“I can’t tell you. I don’t think anyone else can, either,” Hamnet said. “My best guess is, it just happens, the way a man’s hair goes gray when he gets older.”

“Maybe.” Trasamund lost interest in the question. He pointed toward something at the edge of the woods. “Good God! What’s that?”

“A mastodon,” Hamnet answered. “Haven’t you seen them before, coming down into Raumsdalia?”

“I’ve had glimpses, but that’s all.” The Bizogot stared and stared. “It looks like a woolly mammoth, if you can imagine a woolly mammoth made by somebody who’s heard about them but never seen one. Its back is too flat—it ought to slope down like this.” He gestured.

“I’ve seen woolly mammoths,” Hamnet pointed out.

He might as well have saved his breath. Trasamund went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “Its ears are the wrong shape. They’re too big, too. And look at the funny way its tusks curl. And mammoths are supposed to be almost black, not that . . . that tree-bark brown, I guess you’d call it.”

“They can be pests,” Hamnet said. “They raid orchards and they trample down grain fields.”

“You don’t bother to tame them, do you?” Trasamund asked.

“I’ve heard that lumbermen sometimes do. Mastodons are big enough and strong enough to shove tree trunks around better than just about any other beasts. But apart from that, no,” Hamnet replied. “We hunt them, though. We use the meat and the hides and the ivory and the hair.”

“Woolly mammoth hair is better,” Trasamund said. “It’s longer and thicker. I like the color better, too.”

“Which is all very well, I’m sure, only we haven’t got any woolly mammoths in Raumsdalia. Plenty of mastodons in the forests near my castle. They’re nuisances there. That’s the other reason we hunt them: to keep them from tearing up the crops.”

“How much farther to your castle?” Marcovefa asked. To her, mastodons were only a little stranger than mammoths; she’d come to know both beasts since descending from the Glacier.

“Maybe a week’s travel: a little less if we were in a tearing hurry,” Hamnet answered.

“How long do you aim to stay?” Marcovefa asked, and then, “How long will we stay?”

“I don’t know how long I’ll stay. A while, anyhow. Till things settle down a bit—if they ever do,” Hamnet said. “And I can’t really say how long you’ll stay, can I?”

“You have something to do with it. If I decide you make me angry and don’t make me happy, I go,” Marcovefa said. But she added, “So far you haven’t—quite.”

Trasamund guffawed. “High praise, Thyssen!”

“Better than I’ve done with women up till now,” Hamnet said, as calmly as he could. “Maybe I’ve learned something. Maybe Marcovefa just puts up with more than Gudrid or Liv did.” He glanced over at her. “What do you think?”

“Me? I think you know me better than to think I put up with much,” Marcovefa replied. “So far you are not too bad, in bed or out.”

Trasamund started laughing again. Hamnet’s ears felt as if they’d caught fire. He made the most of it he could, saying, “Thank you—I think.”

“You’re welcome—I suppose,” Marcovefa told him. But she was smiling when she said it. Now Trasamund laughed at both of them. They took no notice of him; lacking encouragement, he eventually ran down. They all rode on in what was—Hamnet hoped—a companionable silence.

SOMEHOW, NEWS OF Sigvat’s fall spread faster than Hamnet had imagined it could. He thought he and Marcovefa and Trasamund would be the outermost ripple of news from the pebble that had dropped in the palace at Nidaros. But they weren’t. Whenever they stopped in a village or a town, people had heard that the Emperor was Emperor no more. Some of them had even heard that he’d fled because the Golden Shrine judged him unworthy to rule.

“I heard that, all right,” said the tapman at a serai about halfway to Hamnet’s keep. “Don’t know that I believe it, but I heard it. Till all this talk started, I don’t know that I believed there was any such thing as the Golden Shrine. People talk about it, sure, but people talk about all kinds of things that aren’t real. But I’ve never heard ’em talk about it the way they do nowadays, so maybe there’s something to it after all.”

“It’s true,” Hamnet said solemnly. Marcovefa and Trasamund nodded. Hamnet went on, “I wouldn’t mind another mug of ale. It’s tasty.”

“I thank you for that—I brew it myself,” the tapman said, not without pride. As he dipped up another mug for Hamnet, he continued, “You folks sound like you know what you’re talking about.” Hamnet had listened to a lot of tapmen in his time. He knew this fellow wasn’t necessarily saying he believed them.

“We do,” Trasamund said. “We were there.”

“Where? At the Golden Shrine or in the palace?” No, the tapman didn’t believe they’d set eyes on either place.

“Both,” Marcovefa told him. He didn’t call her a liar—you had to be very bold or very stupid to do that—but disbelief still stuck out all over him. She nudged Hamnet. “Say the words again—the words you got from the Golden Shrine.”

“Mene. Mene. Tekel. Upharsin.” He felt sure he was pronouncing them badly. But chances were no one else born into this age of the world could have done any better. These words were extinct—except, thanks to the priests and priestesses of the Golden Shrine, they weren’t.

Marcovefa murmured a spell. Suddenly, Hamnet saw himself saying those unimaginably ancient words to Sigvat II. By the way the tapman’s jaw dropped, so did he. Hamnet also saw those words on the wall, saw the long-forgotten king’s awe and fear, and Sigvat’s as well, and saw the balance in which they were both weighed and found wanting.

The vision faded fast, which was nothing but a relief. “Well?” Trasamund asked the tapman. “Were we there, or not?”

“You were,” the man whispered. “I don’t know how, but you were. How did you come to be at the heart of—well, everything?”

“Maybe it just worked out that way,” Hamnet said. “Maybe the Golden Shrine or God—if there’s a difference—meant it all along. I don’t know. I don’t expect I ever will. I’m beginning to think the how doesn’t even matter. However it happened, we were there, that’s all.”

“You didn’t even say anything yet about Sudertorp Lake breaking free and drowning all the Rulers and their shamans,” Trasamund observed.

If the tapman’s ears could have pricked erect like a dire wolf’s, they would have. “I didn’t think I should,” Hamnet said. “Marcovefa worked the magic. I only watched it.”

“And keep me alive. And bring me back to myself,” Marcovefa said. The tapman’s eyes got bigger and bigger.

“Anyhow, not quite all of them drowned,” Hamnet said. “But I don’t think they’ll kick up much trouble for a while.”

“By God, you’re not making any of this up, are you?” the tapman said hoarsely. “You really saw those things. You really did those things, too.”

“We saw them,” Hamnet agreed. “We did them.”

“Then what are you doing here?” the tapman said. “Nothing ever happens here. No one who doesn’t live in Gufua knows it’s here or knows its name. Nobody cares to, either.”

“That sounds plenty good to me, at least in a place where we’ll stop for the night,” Count Hamnet said. Marcovefa and Trasamund both nodded. Hamnet went on, “Sometimes, what you want most is not to need to worry. If, uh, Gufua can give us that, we’re glad to take it.” Till the tapman named the hamlet, he hadn’t known what to call it. His companions nodded again.

“If you’ll tell your stories and work your spells for the folk here, you needn’t pay for food and lodging,” the tapman said.

Hamnet looked at Marcovefa and Trasamund. Then he set silver on the bar. “I mean no disrespect, but paying’s the better bargain.” He got more nods from them.

“Have it as you please.” The tapman didn’t seem sorry to scoop up the coins. “It was only a thought. The bedchambers are upstairs.”