Breath of God

XVI

Hamnet Thyssen had always known the imperial palace had dungeons. He hadn’t expected to make their personal acquaintance. Wasn’t a big part of real life the difference between what you expected and what you got?

Fighting a dozen guards would have been suicidally stupid. Hamnet took a certain dour satisfaction in noting how astonished Kormak Bersi seemed when the guards laid hold of him. His only crime had been to tell the truth as he saw it. To Sigvat, that was perfidious enough all by itself.

The guards hustled Count Hamnet and Kormak out of the throne room. The last thing the Raumsdalian noble saw there was the courtier’s smirking face. “What’s going on here?” someone asked as the guards frog-marched the new prisoners through the corridors down which Hamnet had come on his own not long before.

“They made the Emperor angry,” one of the guards answered. He didn’t seem to think he needed to say anything more. By all appearances, he was right.

How many times had Hamnet walked past a stairway without wondering where it went? Now he found out with this one, and wished he hadn’t. Dungeons were supposed to be dark and gloomy, weren’t they? This one, built below ground level, lived up to – or down to – that specification. Mold clung to the massive stones of the wall. Only a few torches gave fitful light. The air was cold and damp, and smelled of sour smoke and stale straw.

“In you go,” the guards told Kormak Bersi. One of them opened a massive wooden door with a small iron grate at eye level. Kormak’s captors shoved him in, closed the door (the hinges didn’t squeal – they were rustproof bronze), and made sure it stayed closed with a heavy wooden bar.

“Now it’s your turn,” a guard said to Hamnet. He went into a cell some distance from Kormak’s. He supposed the guards didn’t want him plotting with the agent. That was a compliment of sorts, but only of sorts. No matter how much plotting he and Kormak did, he couldn’t see how it would help them get away.

His cell had stone walls, a stone floor and ceiling, a musty pallet and wool blanket that were bound to be verminous, and a stinking slop bucket. Maybe a wizard could have put that together and used it to escape, but Hamnet knew he couldn’t. The only light came through the grate.

After a bit, the door to the cell opened again. Three guards pointed bows at Hamnet while a fourth set a jug and a loaf on the floor and then hastily withdrew. When Count Hamnet sniffed the jug, he sighed. It held water. If he drank from it, it would probably give him a flux of the bowels. Of course, if he didn’t… The loaf wasn’t very big, and seemed almost as full of husks and chaff as his mattress. He ate about a quarter of it, and found it tasted as bad as it looked. Saving the rest for later – he had no idea how often they would feed him, but feared the worst – was no hardship. Eating more when he got hungry probably would be. Again, though, not eating was bound to be worse.

He paced off the cell. Six strides from the door to the back wall. Seven from one side to the other. With nothing else to do, he walked back and forth and around and around for a bit. That soon palled, as he’d known it would. He sat down on the miserable pallet. The blanket that went with it would be warm enough now. When the Breath of God started to blow? How many prisoners died of chest fever every winter?

As his eyes got used to the near-darkness all around, he saw more sharply than he had when the guards first shoved him in here. That might have been useful if there were anything much to see in the cell. Or so he thought at first.

After a while, he got up and went back to the far wall. No, his eyes hadn’t tricked him. Prisoners who’d been here before had used – well, who could say what? – to scratch their names and other things onto the stones there. Some proclaimed their innocence. Some named the women they’d loved. One had carefully shown a woman loving him. The man wasn’t a bad artist, and he must have had plenty of time to complete his work. Hamnet wondered how many other luckless souls in this cell had wandered over to the obscene drawing to remind themselves of what they were missing.

His mouth tightened. If he thought of Gudrid or Liv, he wouldn’t necessarily think of them doing that with him. He might be more likely to see them in his mind’s eye loving someone else.

And some of the prisoners cursed the people who’d caused them to end up here. Emperors’ names figured prominently there. Some of them went back hundreds of years. Viglund had been a great conqueror in the days when the Raumsdalian Empire was much younger than it was now. Someone he’d conquered hadn’t appreciated it.

Much good it did the poor bastard, Hamnet Thyssen thought. Much good anything does anybody.

With nothing better to do, he went back to the pallet and sat down again. He started reciting poetry, and wished he knew more of it. A bard might be able to entertain himself for a long time.

