“Try it again,” Hamnet Thyssen told her. “Your magic’s bound to come back to you sooner or later, isn’t it?” He fought not to show his fear.
“Well, I hope so. I don’t want to be mindblind the rest of my days,” she answered. Mindblind wasn’t really a word in Raumsdalian, which didn’t keep Hamnet from understanding it – and from understanding that he wasn’t the only fearful one here.
Marcovefa eyed the drifted snow again. She nodded to herself, as if to say, I can do this. Then she whistled again. The tune was almost the same as it had been before – almost, but not quite. Hamnet couldn’t have defined the difference, but he knew it was there.
Suddenly, a vole popped out of the snow. It stared at Marcovefa with small, black, beady eyes. Then, as if recognizing her as one of its own kind, it scurried towards her. Her smile blazed brighter than the weak northern sun. She stopped whistling. The vole let out a high-pitched squeak of horror, almost turned a somersault spinning around, and scooted away.
She let it go. As she turned to Hamnet, her eyes shone with triumph. “There!” she said. “I did it! I called the vole to me!”
“Good,” he said. “Would you hunt that way up on top of the Glacier?”
“Sometimes I would, if I had to,” she replied. “But you see? I did a magic! Not a big magic yet, but a magic! My head is not ruined, not for good.”
“God be praised for that,” Hamnet said gravely. “Do you suppose you can call mammoths the same way when you get better?”
He was teasing her, but she took him seriously. “I don’t know. I never try anything like that up on the Glacier. No big animals up on the Glacier, not except for people.” She bared her teeth. Maybe she was teasing him back. Or maybe she was remembering the taste of man’s flesh. Then her grin faded. She touched the side of her head, still swollen and bruised. “I have myself back again. I have myself back again.” She made Hamnet hear the pause in the middle of the word.
“Good.” He could imagine what that meant to her. And he knew what it meant to the fight against the Rulers. Without Marcovefa, there was no fight against the Rulers . . . unless Sigvat could somehow mount one. From everything Hamnet had seen, that struck him as unlikely.
She whistled again. Another little furry head popped out of the snowbank. Another ensorceled vole started towards her. This time, she took it in her hands before relaxing the spell. Count Hamnet wondered if the vole would die of fright. It didn’t – it just twisted loose and ran away.
“Not an accident. Not a happenstance,” Marcovefa said happily. “I can really do this.”
“Good,” Hamnet said. “If any of the Rulers stick their heads out of the snow all of a sudden, we know just how to take care of them.”
Marcovefa laughed. Hamnet was joking, and then again he wasn’t. She’d worked magic, but she hadn’t worked strong magic. If this was the most she could do, how could she stand against the Rulers? And if she couldn’t stand against the Rulers, what was the point to anything?
“Suppose we meet the Rulers in the ordinary way,” Hamnet persisted. “What can you do then?”
“Whatever I have to do, I can do,” Marcovefa replied.
That was encouraging, or it would have been had Hamnet had more confidence in it. But he didn’t want to show Marcovefa he had no confidence; if he did show her that, wouldn’t it hurt her confidence? And confidence that she could beat the Rulers was one big advantage she enjoyed over both the Bizogots and the Raumsdalians. She’ll always thought she could, and she’d been right most of the time – till that slingstone made her wrong at just the wrong moment.
“Voles,” Hamnet Thyssen muttered.
“If I see any mammoths hiding in the snowdrift, I am able to call those, too,” Marcovefa said brightly.
“Oh, good,” Count Hamnet said. Marcovefa couldn’t always tell when he was being sarcastic. This time, she noticed, and thought it was funny. Hamnet went on, “Suppose they aren’t hiding there. Suppose they’re just.. . mammothing along. Could you call them then?”
“Mammothing? Is that a word?”
“It is now.”
“I don’t know if I could or not,” Marcovefa answered. “I tell you this, though – I want to find out.”
“So do I.” Hamnet said. If she could call mammoths the way she called voles … Well, what good would it do the Rulers to ride them, if they wouldn’t go where their riders wanted them to? Sometimes mammoth corpses got buried in floods or cave-ins and frozen underground for years or even centuries, then came to the surface again. Some of the people who found them that way thought they lived like moles and died when air touched them. How much of a difference was there between moles and voles?
If you were a vole or a mole, a lot. Otherwise?
“I have my magic back,” Marcovefa said. “Nothing else matters.” Count Hamnet was inclined to agree with her.
Coming up to the steppe before, Hamnet had passed smoothly from one Bizogot clan’s territory to the next. As often as not, riders near the edge of one clan’s lands – or the fierce dogs they had with them – would let him know when he’d come within the bounds of a new jarl’s domain.
Now the Rulers had shattered the arrangements that prevailed for so long. In a broad swath down the center of the frozen plain, the invaders had beaten and broken up the clans that had roamed there for so long. The Rulers had commandeered as many of the herds as they could lay hold of, but others still wandered with no one to protect them from lions and short-faced bears and dire wolves . . and from hungry Bizogots as much on their own as the musk oxen and mammoths and horses were.
Chaos and banditry, of course, spread far beyond the clans the Rulers had actually broken. Refugees and fugitives went where they would, went where they could, and turned their swords and bows against the Bizogots already holding those grounds and herds. Some of the clans the Rulers hadn’t touched got smashed to pieces by their own folk . . and then they spread disorder farther yet.
In the midst of such madness and uncertainty, a knot of hard-bitten travelers who weren’t afraid to fight had no trouble gathering a following. Men who wanted to hit back at the invaders but saw no way to do it on their own were glad to join people who did have a plan.
“How does it feel, being most of the way towards a king?” Ulric Skakki asked Hamnet after they’d collected a pretty fair beginning to an army.
Hamnet rolled his eyes. “How does it feel, being out of your head?”
“I enjoy it most of the time,” Ulric said easily. “Now answer my question.”
“I’m not a king. I’m not a jarl, either. I’m barely even a general,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “If Trasamund wanted that slot, he could take it. I wouldn’t say a word. This is his country, not mine.”
“That’s why he’s standing back and letting you have it,” Ulric said. Before Hamnet could tell him he was crazy again, Ulric went on, “Up here, he’s just another Bizogot – and just another Bizogot who’s lost to the Rulers. But you, you’re -”
“Just another Raumsdalian who’s lost to the Rulers,” Hamnet broke in.
Ulric Skakki shook his head. “You’re a foreigner. You’re interesting. You’re exotic. You carry hope.”
“And other diseases,” Hamnet Thyssen said.
“Ow!” Ulric wasn’t easy to wound with words, but he flinched then. Gathering himself, he said, “Well, the Rulers would agree with you.”
“Bugger the Rulers. Bugger em with a pine cone,” Count Hamnet said.
“That’s what we’re here for,” the adventurer reminded him.
“I know,” Hamnet said. “We’re going to have to hit them. If we don’t, the Bizogots will decide we’re good for nothing. They’ll ride off and leave us, and then -”
“We will be good for nothing,” Ulric Skakki finished for him. “Well, the world has been telling me I’m good for nothing for a long time. Maybe it’s been right all along. You never can tell.”