Beyong the Gap

XIV

Ham net Thyssen spread his arms wide. Liv laughed at him. "You can't span the Gap with your hands, my love," she said. "It's narrow, but not that narrow."

"I suppose not," Hamnet said. But the urge remained. With those cliffs, those mountains, of ice going up and up and up, the gap between them still seemed tiny-and, on the grand scale of things, it was. But a tiny gap was oh, so different from no gap at all. And then Hamnet stopped and gaped, really hearing in his mind everything Liv had said. "What did you call me?"

"I called you my love," she answered. "You are, aren't you?"

"By God!" The idea still startled him. But he had to nod. "I am, yes. And that would make you mine."

"Well, I should hope so." The shaman sent him a sidelong look. "Not much doubt about what we've been doing, is there?"

"Er-no," Hamnet Thyssen said, and she laughed at him. He didn't think it was so funny. He'd lavished all sorts of words of love on Gudrid.

Much good it did him.

Since his love for Gudrid foundered-no, since her love for him did, if she ever knew any-he hadn't wasted such words on any other woman. He would have sickened himself if he had. Now, with Liv, he could affirm he was her love and she his without wanting to bend down over the snow.

After the travelers got beyond the narrowest part of the Gap, after they returned to the regions Bizogots and Raumsdalians had known since time out of mind, they left the worst of the winter weather behind them, or almost behind them. It was as if they were in the front room of a house where the door wouldn't close all the way. The icy wind gusted and roared at their backs, but ahead of them the sun shone.

"Down in Nidaros, it's hardly even autumn yet," Eyvind Torfinn said wistfully.

"It will be cold enough on the plains, by God." Trasamund's breath smoked as he answered. "Coid enough, yes, but not so cold as this."

"As the Gap widens out, your Ferocity, could we perhaps steer away from the very center of it?" Eyvind asked. "That way, the worst of the blast from the north will pass alongside of us instead of blowing through us." Maybe his shiver was exaggerated for effect; on the other hand, maybe it wasn't. Hamnet Thyssen was cold, too.

But Trasamund shook his head. "By your leave, your Splendor, I'll take a cold breeze on my kidneys. I don't care for that, but I can live with it. If chunks of ice decide to come down, they'll squash me like a louse. The two halves of the Glacier are still too cursed close together-a really big avalanche'll squash us no matter where we are. Still and all, I'd sooner keep the risk as small as I can."

"Makes sense," Ulric Skakki said.

Reluctantly, Eyvind Torfinn nodded. "Yes, I suppose it does. I was hoping for the chance to be warm. Like his Ferocity, though, I should much prefer not to be flat."

Ulric looked back toward the narrowest part of the Gap. It was almost like looking back toward a dragon's mouth, except that what it belched was not fire but scudding clouds and snow. In thoughtful tones, Ulric asked, "Could a big avalanche in the right spot still block the Gap, do you think?"

"Wouldn't be surprised," Trasamund answered. "But I don't think God will give us one. God expects people to solve their own problems. He doesn't go around doing it for them."

Hamnet Thyssen found it hard to quarrel with that. But Audun Gilli inquired, "What good is such a God?"

"Well, I don't know that anyone would say he didn't make the world and all the things in it," Trasamund answered. "It'd be a little hard to get along without this old world, even if your kidneys do get cold."

"Do you suppose God made the Rulers?" Hamnet Thyssen asked, not altogether seriously but more so than he would have wanted.

"If he did, he was having a bad day," Ulric Skakki said. "If he didn't, some demon or other was having a good day. Which choice do you like better?"

"I don't like either one of them," Count Hamnet said.

Ulric Skakki chuckled. "All right, then-which choice do you like less?"

"Both," Hamnet answered, and Ulric laughed out loud.

The Gap slowly widened. Little by little, Hamnet Thyssen lost the urge to push the halves into which the Glacier had split farther apart by brute force. When he looked ahead, he saw the gap between the ice mountains stretched farther and farther apart. It still wasn't hospitable country, being flat and often marshy, but he'd known worse.