Or he might not. A guard’s head blocked the grate, killing almost all the light in the cell. “Shut up in there!” the man snarled. “No noise allowed!”

Hamnet Thyssen laughed in his face. “What will you do to me if I make noise? Throw me in the dungeon?”

When the guard laughed, too, it was not a pleasant sound – anything but. “You want to find out, smart boy? Keep mouthing off and you will, by God! There’s never been a bad place that couldn’t get worse.”

He spoke with great assurance. After a couple of heartbeats, Count Hamnet decided he was bound to be right. The guards could do whatever they wanted to a prisoner who annoyed them. “I was only trying to make time pass by,” Hamnet said.

“It’ll pass whether you do anything or not,” the guard said. “So shut up. That’s the rules.” He stomped off.

A kidney stone would pass, too. . eventually. And it would hurt all the time while it was passing. As for the rules, well, the people who enforced them always liked them better than those at whose expense they got enforced.

Swearing to himself, Hamnet – quietly – lay back on the miserable, lumpy pallet. When he and Kormak Bersi didn’t come back to the hostel, Trasamund and Ulric Skakki would realize something had gone wrong. No doubt they would have a good idea what, too. But what could they do about it? When the Emperor was angry, could they do anything at all?

They would probably come straight to the palace to try to find out what was going on. And what would happen then? Count Hamnet’s best guess was that they would end up here in the dungeons themselves in short order.

If Audun Gilli and Liv came along. . . Hamnet Thyssen ground his teeth. He didn’t suppose they would end up here, or Marcovefa, either. But the Emperor was bound to have some place where he could put wizards who caused him trouble – a place warded by other, stronger wizards, no doubt.

Did the Raumsdalian Empire have any wizards stronger than Marcovefa? Count Hamnet wasn’t so sure about that. She was liable to give Sigvat’s arrogant sorcerers a surprise of the sort they hadn’t had in many years, if ever. But was she stronger than all of them put together? Hamnet had trouble believing she was.

While he wondered about such things, time seemed to move at its normal rate. When his river of thought ran dry, though, it was as if everything stopped. He might have been in the cell for centuries, with another eternity or two to look forward to. He wasn’t too hungry. He didn’t need to ease himself. In the unending dim, damp twilight in there, those were his only clues that he hadn’t already spent a very long time indeed down below all the parts of the palace he’d ever visited before.

If I do stay here long enough, my nails will grow out into claws and my beard will reach down to my waist. He might measure months and years that way. Days and weeks? The gauge wasn’t fine enough. Sunrise? Sunset? He was even more cut off from them than he would have been in winter up beyond the Glacier. The sun might stay below the horizon for weeks up there, but you knew it would come back sooner or later. Down here, he had no guarantee of ever seeing another sunrise again.

He must have slept, for he jerked in surprise when the cell door opened and a guard threw in another miserable loaf. He still had some left from the last one. They weren’t trying to starve him, anyway. Was that any favor to him? Again, he wasn’t so sure.

He listened for Ulric Skakki’s sly tones and Trasamund’s bellow outside the door. It wasn’t that he wanted them mewed up in here with him. But he did expect them to come after him. When they didn’t, he wondered what had happened to them – what had gone wrong with them, in other words.

He’d been there for seventeen loaves – another way to count the time – when a guard looked in through the grate and said, “C’mere, Thyssen. You’ve got a visitor.”

“A visitor?” Hamnet’s voice sounded rusty even to himself. He hadn’t used it much lately. He also sounded astonished – and he was. He had trouble imagining any of the travelers talking their way down here without ending up prisoners themselves.

“That’s right,” the guard said. “You want to talk or not?”

“I’m coming.” Count Hamnet hurried to the door. Somebody thought enough of him to come down here. That had to be good news, didn’t it? He eagerly peered out.

Gudrid looked back through the grate at him.

She wore attar of roses, the same scent she’d brought with her when she traveled beyond the Glacier the year before. The flowery sweetness seemed even more incongruous against the stenches in the dungeon than it had up on the frozen steppe.

“Hello, Hamnet,” his former wife said. Her red-painted mouth stretched into a broad, happy smile. “So good to see you where you belong at last.”

“I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” he answered. “Whatever it is, by God, I’m paying for it now.”

“I thought the very same thing when we were together,” Gudrid said.

