Beyong the Gap

XII

WE will ride south and east," Eyvind Torfinn said, no irony audible in his voice. "We will let the other Bizogot jarls and the Raumsdalian Emperor know that the Rulers follow behind us. We will make sure our lands are ready to meet you as you deserve."

"Is good," Roypar said. "Is very good." By Samoth's expression, he didn't think it was very good, but he held his peace. Roypar led here. Anyone else challenged him at his own peril.

Parsh's body lay where it had fallen. "Will you burn him?" Hamnet Thyssen asked. "What is your custom with your dead?"

"He will lie there till the foxes and bears and tigers have feasted on him," Samoth answered. "He failed as a man-he deserves nothing better than to feed beasts. No doubt his spirit, when it is born again, will be born into the body of such a one."

"You believe in reincarnation, then?" Eyvind Torfinn asked eagerly. "Have you evidence to support your belief?"

Trasamund and Hamnet Thyssen had to drag Eyvind away from the wizard of the Rulers. If they hadn't, he would not have ridden south and east. He would have stayed there and plied Samoth with questions for as long as the sorcerer could stand it.

Hamnet glanced over to Roypar. The chieftain looked unmistakably pleased with himself. The Rulers thought of themselves as conquerors beyond compare. Had he lain with a woman of a lesser breed the night before? Hamnet guessed he had. Gudrid showed nothing one way or the other. She was good at making her indiscretions discreet-unless she dropped the mask and showed them off.

Hamnet looked away. She laughed softly. So she knew what he was thinking, did she? She'd always been good at that. Hamnet Thyssen turned his back, which only made her laugh again, louder this time. Too bad, he thought.

Roypar really did let them ride away. That surprised Count Hamnet. It seemed to surprise and dismay Samoth, who muttered into his thicket of beard. The way he muttered sparked suspicion in Hamnet even before the Rulers' encampment dropped below the horizon behind the travelers. He rode over first to Audun Gilli and then to Liv, asking each of them, "Is the wizard back there tracking us by magic? Are we taking along some little spell that lets him spy on us?" He had to repeat himself, using Raumsdalian and then the Bizogots' language. Lie wished the two people among the travelers who knew sorcery could understand each other. As happened too often in life, what he wished for had nothing to do with what he got.

Ulric Skakki understood him both times he asked the question. "You have a nasty, distrustful turn of mind, your Grace," Ulric said-in the Bizogot language, a choice Hamnet found interesting. "I only wish I'd thought of that myself."

"Don't worry," Hamnet said. "You would have before long."

"That kind of spell is possible, I suppose." Audun Gilli didn't seem to think Samoth had actually done such a thing.

Liv did. "Yes, of course. A sorcerous flea, you might say, coming along with us. Maybe it will bite, too, when the time is right."

"Can you find it?" Count Hamnet asked. "Can you kill it?" Again, he had to use the mammoth-herders' language and then his own.

So did Ulric Skakki when he added, "Can you find it and kill it without letting Samoth know it's gone?" Hamnet Thyssen thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. Now he was angry that Ulric had an idea before he did.

"Who knows what all shamanry the strangers have?" Liv said. "They think it is stronger than ours. They may be right-remember how Samoth shattered Audun's opal. But we can try."

"What does she say?" Audun Gilli asked. "I heard my name in that, whatever it was." When Count Hamnet translated for him, he sniffed. "I am sure I could have stopped Samoth if I'd been looking for him to do that. Liv worries over nothing."

Now the Bizogot shaman wondered why Audun was using her name. Hamnet Thyssen turned Audun's words into her tongue. She sniffed on a note almost identical to the one the Raumsdalian sorcerer had used. "He says I worry over nothing, does he? Well, he thinks there is nothing to worry about, and that worries me."

It worried Hamnet Thyssen, too. Having the two sorcerers squabble again also worried him, the more so since they had to do their squabbling through him or through Ulric. Hoping to distract them, he said, "The flea," first in the Bizogot language, then in Raumsdalian.

"Trust a Bizogot to think of fleas," Audun said. Since he was scratching as he spoke-he didn't seem to notice he was doing it-he proved Raumsdalians weren't immune to the pests. Count Hamnet s itches already told him that.