However flat and dull the countryside was, it brought a broad smile to Trasamund's face. "This is my homeland!" he boomed when the travelers camped one evening. "This is the land of my clan! We have roamed here forever!" He thumped his fist against his chest to emphasize the words.

"Forever, to him, means longer ago than his grandfather could remember," Hamnet Thyssen whispered to Ulric Skakki behind his hand.

"No doubt," Ulric whispered back. "I'm surprised he doesn't drop his trousers and dump out a pile of dung to mark his territory, the way mammoths will sometimes." They both smiled. But they were careful not to laugh. Trasamund was not a man you wanted to insult to his face unless you were ready to put your life on the line. Parsh had found that out.

Gudrid had different thoughts about dung. "I want to get back to the Empire," she said. "If you knew how sick I was of eating food cooked over turds . . ."

"It may not be pleasant, but when the other choice is not eating at all, you do what you need to do," Eyvind Torfinn said.

Had no one else added anything, it might have rested there. But Trasamund said, "Me, I like meat roasted over a dung fire better than what you get down in the south, where you cook with wood. The flavor's better."

"All what you're used to," Earl Eyvind said with a smile.

But Gudrid screwed up her face into a horrible grimace. "What you mean is, meat roasted over a dung fire tastes like dung. We've been eating dung ever since we left the Empire!"

She wasn't wrong. The same thought had crossed Hamnet Thyssen's mind once or twice. He wished she wouldn't have said it, though. Now he really had to think about it. By the looks that crossed some of the other Raumsdalians' faces, they felt the same way.

"What does she say?" Liv asked. Count Hamnet didn't much want to translate; that made him think about it, too. But Liv only shrugged and said, "Otherwise, we would starve-and fire is clean."

When Hamnet heard that, he nodded. "You have a good way of looking at things," he said. Fire was clean, even if it was fire from … He shook his head. He didn't want to go down that road. Fire is clean, he told himself, and left it there.

Ulric Skakki shook him awake in the middle of the night. "Sorry to do this to you, your Grace," he said, "but I need my time in the bedroll, too."

"Who says?" Hamnet demanded through a yawn. Ulric laughed. Count Hamnet yawned again. Ulric stayed there by him till he got to his feet. Who hadn't seen a man fall back to sleep instead of going out to stand sentry?

Muttering-and still yawning-Hamnet Thyssen trudged away from the embers of the fire (the dung fire, he thought, and wished he hadn't). Off in the distance, he could see the Glacier on either side of the Gap. It seemed almost magical under moonlight, and made him wonder if it shone from within with a glow of its own. The sensible part of him knew better, but around midnight that part wasn't at its best.

Like all the sentries, he stationed himself north of his sleeping comrades. If trouble came, from where but the direction of the Rulers would it come?

He breathed out fog-the visible warmth flowing from his body every time he exhaled. The landscape was eerily quiet. He could hear the other travelers snoring more than a bowshot away. But for those small noises, there was nothing, so much nothing that before long he could hear the blood rushing in his ears and the beating of his heart.

After a while, someone stirred and sat up, there by the smoldering fire. Was that Liv? Hamnet Thyssen's heart beat faster. Warmth flowed through him instead of flowing out. She got to her feet and walked toward him. A broad smile spread over his face. It still felt peculiar; his muscles just weren't used to shaping that expression.

She kissed him when she got out to where he was standing. But then she said, "Something's wrong," which spoiled his hope for anything more.

"What is it?" he asked. Instead of slipping under her tunic, his hand fell to the hilt of his sword.

"I don't know yet." Moonshadow made her look as troubled as she sounded. "But something."

"Should we wake the others?" Hamnet asked. "Should we wake Audun?" Something that roused foreboding in a shaman was bound to be sorcerous . . . wasn't it?

But Liv shook her head. "If he feels it, too, let him come," she said. "If not.. . not. I would say something different if we could talk together." She switched from her language to Raumsdalian. "Not know enough yet. And Audun Gilli not know Bizogot speech."

"You're doing very well," Hamnet said in Raumsdalian.

