Breath of God

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Hamnet Thyssen hadthought climbing up tumbled and shattered blocks of ice was bad. And it was. How many times had he almost killed himself in the desperate scramble to escape the Rulers? Probably more than he realized, which said everything that needed saying all by itself. But descending made going up child’s play by comparison.

If you slipped while you were climbing, someone below you had a chance to catch you and save you. If you slipped on the way down, you went down yourself, maybe all the way down, and you had a good chance of starting another avalanche when you did it.

“By God, I wish we had more rope,” Trasamund said before they’d gone even a bowshot. “If we could tie all of ourselves together, a slip wouldn’t be so bad.”

“It might be worse,” Count Hamnet said. “If one of us slipped, he might carry everybody he was roped to down with him.”

The jarl grunted. He looked as if he wanted to tell Hamnet he was wrong. He didn’t, though, because too plainly the Raumsdalian was right. Disaster waited under their feet at every step they took. They might have done better staying up on the Glacier. . except that they would soon have begun to starve.

“That other avalanche had a chance to settle down before we tackled it.” As usual, Ulric sounded most cheerful when the going was worst. “This one’s still shifting and sorting itself out.”

“You noticed that, too, did you?” Hamnet pointed down the steep slope.

Crashes and thuds farther down told of more shifting below. “This one’s a long way from finished – but it can finish us any time it wants to.”

“Don’t give it ideas. It’s bound to have enough of its own,” Ulric said.

“I wish I could call you a liar,” Hamnet said. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians had separated into little groups of three and four and five, each group staying as far from the others as it could. If one set of climbers did touch off another avalanche, with luck it wouldn’t sweep them all to their doom. With luck.

Marcovefa descended without a care in the world. Sometimes the raven stayed on her shoulder. Sometimes it flew off and soared and spun and swooped through the air. Hamnet Thyssen had seldom had the chance to watch a bird flying from above it. He didn’t have much of a chance now; he was too busy watching where he put his hands and feet. Killing himself for the sake of an unusual sight struck him as excessive devotion.

Maybe Marcovefa thought she could stop any trouble with a quick spell. Maybe she was right . . and maybe she wasn’t. Count Hamnet noticed that Liv and Audun Gilli both seemed much less carefree. Audun, probably the clumsiest person in the band, seemed scared out of his skin. Hamnet had a hard time blaming him – for that, anyway.

Not only were they above the raven – at least from time to time – they were also above a bank of clouds that bumped up against the side of the Glacier. And then they weren’t above the clouds any more, but in them. Count Hamnet discovered what mountain dwellers already knew: clouds up close were nothing but fog. Not being able to see more than a few feet as he struggled down towards the ground only made the descent even more alarming than it would have been otherwise.

He was on the point of complaining about that when Trasamund beat him to it. Ulric loaded his voice with treacle as he answered, “You poor dear. Maybe we should go back up to the top and try again when the weather gets nicer.”

The Bizogot’s reply should have melted the Glacier all by itself. Somehow, it didn’t. It didn’t scorch Ulric, either; the adventurer only laughed, which infuriated Trasamund all over again. Hamnet Thyssen went right on scrambling down the steep slope of the avalanche, glad he hadn’t offered himself as a target for Ulric s merciless wit.

Little by little, what had been a layer of clouds below and then a layer of fog all around became a layer of clouds above. That seemed normal to Hamnet, as it doubtless did to the other Raumsdalians and the Bizogots.

Marcovefa said something that sounded intrigued as she looked up. Ulric started to laugh again, this time, Hamnet judged, without sarcasm.

“Well?” Hamnet asked.

“She says, ‘There’s something you don’t see everyday,’“ Ulric said. “She’s more used to the tops of clouds than to their bottoms.”

Marcovefa looked down then. That also seemed to interest her. There, at least, Hamnet Thyssen could understand why. She was closer to the ground than any men of the Glacier had come for who could say how many hundred years. She spoke again.

This time, Ulric translated without waiting for anyone to ask him: “She says even the air feels heavy and thick down here.”

“Tell her we think there isn’t enough of it up where she lives,” Hamnet replied.

Ulric did. The comment only made the shaman laugh and shake her head. “Oh, no, she says,” Ulric reported. “It’s just right up there. … All what you’re used to, I suppose.”

“No doubt,” Count Hamnet said. “Of course, she’s also used to eating neighbors she doesn’t get along with.” He paused. “Considering a few of the people I know in Nidaros, that does have something to recommend it. But still . .”

