Liv glanced back toward the rest of the travelers. "How long since the two of you parted?"
"Sometimes it seems like a thousand years. Sometimes it seems as if it happened this afternoon," he said. "Sometimes it seems like both at once. It's worst then."
"She is . .." Liv paused, looking for words. '"If she were a Bizogot, she wouldn't last long. You Raumsdalians have more room for useless people than we do."
"Gudrid's not useless." Hamnet Thyssen's mouth twisted. "Ask Eyvind Torfinn if you think I'm wrong. Ask Trasamund. Ask Audun Gilli. Go back and ask Roypar. God! You can ask me, too." He remembered the last time he'd lain with her. He hadn't known it would be the last then. I should have, he thought. She yawned when we finished, and she wasn't sleepy. She'd slipped out of the castle the next day. He hadn't seen her since, only heard about her . . . till Sigvat II summoned him to Nidaros.
In the pale moonlight, Liv's face was unreadable. "You never found another woman after that, plainly," she said.
"I sleep with women now and again. You know I do," Hamnet said.
"That isn't what I meant," she said. "You never found one who mattered to you."
"No. I never did," Hamnet Thyssen agreed. "I can't say I've looked very hard, though. If things go wrong once, that's bad. If things go wrong more than once . .. If things go wrong more than once, why do you go on living?"
"Why do you think they would go wrong?" Liv asked.
"Why? Because they already did once. I have practice being stupid, you might say." Hamnet tried to make a sour joke of it. Even with that, he was surprised to be saying as much as he was.
"Not all women are like Gudrid," Liv said.
"No doubt you're right," he answered. "But how do I tell beforehand? I didn't think Gudrid was like Gudrid, either, you know."
"Do you think I am like her?" Liv asked quietly.
He laughed once more, this time in sheer surprise. "No," he answered. "I can think of a lot of things I might say about you, but that isn't one of them."
"Well, then," she said.
Well, then—what? But he needed only a heartbeat to realize he was being thick. He put an arm around Liv. She sighed and pressed herself against him. "Are you sure?" he asked.
"How can anyone ever be sure?" she said. "The chance seems good, though. And if you don't bet, how do you expect to win?"
Hamnet Thyssen didn't look at things that way. To him, not betting meant you couldn't lose. He hadn't even thought of winning. He still didn't, not really. He wondered how badly he would get hurt, some time later on. But later didn't seem to matter, not right this minute. He bent his head to Liv—not very far, because she was a tall woman.
Nothing either one of them did after that was surprising—only the things men and women have done as long as there have been men and women. They surprised each other a few times, because neither of them knew the other that way. Those weren't bad surprises; they were both trying to see what pleased the other.
"Easy, there," Hamnet whispered after Liv dropped to her knees. "Not too much of that, or. . ."
She paused. "I wouldn't mind."
"I would," he said, and laid her down on the clothes they'd shed. She inhaled sharply when he went into her, and wrapped her arms and legs around him. He thought he would spend himself almost at once, especially after what she'd been doing, but instead he went on and on, almost as if he were outside himself. Liv's breath came short; her back arched. He covered her mouth with his when she started to cry out—that might have brought the other travelers on the run. Her joy came, and then, a moment later, his.
She kissed him on the end of the nose. Then she said, "You're squashing me," sounding, well, squashed.
"Sorry." He took his weight on his elbows and then leaned back onto his knees. All at once, he noticed it was chilly. It must have been chilly all along, but he'd had other things on his mind. "We'd better get dressed," he said.
"Yes, I suppose so." Liv seemed sorry, which made him feel about ten feet tall. Then she remarked, "That woman was the fool," which made him wonder why he didn't float off the ground and drift away on the breeze.
He glanced back toward the fire. No one was stirring around it. Either the other travelers hadn't noticed what was going on or they were too polite to let on that they had. Which didn't matter to Hamnet Thyssen. Hardly anything mattered to him right then.
"There. You see?" Liv effortlessly picked up the conversation. "It just. . . makes things better for a while."
"For a while," Hamnet admitted.
Liv laughed. "That's all it does," she said. "I'm not trying to steal your soul or anything like that."
"No, eh?" Hamnet Thyssen wanted to laugh, too, and happily, which didn't happen every day—or every month, either. "You may have anyhow." He meant it for a joke. It didn't come out like one.
She shook her head. "That wouldn't be good. I have enough trouble taking care of myself. I don't want to take care of anyone else."
"You'd better be careful," he said.
"Why?"
"If you aren't, we'll end up getting along. Who knows how much trouble that might cause?"
"Oh." Liv smiled. She squeezed his hand. "I'll take the chance. And now I think I'd better go back by the fire, before anyone else wakes up and notices I'm gone."
"Good idea, but I think people will notice anyway before long," Hamnet said.
"Do you? Why should they?"
"Because I'm going to be wandering around with a foolish grin on my face, and I've never done that before," he answered.
"I don't care who knows," Liv said. "I wouldn't have done it if I did. Do you?"
"When Gudrid finds out, she'll try to find some way to spoil things." For a moment, Count Hamnet sounded as mournful as he usually did.
"What can she do?" Liv sniffed scornfully.
Hamnet Thyssen only shrugged. Liv sniffed again, and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and walked back toward the fire. He didn't want to let her go, but the moon and the slow-wheeling stars said he had to stay on watch a while longer.
Before he went back, clouds rolled out of the northwest and hid the moon and stars. After that, he was on his own guessing the hour. The storm he'd seen coming in the halo around the moon was here before he'd expected it.
He went back when he thought it was midnight and cautiously shook Ulric Skakki awake. Being cautious when waking Ulric was a good idea; the adventurer had a habit of rousing in a hurry, and with a weapon in his hand—sometimes with a weapon in each hand.
Here, he just grunted and groaned and yawned, much as Hamnet Thyssen might have. "Is it that time already?" he asked around another yawn.
"Somewhere close, anyhow." Hamnet waved at the cloudy sky. "We're going to get the bad weather sooner than I thought."
"It has that look, doesn't it?" Yawning one more time, Ulric Skakki got to his feet. "Well, if it starts snowing too hard to let me see my way back here, I'll just scream my head off."
"You do that," Count Hamnet said. Ulric clapped him on the back and trudged away from the dimmed remains of the fire. They'd both been joking and not joking at the same time. Snowstorms like that weren't impossible up here, any more than they were in the Bizogot country or in the northern reaches of the Empire. Hamnet didn't think this storm would be one of those—the wind didn't have that sawtoothed edge to it—but you never could tell.
You never can tell, he told himself as he rolled himself in his mammoth-hide blanket. Of all the things he hadn't looked for, finding happiness— even if it proved only a few minutes of happiness—here beyond the Glacier stood high on the list.