“This is the Rulers’ answer to your magic?” he asked Marcovefa.
She nodded. “Nothing else.”
“Does it break your spells?” Ulric asked. “Or does it just say they know the spell is there and they defy you?”
She reached out with a mittened hand, as if feeling the air in front of her. When that didn’t tell her what she wanted to know, she stepped past Hamnet and Ulric, stooped beside the bear’s head, and laid her hand just above one ear. She recoiled, her mouth twisting. “The spell is broken,” she said.
“Can you restore it?” Count Hamnet asked, and then, on second thought, “Is there any point to restoring it?”
“I think not,” Marcovefa answered. “I could do it, but they would only break it again. They would have an easier time breaking it again, because they’ve already done it once and they know how.”
The Bizogot who’d found the bear’s head came up behind them. “Now you know,” he said.
“Now we know,” Hamnet agreed. “You could have told us back at the camp. It would have saved a lot of time.”
“No.” The Bizogot spat in the snow. “Some things you need to see for yourself. When Grimoald hears of this, the war against the Rulers will be to the death for him. They have desecrated his clan animal.”
Hamnet Thyssen found himself nodding. The Bizogots took such things as the deadliest of insults. Ulric Skakki sometimes enjoyed being difficult for the sake of being difficult. He said, “But Grimoald wears the bear-claw necklace. Why should he care if someone else goes hunting?”
“It is not the same thing.” The Bizogot seemed shocked that Ulric couldn’t see as much. “Grimoald hunted with reverence. He killed with reverence. Not like . . . this.” He pointed to the bear’s head, which did indeed seem a sad, dejected object.
“It may have mattered to Grimoald.” Yes, Ulric was determined to be difficult today. “How much did it matter to the beasts? They ended up dead either way.”
“It matters.” That wasn’t the scandalized Bizogot but Marcovefa. “To the bear’s spirit, it matters very much whether it was killed by a warrior with respect and awe or by an enemy in hate.”
“And you know this because . . . ?” Ulric said.
He was bound to be teasing, but Marcovefa answered anyhow: “Because I do. Because I can feel it. Ask any shaman. They will all tell you the same.”
“People tell me lots of different things,” Ulric said. “Figuring out what’s true is half the fun.”
“This is true,” Marcovefa declared. “Do you say I am lying?”
Hamnet Thyssen would not have cared to say any such thing to her. Evidently, Ulric didn’t, either, which struck Hamnet as uncommonly sensible of the adventurer. “Well, no,” Ulric allowed, “but I do say you could be wrong.”
“I could be,” Marcovefa said, with the air of someone making a great and undeserved concession. “I could be, yes, but I am not. As I tell you, ask Liv. Ask Audun Gilli. If they tell you I am wrong, they know less of magic than I think they do.”
“Never mind all this fancy talk,” said the Bizogot who’d found the short-faced bear’s head. “What do we do now?”
“The first thing I must do is tell the bear I am sorry for the indignity it suffered,” Marcovefa answered in the Bizogot language commonly used on the steppe north of the Empire. Then she switched to her own dialect. Hamnet could follow only a word here and there. He got just enough to gather that she was doing what she’d said she would. Maybe—evidently—the apology made her feel better. Whether it did the same thing for the bear he was less sure.
Ulric Skakki’s upraised eyebrow probably said he harbored some of the same doubts. If he did, though, he didn’t come right out and say so. Challenging Marcovefa once was not for the faint of heart. Challenging her more than once? Very bold or very, very foolish.
At last, she seemed satisfied with what she’d done. She picked up what had to be a symbolic handful of snow and dropped it on the head. Then she returned to the usual Bizogot language to say, “We can go now. It is appeased.” After a moment, she looked south, toward the Rulers’ camps. “It is appeased,” she repeated. “It is, but I am not.”
WHEN MARCOVEFA SAID she wasn’t appeased, she meant it. Marcovefa commonly meant what she said. Her cold fury puzzled Hamnet. “The bears killed Rulers. They must have,” he said the next day. “Why not expect the Rulers to kill bears?”
She looked at him—looked through him, rather. “I do expect them to kill bears. Killing is part of war. Killing like that . . .” She shook her head. “No.”
“What can you do about it? Anything?”
“They will pay. Oh, they will pay.” Marcovefa was still looking through him. He wondered whether her eyes saw any of the real world. Then he wondered how real the world was, and whether what she saw wasn’t truer, closer to the absolute heart of things, than the campfire and the snow and the smell of horses on the breeze. He didn’t know; he was trapped forever in mundane reality and the orderly succession of time. Marcovefa had proved she wasn’t. She went on, “Their doom hangs over them like a crag of ice.”
“May it be so,” Hamnet said. “How do we make it fall on them?”
“What?” Abruptly, Marcovefa seemed back in the here-and-now. Hamnet realized she had no idea what she’d just said. It shook him less than it might have; he’d seen the same thing from her before, and from others who trafficked in magic as well. He told her what she’d told him. She looked at him in surprise. “I said that?”
“I’m not making this up, you know,” he answered.
“No. You are not.” Marcovefa sounded more sure than an ordinary person had any business being. Well, whatever else she was, an ordinary person she wasn’t. “If I said it, and I do not know that I said it, it is likely to be so.”
From anyone else, something like that would have been lunacy. Coming from Marcovefa, it made an odd kind of sense. Or Hamnet thought it did, anyhow, which might have proved nothing except that his own grasp on sanity was starting to slip. “How do we make their doom fall on them?” he asked again.
“I cannot tell you that. I wish I could,” she said. “It will come when the Golden Shrine is found again.”
“It will?” Hamnet wondered if she would have any idea she’d come out with that.
She did. “Yes. It will. The doom of the Rulers and finding the Golden Shrine are bound together.”
“How?” Hamnet asked eagerly.
Marcovefa spread her hands. They were callused and scarred: the hands of a person who’d worked hard all her life to survive. Up atop the Glacier, not even shamans had an easy time of it. “I do not know,” she replied. “When it happens, you will see.” Her smile pulled up only half her mouth. “And so will I. And it will surprise both of us.”
“What do we do in the meantime?” Hamnet said.
“Fight the Rulers. What else can we do? If they win, if they evade their doom, prophecy melts like snow on a south-facing slope in summer.”
Hamnet Thyssen scratched his head. “Then how is it prophecy?”
“If we fight them hard, they won’t win. I hope they won’t, anyhow,” Marcovefa said.
“But you aren’t sure?” Hamnet persisted.
“I am sure of what I know. But one of the things I know is that I don’t know everything there is to know,” Marcovefa replied.
He scratched his head again. “Does anybody know anything?” he asked.
“Of course. Just not enough.” By the way Marcovefa said that, she meant it to be reassuring. To Hamnet, it was anything but. He didn’t push it any further, though. If he did, he feared he would end up feeling like a dog chasing its own tail.
Compared to trying to understand what prophecy meant, riding out on patrol was a relief. He knew what he was doing there: looking for enemy warriors. He knew what he would do if he found them, too: either fight or run away, depending on how many of them there were.