“Can they be fooling you?” he persisted.

Marcovefa’s nostrils flared again, this time in scorn. “Not likely!” she said. But then she hesitated. “Maybe not impossible,” she admitted, and Hamnet admired her for that. “Since the sickness spell, I think their shamans are not stupid and hopeless all the time.”

Hamnet reminded himself that the magicians she mocked were far stronger than the best Bizogot shamans and Raumsdalian wizards. “Well, if you do sense anything, don’t keep it a secret,” he said.

“I will not do that,” she said. It didn’t have the Don’t worry, little boy flavor it might have before she learned the Rulers could be dangerous to her. Or maybe she was just getting better at not hurting his feelings.

They hadn’t gone much farther before they discovered the Rulers were doing their best to stay annoying. The road suddenly ended. Actually, no: it didn’t end, but it stopped being usable. Trees had fallen across it in wild disorder, tangled together worse than jackstraws. Going forward—going straight forward, anyhow—was impossible.

“Magic?” Hamnet asked Marcovefa.

“Magic,” she agreed. “But not new magic. They did this a while ago.”

“I’m surprised the folk from Lonsdal didn’t know,” Ulric Skakki said.

“How do you know they didn’t?” Hamnet said. “Maybe they did, but they weren’t about to tell the likes of us.” Ulric grunted and gave back a reluctant nod.

“What do we do about it?” Trasamund asked. “I don’t know much about trees.” He proved he didn’t—he was speaking the Bizogots’ language, but he used the Raumsdalian word for trees. He had to; his own tongue lacked a name for them. “Can we clear them out of the way with magic and go on?”

“Likely easier to slip into the forest and go around the jam,” Ulric said.

Marcovefa nodded. “Yes. This is so. Often magic can make a mess better than it can clear a mess.”

“Well, all right.” By the way Trasamund said it, it wasn’t. “Trees all around? Not even a path through them?” He muttered something under his breath.

“There, there.” Ulric clicked his tongue between his teeth in mock—and mocking—sympathy. “You can hold my hand if it bothers you.”

The jarl suggested several other things he could do with his hand. None of them had much to do with holding someone else’s . . . or with trees, come to that. Ulric Skakki only grinned. Still swearing, Trasamund plunged into the forest. Where one Bizogot would go, others would follow. They might not like it much, but they would do almost anything to keep from seeming cowards.

To Hamnet Thyssen, it was only a forest. The one down by his castle in southeastern Raumsdalia had more broad-leafed trees than evergreens, while this one was almost all conifers. As far as he was concerned, though, the difference was one of degree, not of kind. He didn’t mind having trees all around him. He took it for granted. Roads were fine when you were traveling, but not when you were hunting.

Although the day was cool, sweat poured off Marcovefa. She liked trees, and being among trees, even less than Trasamund did. “We’ll get back to the road soon,” Hamnet assured her.

“Not soon enough!” she said.

“You know, the Rulers come from treeless country, too,” Ulric remarked. “Maybe they don’t like being closed in, so they have a pretty good notion our Bizogots won’t like it, either.”

“Do they wonder about how herd animals think?” Hamnet used the Rulers’ name for other people.

“As little as they can get away with, I suspect, or likely something less than that,” Ulric said, which struck Hamnet as cynical and probable at the same time.

Whatever the reason, the Rulers didn’t harass their foes in the forest except for the fallen trees. The Bizogots breathed loud sighs of relief when they came out into open country once more. Pointing to an apple orchard ahead, Trasamund said, “A few trees every now and then are all right. We can go around them—we don’t have to get stuck amongst ’em.”

Another Bizogot added, “It won’t be like they’re trying to eat us up.”

Count Hamnet and Ulric and even Audun Gilli exchanged amused glances. Only someone who didn’t know trees was likely to imagine them as predators. Hamnet thought of the plums near his castle. He tried to imagine one of them waylaying passersby. The picture didn’t want to form.

“Remember,” Trasamund said, “if you see anybody riding a deer, he’s the enemy. Kill the bastard before he kills you.”

“Always a good idea with enemies,” Ulric agreed. “They hardly ever give you a hard time once they’re dead.”

“Hardly ever?” Hamnet Thyssen said. “What do you do with the ones who haunt you?”

“Exorcise ’em,” Ulric answered at once. “Everybody needs a little exorcise now and then.” Hamnet gave him a reproachful stare, which he ignored.

Most of the time, travelers coming down from the south would have seen horses and cattle and sheep in the fields. Not now. Count Hamnet was saddened but not surprised. The Rulers would have stolen or killed as many animals as they could get their hands on. And the local farmers would have fled with the rest: off to the west or east or south, any direction but the one from which the invaders were coming.

Even without livestock, the land seemed rich to the Bizogots. Something else about it surprised them, too. “You use some of the land for one thing and some for another,” a mammoth-herder said. He might have been talking about a clever piece of sorcery. “I can tell by what grows and the way you have fences.” Up on the broad, trackless steppe, fences were only a waste of time and work.

“We have the notion that land belongs to the person who works it,” Hamnet said. Things were more complicated than that, but it would do for a start.

And it was plenty to shock the Bizogot. “Land belongs to the clan,” he declared. He might have been stating a law of nature. He probably thought he was.

“Different peoples have different customs,” Count Hamnet said. “Not always right. Not always wrong. Just different.”

“Land belongs to the clan,” the Bizogot repeated. His folk, for instance, rejoiced in stubbornness—mulishness, a Raumsdalian would have called it.

“Never argue with a blockhead,” Ulric Skakki said in Raumsdalian. “You won’t convince him, and it only irks you.”

“Who are you calling a blockhead?” the Bizogot demanded, also in Raumsdalian.

“You,” Ulric answered calmly. “Just because you can be a blockhead in more than one language doesn’t mean you’re not a blockhead.”

“By God, I ought to cut your liver out for that,” the mammoth-herder said.

“We need Skakki.” Trasamund’s voice went hard and flat. “Anyone who wants to fight him has to fight me first.”

“I don’t have to hide behind your skirts. If this unwashed ruffian thinks he can take me—” Ulric began.

Trasamund cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture while the offended Bizogot shouted angrily. “I know you don’t need to hide,” the jarl said. “I know you can cut Ottar here into dogmeat, too.” The Bizogot—Ottar—shouted again. Trasamund took no more notice of him than Ulric had of Hamnet not long before. He went on, “We need you, too, Ottar, only not so much. If I have to choose between the two of you, I choose Skakki.”

“He’s not even of our blood,” Ottar said. “Since when do you choose people who sit around all the time over proper nomads?”

Before Trasamund could say anything to that, Ulric laughed in Ottar’s face. “You go back and forth over the same range all the bloody time, and you call yourself a nomad? Have you traveled beyond the Gap? Have you gone up onto the Glacier? Have you ever seen the deserts in the far southwest? Have you been through the jungles beyond the desert? Nomad? Ha!” He laughed again.

Count Hamnet eyed Ottar, wondering what he’d do next. When Ulric went after a man, he flayed him with his tongue. Would Ottar try to wipe out the insult with blood? Or would he go off somewhere and lick his wounds?