"Never mind the snide cracks," Ulric said. "Can you find the magic?" Now he used Raumsdalian, and didn't translate for Liv. She sent Hamnet a look of appeal. He didn't translate, either. She glared at him.

"If it is here, it should be simple enough to find," Audun Gilli said.

"Please go ahead and do it, then," Hamnet Thyssen said, and then, to Liv, "I would also like you to check." By now, he was resigned to going back and forth between languages.

"I will do it if Audun fails." The Bizogot shaman glanced over at the Raumsdalian wizard. "I wish we could understand each other. It might mean much if we have to work together. Would you teach me Raumsdalian, Hamnet Thyssen?"

"If you like," Count Hamnet answered. "You will have to learn the fancy magical terms from Audun, though. I might make mistakes, and mistakes in that kind of thing can be dangerous. I am no wizard, but at least I know it."

"You're right," Liv said. "I should have started learning your language a long time ago, but you and I didn't always get on well."

"Ulric Skakki could have taught you, or Eyvind Torfinn-or Trasamund, come to that," Hamnet said.

"I think you are more patient than they are," Liv said. Hamnet doubted whether anyone in the world was more patient than Eyvind Torfinn. He didn't want to say so, not when Liv paid him such a compliment.

Audun Gilli, meanwhile, was rummaging through the pouches he wore on his belt. He muttered and mumbled as he rummaged-all in all, he might have posed for a picture of a distracted wizard. At last, though, he came up with what he needed and seemed to come back to the real world.

"Here is the dried head of a plover," he said, and held it up. Hamnet Thyssen looked away from the sunken eye sockets. Audun Gilli went on, "It has the virtue that, if used with the proper spell, it prevents deception."

"What does he say?" Liv asked. Hamnet translated for her. She nodded, though a little doubtfully. "We use a different bird for what sounds like the same charm," she said, "and a certain stone as well." She shrugged. "Well, let us see what his shamanry shows."

Audun Gilli held up the plover's head in his left hand. He made passes with his right while chanting in Raumsdalian almost too old-fashioned for Count Hamnet to understand. A moment later, Hamnet blinked. Were the bird's eyes suddenly bright and shiny and full of life? So it seemed.

And the dead, dried plover's head cried out, too-a shrill piping, such as the live bird might have used when frightened. "Well, well." Audun Gilli's voice rose in surprise. "We do have ourselves a flea, you might say."

"Where?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.

"That will take another charm," the wizard replied. He might have asked the plover's head a question. And it seemed to answer him, and to twist in his hand to point the way. It pointed straight toward the horse Gudrid was riding. "Well, well," Audun Gilli said again. "This could be, ah, awkward."

"Yes." Hamnet Thyssen was even less eager to break the news to his former wife than Audun seemed to be. Liv couldn't do it; she and Gudrid had no language in common. Hamnet looked at Ulric Skakki. "Would you be so kind as to . . . ?"

"I'll remember you in my nightmares," Ulric said with a grimace. But he rode over to Gudrid. She accepted his arrival as no less than her due. The way she looked at the world, everything revolved around her and paid her tribute.

Ulric spoke. Hamnet Thyssen couldn't make out exactly what he said; despite morbid curiosity, the Raumsdalian noble didn't go close enough to eavesdrop. Count Hamnet did note the exact instant when Ulric shifted from pleasantries and small talk to the reason he'd gone over to Gudrid. She stiffened in the saddle, then started to laugh. "But that's ridiculous!" she said-Hamnet had no trouble hearing her.

Shaking his head, Ulric Skakki went on talking quietly, doing his best to explain why it wasn't ridiculous. His best wasn't going to be good enough. Hamnet knew his former wife well enough to be sure of that.

And he was right. Gudrid shook her head, too. "I don't know where you get your ideas," she said, "but you can go and put them back there again, because you don't have the faintest notion what you're talking about." She made as if to ride away from Ulric Skakki.

He was not so easily detached. Unlike Gudrid, he still didn't make a lot of noise. But he did point in Eyvind Torfinn's direction. Earl Eyvind was chatting with Jesper Fletti, and not paying any particular attention to Gudrid at the moment. Hamnet Thyssen had a pretty good notion of what Ulric was saying. Don't be difficult, or I'll tell your husband what you were doing last night. If that wasn't it, Count Hamnet would have been astonished.