“I know some of the people in Nidaros you wouldn’t mind seeing dead,” Ulric said. “Anybody who ate ‘em would sick em up again afterwards.”

“It could be,” Hamnet said. “I -”

He broke off. Someone in the group of climbers farthest to his right let out a wild scream of terror. “Watch out!” Two Bizogots and Audun Gilli shouted the same thing at the same time. It was much too late and altogether useless. That whole group – except for Arnora, who was trailing – plunged down the still-steep side of the ice mountain in an avalanche they’d touched off themselves. Hamnet Thyssen never knew what went wrong. A misplaced hand? A foot that came down where it shouldn’t have? Odds were whichever Bizogot made the mistake didn’t have long to regret it, either. How long could you last in a tumble of snow and icy boulders? If you were lucky, you would die fast, before you got buried alive.

Ulric slid half a step towards Arnora, then checked himself. Any move he made, or any she made, might start things sliding again. One of the Bizogots in the next group over did have some rope. He threw it to her. White-faced and panting with terror, she tied it around her waist. Then, moving as if walking on eggs, she sidled towards the man who’d thrown it. He hauled in the rope, and eventually hauled in Arnora with it.

She threw her arms around him and kissed him when she was safe – or as safe as she could be on the side of the Glacier. Count Hamnet glanced over to Ulric to see how he liked that. “I’d kiss him myself, but he’s bound to like it better from Arnora,” Ulric said. Hamnet only nodded. Either Ulric really worried less about such things than he did or hid his worries better. Whichever it was, the adventurer had the advantage there.

“We knew this was dangerous before we started down,” Trasamund said. “Now we truly know it is. Let’s remember till we -”

“Hit bottom?” Ulric suggested.

“Yes,” Trasamund said, and then, “No, curse it. Will you be serious for once in your life?”

“Oh, I’m serious enough,” the adventurer said. “Hard to stay jolly for long when you watch people die on a slope only maniacs would try.”

“Even sane, sensible people will try anything if they see their other choices are worse,” Count Hamnet said.

Ulric didn’t try to argue, from which Hamnet concluded that he didn’t think he could. They’d all decided taking the chance of dying was better than turning into men of the Glacier. Hamnet wondered whether the men the avalanche had buried would still agree. He wouldn’t have the chance to ask them, not in this world he wouldn’t.

The rest of the climbers gingerly went around the new avalanche as they kept descending. They couldn’t go too far around, not unless they got away from the slope of the bigger avalanche they were using for their route down. The rest of the Glacier wasn’t dangerously steep – it was impossibly steep.

Hamnet Thyssen looked up towards the top of the avalanche, back the way he’d come. The clouds that had been below him now hid most of the route. It might have been just as well; seeing what he’d done would only have convinced him he’d been out of his mind to try this.

Or had he? What other choice was there? If he and his comrades hadn’t climbed the Glacier, the Rulers would have killed them. If they hadn’t come down, they would have turned into cannibals. This was bad. Those, as he’d told Ulric, were worse.

“We’ve been beyond the Glacier and on top of it,” he said. “Not many can claim that.”

“You, me, Ulric, Audun, Liv,” Trasamund said. “Not many fools in the world.”

“You’re welcome to speak for yourself, Your Ferocity, but I’ll thank you to include me out,” Ulric said.

“Yes, tell me you’re not a fool. Tell me and make me believe it,” the Bizogot jarl said. Ulric maintained a dignified silence. Trasamund made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a snort. “Didn’t think you could.”

Marcovefa pointed down towards the ground – specifically, towards a herd of musk oxen in the middle distance. She said something that made Ulric snort, too – a snort that came close to a giggle. “Well?” Hamnet asked.

“She says we’re either closer to the ground than she thought or those are the biggest voles she’s ever seen,” the adventurer reported.

After a moment, Count Hamnet started to laugh, too. There he was, clinging like a fly to the side of the Glacier, unable to fly away if by some mischance he slipped, and he laughed hard enough to have trouble holding on. “What will she think when she sees mammoths?” he said when he could finally speak again.

“Probably that the pikas should have gone to the dentist before they grew up,” Ulric answered. That set them both laughing again, and got Trasamund and Audun Gilli started.

“I think we’re losing our minds.” Audun didn’t sound especially dismayed.