Liv returned to her own tongue to answer, "I should have started sooner. Then I would know more. And Audun Gilli should have started learning my language."

Not all Raumsdalians cared to learn the Bizogot tongue. Several of the guardsmen who'd come north with Gudrid also remained ignorant of it. Hamnet Thyssen had heard them muttering about braying barbarians- but never when Trasamund or Liv was in earshot. They might be arrogant, but they weren't foolhardy.

Hamnet put his arm around her-partly from affection and partly for warmth. "However you like. The company is good this way."

She nodded and smiled. "It is. If I was wrong . . . Well, we can see what happens then. But let's wait a while first."

"All right." Hamnet didn't want to wait. He waited anyhow. Pushing an unwilling woman wasn't a good idea any time. It made her think a man wanted her for only one thing-which was too often true. But pushing her when she said trouble was on the way had a special stupidity all its own.

If he were twenty years younger, he might not have cared. What man who was hardly more than a youth didn't think with his prong? Now, though, Hamnet could wait. Liv would still be here after the trouble, whatever it was, went away.

Motion in the sky made both of them swing their heads the same way at the same time. Silent and pale as a ghost, an owl soared past on broad wings. Or was it only an owl? To Hamnet's senses it was, but he would never make a wizard if he lived to be a thousand. "That?" he whispered.

"That," Liv said.

"What can we-what can you-do?"

"I don't know. I don't know if I can do anything," she answered, which wasn't what he wanted to hear. But then she went on, "I'd better try, though, yes?"

"I'd say so," Hamnet Thyssen said. "If you don't, the Rulers will think we're too weak to do anything about them."

"And they may be right to think that," Liv said bleakly, which was not at all what he wanted to hear. "But I don't care to be spied on night after night, and so . . ."

She reached into her pouch and drew from it something feathered, something clawed, and something that in the moonlight might have been a dark stone. "What have you got there?" Hamnet asked.

"The dried right wing of a screech owl, and his right foot, also dried, and his heart, likewise," the Bizogot shaman said.

"You didn't kill an owl on our travels," Hamnet said, and Liv shook her head to show she hadn't. He went on, "Then you've had them with you since we set out," and she nodded. He asked, "Why, by God?"

"Because these three things, taken together, will summon birds to them, which can be useful," Liv answered. "Also, the heart and the foot together, without the wing, will compel a man to truth if set above his heart while he sleeps."

"You did not use this magic against Samoth when he first spied on us," Hamnet said.

"No-he was in man's shape then," Liv said. "He took bird shape and flew away faster than I could have shaped the spell-faster than I thought anyone could do it. If he flies away now, the spell will fail. But if he gives me time to use it… If he does, I may give him a surprise."

"May it be so," Hamnet Thyssen said. "What can I do to help?"

"For now, just stand quiet," she answered. "The time may come, though, when you will want to put out an arm. If it does, I promise you will know it." He scratched his head, wondering what she meant. Meanwhile, she held up the wing and the foot in the right hand and the screech-owl heart in her left. "This spell must have come from the south," she remarked, "for the version we learn first says that these parts are to be hung in a tree." Even under the moon, her smile was impish. "Then we have to reshape it so that it works in our country. But the original still survives."

Hamnet Thyssen wondered why. Maybe the shamans needed the link with the original to ensure that their altered version still worked. He didn't know enough of magic to be sure of anything like that. He didn't have long to wonder, either, for Liv began to chant in a soft voice. He had everything he could do to stay quiet as she'd asked. He wanted to burst out laughing, for the tune she used was the same as a Raumsdalian lullaby. Sure enough, that charm had reached the Bizogots from the south.

Instead of laughing, Count Hamnet watched the owl. At first, he thought its soaring circles were unchanged, and feared the Rulers had some counterspell to deflect or nullify the charm Liv was using. But then he saw that the circles were getting narrower, and that they were centered on Liv and himself, not on the fire as they had been.

The owl called, a strange, questioning note in its voice. Liv answered- Hamnet could find no better way to put it. She gave back fluting hoots, still to the tune of that song that made babies in the Empire close their eyes in the cradle.