Gudrid was astonished, but not in any pleasant way. "You wouldn't dare," she said shrilly. That was the wrong answer to give Ulric Skakki. He twitched the reins and guided his horse away from hers, toward Eyvind Torfinn's. "Wait!" Gudrid screeched.

Courteously, Ulric did wait. The look Gudrid sent him was anything but courteous. Ulric was either made of stern stuff or a fine actor-maybe both-because he seemed undamaged.

"Do what you want to do," Gudrid snapped, and she might have added, And demons take you afterwards.

Again, Ulric affected not to notice. He bowed in the saddle and said something else too low for Hamnet to catch. Then he turned and called, "Liv, sweetheart, would you do the honors here?" He used Raumsdalian, even though Liv didn't speak it. But she had no trouble with his come-hither gesture. And Gudrid, of course, understood both the gesture and the words. She had plenty of reasons for disliking Liv, chief among them that the Bizogot shaman was the only other woman in the party. And now Liv was going to do something sorcerous around her, and she couldn't stop it? She had to hate that.

Hamnet Thyssen almost sent Ulric a formal salute. The adventurer had found a very smooth way to avenge himself.

Liv smiled at Gudrid, and kept the smile although Gudrid didn't return it. Even without a language in common, Liv was bound to know some of what Gudrid felt. What did she feel herself? Hamnet had never had the nerve to ask her.

For the moment, the Bizogot woman seemed all business. She murmured to herself and made several swift passes at Gudrid and the horse. "Ah!" she said brightly. "There it is." Hamnet and Ulric understood her. Gudrid didn't. Liv pointed at Gudrid s tunic. She gestured. "Take it off."

"What?" Gudrid didn't speak the Bizogot language, but that wasn't all that kept her from understanding. Ulric Skakki translated for her. "What?" she said again. "Take off my clothes for this chit of a girl? No!"

If you didn't take off your clothes for the Ruler, we wouldn't have this worry now, Hamnet thought. He almost said it out loud. To his surprise, he didn't. He liked Eyvind Torfinn better than he’d ever imagined he could, and didn't care to shame the older man.

Liv had no trouble figuring out what No! meant, even if she knew hardly any Raumsdalian. She didn't argue with Gudrid. She just dragged her off her horse. Gudrid let out a startled squawk. Both women thumped down on the dirt. Gudrid tried to fight back, but she'd never really learned how. Liv knew exactly what she was doing. Gudrid screamed and swore, which helped her not a bit. The Bizogot shaman quickly and efficiently stripped the tunic off her-and if she gave her a black eye and a split lip while she did it, wasn't she entitled to a little fun?

Gudrid was bare beneath the thick wool tunic. Hamnet Thyssen set his jaw and looked away. He knew what Gudrid's breasts were like-knew them by sight, knew them by touch, knew them by taste. He also knew he would never touch or taste them again. And he had no interest in seeing them again under such circumstances-or maybe he couldn't stand to look.

Liv seemed to care about as much for Gudrid's charms as she would have for those of a musk ox. She murmured a spell over the tunic. Suddenly, she stiffened. "Here it is!" she said. "Just a little fetish, but it will do."

"What on earth is going on?" Eyvind Torfinn said.

Ulric Skakki and Audun Gilli did the explaining. Despite his regard for Earl Eyvind, Hamnet didn't have the heart-or the stomach-for the job. He also wanted to involve himself with Gudrid as little as he could. She screeched at her husband, but warily. She didn't want him to know what she'd been doing the night before. No one else seemed eager to tell him, but that didn't mean no one would.

Eyvind Torfinn plucked at his beard. "This would have been easier if you'd given the shaman your tunic without kicking up such a fuss, my dear," he said at last.

"But she was rude! She was horrid!" Gudrid said.

Liv, meanwhile, had detached the fetish and was eyeing it with what looked like professional admiration. "An ermine's eye and a young hare's ear," she said. "The spell that animates them is not one I would use, but I am sure it will do the job. Samoth has no trouble spying on us as long as we carry this, no trouble at all. He will know just where we are."