Trasamund shook his head. “We lost them a long time ago. We wouldn’t have gone up there if we hadn’t.”

Marcovefa asked a question. Ulric answered. By the way he kept going back and forth, he was having a hard time getting her to believe him. She kept screwing up her face and making derisive gestures. At last, he said something that turned her thoughtful. “She doesn’t want to believe the musk oxen are as big as I say,” Ulric said. “I reminded her of the chunks of horseflesh we had when we got to her mountain. Beasts really do grow bigger down below the Glacier.”

The raven croaked in Marcovefa’s ear. She answered it as seriously as she’d replied to Ulric. It croaked again. She shrugged and nodded.

“She’d sooner believe the bird than you,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

“Proves she knows them both,” Trasamund put in.

“I laugh. Ha. Ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha,” Ulric said.

Hamnet pointed to the ground in front of the musk oxen. “We really are getting close,” he said.

“Pay attention to where you are, not to where you want to be,” Trasamund said. “We’re still plenty high enough for the Glacier to kill us if it sees a chance.”

He spoke of it as if it were alive and malevolent. After two long climbs, one up, one down, and a little while atop its frozen immensity, Hamnet would have been hard pressed to tell him he was crazy. And he gave good advice. A careless mistake now could still be the last one somebody ever made.

They all talked one another down. Hamnet let out a sigh of commingled exhaustion and relief when his boots squelched in mud made soft and slimy by meltwater. Trasamund knelt down to kiss the dirt. That should have been laughable. Somehow, it wasn’t.

“There is a world below the Glacier. Who would have believed it?” Marcovefa said, Ulric translating.

“In one way, it’s no different from the world you just left,” Count Hamnet said. After Ulric did the honors, Marcovefa made a questioning noise. Hamnet explained: “Plenty of enemies will want to kill you here, too.”

As the sun set,the Glaciers shadows stretched farther and farther and darker and darker across the Bizogot plain. The travelers had moved a couple of miles south from the Glacier, not least because they didn’t want to risk another avalanche thundering down on their heads. Marcovefa marveled at everything she saw: the swarms of birds, the variety of voles and mice and lemmings in the undergrowth, and the sheer scope and exuberance of the undergrowth itself.

“This land is so rich,” she said through Ulric. “So wide, so many plants, and even the air makes me think I’ve chewed magic mushrooms.”

“So much more air to breathe down here, it’s probably making her drunk,” Hamnet Thyssen said, again remembering the thin stuff atop the Glacier. “I hope it doesn’t make her sick.”

“Nothing we can do about it if it does – short of sending her off to the mountains, I suppose,” Ulric said.

Marcovefa almost stepped in a mammoth turd. When she realized what it was, she stared down at it in disbelief, then yammered in her own language. Whatever she said, it set Ulric laughing. “Well?” Trasamund said. “Tell all of us.”

“She wants to know if a mountain shit here, or maybe the Glacier,” Ulric told him. Marcovefa added something else. “She says no animal could be big enough to leave a turd like that.”

“She may say it, but that doesn’t make it so,” the jarl said. “Now maybe she’ll believe we weren’t pulling her leg when we told her what the beasts down here were like. She’d better, or she’ll have a thin time of it when she meets her first lion or dire wolf.”

Ulric translated that for the shaman from the men of the Glacier. Count Hamnet found he could make out more words now than he’d been able to when he first met that folk. It was a dialect of the Bizogot tongue, sure enough, but a strange one, and a very old-fashioned one as well.

“You just told her a dire wolf was a fox that weighs as much as a man, didn’t you?” he asked the adventurer.

“That’s right,” Ulric said. “Do you want to take over some of the interpreting? I wouldn’t miss it, by God.”

“I don’t think I could,” Hamnet said. “I can figure out what some of the words are when I hear other people say them, but I don’t know how to say them myself.”

“Does make it harder,” Ulric allowed. “Marcovefa’s got to learn the ordinary Bizogot language. Trouble is, till we made it up to the top of the Glacier she didn’t imagine there were any other languages. I don’t know if she’ll have an easy time finding new words for things.”

Marcovefa looked down at the mammoth turd again. She quickly lost Count Hamnet when she spoke again; he had an easier time following Ulric’s efforts to speak her tongue. With a small sigh, Ulric did the honors: “She says we can have big fires whenever we want if we’ve got turds like that to burn.”

