“If you quarrel, I could magic him.” Marcovefa paused. “I think I could. He’s a strange one, no doubt about it.”

Had she ever seemed doubtful about her own spells before? If she had, Hamnet Thyssen couldn’t remember when. She mocked the sorcery she found down here below the Glacier, both that of Bizogot shamans and that of Raumsdalian wizards. She even mocked the Rulers’ sorcery, which far outdid anything either Bizogots or Raumsdalians could manage. If she wasn’t sure her spells would bite Ulric . . .

“How is he different from the rest of us?” Hamnet asked.

Marcovefa shrugged. “He’s slipperier than anyone else I’ve ever seen. He might find a way to slide out from under any charm I set on him.”

“Ah.” Hamnet thought it over, then nodded. “I can see that. Sounds like Ulric, all right . . .”

TENTS MADE FROM the tanned hides of woolly mammoths straggled across the plain. Bizogot camps were disorderly affairs—this one, put together by survivors from several shattered clans, more so than most. Dogs not far removed from wolves ran at Hamnet and the other newcomers. They barked and snarled and growled, but didn’t quite attack.

“Miserable beasts.” Marcovefa didn’t like dogs. There were none up on the Glacier. Her folk tamed voles and hares so they could have a more reliable food supply, but that was as far as they went along those lines. She asked, “Why keep them around, anyway?”

“They work. They guard,” Hamnet said. Two dogs tripped over each other’s feet. They both went sprawling. He added, “They give us something to laugh at.”

“I suppose so.” But Marcovefa didn’t seem convinced. She pointed to the running pack of boys and girls who followed the dogs. “Isn’t that why people have children?”

“One reason, I suppose.” Hamnet Thyssen had no children he knew of. A lot of things might have been different if he had.

“Have you got anything for us?” one of the boys yelled. He held out a grimy hand for whatever he could scrounge. Bizogots scrounged without shame, wherever and whenever they could. Where they couldn’t scrounge, they often stole.

“Don’t give him anything.” The girl who spoke used a dialect different from the boy’s. They came from separate clans, and never would have joined together if the Rulers hadn’t spread disaster across the Bizogot steppe. She added, “He’s nothing but a miserable nosepicker anyway.”

“Liar!” the boy shouted, and pitched into her. They were at an age where size mattered more than gender, and she had half a head on him. He might have been bold, but he was soon down on the ground and snuffling. By the way his nose ran, he hadn’t picked it any time lately.

“Serves him right for being stupid,” Marcovefa said.

“Yes, but . . .” Hamnet raised his voice: “Enough! Enough, by God!” He yelled loud enough to make the girl stop. She eyed him in surprise. “Enough,” he said once more. “We’re all one clan here, or we might as well be. You made him sorry for jumping you—fair enough. But don’t humiliate him. Save that for our real enemies—the Rulers.”

“Who are you, to talk about all of us being one clan?” the girl demanded. “You aren’t even a Bizogot.” You aren’t even a human being—she didn’t say it, but it was what she really meant.

“So what?” Hamnet Thyssen returned. “The way it looks to me, there are only two clans left: the Rulers, and everyone who hates them. Which side are you on?”

She thought about that. Then, roughly, she pushed the boy away from her. “If I get the chance to kill the Rulers, I will. If anyone says anything different, I’ll kill him.” She couldn’t have been more than eleven, but she plainly meant every word.

“Good enough.” Hamnet pulled a chunk of smoked musk-ox meat from his pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it, stuck it in her mouth, and began to chew. Bizogots needed strong teeth; the dried meat was almost as tough as wood.

Liv and Audun Gilli and a captive from the Rulers came out of a nearby tent. Liv nodded to Hamnet. “By the racket the dogs made, I thought it might be you,” she said.

“If it’s not me, it’s an attack, and that would be worse,” Hamnet answered.

Liv nodded. She was a striking woman, with proud cheekbones, blue, blue eyes, and golden hair unfortunately hacked off short. It was also dirty and greasy, as Bizogot hair commonly was. (So was Hamnet’s. Washing during the winter on the frozen steppe was asking for chest fever.) She’d been the shaman of the Three Tusk clan till the Rulers smashed it.

She’d also been Hamnet Thyssen’s woman till she decided she liked Audun better. Maybe like called to like; Audun was a wizard, even if one with an unfortunate fondness for guzzling everything he could find. Or maybe that had nothing to do with it. Couples came together. Too often, they also came apart.

Hamnet could look at her and deal with her without wanting to kill her or to kill himself. He could even deal with Audun Gilli without wanting to kill him . . . most of the time. All that struck him as very strange, if not downright marvelous. When Gudrid played him false and left him, he’d lingered—wallowed—in a trough of misery for years.

But Liv hadn’t played him false. She’d only shifted her affections. Amazing, the difference that made. Liv didn’t torment him with bygone days that could never come again, either. Hamnet wondered how it was that she came from the barbarous Bizogots while Gudrid was an allegedly civilized Raumsdalian.

Of course, civilization had its sophisticated pleasures, elaborate revenge among them. Why Gudrid thought she needed elaborate revenge on Hamnet . . . one would have to ask her. Since she was hundreds of miles to the south, all comfortable in Nidaros, he couldn’t very well do that—and he didn’t want to, anyhow.

Marcovefa pointed to the captive. “I see you, Dashru,” she said.

Dashru nodded. “I am seen,” he answered unhappily. He spoke the Bizogots’ language with a thick accent and bad grammar. He was shorter than most Bizogots, but wider through the shoulders. His hair and beard were black and curly, his eyes polished jet, his nose a proud scimitar.

That was the only pride he had left. Rulers who had the bad luck or lack of fortitude to fall into enemy hands were dead to their own folk forever after. They were dead in spirit, too, after suffering such a disgrace. Some slew themselves when they found the chance. Others, like Dashru, lived on, but not happily. Never happily.

“Teach us more of your language,” Hamnet said.

Dashru sighed and nodded again. “I do that. You not learn well, though.”

“We try,” Hamnet said. “You don’t learn the Bizogots’ tongue easily, either.”

“Grunting of deer. Squawking of geese,” Dashru said disdainfully.

“We think the same of your speech,” Hamnet told him. Dashru made a horrible face, as if he’d smelled something nasty.

The trouble was, the Bizogot language and Raumsdalian on the one hand and the Rulers’ tongue on the other were as different as chalk and tobacco. Bizogots and Raumsdalians spoke related languages. The vocabulary wasn’t the same, but here and there words in the one tongue sounded something like those in the other. The Bizogots had more complicated noun declensions than people in the Empire used, while Raumsdalian had a battery of verb tenses the mammoth-herders lacked. But the basic principles underlying both languages were similar.

All the words in the Rulers’ language were different. That was bad enough, but not unexpected: why believe a language that had grown up beyond the Glacier would have familiar vocabulary? The grammar, though . . . Whoever put together the grammar in the Rulers’ language had to be twisted. So Hamnet Thyssen thought, anyhow. He knew Dashru felt the same way about the Bizogot speech, but he didn’t care.

When the Rulers talked to one another, they used a word order Hamnet found perverse. They slapped pieces of words together to make bigger, more complicated ones. They used particles to show how the pieces fit together. Why anyone would want to talk like that, Hamnet had no idea. But the invaders found it as natural as he found Raumsdalian.