"Are there any more charms on the tunic?" Eyvind Torfinn said in the Bi-zogot tongue. "If there are none, will you please give it back to my wife and let her dress?"

"Oh, very well." Liv, plainly, didn't think Gudrid deserved to wear the tunic. She all but threw it at the Raumsdalian woman. Gudrid pulled it on. The look she gave Liv would have melted lead.

"You may want to be careful," Hamnet Thyssen said in the Bizogot tongue. "You have embarrassed her. She will look for revenge."

"She is welcome to look," Liv said indifferently. "People look for all kinds of things. Whether they find them .. . That is another story."

Audun Gilli came up and examined the fetish. Slowly, he nodded. "Oh, yes. Not one I recognize in detail, but the principle is plain." He scratched his head. As often happened, what started as a thoughtful gesture turned into a hunt. After crushing something between his nails, he went on, "We should not destroy this."

"He is right," Liv said after Hamnet translated. "That Samoth would surely sense it if we did."

Audun Gilli began to whistle. The tune was strange and discordant- hardly a tune at all, Hamnet Thyssen thought till a short-eared arctic fox walked up to Audun. The wizard patted the animal as if it were a dog. It let him touch it; it even wagged its tail. Then he took a rawhide lashing and tied the fetish around the fox's neck. That done, he whistled a different tune. The fox suddenly seemed to realize where it was and the company it was keeping. With a horrified yip, it dashed away.

"Not bad," Liv said. "Not bad at all. The shaman of the Rulers will realize something is wrong when he tries to listen with the hare's ear, but that may take a while. We spoke mostly Raumsdalian here, and he does not know that tongue."

After translating again, Hamnet Thyssen said, "Their wizard does not admit to knowing our tongue, anyhow. Does Roypar speak Raumsdalian, Gudrid?"

"No," she answered automatically. Then she backtracked. "I mean, how the demon do I know whether he does or not?"

"You have a better chance of knowing than any of the rest of us," Count Hamnet said in a voice with no expression at all to it. The glare Gudrid sent him made the ones shed given Liv seem downright loving by comparison.

Eyvind Torfinn looked as if he wanted to ask questions. If he had, Hamnet wouldn't have lied to him, though he knew the older man might not believe everything-or anything-he said. His home truths would have made Gudrid even happier than she was already. But Earl Eyvind seemed to think better of it. Maybe he would question Gudrid in private. Maybe, as he looked to have done before, he would decide he didn't really want to know. Whatever his reasons, he stayed quiet.

The travelers resumed their journey toward the Gap. Samoth could not spy on them any more. Hamnet Thyssen hoped he couldn't, anyhow.

Summer up in the Bizogot country was a brief and fragile flower, one that bloomed late and withered early. Even in and around Nidaros, the Breath of God could blight crops in almost any month of the year. Knowing all that, Hamnet was still shocked by how fast the weather turned-and turned on the travelers-here beyond the Glacier.

Birds streaming south were the first warning. Only a few days after they fled, the earliest snow flurries dappled the plain. The sun came out again and melted the snow, but more fell a couple of days after that. The sun came out once more. This time, though, the snow stuck longer. Hamnet Thyssen could see his breath even at noon. Something in the sky had changed. Leaden was too strong a word, but he could tell at a glance it would not be warm again for a long time.

Trasamund took snow in stride. But even he kept looking north. "We want to get as far as we can before the first blizzard catches us," he said.

"Blizzards!" Gudrid made it into a curse-blizzards did curse this northern country. "Why did I ever decide to come here?"

To drive me mad, Hamnet Thyssen thought. That was not mere sarcasm; he was all too sure he had the right of it. But she'd finally had more discomfort and danger than even tormenting him was worth. She should have thought of that sooner. They were still on the far side of the Gap. She might need to go through quite a bit more before they got back to the Bizogot country, let alone anything resembling civilization.

The travelers had to stop to let a herd of buffalo pass in front of them. As Trasamund had said back in Sigvat's chambers, these were bigger beasts than the ones that roamed the prairies of the Raumsdalian Empire. They were a lighter brown than their-cousins?-on the other side of the Glacier. And their horns, at least three times as long as those of the animals Hamnet Thyssen knew, swept out and forward instead of curling up.