“I wonder what she’d think if she saw rounds of hickory burning in a fireplace down in Nidaros,” Hamnet said. “Anyone who imagines the Bizogot country is rich – ”

“Has been living on a mountaintop above the Glacier her whole life long,” Ulric finished for him.

That wasn’t what Hamnet would have said, which made it no less true. “Maybe you ought to tell her about horses and riding deer and riding mammoths,” he remarked. “We may have to travel fast now that we’re down here again.”

“Why? Just because we’ll be one jump ahead of the Rulers again – one jump ahead if we’re lucky?” Ulric had a knack for knowing where the worst troubles lay, all right. He went on, “Well, I’ll try. She’s not going to understand about riding, you know, not till she sees somebody doing it.”

He spoke slowly to Marcovefa. He had to keep backing up and starting over. At last, he had Hamnet get down on hands and knees and straddled him to show what riding meant. Marcovefa went into gales of giggles; it might have been the funniest thing she’d ever seen. “Why didn’t you let me do the riding?” Hamnet asked irritably.

“Because I didn’t want to look like an idiot?” Ulric suggested, and Hamnet tried to buck him off. Marcovefa laughed harder than ever. Un-fazed and unthrown, Ulric went on, “Besides, you’re bigger than I am, even if you make a fractious horse. I wanted to show her people ride bigger brutes.”

“Thank you so much,” Hamnet ground out. “Now that you’ve shown her, get the demon off me.”

Ulric did, which was lucky for him. Count Hamnet’s next move would have been to stand. Ulric couldn’t very well have ridden him then, any more than he could have sat in someone’s lap after the former lapholder rose.

“Well?” Hamnet said, an ominous rumble in his voice. “Does she understand what riding’s all about now?”

After more back-and-forth between Ulric and Marcovefa, the adventurer nodded. “She understands it, all right,” he said. “She isn’t sure she believes it. She isn’t sure it’s any good. But now she knows what the word means, and she didn’t before.”

Hamnet Thyssen had to think about that for a little while. He’d made cracks about how impoverished the men of the Glacier were. Now he saw he’d barely begun to understand that. Even their language was a poor, starveling thing. So many things they couldn’t do … and if you couldn’t do something, you didn’t need words to talk about it. So the words had fallen out of their vocabulary, and taken the ideas with them.

He looked back towards the Glacier, and then up towards the top. Both the layer of clouds through which he’d descended and gathering darkness kept him from seeing all the way up. But he didn’t really need to. He knew where he’d been and what he’d done. And if the rest of the world didn’t want to believe him, that was the world’s lookout, not his.

Then he looked south. “I suppose we ought to be glad the Rulers weren’t waiting for us when we got to the ground again,” he said.

“And I suppose you’re right,” Ulric said. “Don’t lose any sleep over it, though. They aren’t likely to leave us alone very long.”

“No, I suppose not,” Hamnet said.

Nothing could have made him lose sleep that night. Slightly muddy ground made a better mattress than ice or bare rock. But he suspected he could have lain down on a porcupine the size of a glyptodont and still started snoring two heartbeats after he closed his eyes.

The sun had to climb up over the Glacier before morning came to the land by its base. That won him more sleep than he would have had a little farther south. He woke grabbing his sword hilt when Trasamund shook him. “We need food,” the Bizogot said. “We need to find out whose land this is, too, and turn them against the Rulers if they aren’t already.”

“Are we still on the White Foxes’ grazing grounds?” Hamnet asked. “Or have we come farther west than that? Which clan lies west of theirs?”

“West of the White Foxes are the Snowshoe Hares,” Trasamund answered. He knew, and had to know, the Bizogot plain the way a native of Nidaros knew the capital’s streets. “They chase the Foxes more often than the Foxes chase them.”

“For all we know, the Rulers are here ahead of us,” Liv said. “Everything that’s held true on the steppe for generations is scrambled now. Even if we beat the Rulers, sorting things out afterwards will take years.”

“We’ll spill a lot of blood doing it, too.” Trasamund sounded matter-of-fact about that, not dismayed the way a Raumsdalian would have. “But at least that will come by our own choosing, not on account of these God-cursed invaders.”

“Not that the people who get maimed and killed will care,” Ulric said.

“Of course they’ll care,” Trasamund insisted. “In a fight, doesn’t who wounds you matter?”

“I’d rather not let anybody wound me, if it’s all the same to you,” Ulric said.