He’d thought she loved him. He’d always known he loved her. Part of him still did, and always would. That only made her betrayal more bitter. He tried to show she couldn’t wound him – a lying, and a losing, battle. “Are you enjoying yourself? Stare all you please,” he said.

“I should throw peanuts, the way I would at monkeys in cages,” she said, smiling wider yet. “What would you do for a peanut, Hamnet?”

He told her where she could put a peanut. He told her where she could put a year’s worth of peanuts, and how well they would fit there, and why. She only laughed. Why not? She was on the outside looking in. He was on the inside looking out. It made all the difference in the world.

“Did Eyvind Torfinn tell you I was here?” he asked.

That only made Gudrid laugh again. “Don’t be sillier than you can help, darling. Dear Eyvind knows, yes, because I told him. But Sigvat told me.”

She sounded smug as a cat in a creamery. She no doubt had the right to sound that way, too. Hamnet Thyssen used a shrug for a shield. “He can say what he wants. He can do what he wants. He’s the Emperor, after all.”

“Oh, you do know that!” Gudrid exclaimed in mock surprise. “He didn’t seem to think you did.”

“Well, there is one thing,” Hamnet said. “If the Rulers overrun Raumsdalia, he won’t stay Emperor for long.”

Gudrid sneered. “How likely do you think that is?”

“You were up there. You saw the Rulers last year. You saw more of some of them than I did, by God.” Count Hamnet wasn’t quite sure Gudrid had slept with their chief; he hadn’t watched them in the act, for which he was duly grateful. But he was sure enough, and that was the kind of thing Gudrid did. For good measure, he added, “They’ve spent the time since last winter smashing up the Bizogots.”

His former wife didn’t bother denying anything. She did ask, “Is Trasamund all right?”

“He’s not hurt, but his clan’s wrecked. He’s down here in Nidaros, too.” Hamnet Thyssen didn’t think he was giving anything away with that news.

All Gudrid said was, “Ah.” Then she asked, “And your new barbarous beloved?”

“Liv is here, too.”

Count Hamnet didn’t think he revealed anything by how he said that. He must have been wrong, though, for Gudrid pounced – or rather, burst out laughing. “So she’s gone and left you, has she? Well, that didn’t take long.”

How did she know? How could she tell? Whatever the answer was, her instincts were unfailing. “Yes, she’s left me,” Hamnet said. “She doesn’t torment me for the fun of it, anyhow.”

“Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. Sooner or later, she will.” With that casual reassurance, Gudrid blew him a kiss and swept out of the dungeon. A guard followed her. Hamnet watched them as far as the grate allowed, which wasn’t very. Then, shaking his head, he went back to the pallet and lay down again.

The guard spoke to him: “You were married to that gal?”

“Afraid so,” Hamnet said.

“I was married to her, I’d be afraid, too,” the guard said. “She’s nothing but trouble.”

“I found that out. A little late, but I did,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

“She why you’re shut up here?”

“No.” Hamnet shook his head. “I found out about the Emperor a little late, too.”

“Here, now. You can’t talk like that,” the guard said. “You do, and -”

“I know. I know. It’ll be even worse than it is already,” Hamnet said wearily. “But you asked. I tried to tell you the truth.”

“That’s what they all say.” The guard didn’t want to listen. And he didn’t have to listen, either. He walked away instead.

What will they do to me now? Hamnet wondered. He knew how it could get worse, all right. They could stop feeding him. They could stop giving him water. Or they could just grab him and haul him off to the torturer. If enough of them came in, he hadn’t a prayer of fighting them off.

They didn’t do any of those things. The loaves and the water kept coming. He stayed in the cell. . and stayed, and stayed. That might not have been worse, but it was bad enough and then some.

“You! Thyssen!” A guard with a raspy voice barked at him through the grate.

“What now?” Count Hamnet asked. Any change in routine worried him. Silence, being ignored, was routine. Getting noticed? He didn’t expect good news.

“Somebody here wants to talk to you,” the guard said.

Do I want to talk to Gudrid again? Hamnet wondered. After what had to be days of doing nothing, even a quarrel with his former wife might seem entertaining. If that wasn’t madness, he didn’t know what would be. All the same, it was so. He got to his feet and walked up to the door.

Seeing him approach, the guard nodded. “Here’s the bum,” the man said, and stepped to one side.

