, but Ulric beat him to the punch again: “And what about Marcovefa?”
“What about me?” Marcovefa asked from behind them. They both jumped. She went on, “Why do you ask somebody else? Do you think I cannot take care of myself? Are you so foolish?”
“Mm—I hope not.” For once in his life, Ulric sounded faintly embarrassed.
“He asked me what I wanted to do, and I told him I was going home,” Count Hamnet said. “Then he asked about you, and you answered before I could. I didn’t know what you were going to say, anyhow.”
“I will come with you. I will see your home. After all, you have seen mine,” Marcovefa said. “Whether I will stay after that”—she smiled—“we can both find out.”
Ulric nudged Hamnet. “Take her up on it,” he stage-whispered. “You won’t get a better bargain.”
“Do you think I’m too stupid to figure that out for myself?” Hamnet said.
“By your track record, yes,” Ulric answered. The worst of it was, Hamnet could hardly tell him he was wrong.
Marcovefa glared at the palace guards and grooms. “Where is my horse?” she demanded. “Do I have to start turning people into voles to get the rest of you to do what you should be doing anyhow?” The servitors all but stumbled over one another in their haste to do what she wanted.
“This is how it ends,” Ulric said, not sadly but in a matter-of-fact way. “We did what we set out to do—enough of it, anyway—and now we go back to taking care of things for ourselves.” He sketched a salute. “Luck, Thyssen. Maybe we’ll run into each other again one of these years.”
“Maybe we will. Nothing would surprise me any more.” Hamnet clasped the adventurer’s hand while grooms led out their horses—and Marcovefa’s.
“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!”