Hamnet Thyssen’s eyes slid towards Liv. He’d given her the power to wound him. He’d done the same with Gudrid all those years before, only to discover he’d made a mistake. That kept him from doing it again . . till he did. He couldn’t prove Liv would make him sorry, too. No, he couldn’t prove it – but he worried about it.

She could have reassured him. She could have . . and she hadn’t. He feared she was as out of sorts with him as he was with her. That wouldn’t do anybody any good. It was, in fact, a recipe for disaster. Sitting down and talking with her might help – if they ever found a moment to sit down together, and if he could figure out what to say if they did. They hadn’t yet, and he hadn’t yet, either, and the silence between them was starting to fester.

And Trasamund got to his feet, saying, “We have to find a herd, and we have to find the folk in charge of it. We need food, and we need mounts, and we need to get back into the fight against the invaders. Come on. Let’s get going.”

As Count Hamnet wearily rose, too, and started trudging across the Bizogot plain, he almost hated the jarl. The nobleman needed other things, too, and Trasamund wasn’t giving him a chance even to figure out how to find them. The things he needed were much less important in the grand scheme. He knew as much. Knowing was scant consolation, if any at all, because what he needed was no less important to him.

They were onthe Snowshoe Hares’ grazing grounds. They found out when two horsemen pulled away from a herd of musk oxen and rode up to look them over. Marcovefa stared at them. Then she stared at Ulric and Hamnet Thyssen. And then she started to laugh. She said something.

Hamnet thought he understood it. When Ulric translated, he proved right: “So you weren’t making it up after all.” Ulric said something in reply, something on the order of, Did you really think we were? And Marcovefa answered, “Well, you never know. Who would have thought beasts could truly grow so big?” Again, Hamnet followed her well enough to get meaning from her words before Ulric turned them into the ordinary Bizogot speech.

“Who are you ragamuffins?” one of the Snowshoe Hares shouted. “What the demon are you doing on our land?”

“We escaped the Rulers,” Trasamund answered. “We had to climb up onto the Glacier and then come down again, so we did that.”

The Snowshoe Hare laughed in his face. “By God, I’ve heard some liars in my time, but never one who came close to you.”

Marcovefa stepped forward to get a better look at him. She said something in her language. “She says you’re a noisy fool even if you can ride a horse,” Ulric translated, helpfully adding, “She’s never seen anybody ride before, so that impresses her more than it does us.”

“What do you mean, she’s never seen anybody ride a horse before?” the Snowshoe Hare demanded.

“I usually mean what I say. You should try it. It works wonders,” Ulric said. “And she’s never seen anybody ride a horse because the biggest animals up on top of the Glacier – except for people – are foxes.”

“More of those lies!” the Bizogot from the Snowshoe Hares jeered.

Marcovefa spoke again. Hamnet Thyssen was afraid he understood what she said. Ulric’s translation confirmed it: “She says she’s eaten better men than you, and she doesn’t mean it any way you’d enjoy. Believe me, she doesn’t.”

The expressions on the faces of the other Raumsdalians and the Bizogots with them told both riders from the Snowshoe Hares exactly how Marcovefa did mean it. As soon as they understood, they looked revolted, too. “Why don’t you kill her, then, if she does things like that?” asked the one who’d done the talking.

“Because she’s a shaman, for one thing,” Ulric answered. “Because two-legged meat is a good bit of what they’ve got to eat up there, for another. It’s a hardscrabble life on top of the Glacier, believe you me it is.”

“Maybe.” The way the Snowshoe Hare said it made it sound like an enormous concession. In his mind, it probably was.

“Now will you answer what I asked you?” Trasamund demanded. “Are you still free of the Rulers? Have the White Foxes gone down before them yet?”

That made the two horsemen put their heads together. When they separated, neither one looked happy. “Something’s happened to the White Foxes, anyway,” admitted the one who liked to hear himself.

“We thought it was a feud inside the clan,” the other one said, proving he wasn’t mute after all.

“It’s worse than that, by God.” Trasamund gave his own name, continuing, “You may have heard of me. I am the jarl of the Three Tusk clan – and what’s left of the free Three Tusk clan stands here in front of you. The Rulers are that bad.”

“Well, they haven’t troubled us,” the talkier Snowshoe Hare said. The other one nodded.

“They’re probably heading south instead,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

“Toward the Empire,” Audun Gilli added.