Hamnet braced himself to start snarling at Gudrid again. But those were not her aging but still attractive – still beautiful – features on the other side of the grate. Instead, Hamnet Thyssen found himself face-to-face with Earl Eyvind Torfinn.

Gudrid’s husband. Gudrid’s husband who hadn’t, or acted as if he hadn’t, the slightest idea how many times she’d put horns on him.

“I grieve to see you like this, Your Grace,” the scholarly noble said.

“I’m not too happy about it myself, Your Splendor,” Count Hamnet answered. “Did Gudrid finally tell you I was here?”

Earl Eyvind didn’t notice that finally. He shook his head. His jowls wobbled. He’d regained the comfortable plumpness he’d enjoyed before his journey to the north the year before. Scratching at the edge of his whiskers, he said, “No. I don’t think she knows you’re here.”

That only proved the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing – nothing new where Gudrid was concerned. “Well, how the demon did you find out I was stuck here, then?” Hamnet demanded.

“Ulric Skakki is a resourceful chap,” Eyvind replied: a truth so obvious, even he could see it. “He got word to me that you were having, ah, difficulties. I was shocked. I truly didn’t believe His Majesty would be so, ah, unaccommodating.”

“Oh, you can’t say that.” Hamnet Thyssen wagged a finger at him. “No, you can’t, by God. After all, here I am – accommodated.”

“Er, yes.” Eyvind Torfinn laughed uneasily. “So you are. But whether you should be. . That, perhaps, is a different question.”

“Sigvat’s got the answer. He says I should.” Count Hamnet sounded more nearly resigned than outraged, which only proved he made a better actor than he’d ever dreamt he could.

“So I discovered,” Eyvind said. “I urged your release – urged it in strong terms, too – but His Majesty was not amenable to reason.”

He sounded surprised that reason couldn’t sway the Raumsdalian Emperor. Reason would have swayed him, and so he believed it should sway everyone. That might have been logical – but it wasn’t reasonable. Gudrid would have known better. Even Count Hamnet knew better.

“Thank you for trying,” he said, and meant it. He couldn’t dislike Eyvind Torfinn, even if the man was – occasionally, no doubt – sleeping with Gudrid. Eyvind’s fondness for her aside, he was a decent man.

“It was my pleasure, my privilege,” he said now. “And Skakki hinted at some remarkable adventures. Ascending to the top of the Glacier. Meeting people who dwelt up there. . . Extraordinary! I wish I could have been with you.”

You had your chance last winter, and you stayed here, Hamnet Thyssen thought. Then he didn’t just think it – he said it out loud. If Eyvind Torfinn didn’t like it, so what? What could he do that Sigvat wasn’t already doing?

The scholarly earl winced. “I am not a young man, Your Grace,” he said stiffly. “I thought myself unequal to another journey up into the wilds so soon after the first, and Gudrid would have been adamantly opposed to setting out again, you know. The travels were a considerable hardship to her.”

Poor thing. She only had Bizogots and warriors from the Rulers to seduce. Hamnet didn’t say that. No one had told him when Gudrid was sleeping with other Raumsdalians, either. He’d had to find out for himself. Earl Eyvind would, too. Or maybe he already knew, and chose to look the other way. Hamnet had wondered about that before. He knew himself to be incapable of it.

Eyvind Torfinn wasn’t lying to him here. He was sure of that. The other noble’s white hair and paunch declared his years. And he seemed to listen to, and to obey, Gudrid as if her fidelity were perfect and unquestioned.

“If you talked to Ulric, you’ll know the Rulers have come south of Sudertorp Lake,” Hamnet said. “You’ll know they’ve smashed the Leaping Lynxes.”

“Yes, he did tell me that.” Eyvind’s voice was troubled. Maybe he’d done his best not to believe it. “It isn’t good news.”

“Too bloody right, it isn’t,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “If those bastards aren’t over the border, they will be soon. You saw some of what their sorcery can do. Will we be able to stop them? Will we even be able to slow them down?”

“I have to hope we will, Your Grace,” Eyvind said.

“I’ve had all kinds of hopes,” Hamnet said harshly. “Gudrid’s married to you. Liv is sleeping with Audun Gilli. I’m spending my time in this stinking dungeon. So what the demon is hope worth?”

Eyvind Torfinn lurched back two steps, his face as shocked as if Count Hamnet had slapped him. “I’m – I’m sorry,” he got out after a couple of heartbeats. “Ulric. . . said nothing of your misfortunes with Liv.”

