“A lodestone,” Liv said. “Does anyone have a lodestone?”

“I have a little one,” Ulric Skakki said. “Here.” He pulled a small, rusty-looking stone from a pouch on his belt and tossed it to Liv. The shaman deftly caught it.

“Why have you got a lodestone?” Hamnet asked.

Ulric only shrugged. “Well, they’re fun to play with. And they’re interesting. And you never can tell when something will come in handy. It’s like a holdout knife, you know? You can go for years and years without ever needing a holdout knife. But when you need one, you’ll need it bad.”

Liv and Audun were using the lodestone and the yellow crystal—what was it really? tourmaline?—on a sick Bizogot. The Rock Ptarmigans’ shamans must have tried something like that when their people fell ill. Much good it had done them. Count Hamnet wished that last handful of words hadn’t crossed his mind.

But he couldn’t pay attention to Liv and Audun, or even to his own worries, for long, because Marcovefa said, “Hamnet—I need your help.”

He started. “Whatever I can give you,” he said.

“Your strength. Come stand by me. Set your hand on my bare skin. . . .”Marcovefa suddenly laughed. “There? Well, if you want. It will do. I can draw from you. I try not to take too much.”

What happens if you do? Hamnet wondered. Maybe he didn’t want to know. Maybe, if she took too much, he would just quietly fall over dead. He shrugged. So what? It was an easier end than most of the ones he could imagine.

He could, or thought he could, feel strength flowing out of him and into her. No—out of him and through her. Her right arm speared out toward the northwest. She might have been aiming at an enemy warrior. She might have been, but the range here was far longer and the effort required far more.

Because she was drawing on Hamnet’s strength, he could sense some of what she was doing with it. The link between them was stranger but in a way more intimate than when their bodies joined in the usual fashion. He felt her long-range grapple with the Rulers’ wizards. They were trying to down her with the same sickness that had felled so many Bizogots. In his mind’s eye, he saw the sickness as a greenish miasma. Whether that had anything to do with reality, he couldn’t have said.

Marcovefa herself might have been the sun: not the sun of the Bizogot steppe, not even the sun of Nidaros, but the hot, fierce sun of the southwestern desert where the Manche bandits skulked. If she could burn through that ugly, roiling miasma . . . It would be like a fresh breeze blowing away the nasty, humid air that oppressed the encampment.

He wondered if the vile weather and the vile sickness were connected. One more thing that wouldn’t have surprised him.

But the roiling green stuff he imagined he saw didn’t want to burn away. Indeed, it clung ever tighter to Marcovefa. If it could seize her before she could dispel it . . . He didn’t know what would happen then. He did know it wouldn’t be good.

Without being asked, Ulric Skakki took his left hand. The adventurer’s strength flowed through Hamnet and into Marcovefa. No, the shaman from atop the Glacier wasn’t mocking the Rulers and their wizardry any more. Maybe this wasn’t the fight of her life, but it was the toughest one she’d had since descending to the plains the Bizogots roamed.

Maybe Ulric’s strength tilted the balance. Before, Marcovefa had struggled to hold her own against the Rulers’ sorcery. Now she blazed brighter and brighter in Hamnet’s imagination—if that was what it was. The choking fog surrounding her, clutching at her . . . Did it start to fade, or did it draw back as if in fear of the spiritual glow that came from her? Hamnet had trouble putting it into words, but both amounted to the same thing.

“Ha!” she cried aloud. Across however many miles it was, Hamnet Thyssen felt the Rulers’ wizards flinch away from her. That cry might have been Trasamund’s fearsome two-handed sword, swung with all the furious power the Bizogot jarl had in him. “Ha!” Marcovefa said again. The enemy wizards broke and fled her strength—those who could. In much more mundane tones, Marcovefa told Hamnet, “You can let go of my tit now, thank you very much.”

He did. “You broke them,” he said.

“Yes. I did.” But she didn’t take it for granted, the way she once had. “You gave me good help—both of you did. And I thank you for it.” Her eyes rolled up in her head, and she crumpled to the ground.

VII

ONLY TWO BIZOGOTS died of the sorcerous plague. Audun Gilli and Liv did all they could; Count Hamnet thought they succeeded better than anyone could have expected. They weren’t satisfied. Wizards seldom were satisfied with anything short of perfection.

Marcovefa was not only dissatisfied, she was also furious—and more than a little frightened. “They could have killed me,” she told Hamnet that evening in the hut the two of them shared. “They should have killed me. If they made their plague strike me first, maybe they kill us all, the way they killed the Rock Ptarmigans.”

He nodded. “That’s what enemies try to do, you know. I’m glad they didn’t think to make you sick first—or maybe they couldn’t at long range.”

“Maybe.” She sounded dubious, and still very angry. “They aren’t supposed to be able to do that to me!”

Hamnet Thyssen sighed. “Everybody except you has been saying, ‘The Rulers are dangerous,’ all along. You’re the one who’s been going, ‘No, no, they’re easy. I can beat them with one hand tied behind my back.’ ”

“And I’ve done it, too!” Marcovefa’s pride flared. “Except when I got hit in the head, I’ve done it every time.”

“A good thing, too. We’d be ruined if you hadn’t,” Count Hamnet said. “But even if you have beaten them every time, it won’t always be easy. There are lots of them, and only one of you. And even if you think they’re bad wizards, they’re better than anyone else down here below the Glacier except you. You need to be careful, the same way you would have up on the Ice. The shamans from those other clans up there were as strong as you were, right?”

“Oh, yes. Some of them were stronger,” Marcovefa said at once. “But they were—are—of my own folk. Not these Rulers. Do you like to think your horse is smarter than you are?”

“Hold on!” Hamnet held up a hand. “The Rulers are the ones who call everybody else ‘the herd.’ They think they can do whatever they want with other people because they think other people are just beasts. I don’t want us to think that way. If we do, how are we any better than they are?”

Marcovefa gave him a sharp-toothed grin. “They are much uglier.”

Stubbornly, Count Hamnet shook his head. “That’s not good enough. Curse it, I’m serious about this.”

“Yes, I see you are. But I wonder why,” Marcovefa said. “Is it that important?”

“I think so,” Hamnet said. “Up on the Glacier, suppose another clan made a great magic by eating some of its own people. Would you use that same kind of sorcery yourself?”

“Eat its own people to make magic?” Marcovefa looked revolted, which made Hamnet sure he’d picked a good example. “No, we would never do that. That would be wickedness itself. It—” She broke off and sent Hamnet a sour stare. “All right. I see what you are saying.”

“Good. I’m glad.” Hamnet Thyssen hoped he didn’t show just how glad he was. If Marcovefa hadn’t seen his point, he would have worried about her almost as much as he worried about the Rulers. She wasn’t quite so alien to the Bizogots and Raumsdalians as they were, but she wasn’t far removed from it, either.

He must not have kept his face as still as he hoped, because Marcovefa laughed at him. “After we beat the Rulers, then you can bash me over the head,” she said.