It soon became plain she had no more control over her bodily functions than a baby did. Grimly, Hamnet took care of that, too. Had Gudrid come by to mock him then . . . But she didn’t. This time, her notion of how far she could push him proved good.
Liv did come by. “I will help you keep her clean, if you let me,” she said. “And sooner or later—you will know when better than I do—her time of the month will come. Chances are you would sooner have me deal with it.”
“Chances are you’re right,” Hamnet said, scrubbing his hands with snow. “I thank you for the kindness.”
“She would do the same for me.” Liv looked at him. “So would you, I think, even now.”
“I hope so.” Hamnet hesitated. Then he said, “Too bad it didn’t work out.”
“Yes, I think so, too.” Liv gave back a nod and a smile and a shrug. “But it didn’t, and we can’t very well pretend it did.”
That felt colder than the snow against his skin—and yet, in another way, it didn’t. “I can’t imagine talking with Gudrid this way,” Hamnet said. “That didn’t work out, either.”
“Well, the difference is, you and I don’t hate each other, or I hope we don’t,” Liv said. “You and Gudrid . . .” She shook her head and didn’t go on.
Hamnet Thyssen started to deny it. No matter what Gudrid felt about him, what he felt about her couldn’t be hate . . . could it? What else would you call it, then? he asked himself, and found no answer. “Thank you—I think,” he said slowly. “You just showed me something about myself I didn’t know before.”
“I’m not sure I did you a favor,” Liv said.
“I’m not, either. That’s why I said, ‘I think,’ ” Hamnet answered. “What are we going to do now?”
“Try to keep her fed and watered and clean,” Liv said. “Try to find a magic that will lift the mistletoe spell—either that or hope it wears off on its own. A lot of spells do, you know.”
“Not quite what I meant,” he told her. “Pretty soon, the Rulers will realize we can’t beat back their magic any more. They’ll see we aren’t aiming strong spells at them. Then they’ll jump on us with both feet.”
The shaman from the Three Tusk clan bit her lip. “You shame Audun and me.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Hamnet said quickly. “By God, Liv, I didn’t.”
“You might as well have meant it if you didn’t.” Her voice was bleak. “It’s not as if you weren’t telling the truth. Marcovefa could beat the Rulers. Audun and I . . . can’t. We’ve seen that.”
“It’s not your fault—not your fault in particular,” Count Hamnet said. “Nobody on this side of the Glacier can beat the Rulers. We’ve seen that, too. So has Sigvat II, and I hope he likes it.” He didn’t need anyone else to tell him that he hated the Raumsdalian Emperor.
“We should be able to beat them. We’d better be able to.” Liv’s shiver had nothing to do with the Breath of God; it could have come at high summer. “If we can’t, what’s to stop them from stomping us underfoot like a mammoth stepping on a vole? Or if they don’t do that, what’s to keep them from driving us back through the trees and up onto the Bizogot steppe again?”
Nothing, Hamnet thought. Not a single, solitary thing. But he didn’t want to make Liv feel worse than she did already, so he said, “Why does that worry you? It’s your homeland, after all.”
“But it’s so much poorer than Raumsdalia. I didn’t understand that before I came down here, but I do now.” Liv had never been one to hide from unpleasant or inconvenient truths. “If the Rulers hold the Empire, they can come after us up on the steppe any time they choose—especially since more and more of them keep riding down through the Gap. They can squeeze us from north and south—squeeze us till there’s nothing left.” The shadows under her proud cheekbones might have been shadows of fear—or maybe Hamnet’s imagination, usually no more energetic than it had to be, was for once running away with him.
“I hope things don’t work out that way,” he said.
“So do I,” Liv answered. “But, however wonderful I think hope is, keeping it gets hard.” She looked at him. Was she . . . hoping he would tell her she was wrong? If she was, he had to disappoint her.Again, he thought bitterly.
WHAT’S TO KEEP the Rulers from stomping us underfoot? What’s to keep them from driving us back through the trees and out onto the Bizogot steppe? As winter went on, Count Hamnet remembered Liv’s questions again and again. He also remembered the response that had formed in his mind when he heard them. Nothing.
Liv turned out to know which questions to ask. And Hamnet turned out to know the answer.
He counted staying alive a victory. He counted every time his ragtag force managed to sting the Rulers another. Retreats, on the other hand . . .
Ulric Skakki joked about them: “This country looked a lot better from north to south than it does from south to north.”
Hamnet didn’t laugh, which seemed to irk the adventurer. Hamnet also didn’t much care whether Ulric was irked or not. By then, they were north of Nidaros again. They hadn’t passed right by the capital. That distressed Eyvind Torfinn and, even more loudly, Gudrid. To Hamnet, it didn’t matter one way or the other.
Marcovefa drank. She ate. She sometimes smiled, though she hardly ever opened her eyes. She gave no sign of coming fully to herself. Without her, the Raumsdalians and Bizogots did what they could against the Rulers. What they could do wasn’t enough, or even close.
The Rulers’ confidence swelled with every new triumph, too. They regained the arrogance they’d shown before Marcovefa taught them they didn’t know everything there was to know. And when you rode to a fight expecting to win, you were more likely to do just that.
When you rode to a fight expecting something to go wrong . . . Raumsdalians began slipping away from the army. Maybe they thought they could do better for themselves by giving up the fight and grubbing out a living under the Rulers. Maybe they were right, too.
“We Bizogots don’t quit, by God!” Trasamund told Runolf Skallagrim one cold evening. “Your folk shouldn’t, either.”
“You’re right. They shouldn’t,” Baron Runolf agreed politely. “I don’t know what to do about it, though.”
“Kill anybody who wants to run away.” The jarl was nothing if not direct.
“If we catch them trying to sneak off, we do kill them,” Runolf said. “The trouble is, we don’t catch many.”
“You need to try harder,” Trasamund said.
“We need to do all kinds of things,” Runolf Skallagrim replied. “We need to beat the Rulers again, for instance. If we do that, people will think our chances are better, so they won’t want to run out on us. We can hope they won’t, anyway.” He eyed Count Hamnet. “How do we go about that, Thyssen?”
“I wish I knew,” Hamnet answered bleakly.
“Marcovefa has to wake up,” Trasamund said.
“Well, how do we make that happen?” Runolf asked.
Even more bleakly, Hamnet shrugged. “I wish I knew. Our wizards have tried. I’ve watched them do it. The only trouble is, they’ve had no luck. It’s in God’s hands now, I think.”
“And God’s done nothing but drop things since he let the Glacier melt through so these stinking Rulers could plague us.” Trasamund sounded bleak himself.
Runolf sent him a measuring look, too. “The way you say that, you’ll be the next one to try and run from trouble.”
“No.” Trasamund didn’t even bother to shake his head. “I’m in this till the end. With the Rulers swarming down the way they do, I have nothing to go back to. They hold my clan’s grazing grounds. The few free Three Tusk Bizogots are all here with me. We’re not a big clan any more, but we’re tough.”
“If you’ve got nothing to go back to, you may as well fight,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “The ones who think they can slip away and go back to being peasants with the Rulers taxing them in place of the Empire—”