He did neither. He tried to fight back with words, jeering, “Talk is cheap. Just because you say you’ve been to those places doesn’t mean you have.”

“I’ve been through the Gap with him. I’ve been up on the Glacier with him, too,” Trasamund said. “The hot places I don’t know, but they wouldn’t surprise me.”

“I’ve been in the desert,” Hamnet Thyssen added. “It is the way Ulric says it is. I haven’t been in the jungle myself—I haven’t fared that far south. But what I’ve heard about it from other people makes me believe Ulric’s been there, too.”

Ottar looked at him. He looked at Trasamund. And he looked at Ulric Skakki. Then, shaking his head, he rode away from the adventurer. Hamnet thought that was one of the smarter things he could have done.

A SQUAD OR SO of Raumsdalian soldiers sat around a fire, roasting a sheep they’d probably lifted. They looked up in alarm when the Bizogots rode down on them. A couple of men stared to run, but they really had nowhere to run to. “Hold it right there!” Trasamund bawled, and hold it they did.

“You aren’t the new barbarians. You’re the other barbarians.” The Raumsdalian who spoke sounded almost indignant, to say nothing of confused.

“Yes—that’s us, the other barbarians,” Count Hamnet said. Hearing perfect Raumsdalian come from his lips, seeing a swarthy man among the blond mammoth-herders, only confused the soldiers more.

“Who the demon are you?” one of them asked.

“Count Hamnet Thyssen,” Hamnet answered, and waited to see what would happen next.

The name meant nothing to some of them. Others, though, jerked as if stung by wasps. “Hamnet Thyssen!” exclaimed the soldier who’d asked his name. “There’s a fat price on your head. Did you know that?”

“No, but I’m not surprised,” Hamnet said. “Since the Emperor sent a man”—he waved toward Per Anders—“to bring me back to Raumsdalia, I don’t think you could collect that price right now.”

“Of course, you could be wrong,” Ulric Skakki said silkily.

“I suppose so,” Count Hamnet said. With Sigvat II, being wrong was easy. His ingratitude towered higher than the Glacier and sank deeper than the bottom of Sudertorp Lake. If you trusted him, you had only yourself to blame.

“What do we do with them?” Trasamund asked—a good, practical question.

“What are they doing here?” Ulric added—another good question. Hamnet suspected the soldiers were there because they’d been part of an army the Rulers shattered. A few questions proved he was right. Ulric asked the stragglers, “Are you ready for another go at the bastards who beat you before?”

Some of the Raumsdalians nodded without hesitation. Others just sat there looking unhappy. They didn’t want another go at the Rulers. All they wanted was to stay where they were, run away from danger, and scavenge as they got the chance. They might as well be coyotes, Hamnet thought scornfully.

“Come on,” he told them. “If Raumsdalia loses, none of this will do you any good. You’ll just be part of the Rulers’ herd, and they’ll cull you whenever they feel like it. Is that any way for a man to live?”

“Beats getting an arrow through your brisket or some nasty magic coming down on your head,” a soldier said.

“That will happen anyhow,” Hamnet said. “It won’t happen today, maybe, because the Rulers are busy farther south. But if they win down there, they’ll clean you out up here, too. Or do you think I’m wrong, too?”

By the miserable, hangdog expression on the soldier’s face, he didn’t think Count Hamnet was wrong, however much he wished he did. “I don’t ever want to fight those buggers again,” he mumbled.

“Would you rather they came hunting you after they cleaned out everybody else?” Hamnet asked. The Raumsdalian trooper looked unhappier yet.

Trasamund lost patience with him, as the jarl was apt to do: “Or would you rather we rolled over you and then went on and fought the Rulers ourselves? We’ll use you people if we can, but we won’t waste time on account of you.”

That persuaded the Raumsdalians. Hamnet Thyssen might have known it would. They couldn’t hope to fight the host in front of them. How well they’d fight against the Rulers . . . Hamnet and Trasamund would just have to wait and see. But if they were going to build their fighting tail, they would have to use odds and sods like these. How many bands, some only four or five men, some perhaps a couple of dozen, wandered through the northern part of the Empire these days? Dozens? Scores? Hundreds? Hamnet couldn’t know, but he thought his guesses were pretty good.

“You can persuade people to do nearly anything,” Ulric Skakki remarked, “as long as all their other choices seem worse.”

“If that’s not philosophy, it ought to be,” Hamnet said.

“Ha!” the adventurer said. “Save that kind of nonsense for Earl Eyvind. There are tricks to riding a horse, and there are tricks to driving people. That’s one of them—or it sure looks like one to me.”

“To me, too,” Count Hamnet agreed. “Why else are we here?”

Trasamund answered that before Ulric Skakki could: “We’re here to beat the Rulers. If we don’t do that, we’re just pissing into the wind.”

A Raumsdalian would have talked about spitting into the wind. That made the jarl crude by imperial standards. It didn’t make him wrong, however much Count Hamnet wished it would have.

He glanced over to Marcovefa. Without her, this motley band of Bizogots and Raumsdalians had little chance against the invaders beyond the Glacier. Hamnet Thyssen shook his head. He laughed at his own foolishness. Without Marcovefa, this ragtag band had no chance against the Rulers, none whatsoever. Were it possible to have less than no chance, the band without Marcovefa would have.

Yet she herself was almost as alien to her comrades as the Rulers were. In some ways, she was more alien. Yes, Rulers who failed at anything important or who found themselves about to be captured often killed themselves to escape what they saw as disgrace. But they didn’t devour the corpses of their defeated foes. Hamnet knew why Marcovefa’s folk had become cannibals. Up atop the Glacier, meat of any sort was too scarce, too precious, to let any of it go to waste. It made her no less strange, no less appalling, to those who didn’t share her customs.

One of the Bizogots pointed southeast. “There’s one of the God-cursed riding deer the God-cursed Rulers use!” he shouted.

Men looked to their weapons. Marcovefa, Audun Gilli, and Liv were warriors only in emergencies. That didn’t mean they weren’t about to fight. And their fight might prove harder and more dangerous than anything swordsmen and archers and lancers faced. Without Marcovefa, it surely would have been. With her, the odds improved.

Before Hamnet could wonder how much they improved—the sorcery-spread sickness had jolted Marcovefa’s confidence—a Raumsdalian who’d just joined them asked, “What did the fellow with the yellow whiskers say?”

Hamnet swore under his breath. He and Ulric were both fluent in the Bizogots’ tongue. Audun Gilli, Per Anders, and Marcovefa could get along in it. Most of the mammoth-herders knew at least some Raumsdalian. But these imperial troopers had never had any reason to learn the northerners’ speech.

He translated for them. Then he spoke to Ulric: “We’ve got a new complication, or an old complication back again.”

“Oldest cursed complication in the world—except for men and women diddling where they aren’t supposed to,” Ulric agreed. He paused. Seemingly of its own accord, his left eyebrow quirked upward. “Nothing personal, Your Grace.”

“Right. Nothing personal,” Count Hamnet said tightly. Was it his fault two of his women had diddled where they weren’t supposed to? (If you listened to them, the answer was yes. If you listened to Ulric Skakki, it was also yes. Hamnet didn’t want to listen to any of them, either in person or inside his own mind. With the enemy out there in front of him, he didn’t have to, either.)