NOT QUITE ARTFULLY enough, Tahpenes contrived to meet Hamnet away from everybody else. “Will you answer some questions?” she asked.

“Maybe,” he answered. “It depends on what they are.”

“This Bizogot folk, it truly has shamans who are women?” she asked.

“You’ve seen that. Why do you even need to ask?” he said.

“But I can’t believe it’s real,” Tahpenes said. “The Rulers say only men can work magic.”

He shrugged. “What do you expect me to do about that? People can say anything they please. Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it’s nonsense.”

“We are the Rulers. We do not speak nonsense,” Tahpenes said stiffly.

He laughed in her face. “Everybody talks nonsense. Not all the time, but sometimes. Your folk are people, like anybody else. You’re full of nonsense, too.”

“We are not like anybody else. We are the Rulers. You have seen our might.” Tahpenes was full of herself, and full of pride for her folk.

“I’ve seen that you’re a prisoner. I’ve seen that you have found some things here you didn’t know about before. If you don’t want to believe them, what does that make you? Besides a fool, I mean.”

She glared at him. Then she wiped the glare off her face and gave him a smile instead. That made him sure what game she was playing. “I don’t want to be a prisoner any more,” she said, softening and sweetening her voice as much as she could.

“Your other choice was getting killed, probably after some unpleasant preliminaries,” Hamnet reminded her. “Don’t you think this is better?”

“Going back to my own folk—that would be better,” Tahpenes said. “I would do almost anything for help to get back to my own folk.” She looked at him from under lowered eyelids.

She was about as seductive as a dire wolf. She would only have got angry if he told her so; realizing as much persuaded him not to bother. “I have a woman I’m happy with,” he said, and let it go at that.

“One of those yellow-haired sluts,” she said scornfully. “They aren’t much—skinny, whey-faced . . .”

“Don’t let Marcovefa hear you say that. She’ll turn you into a vole,” Hamnet said.

“She is strong,” Tahpenes admitted. “Wizards from the herd are not supposed to be strong. How does she get that way?”

By living on top of the Glacier with nothing, Hamnet thought. He didn’t intend to explain to Tahpenes.

“Will you help me get away?” Tahpenes persisted. “All I have to give you is myself. I will do that, and gladly.”

Count Hamnet found himself in a strange position. He wanted Tahpenes to escape, but he didn’t want her. And he had—and had earned—a horror of infidelity. He also had a suspicion he thought well-founded that telling a woman he didn’t want her was an insult that would have called for seconds had its like passed between two men. And so, as sternly as he could, he said, “I didn’t capture you just to let you get away again.”

She bit her lip. “I thought you were a kind man. You could have killed me. The way we look at things, you should have killed me.”

“Taking prisoners when we can is our custom,” Hamnet said.

“A foolish custom,” Tahpenes said. Count Hamnet wondered what she would have thought if she knew Marcovefa felt the same way. Or maybe she did know. Marcovefa wouldn’t hold back about something like that. She would use it for a weapon, to make a captive afraid and to make her talk.

“Foolish or not, it’s what we do,” Hamnet said. “And I’m afraid you picked the wrong man.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to ask that Ulric Skakki,” the woman from the Rulers said tartly. “I could suck him till the inside of my cheeks turned to leather, and he’d still break every promise he made me. If you made one, I think you would keep it.”

“Maybe I would, but I’m not making any.” Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t resist asking, “Does Ulric know what you think of him?”

“If he doesn’t, it’s not because I haven’t told him,” Tahpenes answered.

“What did he do?”

“He laughed and said, ‘You say the sweetest things, darling.’ He’s a rogue. He’s proud he’s a rogue.” Tahpenes sighed. “And the honest man is too honest. And the Bizogots . . . They would screw me and then cut my throat so I couldn’t tell any stories about them.” She shuddered.

“Then you might as well get used to being a captive,” Hamnet said.

“It is a disgrace. Even for a woman, it is a disgrace,” Tahpenes said. “Lying down with a man from the herd is as nothing beside it.”

“Nice to know what you think of me,” Hamnet remarked.

“Not just you. Any of your folk. Any of these blond Bizogots, too,” she replied.

Nothing personal, he thought. Oh, good. Does that make it better or worse? He couldn’t decide. The truth was, the only thing she wanted was to get away from here, and she’d do anything she needed to do—anything at all—to get what she wanted.

She eyed him. “Will you tell the others now? Tell them I want to go back to my own folk?”

“Do you think I need to? Do you think they don’t already know?” Easier to parry questions with more questions.

“Who can guess what folk of the herd know or don’t know?” Tahpenes said. “Maybe they think I am docile, the way they are.”

Hamnet Thyssen burst out laughing. He couldn’t help himself. He didn’t remember the last time he’d been so surprised or heard anything so funny. “Bizogots docile?” he said. “Tell that to Trasamund, by God! You’ll leave here, all right, but you won’t be able to tell your people what you found out.”

Tahpenes frowned. “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?”

“He’ll kill you for the insult, that’s what,” Hamnet answered. “And I will tell you how docile Trasamund is. He beat one of your men, a fellow named Parsh, at Bizogot stand-down on the other side of the Glacier a couple of years ago.”

“What kind of stupid sport is that?” Tahpenes asked.

“Two men stand face-to-face. They take turns hitting each other till one of them can’t stand up and swing any more. He knocked Parsh cold. When Parsh woke up—it took a while—he cut his own throat.” Count Hamnet grimaced. He didn’t like that memory.

“He would. The disgrace of losing to someone not of the Rulers . . .” Tahpenes nodded to herself. What Parsh did made sense to her, even if it didn’t to Hamnet. The woman from Parsh’s folk went on in thoughtful tones: “Bizogot stand-down, you say? No, that does not seem docile.”

“Trasamund uses his hands to tell the weather these days. He broke both of them punching Parsh, and they pain him when a storm is coming,” Hamnet said.

“My brother broke his arm when he was a boy. He can do that,” Tahpenes said.

“You have a brother?” Hamnet didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of her as coming from a family. Maybe because the Rulers seemed too perfectly military for such mundane things as families. They might have been stamped from molds.

They might have been, but they weren’t. Tahpenes nodded. “I have two brothers, and also a sister,” she said. “They will wonder what has happened to me.”

“Plenty of Bizogots and Raumsdalians wonder what’s happened to their kin, too,” Hamnet Thyssen said.

Tahpenes only gaped at him. He’d looked for sympathy from her—he’d looked, but he hadn’t found it. She didn’t care. The Rulers didn’t care. To them, other people weren’t human beings. It was as simple as that. Count Hamnet didn’t know what anybody could do about it. The only thing that occurred to him was getting rid of all the Rulers.

Which sounded easy enough, till you set about doing it.

Dejectedly, Tahpenes turned away from him. “I will go back to the encampment now,” she said.

“I’d better come with you,” Hamnet said. “Just in case you might happen to wander in some other direction instead. By accident, of course.”

“Of course,” she said, as demurely as she could. She recognized a joke, even if a man from the herd made it.