If the horse stumbles under me, I'm a dead man, Hamnet thought. Even so, he booted it on as fiercely as he could. If the cracks in the ice caught up with him, he was also dead. When he looked back one more time, he gasped in dismay. He could see black water there where the cracks had widened. No, he didn't want to go into that. "Come on, horse!" he called. "Run, curse you!"
And the horse did run. And its hooves thudded up the slope of Sudertorp Lake's northern bank just as the cracks and black water reached the edge of the lake. Ulric and Trasamund were ahead of him, Liv and Audun just behind.
For a bad moment, he wondered if the spell could tear land asunder as it tore ice. But it did stop at the lake's edge. He reined in, breathing almost as hard as his horse was. Then he pulled back his hood in lieu of doffing a cap to salute the shaman and wizard. "I think you saved us," he said.
Liv was panting, as if she'd run a long way. "I think I did, too," she said. "And I know—I know—I had help from Audun."
"You knew the spell," Audun Gilli told her. "It worked .. . just well enough." He looked back toward the cracks in the frozen surface of the lake.
So did Liv. Her shiver had nothing to do with winter on the Bizogot plains. "Just well enough is right," she said. "I couldn't stop the spell. I didn't have a chance in the world of stopping it. All I could do was slow it down a little."
"How did the Rulers reach so far?" Hamnet Thyssen asked.
"I don't know!" she blazed, sounding angry at him and herself and the Rulers all at once. "I don't know, I tell you. If I knew, I'd be able to do something like that myself, and I can't. Nobody can."
"Nobody except them." Audun Gilli pointed north.
"What does that say?" Count Hamnet had a pretty good notion what it said, but hoped he was wrong. "Does it say we'd better not quarrel with them, or else we'll lose? Does it say we should bend the knee to them, because that's the best we can hope to do? If it does, why are we fighting?"
"We're fighting because we're free, and we're going to stay free," Trasamund answered before Liv could speak. "If that's not why you're fighting, go back to the Empire, because I want nothing to do with you."
"I'm not going anywhere," Hamnet said. "Except north, that is."
"Next frozen lake we come across, we ought to go around it and not over it," Ulric Skakki said.
"I wonder if it matters," Hamnet said. "If the Rulers know where we are, if they can strike as they please, they'll find some other way, some other place, to try to kill us."
"Foolish to give them the same chance twice," Ulric insisted.
"Why? They've seen it didn't work, so wouldn't they think it's not worth trying again?" Count Hamnet said. "We haven't seen any more wizards pretending to be short-faced bears after we killed the first one."
"That man was not pretending." Liv and Audun Gilli said the same thing at the same time in two different languages.
"Whether he was or not, they only tried it once," Count Hamnet said stubbornly.
"Are we as safe as we can be now?" Trasamund asked. The only answers the others could give were shrugs. How could they hope to know? But even shrugs satisfied the jarl. "Either we let them scare us, or we don't," he said. "And if we don't, we keep moving."
"Spoken like a nomad," Ulric said.
"I am a nomad," Trasamund answered proudly. "I am on the way back to my clan's grazing grounds. And you had better be, too." He urged his horse north. The others came with him. Having ridden so far, what else could they do?
Hamnet Thyssen didn't like his dreams. They'd mostly been happy after he and Liv became lovers. The dreams he'd had since returning to the frozen steppe, though, were muddled and grim, and they got worse the farther north he traveled.
When he finally complained about it, Liv looked surprised. "Yours, too?" she said. "Mine have been the same way. I don't care for the omen."
They soon found they weren't the only ones with ugly dreams. Ulric Skakki made light of his, saying, "What do you expect after you eat musk-ox chitterlings two days running?"
"What's wrong with musk-ox chitterlings? They're good," Trasamund declared. "And besides, they're a lot better than going empty."
"I won't argue with the second part of that," Ulric said. "The first... is a matter of opinion, and it isn't mine."
