Despite all his logic, he scanned the northern horizon again. He stiffened in the saddle. His finger stabbed out. "What's that?"
"Lion," said Ulric Skakki, who rode not far away.
"I suppose so," Hamnet said. That small shape in the distance did move with a sinuous, feline grace.
"It's seen us," Trasamund said. Sure enough, the big cat trotted toward the travelers.
The closer it got, the more they stared at it. "By God," Audun Gilli said, "that's no lion!"
"It isn't," Jesper Fletti agreed. "What is it? It's no sabertooth, either—it doesn't have short hind legs the way they do."
"It is something new," Eyvind Torfinn said. "It is a creature from beyond the Glacier." Awe suffused his voice.
A creature from beyond the Glacier. That was plenty to awe Hamnet Thyssen, too. And itwasasingularlydeadly-lookingcreature.lt looked more like a lion than anything else, but it was bigger than any lion Hamnet had ever seen. It was so big, it surely had to be a male, but it did not bear a mane.
Audun Gilli was right—it was no lion. Instead of a tawny coat, it had a pale golden one, broken by dark stripes that helped confuse its outline till it came quite near. When it yawned, it displayed formidable fangs, but more like a lion's than a sabertooth's.
It trotted alongside the travelers for a while, but showed no inclination to attack. In fact, it showed no inclination to come within bowshot of the horses. Hamnet Thyssen had seen similarly wary lions down in the south. "It knows men," he said. "It knows what weapons can do."
"Looks that way," Ulric Skakki said. "Well, no great surprise, not after some of the other things we've seen—and not after your magical owl."
"Not mine," Hamnet said. "Liv woke me up, so I helped chase it away."
"That'll do." Ulric pointed out toward the big striped cat. "Do you suppose they hunt in prides the way lions do?"
"I hadn't thought about that," Hamnet said. "We'll find out. Where there's one of those things, there are bound to be more."
"Well, you're right about that," Ulric Skakki said. "They might as well be tax collectors, except they don't take such big bites."
"Heh," Count Hamnet said, for all the world as if Ulric were joking.
The striped cat studied the travelers with as much curiosity as they showed it. Coming up from the other side of the Glacier, did they smell strange? Hamnet knew he smelled bad. All the travelers did, and got worse by the day. But he had no reason to believe anyone on this side of the ice was any more fragrant.
After a few minutes, the striped cat seemed to decide the humans were too alert to make good prey. It trotted purposefully off toward the northwest, leaving the horses behind. The animals seemed glad it was gone. Whatever the travelers smelled like to the cat, it smelled like danger to the horses.
"Was that a real cat?" Trasamund asked. "Or was it a man in cat shape, spying on us like the owl?"
He spoke first in his own language, then in Raumsdalian. Both Liv and Audun Gilli looked surprised. "I felt nothing out of the ordinary," the Bizogot shaman said.
Audun looked a question at Hamnet Thyssen, who translated for him. Audun nodded. "I thought it was an ordinary animal, too," he said. Hamnet translated that into the Bizogot tongue for Liv.
"I'm glad to hear it," Trasamund said, again in both languages. "And by God, I hope you're right."
They'd come so far north, full darkness never descended on the world. Not long before midnight, the sun sank below the horizon in the far northwest. Not long after midnight, it rose again in the far northeast. During its brief journey below the edge of the earth, the northern sky stayed light. Nothing deeper than twilight settled over the land, and only a few of the brightest stars came out—and then not for long.
Ulric Skakki made a joke of it, saying, "They won't be afraid to see owls by daylight here."
"No, they likely won't." Hamnet dropped his voice. "But you were up here in the wintertime before. What's it like then?"
Ulric turned and pointed almost due south. With a melodramatic shiver, he said, "The sun comes up there." Then he swung his arm from slightly east of south to slightly west. "And it goes down there. And it never gets higher in the sky than this." He held thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart. "It's like two or three hours of late afternoon in the middle of the day. It's dark the rest of the time, dark and bloody cold. You see by the stars and the Northern Lights—when there are Northern Lights—and the moon. When the moon is full in wintertime, it does what the sun does in high summer, so it's in the sky a lot. Better than nothing, I suppose. The further from full it is, the shorter the time it stays up."