“No, eh? I wonder how often people have accused him of discretion,” Hamnet said. “But he didn’t need to keep his mouth shut. It’s true. Everybody who came down from the Bizogot country with me knows it. It’d be all over the city if people all over the city gave a curse about me.”

“My condolences. Losing one woman is hard. Losing another is much more than twice as hard.” Earl Eyvind’s thoughts marched uncomfortably well with Hamnet’s. The old man sounded as if he spoke from experience. He might well have. He was old enough to have loved and lost any number of times before wedding Gudrid. Did he love her, or was she only an ornament to him? If she was, she was an expensive ornament with a sharp pin.

“Not much I can do about it from here. Not much I can do about anything from here,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If you have the pull to get me out, Your Splendor, I’m in your debt the rest of my days. And what I owe, I pay. If you know me, you know that’s so.”

“I do know you, and I know that,” Eyvind said. “I don’t want your service, Thyssen. I want you free, to do what you can for the Empire. I am already doing everything I know how to do to get you out. This does not sit well with my wife, but I am doing it nonetheless.” He set his chins and looked as heroic as a peaceable, mild-mannered scholar was ever likely to look.

He would try in spite of what Gudrid thought? How much luck was he likely to have, when Gudrid’s thoughts and those of Sigvat II were so much alike? Hamnet had no idea of the answer, though he doubted the omens were good. He took a step back and bowed to Eyvind. “I thank you, Your Splendor.”

“It’s the least I can do, or try to do,” Eyvind Torfinn answered. “I make no promises, however much I wish I could. God keep you.” He sketched a salute and stepped away from the grate.

The guard who’d told Hamnet he’d come led him away. Hamnet listened to his footfalls even after he was out of sight. Someone out there hadn’t forgotten. God didn’t dole out many miracles. For Hamnet Thyssen, Eyvind’s remembering came closer than most of the things he’d seen.

So Hamnet thought right after Eyvind Torfinn visited him, anyhow. But loaf followed nasty loaf. One jar of stale water replaced another. Guards came into the cell to empty the slop bucket, then left again. The air in the dungeon grew chillier. Hamnet didn’t think it was his imagination; was the Breath of God starting to blow outside?

When the guards lifted the bar and opened the cell door when it wasn’t feeding time, he quivered with fear, though he tried not to show it. Another break in routine. It couldn’t be good news.

“Thyssen!” the lead guard barked.

“Yes, that’s me,” Hamnet agreed.

“Come along,” the guard said.

“Or?” Hamnet asked.

“Or rot in there. No skin off my nose one way or the other.”

Hamnet came. The guards paused in front of Kormak Bersi’s cell, opened it, and got him out, too. “What’s this all about?” the imperial agent asked as he emerged.

“You’ll find out,” the guard snapped. “Now shut your fool mouth and follow me.” His mouth twisted in disgust. “You stink. And so do you, Thyssen.”

“Do I?” Hamnet couldn’t smell himself any more. He hardly noticed the stenches of the dungeon. When he first came here, they’d seemed horrible. You could get used to almost anything.

Hope came to life within him when they left the dungeon by the stairs that had brought him down into it. He hadn’t gone very far before he realized the guards could be taking him and Kormak out to the chopping block. What price hope then?

“Winter’s here,” Kormak remarked even before they came up to ground level. The chill in the air was more obvious now that they drew closer to doors and windows that gave on the outside world.

Instead of the block, the guards brought them to a bathroom that held two copper tubs full of steaming water. “Wash yourselves.” the lead guard growled. “Like I told you, you stink.”

Without a word of argument, Hamnet stripped off the clothes he’d been wearing ever since they threw him into the cell and got into the closer tub. Kormak Bersi was only a heartbeat or two behind him. The soap sitting on a tray on the edge of Hamnet s tub wasn’t perfumed, but it got the filth off him and didn’t sear his skin. Soap alone wouldn’t kill nits, though. He wondered if the guards knew, or cared.

Another guard gave him some nasty-smelling lotion and said, “Rub this into your hair – all your hair.” Maybe the stuff was intended to deal with his lice. Standing up, he smeared it over his scalp and in his crotch and under his arms. In the other tub, Kormak was doing the same thing.

