“We didn’t do it on purpose. It just . . . happened,” Ulric said. “I’m sure you were thrilled when we rounded up Gudrid with him.”

“Thrilled. But of course,” Hamnet said tightly. Ulric Skakki gave him an impudent grin. Hamnet hastened to change the subject: “Where do we go from here? What can we do to make sure the Rulers don’t wreck Raumsdalia?”

“Wait till they kill Sigvat, and then beat them,” Ulric answered without the least hesitation. The cynicism in that took Count Hamnet’s breath away. The look on his face must have said as much, because Ulric laughed harshly. “What? Do you think I’m joking?”

“No. I think you’re not. And I think I ought to cry for Raumsdalia because you’re not,” Hamnet said.

“Don’t waste your tears. Do you suppose Sigvat would cry for you?” Ulric Skakki answered his own question: “If you do, you’re a different kind of fool from the one I’ve seen. Sigvat only has tears for himself.”

“And what kind of fool have you seen?” Hamnet Thyssen asked, as dispassionately as he could.

“You’re too stubborn for your own good. You’re too innocent for your own good. And you don’t know enough about women for your own good.” Before Hamnet could say anything to that, Ulric added, “Well, no man knows enough about women for his own good. But you knew even less than most of us poor twits. If you don’t believe me, go ask—”

“Gudrid?”

“I was going to say Marcovefa,” Ulric replied. “If you want to go ask Gudrid, well, you can do that. You want to know what I think, though? If you do, it only proves you’re a fool about women. Anybody who wants to have anything to do with that one . . .” He gave a theatrical shiver.

“Eyvind seems to,” Hamnet said.

“By God, Eyvind’s a fool about women. Even a fool about women like you should be able to see that,” Ulric said. And Count Hamnet nodded, because he could. Ulric patted him on the back. “There. You see? If you can see that, maybe he’s a bigger fool than you are. And they said it couldn’t be done!”

Hamnet got up and walked away from the fire. Ulric’s laughter pursued him.

THE QUESTION HAMNET Thyssen had asked Ulric kept gnawing at him. What could they do to beat the Rulers? They didn’t have enough warriors to do it in battle. He’d banked on Marcovefa’s magic to make up the difference in manpower. Now he saw that, while it could make up some of the difference, it would need strange and unusual help to make up all of it.

What that help might be, he unfortunately couldn’t imagine.

Marcovefa didn’t want to talk about it. “Everything will be all right,” she said when he raised the subject.

“Do you know that?” Hamnet persisted. “Does your magic tell you so? If it does, is it bound to know what it’s talking about?”

“Everything will be all right . . . as long as you don’t keep bothering me.” She paused. “If you do keep bothering me like this, you can find someone else to bother. I have listened to as much as I want to hear. Do you understand me?”

He couldn’t very well not understand her. “Yes,” he growled, and swung his horse’s head away so he could ride off by himself. No matter how big a fool about women he was, he could see he was on the edge of losing this one. How much bigger a fool would that make him?

He looked around. Ulric Skakki was out of earshot. That was something, anyhow—not much, but something.

A scout from the rear guard galloped up to the van. “Rulers!” the Raumsdalian shouted. “Rulers coming down from the north!”

“Let’s bag them!” Trasamund said. “They may not even know we’re anywhere close by. If they’re just coming down into the Empire, chances are they think it’s all over down her except the mopping up.”

“If they do, they’re wrong,” Runolf Skallagrim declared. “Yes, let’s welcome them to Raumsdalia.”

Swinging about and heading north again was a matter of minutes. Hamnet stayed away from Marcovefa instead of asking her what she would do. Maybe he could learn. Maybe.

Since he didn’t talk to her, she rode over and talked to him. That was bound to be a lesson of one kind or another. Which kind, Hamnet wasn’t sure he wanted to know. “Shall we look like them?” Marcovefa said. “Will that surprise them and make things easy for us?”

“What do I know?” Hamnet answered. “Talk to Trasamund and Ulric and Runolf. If they think it’s a good idea, go ahead and do it.”

Marcovefa talked to the others. “They say to go ahead,” she told Hamnet. “So I go ahead. The Rulers will see the spell. Not us. We do not see anything out of the sameness.”

“Out of the ordinary, you mean,” Hamnet said.

“Do I? I suppose I do.” Marcovefa shrugged and got busy with her magic. She didn’t explain it, the way she often did. She simply went ahead with the spell. Hamnet Thyssen looked at his comrades. They didn’t look like Rulers to him. She’d told him they wouldn’t. He felt obscurely disappointed even so.

There were the Rulers. They were on mammoths and deer, and rode through the Empire as if they had not a care in the world. When they spied the Bizogots and Raumsdalians in front of them, they waved cheerfully. Their foes looked like friends to them, anyhow.

The two bands had got quite close to each other before one of the real Rulers called out something in their incomprehensible language. Hamnet and a few others had learned tiny fragments of that tongue. No one he led spoke it well enough to fool someone for whom it was a birth-speech. The men on his side did the best they could: they kept their mouths shut.

Frowning, the broad-shouldered, curly-bearded man repeated himself. Hamnet recognized the same syllables over again. He also caught the annoyance in the—chieftain’s?—voice. Whatever the Ruler said, he expected some kind of answer, and he wasn’t getting it. Which meant . . .

“Let’s hit ’em!” Hamnet, Trasamund, and Runolf all shouted the same thing at almost the same time. Ulric wasted no time on chatter. He simply drew his bow and shot the man who’d called out to people he thought friends. The Ruler looked almost comically astonished when the arrow sprouted in the middle of his wide chest. He slid off his riding deer’s back.

More Rulers tumbled from their mounts. Count Hamnet cut one down before his foe had even drawn his sword. Doing something like that wasn’t fair, which didn’t mean it didn’t work.

Only a few of the enemy warriors aboard riding deer found much chance to fight back. Bizogot and Raumsdalian archers also did everything they could to shoot the Rulers on the war mammoths, and to shoot the mammoths themselves as often as they could. If the beasts went wild with pain, they wouldn’t do what their masters wanted them to.

But a mammoth plucked a Raumsdalian trooper out of the saddle with its trunk and threw him to the ground. His terrified shriek cut off abruptly when the mammoth’s forefoot crushed the life from him. From everything Hamnet had seen, even large animals didn’t like stepping on people. Like it or not, the mammoth did it, as other war mammoths had before. Maybe the Rulers had some training trick to get the best of their reluctance.

“The illusion is broken,” Marcovefa called.

“Get back out of slingstone range!” Hamnet yelled at her. She made a face, but for once did as he asked without arguing. Almost getting her skull smashed before made her less than eager to risk it again.

Another Ruler yammered nonsense at Hamnet. It wasn’t nonsense to the man from beyond the Gap, of course, but it meant not a thing to the Raumsdalian noble. “Give up!” Hamnet shouted back. The Ruler either didn’t understand or didn’t want to.

Their swords would have to speak for them, then. Iron rang against iron. Sun-bright sparks flew. Hamnet wondered whether two swordsmen fighting in dry grass or on dry moss had ever started a fire. Then, as he beat the Ruler’s blade aside the instant before it would have ruined his face, he wondered if he would live through this.