Down spiraled the owl. It flew right in front of Liv's face. She never flinched. Hamnet Thyssen didn't think he could have been so calm with that hooked beak and those tearing claws bare inches from his eyes. Then he remembered what she’d said. Before he quite knew he'd done it, he held out his right arm. The owl perched on it.

It stared from him to Liv and back again. Moonlight flashed from its great golden eyes. Despite that flash, though, it seemed confused. It looked back and forth again, as if wondering how it had got there. Hamnet didn't blame it-he was wondering the same thing.

"Do you understand me?" Liv asked in the Bizogot tongue.

The owl hesitated. Then it answered, "Yes, I understand." An owl's beak and throat were not made to speak any human language. The bird managed even so. Samoth, Hamnet recalled, was fluent in the Bizogot speech.

"You are from the Rulers." Liv didn't make it a question, or need to.

"I am from the Rulers," the owl agreed, and it nodded its round head, one of the eeriest things Count Hamnet had ever seen.

"Are you Samoth? Does his spirit dwell inside you?" The Bizogot shaman was thinking along the same lines as Hamnet himself.

"I am Samoth. It is not a matter of the spirit. I am Samoth," the owl said. To hear its words hoot and hiss their way forth made the hair at the back of Hamnet s neck want to stand up of its own accord, as if he were a frightened animal puffing up in the face of danger. By God, what else am I? he thought.

"And you flew here to spy on us?" Liv asked.

"To spy on you, yes, and to spy out the way south," said the bird that was also a wizard or a shaman or whatever the right word among the Rulers was.

"Hear me, Samoth." Liv's voice changed from questioning to commanding. If anything, the hair on Hamnet's nape stood higher and straighten "Hear me," Liv repeated. "When you flew forth, you found no Bizogot or Raumsdalian travelers."

"When I flew forth, I found no Bizogot or Raumsdalian travelers," agreed the owl that was Samoth.

"You did not pass through the Gap at all-the snowstorm to the north was too strong."

"I didn't pass through the Gap at all-the snowstorm to the north was too strong," the owl echoed. Were its eyes duller than they had been when it landed on Count Hamnet's wrist? He thought so, but he couldn't be sure. He steadied his right arm with his left hand to make sure no quiver upset the owl or disrupted Liv's magic.

Her eyes, by contrast, shone as she thanked him with them. "You turned back and flew off to your camp because you could fly no farther," she said to Samoth.

"I turned back and flew off to my camp because I could fly no farther," the ensorceled owl agreed.

"And of course you remember nothing of this talk, for it never happened," Liv said. When the owl echoed her once more, she nodded to Ham-net Thyssen. He thrust his arm up and forward, as if launching a falcon against a quail. Like a hawk trained to the fist, the owl flew away. It arrowed off toward the north.

"That was-bravely done," Hamnet whispered, not wanting to disturb its flight in anyway. "Bravely done!"

"My thanks," Liv whispered back. She let out a long, weary, fog-filled breath. "He is very strong. He almost slipped free of my magic four or five times, even as an owl. As a man … I don't know if I could stand against him as a man. This should have been easy, and it was anything but."

"You did it. What else matters?" Hamnet Thyssen was determined to look on the bright side. That felt strange for him, but it was true.

"Nothing else matters-now," Liv answered. "But if we see the Rulers again . . . When we see the Rulers again . . . How strong they are matters a lot."

He couldn't tell her she was wrong, for she plainly wasn't. "The way you sent Samoth off makes it less likely we'll see them anytime soon," he said. "It may mean we won't see them at all."

"I doubt that," the Bizogot shaman said. "What I wonder is whether he'll stay fooled, whether he'll believe the weather was bad or hell realize he had a spell put on him. If he does realize I used magic against him, will he know how close his owl-self came to breaking free?" She sighed again, even more deeply than before. "Nothing is ever simple, however much we wish it would be."

Count Hamnet nodded; he couldn't argue there, either. But he said, "You did everything you could. It all worked, every bit of it. Be proud of that." He put his arm around her.