"We don't want to spook them," Ulric Skakki said. His foxy features twisted in distaste. "That could be … unpleasant."

"They'd squash us flatter than a herd of mammoths could," Trasamund said. "There are a lot more of them."

Packs of wolves trotted along with the buffalo, prowling after stragglers. Again as Trasamund had said, the wolves on this side of the Glacier were smaller than dire wolves. But they seemed quicker and more agile, like woods wolves back home. Hamnet Thyssen also saw a … a tiger, the Rulers had called it. It might be able to pull down a buffalo all by itself. But it moved aside when the wolves came too close. It could kill several of them, without a doubt. Just as certainly, it was no match for a pack.

An hour and a half went by before the last stragglers from the buffalo herd ambled past. "Well," Eyvind Torfinn remarked, "we have all the dung we need-or we would il it were dry."

Trasamund didn't see the joke. "Plenty more that's been on the ground for a while." When it came to survival, he was altogether singleminded.

And he was right. The travelers had no trouble finding fuel for the evening's fire. As usual, they set out sentries all around. Maybe Roypar's wasn't the only band of Rulers in this part of the plain. Maybe other kinds of men lived around here, too. Strangers couldn't be sure. Better to take no chances.

One of the guardsmen who'd come north with Jesper Fletti and Gudrid shook Hamnet Thyssen awake in the middle of the night. "Sorry, your Grace," the man murmured, "but I'm glad to get some sleep myself."

"It's all right," Hamnet said around a yawn. "Well, it's not all right, but it's necessary." He yawned again, and climbed to his feet to make sure he didn't go back to sleep. He went out and took a position a bowshot away from the fire. It was cool out there, but not really cold; they seemed to be between storms.

But another one was coming. The gibbous moon wore a halo. That meant rain or snow down on the other side of the Glacier; he had no reason to think things worked differently here. And the air smelled and tasted damp. Tomorrow afternoon, maybe tomorrow night. . . That was his guess.

Off in the distance, a wolf howled, and then another and another and another, till it sounded as if a chorus of demons were howling at the haloed moon. These wolves had voices higher and shriller than those of the dire wolves he was used to, which to his ear only made them all the more unearthly. I suppose they're wolves, he thought uneasily. With only his ears to guide him, he couldn't prove they weren't demons. But he'd seen wolves trailing the long-horned buffalo, and he hadn't seen any demons-or he couldn't prove he had, anyhow.

The chorus of yowls and yips and howls quieted, then picked up again, even louder and wilder than before. It went on and on. Hamnet Thyssen looked back toward his comrades. How anyone could sleep through that hellish racket was beyond him, but they seemed to have no trouble.

Once he thought he heard an owl through the wolves' din. That really alarmed him, where the wolves only annoyed him. The wolves might possibly be demons, but even if they were he had no reason to think they were more interested in the travelers from the far side of the Glacier than in, say, the Rulers. A seeming owl, though, might be Samoth the wizard in owl's plumage flying out after the travelers on discovering his fetish had failed.

Hamnet Thyssen peered into the night, looking now this way, now that. Try as he would, he couldn't spot the owl, if owl it was. He muttered to himself, wondering what that meant. Was it just an owl that called once and then fell silent? Or was it Samoth mocking him, mocking all the travelers, and trying to spook him?

If it was the wizard, he was doing a good job. Hamnet chuckled mirthlessly. Even if it wasn't the wizard, he was still doing a good job.

Because Count Hamnet was searching for the owl that might or might not have been there, he didn't notice soft footsteps behind him till they drew very close. Then he whirled, hand flashing to the hilt of his sword. "Who the-?" he blurted, and then went on, "Oh, it's you." He felt foolish.

"Yes, it's me," Liv said quietly. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you."

"It's all right," Hamnet said. "You shouldn't have startled me. I should have heard you coming sooner." Now he was angry at himself, not at the Bizogot shaman.

"The wolves woke me." She pointed back toward the fire, which had died back to embers. "The others are snoring away. I don't know how they do it."

"I was thinking the same thing not long ago," Count Hamnet said. "Did you hear the owl, too?"

