“It is not magic at all,” Hamnet Thyssen insisted. “It is a craft, like making a bow or fletching an arrow. Anyone can learn it.”

“So you say,” Rankarag replied. “You are not part of the Bizogot herd. Do these Bizogots know this so-called craft?”

“No,” Hamnet said.

“So your herd keeps it for itself, then,” the warrior from the Rulers said. “One day, you will use it against the Bizogot herd. You will slaughter them all, except for the pretty women, and you will take their land.” He had a very basic notion of what went into diplomacy. So did the rest of his folk.

Count Hamnet wanted to laugh in his face. Instead, he just shook his head. “We don’t want the Bizogots’ land. We have better land of our own.”

“But you still keep these, these characters secret from the Bizogots,” Rankarag said.

“No,” Hamnet replied, as patiently as he could. “They can learn to write if they want to. A few of them have. Most see no use for it, though.”

“Then this Bizogot herd is full of fools,” Rankarag said – a view not too different from the one many Raumsdalians held. He pointed a finger at Hamnet Thyssen. “I can prove that you are lying. I can make you prove it, in fact. If it is only a craft” – he laughed at the very idea – ”you will not mind showing me all of these characters.”

After writing Rankarag’s name again, Hamnet showed him the sound that each character in it made, finishing, “You see the r sound and the a sound are there together twice. These are the characters that make them, and they are also there twice. We have thirty-seven characters in all. Here they are.” He wrote them out in order, saying the sound for each one as he did.

Rankarag stared at him, at the Raumsdalian characters, at him again. “You are not making this up,” he said slowly.

“By God, no!” Hamnet said. “That would be more trouble than it’s worth.”

Like a lot of Bizogots, Rankarag proved to have an excellent memory for what he saw and heard. He took the bit of bone from Count Hamnet and wrote in the muddy ground, muttering to himself as he did. “So this would say tent in the tongue of the Bizogot herd, then?”

“Almost. Not quite. What you wrote is tint, which means a color. Here is the character for the e sound.” Hamnet pointed it out, then wrote tent himself. In spite of himself, he was impressed that Rankarag had come so close after hearing the sound of each character only once.

“Tent.” Rankarag wrote it again, this time correctly.

“That’s right,” Hamnet said.

Rankarag eyed him. “I could put your name in the mud, the same as you put mine. I could work magic on it if I were a shaman.”

Suddenly, Count Hamnet wondered whether showing him the way Raumsdalians wrote was such a good idea. Rankarag didn’t see writing as a tool. He saw it as a weapon. The minds of the Rulers seemed to run in that direction. As casually as Hamnet could, he said, “You could try. Because we use characters all the time, of course we are warded against them.” That sounded good. He wished it were true.

And it impressed the captive less than he hoped it would. “You folk of the herds, what are your wards worth?” Rankarag said. “Our shamans should have no trouble beating them down.”

“Your magic is not always as strong as you think it is,” Hamnet Thyssen replied, trying to fight down his unease. “Besides, what do you care what the Rulers do? You don’t belong to them anymore. You are a prisoner, a prisoner of the Bizogots.”

Rankarag flinched as if Hamnet had threatened to hit him. The real threat probably wouldn’t have scared him; he was a warrior to the core. “I wish you hadn’t reminded me,” he said in a low, sullen voice.

“You need to remember it. You failed. You were captured. The Rulers don’t want you back. If you have any future at all, it’s with us, not with them.” Count Hamnet hoped he was right. If Rankarag escaped and brought writing and the idea of writing back to the Rulers’ wizards, would that make him valuable enough to earn his way into the ranks of his folk once more? Hamnet couldn’t be sure; he simply didn’t know the enemy well enough to judge.

One thing he could do – and he did it. He warned the guards to keep an extra close watch on the prisoners. “We’ll do it,” one of them said.

Hamnet asked Trasamund and Totila to tell the guards to be careful, too. They would take an order from a jarl more seriously than a warning from a foreigner. He hoped they would, anyhow. He had the feeling he’d put a sword into the Rulers’ hands. He hadn’t intended to, but what did that have to do with the price of meat?

“Name magic, yousay?” Ulric Skakki looked at Count Hamnet as if he’d found half of him in his apple. “Name magic with letters? Well, there’s one more thing to have nightmares about. Thank you so much.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Hamnet said sheepishly.

“Yes? And so?” Ulric said. “Probably the best thing we could do now would be to kill this Rankarag whoreson. Or do you suppose he’s already passed on the news to the rest of the prisoners?”

“I hope not,” Hamnet said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“No. Neither would I,” Ulric said. “You and your big mouth – and you talk about me. If the Rulers were freezing, would you have told them to start a fire?”

“I didn’t think they would think to use writing for sorcery,” Hamnet said unhappily.

“Why the demon not?” Ulric Skakki rolled his eyes. “That’s probably what we used it for first, too. After awhile, some people figured out you could do other things with it, too. But they had to pry it out of the wizards’ hands before they could – you can bet on that.”

“How do you know? Were you there?” Hamnet asked.

“Of course,” Ulric said easily. “This was in the days when mammoths weren’t woolly and musk oxen were green, you understand.”

“I wonder what Audun would say about that,” Hamnet Thyssen remarked.

“Well, you can ask him if you want to.” Ulric’s voice was dismissive. “I didn’t see him around then, though – I’ll tell you that.” He often took his whimsy more seriously than things any sensible person would have known were worth taking seriously.

As much to annoy the adventurer as for any other reason, Count Hamnet did hunt up Audun Gilli. “What do you know about how writing started?” he asked out of a clear blue sky – something the frozen steppe didn’t see all that often, but something it enjoyed now.

The wizard blinked. “What on earth brought that on?” he asked.

Hamnet Thyssen explained his unfortunate introduction of the idea to Rankarag, and also his fruitless – at least from his point of view – discussion with Ulric Skakki. “So if you know anything about the days when the musk oxen were green, let’s hear it,” he finished.

“Green musk oxen,” Audun Gilli murmured. “I wasn’t there for that, I will say. But Ulric’s right, I think – wizards likely did come up with writing first. We needed it more than other people would have.”

“How much trouble can the Rulers cause if they start using it?” Hamnet asked.

“How should I know?” Audun answered – which was, Hamnet had to admit, a sensible response. The wizard went on, “My best guess is, they’ll cause more trouble than we expect them to. They seem to be like that.”

“They do, don’t they?” Hamnet Thyssen said unhappily. “We’ve got to make sure none of our captives flees north, then. I’ve talked to the Bizogots about it, but sometimes talking to them is like talking to the Glacier. You can do it, but you wonder why you bother.”

“They follow their own bent, don’t they?” Audun said.

Hamnet laughed, not that he found it very funny. “That’s the kindest way I ever heard to say they do whatever they cursed well please.”

“They sure do,” Audun said. “They ought to be able to see that this is important . . . except they don’t write themselves, and so they don’t understand why it would matter whether or not the Rulers do.”