Ulric Skakki chuckled. "All right, then-which choice do you like less?"
"Both," Hamnet answered, and Ulric laughed out loud.
The Gap slowly widened. Little by little, Hamnet Thyssen lost the urge to push the halves into which the Glacier had split farther apart by brute force. When he looked ahead, he saw the gap between the ice mountains stretched farther and farther apart. It still wasn't hospitable country, being flat and often marshy, but he'd known worse.
However flat and dull the countryside was, it brought a broad smile to Trasamund's face. "This is my homeland!" he boomed when the travelers camped one evening. "This is the land of my clan! We have roamed here forever!" He thumped his fist against his chest to emphasize the words.
"Forever, to him, means longer ago than his grandfather could remember," Hamnet Thyssen whispered to Ulric Skakki behind his hand.
"No doubt," Ulric whispered back. "I'm surprised he doesn't drop his trousers and dump out a pile of dung to mark his territory, the way mammoths will sometimes." They both smiled. But they were careful not to laugh. Trasamund was not a man you wanted to insult to his face unless you were ready to put your life on the line. Parsh had found that out.
Gudrid had different thoughts about dung. "I want to get back to the Empire," she said. "If you knew how sick I was of eating food cooked over turds . . ."
"It may not be pleasant, but when the other choice is not eating at all, you do what you need to do," Eyvind Torfinn said.
Had no one else added anything, it might have rested there. But Trasamund said, "Me, I like meat roasted over a dung fire better than what you get down in the south, where you cook with wood. The flavor's better."
"All what you're used to," Earl Eyvind said with a smile.
But Gudrid screwed up her face into a horrible grimace. "What you mean is, meat roasted over a dung fire tastes like dung. We've been eating dung ever since we left the Empire!"
She wasn't wrong. The same thought had crossed Hamnet Thyssen's mind once or twice. He wished she wouldn't have said it, though. Now he really had to think about it. By the looks that crossed some of the other Raumsdalians' faces, they felt the same way.
"What does she say?" Liv asked. Count Hamnet didn't much want to translate; that made him think about it, too. But Liv only shrugged and said, "Otherwise, we would starve-and fire is clean."
When Hamnet heard that, he nodded. "You have a good way of looking at things," he said. Fire was clean, even if it was fire from … He shook his head. He didn't want to go down that road. Fire is clean, he told himself, and left it there.
Ulric Skakki shook him awake in the middle of the night. "Sorry to do this to you, your Grace," he said, "but I need my time in the bedroll, too."
"Who says?" Hamnet demanded through a yawn. Ulric laughed. Count Hamnet yawned again. Ulric stayed there by him till he got to his feet. Who hadn't seen a man fall back to sleep instead of going out to stand sentry?
Muttering-and still yawning-Hamnet Thyssen trudged away from the embers of the fire (the dung fire, he thought, and wished he hadn't). Off in the distance, he could see the Glacier on either side of the Gap. It seemed almost magical under moonlight, and made him wonder if it shone from within with a glow of its own. The sensible part of him knew better, but around midnight that part wasn't at its best.
Like all the sentries, he stationed himself north of his sleeping comrades. If trouble came, from where but the direction of the Rulers would it come?
He breathed out fog-the visible warmth flowing from his body every time he exhaled. The landscape was eerily quiet. He could hear the other travelers snoring more than a bowshot away. But for those small noises, there was nothing, so much nothing that before long he could hear the blood rushing in his ears and the beating of his heart.
After a while, someone stirred and sat up, there by the smoldering fire. Was that Liv? Hamnet Thyssen's heart beat faster. Warmth flowed through him instead of flowing out. She got to her feet and walked toward him. A broad smile spread over his face. It still felt peculiar; his muscles just weren't used to shaping that expression.
She kissed him when she got out to where he was standing. But then she said, "Something's wrong," which spoiled his hope for anything more.
"What is it?" he asked. Instead of slipping under her tunic, his hand fell to the hilt of his sword.
"I don't know yet." Moonshadow made her look as troubled as she sounded. "But something."
"Should we wake the others?" Hamnet asked. "Should we wake Audun?" Something that roused foreboding in a shaman was bound to be sorcerous . . . wasn't it?
But Liv shook her head. "If he feels it, too, let him come," she said. "If not.. . not. I would say something different if we could talk together." She switched from her language to Raumsdalian. "Not know enough yet. And Audun Gilli not know Bizogot speech."
"You're doing very well," Hamnet said in Raumsdalian.
Liv returned to her own tongue to answer, "I should have started sooner. Then I would know more. And Audun Gilli should have started learning my language."
Not all Raumsdalians cared to learn the Bizogot tongue. Several of the guardsmen who'd come north with Gudrid also remained ignorant of it. Hamnet Thyssen had heard them muttering about braying barbarians- but never when Trasamund or Liv was in earshot. They might be arrogant, but they weren't foolhardy.
Hamnet put his arm around her-partly from affection and partly for warmth. "However you like. The company is good this way."
She nodded and smiled. "It is. If I was wrong . . . Well, we can see what happens then. But let's wait a while first."
"All right." Hamnet didn't want to wait. He waited anyhow. Pushing an unwilling woman wasn't a good idea any time. It made her think a man wanted her for only one thing-which was too often true. But pushing her when she said trouble was on the way had a special stupidity all its own.
If he were twenty years younger, he might not have cared. What man who was hardly more than a youth didn't think with his prong? Now, though, Hamnet could wait. Liv would still be here after the trouble, whatever it was, went away.
Motion in the sky made both of them swing their heads the same way at the same time. Silent and pale as a ghost, an owl soared past on broad wings. Or was it only an owl? To Hamnet's senses it was, but he would never make a wizard if he lived to be a thousand. "That?" he whispered.
"That," Liv said.
"What can we-what can you-do?"
"I don't know. I don't know if I can do anything," she answered, which wasn't what he wanted to hear. But then she went on, "I'd better try, though, yes?"
"I'd say so," Hamnet Thyssen said. "If you don't, the Rulers will think we're too weak to do anything about them."
"And they may be right to think that," Liv said bleakly, which was not at all what he wanted to hear. "But I don't care to be spied on night after night, and so . . ."
She reached into her pouch and drew from it something feathered, something clawed, and something that in the moonlight might have been a dark stone. "What have you got there?" Hamnet asked.
"The dried right wing of a screech owl, and his right foot, also dried, and his heart, likewise," the Bizogot shaman said.
"You didn't kill an owl on our travels," Hamnet said, and Liv shook her head to show she hadn't. He went on, "Then you've had them with you since we set out," and she nodded. He asked, "Why, by God?"
"Because these three things, taken together, will summon birds to them, which can be useful," Liv answered. "Also, the heart and the foot together, without the wing, will compel a man to truth if set above his heart while he sleeps."