“Mm, when you put it that way, probably nothing,” the adventurer replied. “All right—back to the Empire . . . if we can get there. Good-sized army of Rulers already down there, remember. If they move up against us—”

“Why would they do that?” Hamnet said. “It’d be like a sabertooth walking away from a buffalo carcass to chaster after a yappy little fox.”

“A sabertooth wouldn’t be that stupid,” Ulric admitted. “I’m not so sure about people. And we haven’t just yapped at the Rulers. We’ve nipped them a few times—and nobody else on this side of Glacier seems able to do even that much. They have their reasons from coming after us. Besides, they’re afraid of you, remember.”

Hamnet Thyssen laughed bitterly. “If they are, they’re every bit as stupid as you make them out to be. Too much to hope for, though, I fear.”

“They’re smarter than you are, because they’ve got some notion of what’s dangerous to them,” Ulric said.

“Oh, I know what’s dangerous to me, all right,” Hamnet said. “I ought to, after all the mistakes I’ve made with them.”

“You may be dangerous to women. That doesn’t mean they’re dangerous to you,” Ulric told him.

“If they’re not, God save me from running into anything that is,” Count Hamnet said.

“You take things too seriously,” the adventurer said.

“I’ve had things happen to me that need to be taken seriously,” Hamnet retorted. “Not everybody slides through life with a greased hide the way you do.”

“Just goes to show you don’t know me as well as you think.” Ulric shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, not really. We decided what we needed to decide. Only thing left now is convincing Trasamund.”

That sent Hamnet laughing again. “You don’t ask for much!”

“Oh, he’ll come around. He’ll yell and fuss and bellow till he works all the indigestion out of his system, and then he’ll be fine. He doesn’t sit around brooding like some people I could name.” Ulric sent Hamnet a pointed glance.

When Hamnet suggested a few things Ulric could do if he didn’t like it, the adventurer only laughed. That made Hamnet offer more suggestions. Ulric laughed harder. Hamnet knew Ulric was trying to get his goat. The adventurer was good at getting what he wanted, too. Instead of swearing any more, Hamnet subsided into quiet fury.

That wasn’t what Ulric Skakki wanted. “Come on, Thyssen—swear some more,” he said. “You need to get it out of your system, too, and I don’t care if you call me names. You wouldn’t be the first one, God knows.”

“If you don’t care, what’s the point?” Hamnet said.

Ulric started to laugh some more, but broke off. “All right. Fine. I give up. Do what you want to do, no matter how idiotic it looks. Never mind that the Rulers worry about you. They’re nothing but a pack of fools. We’re all a pack of fools. Everybody in the whole stupid world’s a fool—except you.”

That set Hamnet swearing again. Ulric Skakki bowed in the saddle, which only irked Hamnet more. “If the Rulers are so stinking afraid of me, why? What have I done?” he demanded. “They’ve trounced the Bizogots while I was up here. They’ve trounced the Empire while I was down there. I’m useless, is what I am.”

“Are they better wizards than the ones we’ve got, or are they worse?” Ulric asked. “I mean Raumsdalian wizards and Bizogot shamans—leave Marcovefa out of it.”

“They’re better, and you know it as well as I do,” Hamnet Thyssen snapped. “Why talk about what’s obvious?”

Ulric bowed again. “Why? Because it’s so obvious, you don’t want to look at it. If they’ve got better wizards than we do—and they’ve got ’em, all right—then they can see things we can’t. And one of the things they see is that Count Hamnet Thyssen means trouble to them.”

“Only goes to show they’re not smart all the time,” Hamnet said stubbornly.

“You don’t want to believe me. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you it got cold up here in the wintertime,” Ulric Skakki said. “Fine. Don’t believe me. But ask your lady love. If she says it, you’d better believe it.”

“She’s not my lady love,” Hamnet muttered. That was part of his problem, too. He slept with Marcovefa. He kept company with her. He liked her—when she didn’t scare the piss out of him. Love her the way he’d loved Gudrid and Liv? No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t come close. She was too strange . . . and she didn’t seem to want him to love her, either.

He didn’t try explaining that to Ulric. He would have had trouble explaining it to himself. But it was there, and it ate at him at the same time as the troubles against the invaders did.

By the way Ulric eyed him, he didn’t need to explain it. The adventurer was alarmingly good at understanding how people worked. To Hamnet, that came close to being magic—dark magic. “Lady love or not, ask her anyway. She’ll give you a straight answer. Maybe she’ll even figure out why the Rulers get all weak in the knees when they think about you.”

“Oh, go howl!” Hamnet said. But the seed, once planted, wouldn’t go away.

MARCOVEFA LOOKED AT him. For all Count Hamnet could tell, she looked into him, looked through him. “Why do the Rulers fear you?” she said. “Why do you care so much about why? Isn’t it enough to know that they do?”

“No, curse it,” Hamnet said. “As far as I can see, it’s nothing but stupidity. They have no reason to do it. Trasamund is more dangerous to them than I’ll ever be. The Bizogots listen to him. Nobody listens to me here. Nobody listens to me down in the Empire, either. God knows that’s true.”

“You worry too much about things,” Marcovefa said.

Hamnet Thyssen laughed harshly. “Now tell me something I didn’t know. But I think the Rulers worry too much about me.”

“If you want me to”—by the way Marcovefa said it, she meant, If you’re daft enough to want me to—“I can try a divination to see why. I don’t know what it will show. I don’t know if it will show anything.”

“Try,” Hamnet said. “If it doesn’t do anything else, maybe it’ll make Ulric Skakki shut up. That’d be worth a lot to me all by itself.”

She raised an eyebrow. “All right,” she said. “We see.” She smiled to herself as she picked up a small earthenware bowl. She admired pottery. So did the Bizogots, who got it in trade from the Empire. Their nomadic way of life didn’t let them build the kilns they would have needed to make their own bowls and pots and jugs. “I will be back,” she told him. “I need water for this divination. I will look into the water in the bowl and see what it shows.”

“All right. We have scryers who work like that,” Hamnet said.

She nodded. “I am not surprised. Anyone who does magic would think of this. Easier to keep water in a bowl than to weave a basket that holds it.”

“Yes.” Count Hamnet nodded, too. The Bizogots also had that art. Raumsdalians didn’t. No need for it in a land where potters worked in every village.

Marcovefa ducked out of their hut. It wasn’t far from the edge of Sudertorp Lake; she soon returned, carrying the bowl carefully so she wouldn’t spill the lakewater. “Come outside,” she told Hamnet. “The sun will help show what there is to see.”

“If you say so.” Hamnet expected the perpetually curious—perpetually nosy—Bizogots to crowd around and watch her work magic. But they didn’t. Maybe keeping them away was another magic. Hamnet couldn’t think of anything else likely to do it.

The shaman from atop the Glacier began to chant in her own dialect. Hamnet Thyssen had learned bits and pieces of it, but not enough to follow her song. Follow or not, he knew about what she had to be saying. She was asking for calm water, in which she could see what would happen in days to come.

She bent low over the bowl, still chanting. The water inside lay utterly still. To Hamnet, it was only water. To Marcovefa, it would show what lay ahead more clearly than a mirror of polished silver down in Nidaros showed a fair lady’s reflection.