Hamnet Thyssen tried to imagine darkness spread across the landscape for almost the whole day. "You must have slept a lot," he said.
"Well, what else is there to do?" Ulric asked in reasonable tones. "You ride, and you hunt, and you roast what you kill, and you sleep. You don't even have to hunt so much in the winter, because the meat doesn't spoil. You just have to make sure the wolves and the bears and the foxes and the big striped cats don't steal it."
"That must be fun," Count Hamnet observed.
"Oh, sometimes." Ulric Skakki smiled crookedly. Then he nodded to Hamnet. "You ought to come up here in wintertime yourself, your Grace, just to see it. It might appeal—darkness suits you, eh?"
"What's that supposed to mean?" Hamnet asked. Ulric Skakki's shrug was a small masterpiece of its kind. However much Hamnet fumed, he didn't ask the other man to explain himself again. He knew too well what Ulric had to mean. Darkness crouched at the center of his soul. It had for years. He feared it always would.
He'd never been a cheery, outgoing man. He never would be; he didn't need sardonic Ulric to remind him of that. But what his former wife did to his spirit was like a wound that wouldn't heal. The spiritual pus that leaked from it infected his whole spirit.
"I know what you need," Ulric said.
Hamnet Thyssen scowled at him. "I need you to shut up and go away," he growled.
"You need to fall in love." Ulric went on as if he hadn't spoken. The adventurer's grin was bright, charming, and altogether infuriating.
"I really need you to shut up and go away." Hamnet Thyssen’s laugh came harsh as a raven's croak. "You damned fool, what are the odds?" He tried to imagine himself in love again. Imagining himself wringing Ulric Skakki's neck was much easier.
Ulric laughed again, too, a light, airy sound that made Count Hamnet wonder how such different things could have the same name. "You won't do it if you don't go looking for somebody, that's for sure," he said.
"And if I do go looking for somebody, what'll she do?" Hamnet demanded. "Betray me the same way Gudrid did, that's what."
"Well, maybe you—" Ulric Skakki broke off, not from fear but from a certain self-protective caution. "You have murder in your eye, your Grace. Perhaps you should put it back in your pocket or wherever you usually keep it."
"You were going to say, 'Maybe you had it coming,' weren't you?" Hamnet said thickly. "Why shouldn't I kill you for that, you son of a whore?"
"Because it may be true even if you don't like it?" Ulric sounded as light and carefree as usual, but his hand hovered near his swordhilt.
Hamnet Thyssen's hand dropped to his. "You lie," he said. "I didn't do anything to deserve having horns put on me."
"No one ever does," Ulric Skakki said. "No one ever does, if you listen to him tell it. Or her—plenty of women sing the same sad song. 'No, I didn't do anything.' But people get horns put on them every day of the week, every week of the month, every month of the year. Meaning no offense, your Grace, but maybe doing nothing was your problem."
"What nonsense are you spewing now?" Hamnet said.
Ulric sighed. "I might have known you'd see it that way. By God, I did know you'd see it that way. Sometimes you have to try, whether you think it'll do any good or not." He turned away—but he kept an eye on Hamnet Thyssen even so.
"Doing nothing," Hamnet muttered in disgust. As if that meant anything! Gudrid played Eyvind Torfinn for a fool, too. Did that mean he was doing nothing, too? Count Hamnet glanced over toward Eyvind. At the moment, he was trimming his nails with a clasp knife, and making heavy going of it—the years had lengthened his sight, so he had to work at arm's length.
With what kind of man would Gudrid be happy? Count Hamnet couldn't imagine. By all the signs, Gudrid couldn't, either. Hamnet glared at Ulric Skakki. He thought he had all the answers, did he? Well, he wasn't half as clever as he thought he was.
Was he?
North and west, north and west. Hamnet Thyssen hadn't realized there was so much land beyond the Glacier. He'd thought the ground on the far side of the ice would be an afterthought, an appendage to the real world, the world he was familiar with. After all, the Raumsdalian Empire, the Bizogot steppe, and the lands to the south of those that Sigvat II ruled added up to a vast sweep of terrain. Why would anyone—or even God—need more of the world than that?