“Right now, letting go is better,” Hamnet said, glad Trasamund didn’t want to hold him to their promise. He nodded to Marcovefa. “You must have expected all this.”
“Not me,” she said. “I always thought beating the Rulers would have to happen up here on the Bizogot plain. I didn’t understand why that was so till just before the end. And the Golden Shrine . . . Who could expect the Golden Shrine? You hope. You imagine. You never expect.”
A goose alighted in a puddle on what had been the bottom of Sudertorp Lake. The bird seemed bewildered at the changes that had turned its world all topsy-turvy. Hamnet Thyssen understood how it felt.
The road ran straight to the Golden Shrine. Had it really lain there under the waters of the lake? Had it really lain under the Glacier even longer? Like the Shrine, the road showed no signs of any such mishap. Had they been somewhere else—perhaps not even on or in or of this world at all—and suddenly appeared here when the Rulers were swept away?
However tempting that was, Count Hamnet couldn’t believe it. Both the roadway and the Golden Shrine gave the impression of belonging where they were. He couldn’t have said why or how they did, but it was so.
He slid off his horse and walked toward the doorway. A polished brass knocker was fixed to the door just below eye level. Why isn’t it green with patina? he wondered. When the Golden Shrine wasn’t dripping—when it wasn’t ground to dust—he had no idea why that detail puzzled him, but it did.
Gudrid laughed harshly when he reached for the knocker instead of the latch. “Do you truly think someone will open it?” she jeered.
“I don’t know what to think right now,” Hamnet answered. “And if you think you do know, you’re wrong.”
The knocker swung smoothly in his hand. He rapped with it once, twice, three times. The clear, sharp sound echoed out over what had been Sudertorp Lake. The goose in the puddle took off. Hamnet paused, then knocked three more times.
“Oh, well. So much for that,” Ulric Skakki said. “Now try the latch.”
Hamnet was reaching for it when the door into the Golden Shrine swung open on silent hinges. Magic, he thought, or maybe the power of God. Is there any difference?
A woman in a golden robe looked out at him and his companions. “Good day,” she said. That was what he heard, anyhow, although it didn’t match the motion of her lips.
Trasamund laughed raucously. “Ha!” he told Gudrid. “D’you see? Do you?” She pointed her nose to the sky, pretending not to hear.
“Welcome,” the woman went on. “We haven’t had visitors in . . . oh, quite a long time.” She wasn’t very large. Her hair was light brown, her eyes somewhere between green and hazel. By that and by her cast of features, she might have been either Raumsdalian or Bizogot—or both, or neither.
“She speaks my dialect,” Marcovefa said, and then, “Oh. It must be a translation spell. If the Rulers sometimes use them, why should we be surprised the folk of the Golden Shrine do, too?”
“It is a translation spell,” the woman in the golden robe agreed.
In a way, Marcovefa’s words made good sense to Hamnet. In another . . . “How are there folk of the Golden Shrine?” he asked. “This place has, mm, been through a lot, hasn’t it?”
“Yes—and no. That is the only answer I can give.” Smiling, the woman stood aside. “Come in. You will see for yourselves.”
There was only one problem with that: no one wanted to stay behind and hold the horses. After some argument, Hamnet said, “We’ll just tether them, then. I don’t think anyone will steal them, not on the grounds of the Golden Shrine.” He glanced toward the priestess in some embarrassment.
Her smile didn’t falter. All she said was, “I think you are right. They are also unlikely to stray.” One by one, the Raumsdalians and Bizogots dismounted. They queued up behind Count Hamnet. The horses hardly needed tethering. They seemed content to crop the grass growing outside the wall.
“You’ll be the first one in,” Ulric told Hamnet. “Someday, somebody’ll write your name in a history book.”
“Now tell me something that matters,” Hamnet said. Ulric chuckled. Hamnet walked through the door and into the Golden Shrine.
It was warm in there, not warm as if summer were here, but warm as if the Glacier had never rolled south, warm as if the Breath of God never blew. Some of the plants that grew in the courtyard lived far, far to the south, in lands where the Breath of God didn’t reach. Others Hamnet Thyssen had never seen before, on this side of the Glacier or the other.
He pointed to one of them. “Have those grown here since before the ice began to swell?” he asked.
“You might say so,” the priestess answered. “Or you might not.”
“Why do you talk in riddles?” Marcovefa demanded. “This is the Golden Shrine. This is the place where there should be answers, not more questions.”
“The answers are here,” the priestess assured her. “Whether you can understand them all . . . That, I fear, is one more question.” She smiled to show she wasn’t mocking Marcovefa.
More priestesses and priests came out to greet the awestruck newcomers. Like the first one, they might have been Raumsdalians or Bizogots . . . or they might not have. The one thing Hamnet was sure of was that they weren’t close kin to the Rulers.
As Hamnet had, Eyvind Torfinn pointed to some unfamiliar flowers. “Where do these come from?” he asked.
“Why, they grow here,” the priestess said.
“I see that, yes.” Earl Eyvind nodded. “But where did they come from before they grew here?”
“They grew out in the world before the Glacier came down,” the priestess replied. Her eyes twinkled as she waved to include her colleagues. “So did we. Things outside the Shrine have changed more than they have here.”
“How much more?” Eyvind asked. “Have you yourself been here since before the Glacier advanced?”
Put that way, the question sounded innocuous. What if he’d asked, Are you thousands and thousands of years old? That would have meant the same thing, but it wouldn’t have sounded the same. Oh, no—not even close.
“You had to call us forth,” the priestess said. “If you hadn’t, we would have gone on in near-nothingness till someone else did. A day? A month? A year? A century? Where we were, none of them mattered very much. We noticed—about the way you would notice an itch. After we scratched, it was gone. And once it was gone, it was forgotten.”
“Could the Rulers have, uh, called you forth?” Hamnet Thyssen used her term for it, having no better one of his own.
The priestess frowned. “I do not like to say anything is impossible—the fullness of time often makes a mockery of the word. But I will say, knowing what I know of the Rulers, that the idea strikes me as most unlikely.”
“What do you know of the Rulers?” Trasamund asked. “If you’re so mighty, why didn’t you do something about them?”
“Those are two separate questions,” a priest remarked, coming up beside the priestess who’d done all the talking till now. He had a handsome face and a light, pleasant voice. He didn’t seem dangerous. Hamnet wondered how much that proved. Very little, unless he missed his guess. The man went on, “Which would you rather we answer?”
“Either,” Trasamund said. “Both.”
“No.” Ulric Skakki shook his head. “Tell us why you didn’t do something about the Rulers.”
“How do you know we didn’t?” the priest said, smiling. “They were stronger than you in almost every way. Yet you prevailed. How?”
“Because I found a spell that poured Sudertorp Lake out onto them,” Marcovefa answered proudly.
The priest didn’t lose his smile. “And how do you think that spell came to you?” he asked. “What did you know of lakes, living up atop the Glacier all your life?”
How did he know that? Marcovefa hadn’t said anything about it, not in his hearing. Did he recognize her dialect? That was the only thing that occurred to Hamnet, but it also struck him as unlikely. The Golden Shrine had lain under Sudertorp Lake all the time Marcovefa’s folk lived up there . . . hadn’t it?