"To hell with them," he muttered fiercely, driving them from his mind and concentrating on keeping the ship perfectly on course, frowning fiercely as he watched the pole stone needle floating in its gimballed bowl by the steering blade.

On the twelfth day of the crossing, they made a landfall with the Skandian coast-exactly where Erak had predicted they would fetch up.

From the admiring glances the men cast at the Jarl, Will could tell that this was a considerable feat.

Throughout the following days, they edged closer to the shore, until Will and Evanlyn could make out more detail. High cliffs and snow-covered mountains seemed to be the dominant features of Skandia.

"He's caught Loka's current perfectly," Svengal told them as he prepared to climb to the lookout position on the mast's crosstrees.

The cheerful second in command had developed a certain fondness for Will and Evanlyn. He knew their lives would be hard and pitiless as slaves, and he tried to compensate with a few friendly words whenever possible. Unfortunately, his next comment, meant in a kindly fashion, was little comfort to either Will or Evanlyn.

"Ah well," he said, seizing hold of a halyard to haul himself to the top of the mast, "we should reach home in two or three hours."

As it turned out, he was mistaken. The wolfship, finally under oars again, ghosted through the thick fog that shrouded the Hallasholm harbor mouth barely an hour and a quarter later. Will and Evanlyn stood silently in the waist of the ship as the town of Hallasholm loomed out of the fog.

It was not a large place. Nestled at the foot of towering pine-clad mountains, Hallasholm consisted of perhaps fifty buildings-all of them single story and all, apparently, built from pine logs and roofed with a mixture of thatch and turf.

The buildings huddled around the edge of the harbor, where a dozen or more wolfships were moored at jetties or drawn up on the land, canted on their sides as men worked on the hulls, fighting a never-ending battle against the attacks of the marine parasites that constantly ate away at the wooden planks. Smoke curled up from most of the chimneys and the cold air was redolent of the heady smell of burning pine logs.

The principal building, Ragnak's Great Hall, was built from the same logs as the rest of the houses in the town. But it was larger, longer and wider, and with a pitched roof that let it tower above its neighbors. It stood in the center of the town, dominating the scene, surrounded by a dry ditch and a stockade-more pine logs, Will noticed.

Pine was obviously the most common building material available in Skandia. A long, wide road led up to the gateway in the stockade from the main quay.

Gazing at the town across the glass-smooth water of the harbor, Will thought that, in another time and under other conditions, he would probably find the neatly ordered houses, with the massive, snow-covered mountains towering behind them, to be quite beautiful.

Right now, however, he could see nothing to recommend their new home to him. As the two young people watched, light snow began to drift down around them.

"I should think it's going to be cold here," Will said quietly.

He felt Evanlyn's chilled hand creep into his. He squeezed it gently, hoping to give her a sense of encouragement. A sense that was totally foreign to the way he himself was feeling at the moment.

"I TOLD YOU THAT SYMBOL ON YOUR SHIELD WOULD MAKE traveling easier," Halt remarked to Horace. They sat at ease in their saddles, Halt with one leg cocked up over the pommel, as they watched the Gallic knight who had been barring passage to a crossroads ahead of them set his spurs to his horse and gallop away toward the safety of a nearby town. Horace glanced down at the green oakleaf device that Halt had painted on his formerly plain shield.

"You know," he said, with a hint of disapproval in his tone, "I'm not actually entitled to any coat of arms until I have been formally knighted." Horace's training under Sir Rodney had been quite strict and he felt sometimes that Halt didn't pay enough notice to the etiquette of chivalrous behavior. The bearded Ranger glanced sidelong at him and shrugged.

"For that matter," he remarked, "you're not entitled to contest any of these knights until you've been properly knighted either. But I haven't noticed that stopping you."

Since their first encounter at the bridge, the two travelers had been stopped on half a dozen occasions by freebooting knights guarding crossroads, bridges and narrow valleys. All of them had been dispatched with almost contemptuous ease by the muscular young apprentice. Halt was highly impressed by the young man's skill and natural ability. One after another, Horace had sent the roadside guardians toppling from their saddles, at first with a few deftly placed strokes from his sword and, more recently, as he had captured a good, stout lance with a balance and a feel that he liked, in a thundering charge that unseated his opponent and sent him flying meters behind his galloping horse. By now, the two travelers had amassed a considerable store of armor and weapons, which they carried strapped to the saddles of the horses they had captured. At the next sizable town they came to, Halt planned to sell horses, arms and armor.

For all his admiration of Horace's skill, and despite the fact that he felt a grim satisfaction at seeing the bullying vultures put out of business, Halt resented the continual delays they caused in his and Horace's journey. Even without them, he and Horace would be hard put to reach the distant border with Skandia before the first winter blizzards made it impassable.

Accordingly, five nights previously, as they camped in the half-ruined barn of a deserted farm property, he had rummaged through the piles of old rusting tools and rotting sacks until he unearthed a small pot of green paint and an old, dried-out brush. Using these, he had sketched a green oakleaf design onto Horace's shield. The result had been as he expected. The reputation of Sir Horace of the Order of the Oakleaf had gone before them. Now, more often than not, as the brigand knights had seen them approaching, they had turned and fled at the sight of the device on Horace's shield.

"I can't say I'm sorry to see him go," Horace remarked, gently nudging Kicker forward toward the now-deserted crossroads. "My shoulder's not totally healed yet."

His previous opponent had been considerably more skillful than the general run of highway warriors. Undaunted by the oakleaf device on the shield, and obviously not bothered by Horace's reputation, he had joined combat eagerly. The fight had lasted several minutes, and during the course of their combat, a blow from his mace had glanced off the top rim of Horace's shield and deflected onto his upper arm.

Fortunately, the shield had taken a good deal of the force of the blow, or Horace's arm would, in all likelihood, have been broken. As it was, there was severe bruising and his arm and shoulder were still not as free moving as he would have liked.

Barely half a second after the mace had done its damage, Horace's backhanded sword stroke had clanged sickeningly into the front of the other man's helmet, leaving a severe dent and sending the knight sprawling unconscious and heavily concussed on the forest floor.

Now he was relieved that he hadn't had to fight since.

"We'll spend a night in town," Halt said. "We may be able to get some herbs and I'll make a poultice for that arm of yours." He'd noticed the boy was favoring the arm. Even though Horace hadn't complained, it was obviously causing him considerable pain.

"I'd like that," Horace said. "A night in a real bed would be a pleasant change after sleeping on the ground for so long."