Liv nodded. "I hope it was only an owl." Hamnet almost told her that thought matched his, too, but judged her too likely to know it already. She went on, "I think it was. But even if it wasn't, we've made Samoth work harder than he expected to. Showing him we're not to be despised can't hurt."

"I hadn't looked at it that way," Hamnet said. "Of course, he'll despise us anyway. We aren't of the Rulers, so how can he help it?"

"They make much of themselves, sure enough." Liv's voice was troubled. "I hope they don't have good reason for their bragging and boasting and preening."

"From what I've seen, people who brag a lot are usually trying to convince themselves even more than other people," Hamnet said.

"Yes, that's so. It's one of the things shamans find out about people." Liv cocked her head to one side. "How did you come to see it?"

"By getting to be as old as I am and keeping my eyes open," Hamnet answered with a shrug. "I don't know what else to tell you."

"Plenty of people older than you who never notice such things," the Bizogot shaman said.

Hamnet Thyssen shrugged. "Plenty of people are fools." He laughed harshly. "I'm a fool, too, but not that particular way. You can be a fool all kinds of different ways."

"How are you a fool?" Liv's voice was serious; she really meant the question.

But Hamnet Thyssen only laughed some more, on an even more bitter note than before. "How do you think? She's asleep over there by the fire."

Liv glanced back toward the rest of the travelers. "How long since the two of you parted?"

"Sometimes it seems like a thousand years. Sometimes it seems as if it happened this afternoon," he said. "Sometimes it seems like both at once. It's worst then."

"She is . .." Liv paused, looking for words. '"If she were a Bizogot, she wouldn't last long. You Raumsdalians have more room for useless people than we do."

"Gudrid's not useless." Hamnet Thyssen's mouth twisted. "Ask Eyvind Torfinn if you think I'm wrong. Ask Trasamund. Ask Audun Gilli. Go back and ask Roypar. God! You can ask me, too." He remembered the last time he'd lain with her. He hadn't known it would be the last then. I should have, he thought. She yawned when we finished, and she wasn't sleepy. She'd slipped out of the castle the next day. He hadn't seen her since, only heard about her . . . till Sigvat II summoned him to Nidaros.

In the pale moonlight, Liv's face was unreadable. "You never found another woman after that, plainly," she said.

"I sleep with women now and again. You know I do," Hamnet said.

"That isn't what I meant," she said. "You never found one who mattered to you."

"No. I never did," Hamnet Thyssen agreed. "I can't say I've looked very hard, though. If things go wrong once, that's bad. If things go wrong more than once . .. If things go wrong more than once, why do you go on living?"

"Why do you think they would go wrong?" Liv asked.

"Why? Because they already did once. I have practice being stupid, you might say." Hamnet tried to make a sour joke of it. Even with that, he was surprised to be saying as much as he was.

"Not all women are like Gudrid," Liv said.

"No doubt you're right," he answered. "But how do I tell beforehand? I didn't think Gudrid was like Gudrid, either, you know."

"Do you think I am like her?" Liv asked quietly.

He laughed once more, this time in sheer surprise. "No," he answered. "I can think of a lot of things I might say about you, but that isn't one of them."

"Well, then," she said.

Well, then-what? But he needed only a heartbeat to realize he was being thick. He put an arm around Liv. She sighed and pressed herself against him. "Are you sure?" he asked.

"How can anyone ever be sure?" she said. "The chance seems good, though. And if you don't bet, how do you expect to win?"

Hamnet Thyssen didn't look at things that way. To him, not betting meant you couldn't lose. He hadn't even thought of winning. He still didn't, not really. He wondered how badly he would get hurt, some time later on. But later didn't seem to matter, not right this minute. He bent his head to Liv-not very far, because she was a tall woman.

Nothing either one of them did after that was surprising-only the things men and women have done as long as there have been men and women. They surprised each other a few times, because neither of them knew the other that way. Those weren't bad surprises; they were both trying to see what pleased the other.

"Easy, there," Hamnet whispered after Liv dropped to her knees. "Not too much of that, or. . ."

She paused. "I wouldn't mind."

