No good deed went unpunished. The mammoth could still use its wounded member. It plucked up the Ruler and threw him down in the snow in front of it. His terrified shriek cut off abruptly as the mammoth’s right foot crushed the life out of him. The great beast left one red footprint out of four for some little while after that. The other warriors who rode on it sat very quietly, trying their best not to remind it they were there.

“Well done!” Liv said warmly.

“It won’t matter much in the long run. We’ve got to pull back any which way,” Hamnet answered. He didn’t want her praising him. It reminded him of what they’d been not so long before. He hadn’t lain with a woman since Marcovefa went down. Wasn’t life complicated enough without fresh temptations?

An arrow zipped past his head, venomously close. He realized what a bad position he was in to be worrying about any kind of temptations, fresh, salted, or pickled.

Then one of the Raumsdalians in the rear guard pointed and exclaimed, “What the demon’s that?”

For a moment, Hamnet Thyssen thought it was nothing but blowing snow. Then he realized that, while it was blowing snow, it wasn’t nothing but blowing snow. It was blowing snow and sorcery. The sorcery packed it together tighter than blowing snow had any right to get, and gave it a shape distinct from the randomly blowing snow all around it. That shape was much too much like a man’s. But it was bigger than a man had any business being, and it had much larger arms.

It also had an awareness to it, an awareness that Hamnet immediately thought of as wolfish. Why, he couldn’t have said, not consciously. The feeling welled up from the place that made his balls want to crawl up into his belly and his hair stand straight on the back of his neck.

Not only that, its awareness centered on him, or perhaps aimed at him. Those long, snowy arms outstretched, it strode purposefully in his direction. It left no footprints, red or otherwise. He might have known all along that it sought his life in particular. Part of him had known all along: the part that made his balls crawl up and his hackles rise.

He nocked an arrow and let fly. It was a shot he could have been proud of—straight through the heart, if a snow dev il had a heart. Evidently not, for it didn’t fall.

It did laugh at him. Its laughter was winter wind congealed: all the cold and emptiness in the world, boiled down to a pint. Count Hamnet had pierced its heart without harming it. The snow dev il’s laughter pierced his heart, too, pierced it and almost froze it shut.

Don’t be foolish, he thought. You did that to yourself years ago.

Before he could even wonder what he meant, Liv started a spell. It was in a dialect of the Bizogot language so old-fashioned, he could hardly follow it. He would rather have tried to gallop away, though he had no guarantee his horse could outrun a thing half made of gale.

Then Liv switched to urgent Raumsdalian: “Quick! Shoot it again!”

“What good will that do? What good will anything do?” Yes, the snow dev il had done its best to freeze Hamnet’s heart, and its best was better than he’d dreamt possible.

“Shoot it!” Liv slapped his face.

His shocked bellow wasn’t so loud or so shrill as the war mammoth’s had been when he shot it, but was no less startled, no less outraged. He almost shot Liv. But instead he drove another arrow through the snow devil—easy now, when it was so close.

As chunks of ice broke to start an avalanche, did they scream? If they did, they surely let out a cry like the one that ripped from the snow dev il when Hamnet’s second arrow struck. This shaft, unlike the one that had gone before it, wounded the sorcerous apparition. No—it slew.

Wind had made the snow dev il coalesce. And wind tore it to pieces in the blink of an eye. One heartbeat, it was about to lay hold of Count Hamnet. What would have happened then, he didn’t know: only that it would have been nothing good. But the snow dev il was gone the next heartbeat, gone as if it never existed.

“Well shot!” Liv yelled.

“Well spelled!” Hamnet yelled back.

Somewhere among the Rulers, a shriek almost as full of torment as the snow dev il’s burst from a man’s throat. Maybe the snow dev il’s throat was meant for such sounds; a man’s assuredly wasn’t. How much of himself had the enemy wizard poured into his sorcerous creation? Enough to ruin him—worse than ruin him—when it was all lost at once.

But for that shriek, Hamnet might have kissed Liv, or she him. With it still echoing inside them, they both fought shy of that. The torment it held put out passion the same way a brass candle-snuffer dampened flame.

A nod sufficed Hamnet, then. “You did what you needed to do,” he told her. She nodded, her face half proud, half horrified at what she’d unwittingly inflicted on the Rulers’ sorcerer.

“I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone—not even one of those people,” Liv said with shudder.

Count Hamnet grunted. “He wouldn’t waste any grief on you.”

“Even so,” Liv insisted. Remembering what the other wizard sounded like after the snow dev il perished, Hamnet decided she had a point.

Another arrow snarled through the air between him and Liv. Maybe the archer who loosed it couldn’t decide which of them he would sooner have killed. Maybe the next bowman wouldn’t have any trouble making up his mind. Or maybe he’d just turn out to be a better shot. “Do you think we’ve given the main force enough time to get away?” Hamnet Thyssen asked.

“Yes. And I think you had better get away,” Liv answered. “That snow fiend or whatever you want to call it only makes things plainer—the Rulers want you dead, and they don’t care what they do to get you that way.”

Hamnet grunted again. He didn’t think he was important in the grand scheme of things, and resented that anyone should think so when he didn’t. Ordering the Raumsdalians and Bizogots with him to fall back meant he didn’t have to dwell on what anybody else thought.

The Rulers came after the rear guard, but less enthusiastically than they’d attacked at first. A wounded war mammoth and a wizard dreadfully disabled if not dead gave them pause. They were men like any others, no matter how they tried to disguise it with ferocity. Getting reminded of that reassured Hamnet . . . a little.

“They’re going to let us get away.” One of the Raumsdalians sounded even more relieved—and even more surprised—than Hamnet was.

Somewhere ahead of him, the main force would be heading . . . where? Up onto the Bizogot plains? Where else were they likely to go? And not nearly far enough behind him, the Rulers were getting ready to pursue them. Somehow or other, his friends would have to take along the still-unconscious Marcovefa.

That brought something else to the top of Hamnet Thyssen’s mind. “Ask you a question?” he said to Liv.

“It’s hard to ask anything else,” she replied, as if she were Ulric Skakki. Then she nodded. “Go ahead.”

He gave her Trasamund’s suggestion, finishing, “Has that got any chance of working, or is it as disgusting as it sounds to me?”

He expected it would disgust her even more, not least because she was a woman. To be taken unawares, so to speak . . . But she gave it her usual careful consideration. At last, she said, “Well, I don’t see how it could hurt. What’s the worst thing that could happen? You get her with child. You might do that when she’s awake, too.”

“But—But—” Hamnet had to work to make himself quit sputtering. “But do you think it would do any good?”

“I don’t know. It might connect her to this world again—or, of course, it might not,” Liv answered. “Maybe it’s worth a try. Who can say? If she knew why you were doing it, I think she’d forgive you, if that makes you feel any better.” It didn’t, or not much. Hamnet rode on, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut.