“I’m not sure I did you a favor,” Liv said.
“I’m not, either. That’s why I said, ‘I think,’ ” Hamnet answered. “What are we going to do now?”
“Try to keep her fed and watered and clean,” Liv said. “Try to find a magic that will lift the mistletoe spell—either that or hope it wears off on its own. A lot of spells do, you know.”
“Not quite what I meant,” he told her. “Pretty soon, the Rulers will realize we can’t beat back their magic any more. They’ll see we aren’t aiming strong spells at them. Then they’ll jump on us with both feet.”
The shaman from the Three Tusk clan bit her lip. “You shame Audun and me.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Hamnet said quickly. “By God, Liv, I didn’t.”
“You might as well have meant it if you didn’t.” Her voice was bleak. “It’s not as if you weren’t telling the truth. Marcovefa could beat the Rulers. Audun and I . . . can’t. We’ve seen that.”
“It’s not your fault—not your fault in particular,” Count Hamnet said. “Nobody on this side of the Glacier can beat the Rulers. We’ve seen that, too. So has Sigvat II, and I hope he likes it.” He didn’t need anyone else to tell him that he hated the Raumsdalian Emperor.
“We should be able to beat them. We’d better be able to.” Liv’s shiver had nothing to do with the Breath of God; it could have come at high summer. “If we can’t, what’s to stop them from stomping us underfoot like a mammoth stepping on a vole? Or if they don’t do that, what’s to keep them from driving us back through the trees and up onto the Bizogot steppe again?”
Nothing, Hamnet thought. Not a single, solitary thing. But he didn’t want to make Liv feel worse than she did already, so he said, “Why does that worry you? It’s your homeland, after all.”
“But it’s so much poorer than Raumsdalia. I didn’t understand that before I came down here, but I do now.” Liv had never been one to hide from unpleasant or inconvenient truths. “If the Rulers hold the Empire, they can come after us up on the steppe any time they choose—especially since more and more of them keep riding down through the Gap. They can squeeze us from north and south—squeeze us till there’s nothing left.” The shadows under her proud cheekbones might have been shadows of fear—or maybe Hamnet’s imagination, usually no more energetic than it had to be, was for once running away with him.
“I hope things don’t work out that way,” he said.
“So do I,” Liv answered. “But, however wonderful I think hope is, keeping it gets hard.” She looked at him. Was she . . . hoping he would tell her she was wrong? If she was, he had to disappoint her.Again, he thought bitterly.
WHAT’S TO KEEP the Rulers from stomping us underfoot? What’s to keep them from driving us back through the trees and out onto the Bizogot steppe? As winter went on, Count Hamnet remembered Liv’s questions again and again. He also remembered the response that had formed in his mind when he heard them. Nothing.
Liv turned out to know which questions to ask. And Hamnet turned out to know the answer.
He counted staying alive a victory. He counted every time his ragtag force managed to sting the Rulers another. Retreats, on the other hand . . .
Ulric Skakki joked about them: “This country looked a lot better from north to south than it does from south to north.”
Hamnet didn’t laugh, which seemed to irk the adventurer. Hamnet also didn’t much care whether Ulric was irked or not. By then, they were north of Nidaros again. They hadn’t passed right by the capital. That distressed Eyvind Torfinn and, even more loudly, Gudrid. To Hamnet, it didn’t matter one way or the other.
Marcovefa drank. She ate. She sometimes smiled, though she hardly ever opened her eyes. She gave no sign of coming fully to herself. Without her, the Raumsdalians and Bizogots did what they could against the Rulers. What they could do wasn’t enough, or even close.
The Rulers’ confidence swelled with every new triumph, too. They regained the arrogance they’d shown before Marcovefa taught them they didn’t know everything there was to know. And when you rode to a fight expecting to win, you were more likely to do just that.
When you rode to a fight expecting something to go wrong . . . Raumsdalians began slipping away from the army. Maybe they thought they could do better for themselves by giving up the fight and grubbing out a living under the Rulers. Maybe they were right, too.
“We Bizogots don’t quit, by God!” Trasamund told Runolf Skallagrim one cold evening. “Your folk shouldn’t, either.”
“You’re right. They shouldn’t,” Baron Runolf agreed politely. “I don’t know what to do about it, though.”
“Kill anybody who wants to run away.” The jarl was nothing if not direct.
“If we catch them trying to sneak off, we do kill them,” Runolf said. “The trouble is, we don’t catch many.”
“You need to try harder,” Trasamund said.
“We need to do all kinds of things,” Runolf Skallagrim replied. “We need to beat the Rulers again, for instance. If we do that, people will think our chances are better, so they won’t want to run out on us. We can hope they won’t, anyway.” He eyed Count Hamnet. “How do we go about that, Thyssen?”
“I wish I knew,” Hamnet answered bleakly.
“Marcovefa has to wake up,” Trasamund said.
“Well, how do we make that happen?” Runolf asked.
Even more bleakly, Hamnet shrugged. “I wish I knew. Our wizards have tried. I’ve watched them do it. The only trouble is, they’ve had no luck. It’s in God’s hands now, I think.”
“And God’s done nothing but drop things since he let the Glacier melt through so these stinking Rulers could plague us.” Trasamund sounded bleak himself.
Runolf sent him a measuring look, too. “The way you say that, you’ll be the next one to try and run from trouble.”
“No.” Trasamund didn’t even bother to shake his head. “I’m in this till the end. With the Rulers swarming down the way they do, I have nothing to go back to. They hold my clan’s grazing grounds. The few free Three Tusk Bizogots are all here with me. We’re not a big clan any more, but we’re tough.”
“If you’ve got nothing to go back to, you may as well fight,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “The ones who think they can slip away and go back to being peasants with the Rulers taxing them in place of the Empire—”
“They’re all Raumsdalians,” Trasamund broke in.
“That’s not what I was going to say,” Hamnet told him.
“Doesn’t make it any less true,” the Bizogot replied.
“Those are the ones we have to worry about.” Count Hamnet stubbornly finished his own thought.
“But if they desert, what kind of fight can we put up?” Trasamund said.
“We came down here with an army that was mostly Bizogots,” Hamnet said. “We can go on that way if we have to.” We can get driven out of the Empire that way, he thought, but didn’t speak words of ill omen aloud.
Trasamund did it for him: “We came down here with an army that had Marcovefa in it, too. Without her, we’re buggered, is what we are.”
“Well, in that case why do you blame the Raumsdalian soldiers for leaving the fight when they see the chance?” Runolf Skallagrim asked. “They figure they won’t make any difference one way or the other, and it looks to me like they’ve got something.”
“They may not help us lose if they desert,” Hamnet said. “Sure as sure, they won’t help us win.”
“And I’ll tell you what they’ve got,” Trasamund added. “They’ve got yellow bellies, that’s what.”
Runolf scowled at him. The Raumsdalian veteran’s hand began to slide toward the hilt of his sword. “Enough, both of you,” Count Hamnet said wearily. “Too much. We’re all doing the best we can. If we fight amongst ourselves, we only help the Rulers.”
“If they don’t fight, they help the Rulers, too.” Trasamund didn’t want to let it drop.
“Enough, I said.” Hamnet got between the Bizogot and Baron Runolf. “Fight me first, if you have to fight somebody.”