She leaned against him for a little while, drawing strength or at least consolation from his touch. Then she straightened and took her weight on her own feet again. "I am," she said. "But it should have worked better. It should have worked easier."

Hamnet Thyssen almost did argue with her then. At the very end, he held his tongue. He recognized that drive to have everything come out perfect, and the gnawing sense of dissatisfaction when any tiny little detail didn't. He had it himself. If anyone had told him not to worry so much, what would he have done? Ignored the advice and probably lost his temper. Why wouldn't Liv do the same? No reason at all, not that he could see. And so he kept quiet.

When the travelers rode south the next morning, Audun Gilli had the oddest expression on his face. He rode up alongside of Count Hamnet and asked, "Did anything strange happen in the nighttime?"

"Strange? What do you mean?" Hamnet couldn't have sounded more innocent if he'd worked at it for a year.

"I had the oddest dream," Audun said. "I was flying. I was a bird of some kind, not a flying man, the way you can be in dreams. I know I was a bird, because I looked down and saw myself. I don't know how I could, though, because it was night in the dream. But I did. And then-then I didn't. Then everything was all confused, as if I couldn't see at all. And I was flying away as fast as I could. But do you know what the oddest thing was?"

"No," Hamnet Thyssen said gravely. "You're about to tell me, though, aren't you?"

"The oddest thing was"-Audun Gilli ignored, or more likely didn't notice, his irony-"that in the middle of all this, your Grace, I somehow shook hands with you. Isn't that peculiar?"

"Yes, that is peculiar," Hamnet said. The wizard's occult senses, whatever they were, must have picked up some of what Liv was doing. But Audun never fully woke, and so had only a dreamer's confused notions of what had happened.

Audun sent him a quizzical look-or maybe a look a little more than quizzical. "You don't seem surprised by what I tell you."

"Nothing you tell me ever surprises me," Count Hamnet said-let Audun make of that what he would.

The wizard scratched his head. "When we get back to Nidaros, I will buy myself scented soap and a tub of hot water," he said. "And then . .." He didn't go on, not with words, but his smile was blissful.

"Sounds good to me," Hamnet said, nodding. "Buy one more thing while you're at it."

"What's that?" Audun Gilli asked.

"A brush with at least medium-strong bristles," Hamnet answered. "We've been up here a long time, and the soap will need some help."

"You're right." Now Audun nodded, as if making sure he would remember. "I'll do that." Hardly noticing, he went on scratching.

Watching him made Hamnet scratch, too, the way someone else yawning might make him do the same. And once he started scratching, he also went right on. "You wizards don't have a sorcerous cure for bugs, eh?" he said.

"Not one that does much good," Audun Gilli said mournfully. "If we did, we'd be richer than we are, I'll tell you that."

Hamnet Thyssen scratched some more-thoughtfully at first, and then just because scratching felt good. "Speaking of rich . . . Meaning no offense, but Ulric Skakki found you in the gutter. How do you aim to buy your soap and your soak and your brush?"

Now Audun Gilli looked appalled. "Won't the Emperor pay us, reward us, for going beyond the Glacier in his name?"

"Well, I don't know." Hamnet made his hand stop scratching, lest he rub himself raw. It wasn't easy. He went on, "He may think we can live on fame." He could himself. Eyvind Torfinn could, easily. Jesper Fletti and the other guardsmen would go back to the duty they'd had before setting out. Ulric Skakki? Count Hamnet didn't know how much Ulric had stashed away, but Ulric was enough like a cat to be able to land on his feet no matter what happened.

Audun Gilli. . . wasn't. "I hope you're wrong," he said in what had to be one of the most desperately tense understatements of all time. "Times were . . . hard for me before I started this journey."

"I know," Hamnet said. "No matter what, you have a story people will want to hear, likely a story people will pay to hear. That will help you carry on your trade, too. You'll be a known man, even a famous man."

"Do you think that will stop me from ending up in the gutter again?" Audun asked. It was a serious question; he sounded as if he really wanted to know.

"Well, I can't answer that. Only you can," Hamnet Thyssen said. "If you can't keep yourself out of the gutter, who else will?"