Even though Trasamund liked what he was eating, he also had bad dreams. He put it down to worry. "I keep wondering how things are with the clan," he said. "I imagine everything that could go wrong. Do that long enough and you'll start doing it whether you're awake or asleep."
Audun Gilli said, "If my dreams are bad, it's because someone is trying to make them bad. And someone is doing it, too."
"The Rulers?" Hamnet said.
"I can't think of anyone else it's likely to be," Audun said. "Can you?"
"I can't." Liv's voice was worried, too. "None of the other Bizogots hate the Three Tusk clan enough to bring a sending down on us."
"What about his Imperial Majesty?" Ulric Skakki, as usual, was full of pleasant ideas.
However much Count Hamnet wished he could, he couldn't dismiss that one out of hand. The most he would say was, "I don't like to think that of Sigvat."
"Well, neither do I. But I don't like nightmares, either. I don't like waking tireder than I went to sleep," Ulric said. "How do we know for sure our own wizards weren't cracking the ice on Sudertorp Lake?"
"How do we know? Because they cursed well weren't, that's how," Audun Gilli said. "I know what our sorcery feels like. I ought to, by God. This had nothing to do with that. It felt strange, strange and strong. Whoever worked that magic has been making spells in a tradition, in a style, separate from ours for... for forever, as best I can tell."
"He's right," Liv said. "I know Bizogot shamanry. I know some of what Raumsdalian shamanry feels like. This was different, as different as blackberries and musk oxen."
Ulric spread his hands. "All right, I was wrong about that. But are you sure I'm wrong about the sending?"
Liv and Audun looked at each other. "I thought it was coming from the north," she said slowly. Audun Gilli nodded. But Liv went on, "I'm not sure of that, not the way I was with the spell on the lake. I still think it's likely, but I'm not sure."
"My dreams have been cold. All of them have been cold," Audun said. Thinking back on it, Hamnet realized his had, too. Audun continued, "That doesn't prove it's the Rulers and not the Emperor, but I'd bet on them."
"When we get back among the good folk of the Three Tusk clan, we will be troubled no more," Trasamund said. "By being what they are, they will shield us from this nuisance."
"What? We're not good folk ourselves?" Ulric asked. "If that's all it takes . . . We don't have some of the people who came along with us last time here now, you know." He named no names, which was just as well. Hamnet Thyssen's mind immediately turned to Gudrid.
But he hadn't had nightmares about her up here, not even once. That struck him as odd. He'd had plenty of them before.
Trasamund's thoughts ran in a different direction. "Nothing wrong with Eyvind Torfinn," he said. "Jesper Fletti and the other soldiers—I don't miss them so much."
He thought Earl Eyvind was a good fellow because the aging noble either didn't see his sport with Gudrid or pretended not to notice it. Hamnet didn't think Eyvind Torfinn a bad fellow, either, but he esteemed the other Raumsdalian despite his ties to Gudrid, not because of them.
Trasamund sent Ulric Skakki a sly glance. He didn't say anything about Ulric. He didn't say the adventurer wasn't a good man. Whatever he thought, he thought. And if Ulric growled and muttered, he didn't—he couldn't—do any more than that. Trasamund . .. smiled.
Who would have thought a Bizogot could show such subtlety?
The Red Dire Wolves—not to be confused with the Black Dire Wolves, who dwelt far to the west—fed the travelers to the bursting point. They’d just killed a bull mammoth, and for the time being had more meat than they knew what to do with. Baked mammoth, stewed mammoth, mammoth fritters, roasted mammoth marrow—a delicacy, that, even without toasted bread on which to spread it—mammoth blood sausage, mammoth head cheese . . . Anything you could do to and with a mammoth's carcass, the Red Dire Wolves did.
"I'm surprised we didn't see mammoth eyeballs and mammoth bal-locks," Audun Gilli said during a pause in the orgy of eating.
"Oh, the jarl gets the eyeballs," Trasamund said seriously. "They help make him farseeing, or so the hope is. As for the ballocks, the clansmen slice them up and roast them first thing. Same with the pizzle. You can figure out why."