“I see what I can do,” Marcovefa said when he told her what was wrong. “Maybe I ride with some scouts, see if I can lure the Rulers into coming after us. They get a surprise then, yes?”

That made Hamnet wish he’d kept his mouth shut. “We can’t afford to lose you. You know that,” he said.

“Foolishness,” Marcovefa sniffed. “Any shaman who knows anything should be able to beat these foolish Rulers.” Then she sighed. “But your shamans and wizards don’t know much, do they?”

“We used to think so,” Hamnet said. “Now . . . You and the Rulers have taught us some lessons we’d rather not have had.”

“You were like this.” Marcovefa closed one eye and squinted through the other one. “You were all like this, so you didn’t know it. The Rulers are like this.” She opened the one eye a little wider. “You need to be like this.” She opened both eyes very wide. Then she winked at Hamnet.

“You’re bound to be right,” he said, ignoring the wink. “But even if you are, you can’t always stay away from arrows or slingstones. And we can’t do without you, even if you think we should be able to.”

“You have a trouble, a problem. You bring it to me. Now you don’t want me to fix it,” Marcovefa said. “Where is the sense in that?”

“Losing scouts is a problem,” Hamnet Thyssen agreed. “Losing you is a catastrophe.” Then he had to explain what a catastrophe was: “Worse than a problem. Much worse.”

“But you won’t lose me,” Marcovefa said. “Don’t think so, anyway.”

“You don’t think so,” Hamnet echoed discontentedly. “Don’t you see? That isn’t good enough. Without you, we’re nothing.”

“You are more than you think you are,” Marcovefa said. “You don’t know how much you are. You have no idea.”

“Do you mean me, or do you mean all of us?” Hamnet’s wave encompassed the ragtag army he’d helped build.

“Yes,” Marcovefa answered, making herself as annoying as if she were Ulric Skakki.

Count Hamnet fumed, but only to himself. “Which?” he asked.

“I mean you, and I mean everyone,” Marcovefa said. “It is not a question with only one answer. If you were not stronger than you think, the Rulers would have won a long time ago. Don’t you see that?”

“Well . . . maybe.” Hamnet Thyssen wasn’t sure he wanted to see it. He’d got used to looking down on himself. Why not, when everyone else did. That was how his thoughts ran, anyway. Losing first Gudrid and then Liv did nothing to make him feel better about himself, either.

“No maybe,” Marcovefa said. “It is a truth. An important truth, too.”

“Maybe,” Hamnet said again—he didn’t want anyone making him happy against his will. “All I know is, whenever we went up against the Rulers in any kind important fight before we climbed to the top of the Glacier and found you, we lost. The only reason we climbed it was because it gave us one chance in a thousand to get away from the Rulers. If we stayed down on the Bizogot steppe, the mammoth-riders would have killed us all.”

Smiling, Marcovefa shook her head. “Not so simple.”

“No?” Sure enough, Count Hamnet didn’t want to believe anything. “Then what were we doing up there?”

“I think the Golden Shrine sent you.” Marcovefa sounded as matter-of-fact as if she’d said something like I think the Three Tusk clan sent you.

No matter how matter-of-fact she sounded, she made Hamnet Thyssen gape. “How do you know something like that? How can you? Did God tell you?” He didn’t believe God went around doing such things. He was sure God didn’t do them with him. He wished God did.

“God didn’t tell me anything. I don’t know this is true. But I think so. We all need the Golden Shrine now. Maybe never in all the time since it disappeared do we need it more,” Marcovefa said.

How long had the Golden Shrine been lost? Hamnet didn’t know if he’d ever heard a number of years. Eyvind Torfinn would know, if anyone did. What he didn’t know about the Golden Shrine, nobody knew. Hamnet Thyssen didn’t feel like asking him. Dealing with Earl Eyvind was too likely to mean dealing with Gudrid. As long as Hamnet didn’t have to do that, he didn’t want to.

But he couldn’t help wondering how many people down through the ages had been sure their time was the worst one possible. They would have been sure they had to have the Golden Shrine’s help, too. No matter how much they needed it, they wouldn’t have got it. Some would have gone down to ruin without it. Others, he supposed, would have got through on their own.

Clumsily, he tried to explain that to Marcovefa. It seemed very clear inside his own head—much less so when he put it into stumbling words. She heard him out, then said, “Things are worse now.” As before, she sounded very matter-of-fact, very sure.

“How can you know they are?” Hamnet demanded.

“I know what I know. And time is not all strung together in little pieces like beads on a string. Time is. All of it. At once,” Marcovefa said.

Hamnet muttered to himself. That sounded like nonsense to him . . . till he remembered how she’d led the little band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians to the edge of the Glacier, to the very spot where an avalanche would make the descent less steep, less difficult. But the avalanche hadn’t happened yet when they got there. She’d seen it through time, but she hadn’t quite seen it in time. Then the time came round, and they were able to climb down.

“Why don’t you know where the Golden Shrine is, then?” Hamnet asked.

The question didn’t interest Marcovefa. “It is where it is. It is where it needs to be. When it is appointed to show itself, show itself it will.”

Appointed to show itself. Count Hamnet wondered what that meant, and whether it meant anything. Marcovefa must have thought so. He didn’t ask her to explain—he didn’t think what she said would mean anything to him. He couldn’t see, couldn’t conceive of, all time as a single thing. He wondered if his inability was a curse . . . or a blessing.

XIV

THIS TIME, IT was the Breath of God. The wind howled down from the north, howled down off the Glacier. The ice might have retreated, but it was a long way from gone. The wind might have traveled a long way, too, but it was as cold as if it had blown but a few miles.

Hamnet Thyssen had cold-weather gear. So did every other Raumsdalian in his ragtag army. Down in the far south, beyond the Empire’s reach, Ulric Skakki insisted, there were countries the Breath of God never touched. Hamnet had traveled far enough south to find that likely, even if he couldn’t testify to it from personal experience. But men in these parts knew they had to stay warm through the winter or die.

So Hamnet donned furs with resignation. Most of the other Raumsdalians felt the same way. The Bizogots, by contrast, gloried in the cold weather. “Snow!” Trasamund exclaimed. “About time! Everything up in the Three Tusk country would be covered in white by now.”

“God’s dandruff,” Ulric said. He could take as much cold as anyone—slipping through the Gap to the lands beyond the Glacier in the middle of winter proved that. But he didn’t enjoy it the way the Bizogots did.

“Why, you blasphemous vole!” Trasamund blurted. A Raumsdalian would have called Ulric a toad or a snake, but creatures like that couldn’t survive up on the frozen steppe. The jarl did the best he could with what he knew.

“Your servant, Your Ferocity.” Ulric gave back a mocking bow.

Trasamund had put on mittens, which made it hard for him to wag a finger under the adventurer’s nose. Again, he did his best. “You should not speak so,” he said severely. “If you do, maybe God will not choose to show us where the Golden Shrine lies. Don’t you think we should be pure of mind, pure of heart, pure of speech, to deserve to learn where the Shrine is?”