"I suppose you're right." Audun Gilli sighed, almost as wearily as Liv had the night before. "I don't know whether it's good news or bad, though. Well, I expect I'll find out." As the Bizogot shaman's had, his breath filled the air with fog.

The travelers hadn't left winter behind. The wind didn't howl so hard on this side of the Glacier, but the cold still reached into Hamnet Thyssen's bones in spite of the furs that muffled him.

"Before long, we should run into bands of my folk and their herds," Trasamund said. "It will good to see my clansmen's faces again. It will be good to see the faces of the women, too," he added in a different tone of voice. Gudrid's back stiffened.

They started to run low on meat. Things might have got serious if they hadn't come upon a herd of musk oxen. Ulric Skakki slew one bull with an arrow through the eye, a perfect shot that dropped the big beast in its tracks.

"You couldn't do that again in a hundred years," Jesper Fletti said as they started the gory job of butchery.

Ulric studied him with a mild and speculative gaze. "Would you like me to try?" he asked in a voice so mild that no one could possibly take offense at it. Despite that mildness, Jesper was quick to shake his head. Maybe he didn't think Ulric was talking about shooting musk oxen. Hamnet Thyssen certainly didn't.

They gorged themselves on the meat once they cut it off the bones. People needed much more food in this climate just to fight the cold. Hamnet Thyssen was amazed at how much half-scorched, half-raw flesh he put away. It was as if he were doing hard physical labor even while only riding. When he actually did have to work hard … he needed even more.

The horses were in worse shape than their riders. They had trouble finding enough fodder under the snow. When one of them went down and would not rise, Trasamund knocked it over the head. The travelers butchered it as they'd butchered the musk ox. Hamnet had eaten horse before after similar misfortunes. It was chewy, almost gluey, but ever so much better than nothing.

Chewing-and chewing, and chewing-Eyvind Torfinn smiled wryly. "I don't believe my cook down in Nidaros has any recipes for this particular meat."

"I hope he doesn't," Gudrid said.

"It may not be wonderful food," Ulric Skakki said, "but any food is better than going hungry."

"All Bizogots know this, for we know how hard life can be when winter clamps down," Trasamund said. "I was not sure a man from the south, where you have bread and grain as a cushion against bad times, would understand it."

"I've been hungry a time or two, your Ferocity," Ulric answered. "Believe me, having food is better."

"To food!" Trasamund said. "A toast I will make in earnest when I can."

After they ate, they rode. Hamnet Thyssen had never spent so much time in the saddle before this journey. He wondered if he was growing bowlegged, the better to fit his shape to the horse's. He also wondered how long he would be able to go on riding. If the horses kept getting weaker, he and the other travelers might have to dismount and lead them. They might have to slaughter them one by one. The thought of more meals like the one he'd just eaten did not appeal. He patted the side of his mount's neck.

"Sizing up how tender the beast will be when the time comes to roast it?" Ulric Skakki asked.

"God, don't listen to this man!" Hamnet Thyssen exclaimed.

Ulric laughed. "Can't say as I blame you. Not the finest supper I've ever got down. But swallowing anything is better than not."

"Some people will certainly swallow anything," Count Hamnet said.

That drew another laugh from Ulric Skakki. "You're in a cheerful mood, aren't you, your Grace?" These days, he used Hamnet s title only for sardonic effect. They'd all traveled too far with one another for the formalities to matter any more.

"No." Hamnet wasn't laughing. "We've come an awfully long way. I'd hate to see us fall just short of getting back to … to Trasamund's clan." He almost said, Back to civilization. No matter how far he'd come, no matter what he'd seen, he wasn't about to confuse the way the Bizogots lived with civilization.

By Ulric Skakki's mischievous grin, he had a pretty good notion of what Count Hamnet didn't say. With his pointed nose and narrow, foxy eyes, he was good at sniffing his way past all kinds of deceptions and evasions. "Better to have the Bizogots with us than against us," he said, and Count Hamnet could hardly quarrel with that. Then, looking even more sly than usual, Ulric added, "You've got one Bizogot on your side, all right."