When Hamnet rinsed the lotion out of his hair, he got a little in his eyes. Then he quickly splashed more water into them. “Be careful,” he warned Kormak Bersi, spluttering. “Burns like fire.”

“Now you tell me,” Kormak said, which doubtless meant he’d found out the same thing for himself.

Hamnet’s old clothes had disappeared while he was bathing. So had the imperial agent’s. The tunic and trousers Hamnet put on when he got out of the tub fit him tolerably well, but no better than that. The boots they gave him were loose, but that was all right. He asked for a second pair of thick wool socks, and the guards brought them to him. If the season really had turned, as seemed likely, the extra layer would help keep his feet warm when he had to go outside.

Kormak Bersi put on a similarly bland outfit. As soon as they were both dressed, the guards hustled them out of the bathroom. “Will you tell me where you’re taking me?” Count Hamnet asked.

“Shut up,” one of the guards explained.

“You’ll find out,” another one added. Hamnet Thyssen asked no more questions. The men seemed jumpy – and they were armed, while he and Kormak weren’t. If they wanted to dispose of a couple of prisoners, they could. Hamnet consoled himself by thinking they wouldn’t have bothered cleaning him and Kormak off if they were just going to take their heads. He hoped not, anyhow.

“In here,” growled the guard who’d told him to shut up. Hamnet got shoved through a door into what looked like a small meeting room. So did Kormak Bersi. Hamnet wasn’t astonished to discover Sigvat II sitting behind a small table there. Nor was he particularly surprised that the Emperor looked as if he hated him. Sigvat had looked at him that way often enough to get him used to it.

No matter how sour Sigvat looked, he remained lord of the Raumsdalian Empire. The forms had to be observed. Dropping to one knee, Count Hamnet murmured, “Your Majesty.” Beside him, Kormak went to both knees.

“Get up, you two,” Sigvat snapped. As Hamnet and the imperial agent rose, the Emperor went on, “I hope you’re happy, now that you’ve gone and shown how smart you are.”

“Your Majesty?” This time, Hamnet Thyssen used the phrase as a question. He couldn’t very well know what had happened while he was in the dungeon. The Emperor couldn’t expect him to. . could he? Sigvat couldn’t reasonably expect him to, no, but how reasonable was His Majesty? One more question Hamnet wished he hadn’t thought of.

Sigvat didn’t look reasonable now – he looked angry enough to bite horseshoe nails in half. “You’ve gone and shown how cursed smart you are,” he repeated, vitriol in his voice. “These – these Rulers, that’s what.” He spat out the name of the tribe from beyond the Glacier.

“What have they done, Your Majesty?” Kormak Bersi asked. . reasonably.

“They wrecked an army of ours near Vesteralen,” the Emperor answered. “Wrecked it, I tell you. We had wizards attached to the army – whether you people think so or not, I did listen to you, by God. I don’t think any of the wizards got out. For all I know, the Rulers ate them.”

He wasn’t joking, or not very much. Hamnet Thyssen tried to remember just where Vesteralen lay. Somewhere up in the northern woods – he knew that much. He couldn’t come closer than that; as far as he knew, he’d never gone through the town.

“What do you want us to do about the Rulers, Your Majesty?” he asked.

Sigvat looked at him as at any idiot. “Stop them!” he exclaimed.

“How?” Hamnet asked. “What do you think a couple of men fresh from the dungeons can do that an army and a squad of wizards can’t?”

“You have friends. I have trouble imagining how or why, but you do.” The Emperor might have been accusing him of some nasty vice, like accosting little girls. Scowling and spiteful, Sigvat continued, “Some of those friends have been whining that I should have let you out a long time ago, or even that I never should have jugged you in the first place.”

I really do have friends, Count Hamnet thought with some surprise. Maybe Eyvind Torfinn had done what he’d said he would do. Maybe Ulric Skakki had greased a few palms. Maybe – no, almost certainly – Trasamund had made a nuisance of himself. For me. Hamnet had trouble believing it.

But, as if to confirm it, Sigvat said, “Your friends, taken all in all, are a sneaky slither of snakes. Put all of you together and you should be able to give the Rulers trouble if anyone can.”

“Yes. If,” Kormak Bersi said, which perfectly echoed what was going through Hamnet’s mind.

“I will do what I can, Your Majesty, on one condition,” Hamnet said.