"I would," he said, and laid her down on the clothes they'd shed. She inhaled sharply when he went into her, and wrapped her arms and legs around him. He thought he would spend himself almost at once, especially after what she'd been doing, but instead he went on and on, almost as if he were outside himself. Liv's breath came short; her back arched. He covered her mouth with his when she started to cry out-that might have brought the other travelers on the run. Her joy came, and then, a moment later, his.

She kissed him on the end of the nose. Then she said, "You're squashing me," sounding, well, squashed.

"Sorry." He took his weight on his elbows and then leaned back onto his knees. All at once, he noticed it was chilly. It must have been chilly all along, but he'd had other things on his mind. "We'd better get dressed," he said.

"Yes, I suppose so." Liv seemed sorry, which made him feel about ten feet tall. Then she remarked, "That woman was the fool," which made him wonder why he didn't float off the ground and drift away on the breeze.

He glanced back toward the fire. No one was stirring around it. Either the other travelers hadn't noticed what was going on or they were too polite to let on that they had. Which didn't matter to Hamnet Thyssen. Hardly anything mattered to him right then.

"There. You see?" Liv effortlessly picked up the conversation. "It just. . . makes things better for a while."

"For a while," Hamnet admitted.

Liv laughed. "That's all it does," she said. "I'm not trying to steal your soul or anything like that."

"No, eh?" Hamnet Thyssen wanted to laugh, too, and happily, which didn't happen every day-or every month, either. "You may have anyhow." He meant it for a joke. It didn't come out like one.

She shook her head. "That wouldn't be good. I have enough trouble taking care of myself. I don't want to take care of anyone else."

"You'd better be careful," he said.

"Why?"

"If you aren't, we'll end up getting along. Who knows how much trouble that might cause?"

"Oh." Liv smiled. She squeezed his hand. "I'll take the chance. And now I think I'd better go back by the fire, before anyone else wakes up and notices I'm gone."

"Good idea, but I think people will notice anyway before long," Hamnet said.

"Do you? Why should they?"

"Because I'm going to be wandering around with a foolish grin on my face, and I've never done that before," he answered.

"I don't care who knows," Liv said. "I wouldn't have done it if I did. Do you?"

"When Gudrid finds out, she'll try to find some way to spoil things." For a moment, Count Hamnet sounded as mournful as he usually did.

"What can she do?" Liv sniffed scornfully.

Hamnet Thyssen only shrugged. Liv sniffed again, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and walked back toward the fire. He didn't want to let her go, but the moon and the slow-wheeling stars said he had to stay on watch a while longer.

Before he went back, clouds rolled out of the northwest and hid the moon and stars. After that, he was on his own guessing the hour. The storm he'd seen coming in the halo around the moon was here before he'd expected it.

He went back when he thought it was midnight and cautiously shook Ulric Skakki awake. Being cautious when waking Ulric was a good idea; the adventurer had a habit of rousing in a hurry, and with a weapon in his hand-sometimes with a weapon in each hand.

Here, he just grunted and groaned and yawned, much as Hamnet Thyssen might have. "Is it that time already?" he asked around another yawn.

"Somewhere close, anyhow." Hamnet waved at the cloudy sky. "We're going to get the bad weather sooner than I thought."

"It has that look, doesn't it?" Yawning one more time, Ulric Skakki got to his feet. "Well, if it starts snowing too hard to let me see my way back here, I'll just scream my head off."

"You do that," Count Hamnet said. Ulric clapped him on the back and trudged away from the dimmed remains of the fire. They'd both been joking and not joking at the same time. Snowstorms like that weren't impossible up here, any more than they were in the Bizogot country or in the northern reaches of the Empire. Hamnet didn't think this storm would be one of those-the wind didn't have that sawtoothed edge to it-but you never could tell.

You never can tell, he told himself as he rolled himself in his mammoth-hide blanket. Of all the things he hadn't looked for, finding happiness- even if it proved only a few minutes of happiness-here beyond the Glacier stood high on the list.

Looked for or not, here it was, and he would have to figure out what to do about it. So would Gudrid, no matter what Liv thought. She hadn't left him to make him happy. She'd left for her own sake. "Well, too bad," he mumbled, and fell asleep.