Hamnet refused to rise to the bait. "You already teased me about that. If you do it over and over again, people will say you're boring."

"People? What do people know?" Ulric said. "Or did you mean the Rulers? They know everything-and if you don't believe me, you can bloody well ask them."

"I don't want to ask them anything. I hope I never see them again." Ham-net Thyssen feared that was a forlorn hope.

"Now that you mention it, so do I." But Ulric sounded no more hopeful than Hamnet. He looked to the east and to the west. The Glacier still loomed tall on both horizons, but a broad expanse of land lay between the two walls of ice-the Gap was widening out. Then Ulric Skakki stared south. "I never want to see the Rulers again, no, but I wouldn't mind meeting a Bizogot besides our ferocious jarl and the admittedly charming Liv."

"Neither would I," Hamnet allowed. "We're far enough south that we could any day now."

"There is some small difference between could and will," Ulric said. "You may perhaps have noticed."

"Why, no." Hamnet tried to play the game of irony himself. "Explain it to me, if you'd be so kind."

One of Ulric's gingery eyebrows rose. "I could say you're being difficult. I will say you're doing it on purpose."

"Very neat," Hamnet said with a mounted bow. "You should be a scholar."

"Thank you, but no," Ulric Skakki said. "No silver in it."

"Oh, I don't know. Look at Earl Eyvind." Hamnet Thyssen did look at him. Eyvind Torfinn was talking earnestly with Gudrid. For the moment, playing a subdued, demure wife seemed to suit her.

Ulric Skakki shook his head. "Earl Eyvind had silver before he decided he wanted to be a scholar. He's a scholar in spite of his money, not because of it."

"Well, not altogether," Hamnet said. "The silver he's got lets him do what he pleases. He wouldn't be able to buy his books and learn his lore without it."

"I suppose so," Ulric said. "But he isn't the kind of scholar I had in mind, anyway. I meant the hole-and-corner kind, the ones who have to stuff a rag into the toe of their felt boots in wintertime because they can't afford to patch them. That sort is good enough to teach boys how to read and write and count, but not for much more."

"Plenty of them around," Count Hamnet agreed. "They call themselves scholars, but I'm not sure how many other people do."

Ulric Skakki surely said something in reply. Whatever it was, Count Hamnet didn't hear it. His eyes went to an owl flying past the travelers from out of the north, white and swift and strong. Samoth? Hamnet's heart pounded. No wizard himself, he couldn't tell. His gaze went to Liv. She noticed him no more than he'd heard Ulric. All her attention pursued the bird till it streaked out of sight to the south.

Only then did she turn in the saddle and look for him. Even before she spoke, he saw the relief lighting her fine features. "Sometimes a white owl is only a white owl," she called.

"A good thing, too," Hamnet answered. They smiled at each other.

"Sometimes I think I don't know everything that's going on," Ulric Skakki said in tones full of mock self-pity.

Count Hamnet reached out and set a consoling hand on his arm. "Don't worry about it. Sometimes I don't think you know what's going on, either."

"Thank you. Thank you so much," Ulric said. Hamnet waved modestly.

On they went, farther and farther south. Another horse died, and another. They cut up the animals and ate them. The meat was strong-flavored and there wasn't a great deal of it; the horses had got very scrawny before finally failing.

"Do you think we'll make it?" Jesper Fletti asked Hamnet. The guards officer had never been up in the north before this journey. All things considered, he'd acquitted himself well enough. Hamnet Thyssen could … almost forget that he'd come along to protect Gudrid.

"I think so," Hamnet answered. "We can't be far from outriders from the Three Tusk clan. I would have guessed we'd run into them already, truth to tell." That they hadn't worried him, though he didn't say so. Had some disaster befallen Trasamund's clan while the jarl journeyed beyond the Glacier? That was the worst kind of bad news he could imagine.

The words were hardly out of his mouth, the thought hardly through his head, before Trasamund let out a bellow that might have come from the throat of a bull musk ox. That dot on the southern horizon was a mounted man, and he was riding toward them.