“You dare bargain with me?” Thumbscrews and racks and endless gallons of water roughened Sigvats voice.

Hamnet Thyssen nodded anyway. “I do, sir. Whatever you do to me here, it won’t be worse than letting Gudrid come north with me. She is no friend of mine. If you send me against the Rulers, don’t send her. If you send her. . well, I’d rather go back to the dungeon.”

“If I take you up on that, you won’t come out again,” Sigvat warned. Count Hamnet only shrugged. The Emperor filled his lungs to call for guards to take Hamnet away.

“Wait, Your Majesty. Think,” Kormak Bersi urged. “You need Thyssen more than you need me. He knows more about this business than I do, and he’s a better man of his hands than I am, too.”

Sigvat looked as astonished as if one of his chairs had spoken to him. He rounded on Count Hamnet. “Gudrid is no fonder of you than you are of her.”

“Then why would she want to come north again?” the Raumsdalian noble asked.

But that question almost answered itself. Hamnet wanted nothing more than to stay away from his former wife. She, on the other hand, wanted to keep sticking pins in him to make him writhe. He’d done all the writhing he intended to do, though, at least on her hook. What Liv could do to him . . . He hadn’t said anything to Sigvat about Liv. Was that because she’d wounded him less or because he had the feeling the fight would need her? He wasn’t sure himself.

“If I didn’t think you were important -” the Emperor ground out. Hamnet said nothing. He just waited for whatever happened next. If it was the dungeon, then it was, that was all. But if it wasn’t. . “Stop the Rulers, and there aren’t many rewards big enough.”

“By God, Your Majesty, I don’t care about most of that nonsense. You know I don’t,” Count Hamnet said. “I just want people to leave me the demon alone. You, Gudrid, everybody. Is that too much to ask?”

“Frequently,” Kormak said before Sigvat could answer.

The Emperor said, “You’d have all the privacy you want in a cell.”

“True.” Again, Hamnet left it there – but not for long. He couldn’t help adding, “Till the Rulers get here, anyway.”

Sigvat II made a horrible face. That worry had to be in his mind, too. “Give me what I want, Your Grace, and I’ll do the same for you,” he said. “I will keep Gudrid away from you while you fight the foe – you have a bargain there.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Hamnet said. “And the rest of it?”

“If you beat the Rulers, I’ll leave you alone,” the Emperor said. “Before God, I will, and I’ll see that Gudrid does, too. But if you don’t -”

“Don’t worry about it, Your Majesty,” Hamnet said. Sigvat stared at him. He explained: “If I lose, chances are you won’t get the chance to punish me. I’ll be too dead for you to worry about it. Losing to the Rulers is its own punishment.”

“Mm, yes, I can see how that might be.” Sigvat smiled a thin smile. Hamnet Thyssen had a pretty good idea of what he was thinking. Whether Hamnet won or the Rulers did, the Emperor didn’t lose everything.

Or he thought he didn’t, anyhow. Hamnet doubted whether he’d thought things through – but Hamnet doubted that about Sigvat a lot of the time. If the Rulers won, the most he could hope for was to go on as their vassal. They were more likely to dispose of him and find another puppet – or to do without puppets altogether.

As far as Count Hamnet was concerned, Sigvat deserved that kind of fate. Whether the rest of Raumsdalia did might be a different story.

“Well, go on,” the Emperor said. “God go with you. Good fortune go with you.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Hamnet and Kormak said together. Hamnet went on, “Will the guards still have our weapons, to give them back when we leave the palace?”

“They will,” Sigvat promised.

And they did, though the dirty looks one of them sent Hamnet’s way suggested that he’d done some appropriating while Hamnet sat in his cell.

With a sword on his hip and a knife on his belt, Hamnet felt better able to face the world outside. He knew it was more likely to yield to such weapons than the heartless world of the palace was.

The Glacier lay a long way north, but he could feel it in the wind when he walked out. He stepped carefully; ice crunched under his bootheels at every stride. Yes, winter was here, sure enough.

“All you have to do now is keep your word and beat the Rulers,” Kormak Bersi remarked.

“Yes, that’s all,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. The imperial agent sent him a sharp look, scenting sarcasm. Hamnet hadn’t intended any. He’d got out of Sigvat s dungeon. After that, wouldn’t anything else be easy by comparison?