How much would that matter to the Snowshoe Hares? Not much, not unless Count Hamnet missed his guess. The Raumsdalian Empire seemed barely real to most Bizogots up here by the Glacier, just as their world was strange and alien to the folk who dwelt below the tree line, and especially to those who lived south of the great forests.

“Let us talk to your jarl,” Trasamund said. “Feed us, if you will – we’re not your foes. If you don’t help us, you help the God-cursed Rulers.”

Hamnet Thyssen hoped he didn’t ask the other Bizogot for horses for all his comrades. The Snowshoe Hares were unlikely to have enough to give them to him. They were less likely to want to do it even if they did have horses to spare.

But Trasamund must have made the same mental calculation himself. Instead of barking out more demands, he stood there waiting with as much calm dignity as he could muster, doing his best to seem like a man who’d asked for no more than he was entitled to.

Calm and dignity were in short supply among the Bizogots, and so all the more impressive when they did get used. The two Snowshoe Hares put their heads together again. Then the mouthier one said, “Yes, come with us. We’ll feed you, and we’ll take you to Euric, and he’ll decide what to do next. I’m Buccelin; this is my cousin, Gunthar.”

One by one, the Bizogots and Raumsdalians with Trasamund named themselves. Marcovefa came last – or Count Hamnet thought she would, anyhow. But after she told Buccelin and Gunthar her name, the raven on her shoulder croaked out a few syllables, too. Was that a coincidence, or was it also naming itself? Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure. By the way Buccelin and Gunthar muttered, they weren’t, either.

Marcovefa? She smiled and scratched the big black bird’s formidable beak. The raven couldn’t very well smile back, but Hamnet got the feeling that was what it was doing.

The Snowshoe Hares led the travelers who’d come down from the Glacier off towards the southwest. They traveled at what was a slow walk for their horses, so the men and women on foot wouldn’t fall behind. Marcovefa watched them intently. After a couple of miles, she spoke up.

“She says she’d like to try to ride for a little while – she’s never done it before,” Ulric said.

Plainly, the mounted Bizogots wanted to say no. Just as plainly, they didn’t have the nerve. Their eyes kept going from her face to the raven and back again. Gunthar reluctantly reined in and dismounted. He showed Marcovefa how to set her left foot in the stirrup and swing up over and onto the horse’s back.

She managed more smoothly than Hamnet would have expected. When she was in the saddle, she smiled again. “She says she feels so tall!” Ulric said. “She says she can see as far as the raven can.”

Gunthar laughed. “Is she witstruck?”

“Not the way you mean,” Hamnet answered. “Everything down here is new to her. They haven’t got much, there up on top of the Glacier.”

“You’re still going on about that, are you?” the Snowshoe Hare said.

“It’s the truth,” Hamnet Thyssen said stonily. “If you don’t believe it, try crossing Marcovefa and see what happens.”

“No, thanks,” Gunthar said. “I don’t know where the demon she’s from. For all I can say, she fell from the back side of the moon. But I know a shaman when I see one. We’ve had a witstruck shaman or two in our clan. It doesn’t mean they can’t use spells well enough.”

Buccelin showed Marcovefa how to use the pressure of her legs to urge the horse forward, and how to guide it to the right and left with the reins. She proved an apt pupil. The first question she asked was, “How do you make these big beasts your slaves?”

“We train them, starting when they’re small,” Buccelin answered.

After Ulric translated, the shaman nodded. Then she asked, “And what do you do when they rebel?”

“She really doesn’t know anything about this business, does she?” Buccelin remarked. With a shrug, he went on, “We train them some more. We punish them. If we still can’t break them, we can always kill them and eat them.”

“Ah,” Marcovefa said. “You are men, sure enough.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” the Bizogot demanded. The woman from atop the Glacier said not another word. After a few more minutes, she dismounted, and did so with more grace than she’d used getting up on the horse. Buccelin mounted. Marcovefa sketched a salute. He gave back a brusque nod, then made a point of not riding anywhere near her.

In midafternoon, they approached a herd of musk oxen. Marcovefa pointed towards them. “So many large animals! Do you get up on top of these, too?”

“Maybe we could, but we don’t.” By then, Buccelin seemed resigned to playing guide. “We use them for their meat and hides and milk and wool and bones and horn.” He chuckled. “Everything but the grunt.”

Marcovefa thought that was funny, which proved she came from the back of beyond. A couple of other Snowshoe Hares rode out from the herd. “Who are these ragamuffins?” one of them shouted. “Where did they come from? Down off the Glacier?” He threw back his head and laughed at his own wit.

