When Gudrid brought her meat to the fire, it exploded into brilliant white flame. Gudrid let out a startled shriek. She thrust her hand into the snow, so the sudden burst of heat must have burned her.

Eyvind Torfinn hurried over to her. “How bad is it?” he asked anxiously.

“Not—too.” Gudrid looked at her hand. “No, not too. But only luck it isn’t. That horrible bitch—” She sent Marcovefa a glare full of daggers.

“If you would leave off quarreling with her and with Count Hamnet, you would give her no excuse for harassing you.” Eyvind Torfinn sounded earnest and sensible.

That, of course, did him no good with Gudrid. “How am I supposed to eat?” she shrilled. “There’s nothing left of that piece of meat.”

“Try another one, then.” Yes, Earl Eyvind was sensible. “I’m sure everything will be all right this time.”

“I’m not.” But Gudrid’s only other choice was going hungry. She worried another gobbet off the carcass. Marcovefa, whose new rib had cooked in the most ordinary way imaginable, sat there smiling and watching her do it. Gudrid muttered to herself. Hamnet thought she wanted to tell Marcovefa to look away but didn’t have the nerve. He doubted whether he would have had the nerve himself.

More than a little apprehensively, Gudrid took the new piece of meat over to the closest fire. It didn’t burst into white flame. It burst into searing green flame instead. Gudrid squalled and soothed her hand with snow—although, again, the real damage seemed small.

“How am I supposed to eat?” she asked again, plaintively this time. Marcovefa . . . smiled.

MARCOVEFA SEEMED TO gain strength far faster than finally getting enough to eat again could account for. By the end of her first day awake, she wasn’t far from where she had been before the Rulers wounded and enchanted her. So it seemed to Hamnet Thyssen, anyhow. “Did you enjoy making Gudrid squawk?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said matter-of-factly. “Did you enjoy it, too?”

“Some.” Hamnet felt uncomfortable admitting it, but he would have felt more uncomfortable lying.

“Good. She should leave you alone. If she has not got the sense to do that, she will find out other people will not leave her alone. Me, for instance.” Marcovefa hesitated, something she rarely did. “But maybe I should have just slapped her instead of using a spell, even one that is not so big.”

“What? Why?” Hamnet asked.

“Because the Rulers, curse them, they felt it. I could tell. They know I am awake again,” Marcovefa said.

“Oh.” The small word carried a lot of freight. “They’ll . . . try to do something about that, won’t they?”

“Yes.” Marcovefa’s brief answer was freighted, too. “I am dangerous to them—and so are you.”

“Me? Everybody says so, but I wish I could believe it,” Hamnet said.

“Who woke me? You did!” Marcovefa said. “Could anyone else have done that? I do not think so! Do we have a better chance with me or without me? With me, I think. And you put me back in the fight.”

“That doesn’t make me dangerous. It makes you dangerous,” Count Hamnet insisted. “And you are. You know it, and the Rulers know it.”

“And they know about you, too, and they fear you,” Marcovefa told him.

“The Rulers don’t fear much of anything.” Hamnet despised them, which didn’t mean he didn’t—reluctantly—respect them. Say what you would of them, they made formidable foes.

“They fear us. Not just me. Us.” Marcovefa sounded so certain, she challenged Hamnet Thyssen not to believe her. And then she did something altogether different: she changed the subject. “You know how you got me to wake up?”

“Yes. I finally listened to Trasamund,” Hamnet answered. “That isn’t something you want to do every day, not if you have any sense.”

“This is not what I meant. You should know it is not,” Marcovefa said severely. “You know what you did to make me wake up?”

“Of course I know what I did,” Hamnet said. “If it had been anything else, I would have tried it sooner.”

“I was not awake then. I did not wake up till the morning. I am awake now.” Marcovefa waited with what Hamnet took to be quickly shrinking patience.

A heartbeat or two more slowly than he should have, Hamnet realized why her patience might be shrinking. “Well, then,” he said after the light dawned, “let’s see what we can do about that.”

What they did was what they’d done the night before. As Hamnet had known it would be, it was a great deal better with both of them awake to take pleasure in it. Afterwards, Marcovefa stroked his cheek. “We do all right together.”

That was less than enormous praise, but enough to make Hamnet nod. “How much more can you hope for?” he said. Even managing to keep that much would be better than he’d done with Gudrid or Liv.

As if picking the thought from his mind, Marcovefa said, “I am surprised you did not kill that mouthy woman while I lay asleep. She is like a flea—she bites and jumps away and then bites again.”

“I came close a couple of times,” Count Hamnet admitted. “But people talk if you kill a woman.”

“Let them. She is gone after that, and no one has to listen to her any more,” Marcovefa said ruthlessly.

Hamnet didn’t care to think about that. Thinking about it was too likely to tempt him to do it. He changed the subject instead: “The Rulers’ wizards can sense you’re yourself again?”

Marcovefa nodded. “I said so. I was not spinning fables.”

“They’ll come after you, then. They’ll come after all of us.” Hamnet Thyssen wanted those to be questions. They came out as flat statements.

She nodded again. “It is as we said this morning—I am sure they will. They are not fools. They would not be so much trouble if they were. If I were fighting us, I would come after us once I got such news. Would you not?”

“Too right I would,” Hamnet said regretfully.

“There you are, then.” Marcovefa might have been a schoolmistress going through a proof in geometry. Back in his school days, Hamnet had never imagined lying naked on a mammoth hide with a schoolmistress. Most teachers in Raumsdalia were men. Most of the ones who weren’t were neither young nor attractive. He supposed that rule was bound to have exceptions, but he’d never met one.

Again, he hauled his thoughts back to the business at hand: “How can we beat them?” But that wasn’t the question he really needed to ask. He asked the one that was: “Can we beat them?”

“They would not worry so much about us if they did not think we could,” Marcovefa answered.

“How?” Hamnet asked bluntly.

“I don’t know. We will have to find that way.” Marcovefa asked a question of her own: “Do you think you can find the way again?”

Most of the time, Hamnet would have said no—it was too soon, and he not young enough. But he found he could after all, so he did. As he’d seen before, having a shaman for a lover wasn’t the worst thing in the world. No, indeed.

XIX

SUDERTORP LAKE WAS thawing. Spring was in the air. So were countless thousands—millions, more likely—of waterfowl, all bound for the marshes around the lake to breed.

In years gone by, the Leaping Lynxes would have settled in their stone huts to live off the fat of the land as long as it lasted. No more: the Rulers had smashed that Bizogot clan. And Marcovefa didn’t want to go back toward the eastern edge of the lake, where the Leaping Lynxes’ village stood.

“Why not?” Hamnet asked her. So did Trasamund. So did Liv. So did Audun Gilli. So did Ulric Skakki. So did Runolf Skallagrim and everyone else who knew her.

“It is not lucky,” she answered. When people tried to argue with her—and a lot of them did—she added, “Are you the shaman, or am I?”