"If you like, I'll ride off by myself," Hamnet said. "The wizards from the Rulers seem to want to kill me in particular, fools that they are. I don't want to bring my troubles down on anyone else."

"You'll do no such thing!" Liv's voice went high and shrill. She does care for me, Hamnet thought. That seemed a stranger, stronger magic than the one Audun used to fill their trail with snowflakes.

"Stay with us, Thyssen," Trasamund said. "Stay with us. If the Rulers want you so much, it follows that you can hurt them if you live. And so we'd better keep you alive if we can." He cared for Hamnet, too, cared for him the same way he cared for his own weapons. Anything he could aim at the Rulers, he would.

Count Hamnet didn't want to leave Liv. And he didn't want to leave Trasamund, either. The Bizogot jarl wanted to hit back at the invaders. That was more than Sigvat II did. Hamnet Thyssen was in the right place, and in the right company. "If you don't think my coming along will endanger you, I'll gladly stay."

"Good. That's good. We need all the enemies of those lion turds to ride together." Trasamund could see that, even if Sigvat couldn't. "And we need to hit back at them as soon as we can without throwing ourselves away."

"How?" Once more, Ulric Skakki asked a bluntly practical question.

He asked it, and the Bizogot waved it aside. "I don't know yet. But we need to do it when we see the chance. We need to show the rest of my folk that we can hit back. If we don't, what's to stop them from rolling on their backs like a dire wolf that's lost a fight and giving the cursed Rulers whatever they want?"

"A point." Ulric didn't sound happy about admitting it, but he did. He was no more honest than he had to be, but was in his own way scrupulous.

"Gelimer!" Trasamund boomed. The other Bizogot nodded miserably. Trasamund went on, "You will know where the herds are, not so?"

"I know where they were, your Ferocity. Where they were before the thunderbolt from the north hit us, I should say," Gelimer answered.

"We warned you. By God, you should have listened." But Trasamund let that go—for a Bizogot, a rare show of magnanimity. "The Rulers will be feeding off the beasts closest to your camp. Guide us to a herd farther away. It will feed us for a while. And, sooner or later, the invaders will come to steal. When they do"—he smacked his hands together—"we strike!" He made it sound simple. Whether it would be ...

Gelimer seemed to gain a little life at the thought of hitting back. "Off to the west is where most of the musk oxen were. The mammoths roamed closer to our camp. I don't know if those .. . Rulers are breaking them to ride. Even after you said they could do that, who would have thought it was true?"

"You should have," Hamnet Thyssen answered before Trasamund could speak. "Did you think we were making up stories to pass the time?"

"With Raumsdalians, who knows?" Gelimer said. "All you people lie all the time, so how can we tell what to believe?"

Hamnet looked at Liv. She was looking back at him. They both remembered Eyvind Torfinn's paradox. Hamnet wished the Bizogots here hadn't taken it so literally; it might have cost them dear. Or, then again, it might not have mattered. Who could say whether the Rulers would have beaten them anyhow?

"Am I a Raumsdalian? Is the jarl a Raumsdalian?" Liv asked Gelimer. "When we say something is true, you can rely on it. You can, but you didn't. And now you see what happened."

"You don't need to make me feel any worse, Lady," Gelimer said. "I'm already lower than a maggot's belly."

"Killing the enemy will make a man of you again," Trasamund declared. "West, you said the musk-ox herds were? Then west we shall ride, west and north, back into our own lands again."

Enough fatty roast meat made the cold all around much easier to bear. The furnace inside Hamnet Thyssen, stoked with such fuel, burned harder and hotter. He seemed warmer, and supposed he really was.

The Bizogots had no trouble cutting an old bull musk ox, half lame and slow, out of the herd and leading it downwind so the smell of blood wouldn't panic the other animals. Killing it took a lot of arrows, but they had them. When it went down at last, bawling in pain and incomprehension, Trasamund finished it with a headsman's stroke from his great two-handed blade.

Gore crimsoned the snow. Some of the hungry Bizogots snatched up that bloody snow and stuffed it into their mouths. They couldn't wait for butchery, let alone a fire. Bodies needed food of any sort in this weather. The nomads grinned with blood on their lips and running down their chins.

Hamnet Thyssen, having eaten better lately, left the blood alone. After the dung fire began to burn, he roasted his meat and gulped it down— burnt on the outside, raw in the middle. He didn't care. You couldn't be very fussy in the Bizogot country, not if you wanted to go on living. He supposed he would eat bloody snow if he got hungry enough. He didn't think he would grin afterwards, though.

Trasamund seemed to gain strength with food, too. "Where are the Rulers?" he roared. "Let them come now. Yes, let them come, by God! We will kill them by the hundreds, by the thousands!" The remnant of his clan had no more than twenty warriors, counting the newcomers up from the south.

"Let them come, yes—but not too many of them." Wherever you put him, Ulric Skakki had good sense.

"Let them leave their wizards behind, too." That wasn't Trasamund scorning Liv and Audun Gilli. That was Audun himself. "They are stronger than we are, however much I hate to admit it."

"Maybe we can take them by surprise," Liv said. "They'll think we're weak." And they'll be right, too, Hamnet Thyssen thought. The shaman went on, "And they'll think we're afraid. And we will show them they're wrong."

"We're not afraid of them. We were never afraid of them." Gelimer's voice was blurry, because he talked with his mouth full. He was too busy eating to pause very much. "But they beat us. They were too many and too strong."

"They won't come against us with everything they have. That's bound to be true. They won't think they'll need to. And they'll be gathering strength for a raid farther south. That's what I would do if I were one of them, anyhow. They'll push through the Bizogot country so they can attack the Empire."

"What makes you so special?" demanded one of the Bizogots who'd lived through the Rulers' onslaught. "What are you doing here, if you think you're better than we are?"

"I didn't say anything about better. I don't say anything about that," Ul-ric answered. "But we're richer than you are. Our lands are richer than yours. Our weather is warmer than yours. The Rulers will strike south." He defied the Bizogot to disagree with him.

The man wanted to. Hamnet Thyssen could see as much. But the fellow only muttered into his gingery beard and went back to stuffing himself with meat.

Down in Raumsdalia, the musk ox's stones would have been called prairie oysters. Trasamund toasted them over the fire and ate them. "As the bull battered down his rivals and won his mates, so will I beat down the Rulers," he vowed.

"So may it be," Liv said softly.

Ulric Skakki had to remind Trasamund to put scouts out to the east. The jarl still wasn't at his best, or anything close to it. "If we had another leader here to follow, I would," Ulric told Hamnet Thyssen.

The way the adventurer looked at Count Hamnet alarmed him. "I don't want to lead anybody," Hamnet said. "I didn't want to do it down in Raumsdalia with my own folk. I really don't want to do it here. The Bizogots wouldn't follow me anyhow."

"You might be surprised," Ulric said. "You're large and you're tough and you don't spend all your time going on about how wonderful you are."