"My dreams have been cold. All of them have been cold," Audun said. Thinking back on it, Hamnet realized his had, too. Audun continued, "That doesn't prove it's the Rulers and not the Emperor, but I'd bet on them."

"When we get back among the good folk of the Three Tusk clan, we will be troubled no more," Trasamund said. "By being what they are, they will shield us from this nuisance."

"What? We're not good folk ourselves?" Ulric asked. "If that's all it takes . . . We don't have some of the people who came along with us last time here now, you know." He named no names, which was just as well. Hamnet Thyssen's mind immediately turned to Gudrid.

But he hadn't had nightmares about her up here, not even once. That struck him as odd. He'd had plenty of them before.

Trasamund's thoughts ran in a different direction. "Nothing wrong with Eyvind Torfinn," he said. "Jesper Fletti and the other soldiers—I don't miss them so much."

He thought Earl Eyvind was a good fellow because the aging noble either didn't see his sport with Gudrid or pretended not to notice it. Hamnet didn't think Eyvind Torfinn a bad fellow, either, but he esteemed the other Raumsdalian despite his ties to Gudrid, not because of them.

Trasamund sent Ulric Skakki a sly glance. He didn't say anything about Ulric. He didn't say the adventurer wasn't a good man. Whatever he thought, he thought. And if Ulric growled and muttered, he didn't—he couldn't—do any more than that. Trasamund . .. smiled.

Who would have thought a Bizogot could show such subtlety?

The Red Dire Wolves—not to be confused with the Black Dire Wolves, who dwelt far to the west—fed the travelers to the bursting point. They’d just killed a bull mammoth, and for the time being had more meat than they knew what to do with. Baked mammoth, stewed mammoth, mammoth fritters, roasted mammoth marrow—a delicacy, that, even without toasted bread on which to spread it—mammoth blood sausage, mammoth head cheese . . . Anything you could do to and with a mammoth's carcass, the Red Dire Wolves did.

"I'm surprised we didn't see mammoth eyeballs and mammoth bal-locks," Audun Gilli said during a pause in the orgy of eating.

"Oh, the jarl gets the eyeballs," Trasamund said seriously. "They help make him farseeing, or so the hope is. As for the ballocks, the clansmen slice them up and roast them first thing. Same with the pizzle. You can figure out why."

"Er—yes." Audun raised a leather jack of smetyn to his lips. He was on his way to getting drunk, but so were the rest of them. He didn't get drunk when he needed to stay sober, which was all that really mattered.

Hamnet Thyssen gnawed more meat off a chunk of mammoth rib. Some enterprising Raumsdalian trader had sold the Red Dire Wolf clan several bone saws, of the sort surgeons used down in the Empire. For the Bizogots, they made first-rate butcher's tools. Hamnet wondered who his clever countryman was. The fellow had found an odd way, but a good one, to meet his customers' desires.

A big, burly graybeard named Totila ruled the Red Dire Wolves. He eyed Hamnet and Ulric and said, "Some of you foreigners can fill yourselves almost like real people." He didn't include Audun in that. The wizard was small to begin with, and didn't seem to have an infinitely extensible paunch.

"Practice, your Ferocity," Ulric Skakki answered. "The mammoth brain is very tasty, but now I keep wanting to wave my trunk and wiggle my ears." He did wiggle them, something Hamnet hadn't known he could do.

Totila stared, then laughed and laughed. "As long as thinking like a mammoth doesn't make you want to shit in the middle of my tent, eat all the brains you please."

Ulric did eat some more, then mimed pulling down his trousers. Totila laughed harder than ever. In Raumsdalian, Hamnet Thyssen said, "I see you've found your true level."

"I'll cut your heart out and eat it for that," Ulric answered. "And what kind of fool will I act like then?"

"A jealous fool, I'd say," Hamnet answered. "And I ought to know about those." He remembered the feel of his point grating off the ribs of Gudrid's first lover—the first one he found out about, anyhow—and then sliding deep to pierce the man's heart. He remembered the anguished surprise on Ingjald Oddleif's face. This can't be happening to me, he must have thought, there at the end. But it was.

Totila found girls for Trasamund and Ulric Skakki. He would have found one for Audun Gilli, too, but the wizard was using the bits of the Bizogot tongue he'd painfully acquired to try to talk shop with the deaf old man who was the Red Dire Wolves' shaman. Audun would have liked to find someone to translate for him, but the rest of the travelers were otherwise occupied—Hamnet and Liv had crawled under a mammoth hide together, too. Audun had to do the best he could on his own.

When the travelers rode out of the Red Dire Wolves' encampment the next morning, the wizard said, "I think Odovacar told me there were changes in the north."

"Their shaman? Has he had bad dreams, too?" Ulric Skakki asked. By his self-satisfied smirk, whatever dreams he'd had after enjoying the Bizogot woman weren't bad at all.

But he sobered when Audun Gilli nodded. "He has. I'm almost sure of it," Audun said. "That makes it more likely the Rulers are sending the dreams, not the Emperor. Why would imperial wizards trouble a shaman's dreams?"

"Why would the Rulers?" Hamnet Thyssen asked in turn. "If they're plotting something, wouldn't they want to keep shamans in the dark as long as they could?"

In the dark was the right phrase. The sun rose late and set early, scuttling across the sky from southeast to southwest and never rising high above the southern horizon. Beyond the Glacier, it wouldn't come up even this far. Hamnet remembered Ulric's account of winter up there.

"Sometimes spells wash out farther than you wish they would," Liv said in Raumsdalian, and Audun Gilli nodded. She went on, "Odovacar may have felt bits and pieces of what was aimed somewhere else."

"Aimed at us?" Hamnet asked.

"It could be," Liv said. "Or maybe—" She broke off.

"Maybe what?" Audun Gilli asked.

She didn't answer. She stopped speaking Raumsdalian. In her own language, she called out to Trasamund, saying, "I fear the Rulers may have struck at our clan. God grant it not be so, but I fear it."

"Would they dare?" the jarl said.

"Never doubt what the Rulers would dare," Ulric Skakki said in the Bizogot tongue. "They may not always get everything they want, but they want a lot."

"God be praised we come in time to stop them here, then," Trasamund said.

"If we do," Hamnet Thyssen said. Trasamund sent him a horrible stare. He looked back steadily. The Bizogot was assuming that what he wanted was true. But was it really? We'll find out soon, the Raumsdalian thought.

On they rode. The weather was clear but very cold. Totila had given them some mammoth meat to take with them on their journey. They also killed hares. Even so far north, though, those had next to no fat on them, relying on their thick white fur for warmth. They would feed a man, but wouldn't keep him going indefinitely by themselves. In such weather, people needed fat for fuel to keep from freezing.

"Now we ride into the lands of the Three Tusk clan," Trasamund said a couple of days after they left the Red Dire Wolves' encampment. "Now we join the grandest clan among the Bizogots." He looked around. "I see no herds, not yet. They will be wandering elsewhere, no doubt. Our grazing range is vast."

And needs to be, Hamnet Thyssen thought. If the land up here by the Glacier were better, the musk oxen and mammoths could have lived on less of it. By the ironic glint in Ulric Skakki's eye, he saw the same thing. Neither of them pointed it out to Trasamund. That would have enraged him without being able to change anything.