“Yes, I think they really did,” Buccelin answered, which made the other Bizogot’s jaw drop. “We’re taking them to Euric. They know what the mess to the east is all about. This one” – he aimed a thumb at Trasamund – ”used to be jarl of the Three Tusk clan.”

“And I still am, by God.” Pride rang in Trasamund’s voice … for a little while. But he seemed to deflate as he continued, “It’s just that the clan . . has run into a few problems lately.”

“A few problems have run over the clan, he means,” Ulric whispered to Hamnet Thyssen, who nodded.

“We need to feed them,” Buccelin said. “They seem hungry like they just came down off the Glacier, that’s for sure. Any beast in bad shape?”

“We’ve got a cow that’s limping,” the other Bizogot said. “It’s not slowing up the herd or anything, but we can kill it.”

They did, and butchered it, and got a big fire of dried grass and dung going to cook the meat. Meanwhile, Trasamund and his clansmates and the Raumsdalians told what they knew of the invasion of the Rulers. They also told how they’d climbed the Glacier and what they’d found on top of it. None of them, though, mentioned some of Marcovefa’s dining habits. Maybe that was coincidence. Maybe it was shared revulsion. Maybe it was some subtle spell from the shaman. Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t be sure.

He was sure he stuffed himself like a Bizogot, gobbling down meat and fat and breaking big bones to reach the marrow. His hands and face got all greasy. He didn’t care. He’d been empty a lot lately. Not having the fist of hunger pounding his stomach felt wonderful.

So did not needing to worry about standing watch. The Snowshoe Hares insisted that was their job. None of the travelers tried to argue with them. “We’re out of danger for a little while, anyhow,” Hamnet said.

“Danger from the outside, anyhow,” Liv said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“I’m like you and Ulric – I usually say what I mean,” she answered. “We have trouble – you and I have trouble – because you can’t get over being jealous.”

“Can you blame me?” Hamnet said.

But Liv nodded. “Yes, by God, I can blame you, because I haven’t done anything to make you jealous.”

“The demon you haven’t.” Hamnet didn’t like arguing in a near-whisper to keep the others from hearing what was going on. He wanted to shout and raise a fuss and pound on things. He wondered why he didn’t. It wasn’t as if they didn’t know about his squabbles with Liv. But he went on quietly: “If you haven’t been clinging to Audun Gilli – ”

“I haven’t!” Liv’s voice was also soft, but fire filled it all the same.

“You sure haven’t clung to me lately. God only knows the last time we made love – I have trouble remembering,” Hamnet said.

“I could say I’m not your toy. I could say we’ve had a few other things going on lately. I could even say you’ve been spending a lot of time around Marcovefa.”

“Her?” Hamnet Thyssen clapped a hand to his forehead. “You are out of your mind! She’s a barbarian, a savage.”

“You mean you don’t think the same thing about me?” Liv retorted. “And why am I out of my mind for doubting you when you’re not out of yours for doubting me?”

“Because nothing’s going on between me and the cannibal,” Count Hamnet answered. She couldn’t accuse him of thinking that about her. “I’m just trying to learn a little of her language and teach her some of yours.”

“Well, what do you think I’m doing with Audun?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing with Audun. That’s what worries me.”

“You pick stupid things to worry about, especially when we have so many real ones that are bigger.” Liv turned her back on him and rolled herself in her hide blanket. “Finding enough sleep is a real one. I had trouble up on top of the Glacier. I never thought I was getting enough air.”

Count Hamnet felt the same way, but he would sooner have jumped from the top of the Glacier than admit it. He got under a hide, too, and closed his eyes. He didn’t think he would sleep at all – too much anger seethed inside him – but exhaustion sneaked up from behind and clubbed him over the head.

When he woke in the middle of the short northern summer night, Liv was leaning over him. He wondered if he ought to grab for one of the knives on his belt. But all she did was shake her head and say, “You fool.”

“What? For loving you too much?”

“Yes. For loving me too much. It makes you stupid, and you aren’t stupid often enough to know how to do it right.” Shaking her head, Liv slid under the hide with him. “Well?” she said: a one-word challenge, as if he didn’t deserve what she was giving him. She probably thought he didn’t.

He did the best he could. It seemed to be good enough. But even if it was, he knew it didn’t really settle anything.