The sword snapped.

A rock—maybe the same one as last time—got him in the pit of the stomach once more. “Oof!” he repeated. This time, it really hurt. For a moment, he thought he’d killed himself even if he hadn’t stabbed himself. At last, though, he managed to suck in a shuddering breath, and then another. He wouldn’t perish for lack of air.

He wouldn’t perish from falling on that sword, either. He picked up the nub with the hilt. He’d had no idea the blade was flawed. Maybe one of the blows he’d exchanged with the Rulers had cracked it. If he’d gone on fighting a little longer, suddenly he would have been most embarrassed.

Or maybe God just didn’t intend to let him die right now.

He looked at the broken sword for a long time. Then he muttered an obscenity and threw the hilt and nub away, as hard as he could. Snow puffed up where the fragment landed.

After another oath, he brushed more snow off himself. He started back toward camp. He was perhaps halfway there when he realized he still had his dagger, and could slash it across his throat or slit his wrist. He didn’t suppose it would break in his hand. But the black moment had passed. He went on walking.

“ANYONE HAVE A spare sword?” Hamnet asked.

“I do,” Ulric Skakki said. “What happened to yours?”

“Broke.” Hamnet mimed snapping a stick with his hands.

“Just like that?” One of the adventurer’s eyebrows rose. “What were you doing with it?”

“Trying to kill myself,” Hamnet said.

Ulric laughed. “Ask a stupid question, you deserve the answer you get.” He rummaged in the leather sack that held his worldly goods, then handed Hamnet a sword in a battered leather sheath. “Here you go. It’ll probably suit you better than me, anyhow. A little long and clumsy for my taste, but you’re bigger than I am.”

“Thanks.” Count Hamnet drew it. He tried a few cuts. “Kind of point-heavy,” he remarked. “Better for slashing than for thrusting.”

“That’s what you want if you’re fighting from horseback,” Ulric said.

“I hope I will be,” Hamnet said. Foot soldiers were at a grim disadvantage against mounted men who could strike from above—and who could leave infantry behind in a matter of minutes.

Trasamund had been trimming his nails with a clasp knife that must have come from inside the Empire. Finishing the job, he looked up and asked, “Why did you want to kill yourself this time?”

The time before, Hamnet had warned that he wouldn’t let himself live if anyone tried to make him Emperor. Now . . . Now he only shrugged. The impulse had passed, and seemed to have belonged to someone else. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Kill Rulers instead,” the jarl said. “When they’re gone, you can do whatever you want to yourself. Till then, you have more important things to worry about.”

“Thank you so much.” Hamnet Thyssen bowed. “I don’t know what I’d do with my life if I didn’t have someone to run it for me.”

“Not my job.” Trasamund shook his head. “You want someone to run your life, you need a woman. Since you have a woman, she has to do it.” He seemed as pleased with himself as a geometer with a new proof.

Reminded of Marcovefa, Hamnet was already reminded why and how he’d broken his sword. He didn’t like to think about that. He would probably go through it again and again in his nightmares. But which would be the more terrifying dream? The one where the sword snapped, or the one where it didn’t?

“What are we going to do to keep the Rulers from pushing us back farther?” Ulric asked. “If Marcovefa could lay eggs, if she hatched out twenty more like her, we’d have a pretty good chance. Or if she could be in four places at once . . .”

“She can’t,” Hamnet said bleakly. “We’re lucky she can be one place at once, by God.”

“I know what we need to do.” Ulric Skakki’s bright, assured tone made Hamnet certain that, whatever he proposed, it wouldn’t be anything they could actually manage. And it wasn’t: “We need to go back to the Glacier, climb it again, and bring back some more shamans like her.”

“Go ahead,” Hamnet said. “Hurry back. I’ll see you here in three or four days, right?”

“But of course.” Ulric grinned at him. They were both spouting nonsense, and they both knew it. The difference was, it amused Ulric and didn’t come close to amusing Count Hamnet.

“Wouldn’t help, anyhow,” Trasamund said. “The other shamans would come from different clans. They’d likelier go after Marcovefa or one another than the Rulers. Why should they care about a bunch of people they’ve never seen before?”

“If you’re going to complain about every little thing . . .” Ulric said. Trasamund snorted. After a moment, Ulric went on, “Well, all right. How about this? Instead of these shamans, we set all the short-faced bears moving against the Rulers. They mostly don’t sleep through the winter, the way black bears do.”

“That’s . . .” Hamnet’s voice trailed away. He’d started to say it was ridiculous, but it wasn’t. What came out of his mouth was, “That’s not a half-bad notion.”

“It isn’t, by God,” Trasamund agreed. “Bears are trouble. If they’d go after the Rulers, that would give those miserable mammoth foreskins all kinds of grief.”

“Have mammoths got foreskins?” Ulric sounded intrigued.

“It only matters to another mammoth,” Hamnet assured him. “Now we need to see whether Marcovefa laughs at us for coming up with a foolish notion or whether she thinks she can make a magic like that.”

“I meant it for a joke, you know,” Ulric Skakki said.

“So what?” Count Hamnet answered. “A shipwright means a mast to hold the sails. That doesn’t mean a drowning man won’t hang on to it to keep his head above water. Let’s go talk to Marcovefa.”

“Yes. Let’s.” Trasamund started away from the fire.

Not long before, Hamnet Thyssen had wished he were dead and done his best to make his wish come true. Now he was going off to find Marcovefa with a new scheme to bedev il the invaders. That was very strange—just how strange, he didn’t think about till much later.

MARCOVEFA’S EYES GLINTED when she saw Hamnet. “You see?” she said. “It is not so easy after all.”

“Never mind that,” he answered, and she laughed out loud. He and Trasamund and Ulric Skakki took turns explaining what they had in mind. Hamnet finished with an eager question: “Can you do that?”

“It is a thought of weight. It may be a thought of merit.” Marcovefa’s gaze went far away as she weighed possibilities—or, for all Hamnet knew, impossibilities. After a long pause, she said, “It may be, yes. Have we here men of the bear clan? Have we men whose spirit animal is the short-faced bear?”

Raumsdalians didn’t define themselves in those terms. Bizogots did. Marcovefa, whose people sprang from Bizogot stock, must have known as much. “I will ask among the folk who come from the free plains,” Trasamund said. Then his blunt-featured face clouded. “The plains that once were free, I should say.”

If Marcovefa noticed the amendment, she paid no attention to it. “Find one of them,” she said. “Bring him to me. I will see what I can do. I promise nothing. But I will try.”

Off Trasamund went. He came back half an hour later with a scarred Bizogot he introduced as Grimoald. “He is of the Bear Claws clan,” he said. Sure enough, Grimoald wore a necklace of claws.

“Good,” Marcovefa said. “These are the claws of the short-faced bear?” She sounded like—and was—someone making sure.

“They are,” Grimoald said.

“Those are the only bears in the Bizogot country,” Trasamund said. “They have others down here, and we saw still others beyond the Glacier. But if a man is of the Bear Claws clan, they are the claws of the short-faced bear.”

“All right. Fine,” Marcovefa said. “Shall we move these bears against our foes?”

“If you know how, shaman, I would like to do that,” Grimoald said. “If I can help you do it, I will.”