“Well, well,” Ulric Skakki said. “No wonder they think they can take us.”

“No wonder at all,” Hamnet said. “But this bastard never ran into Marcovefa.”

He glanced over to her. She probably didn’t notice him: her eyes were on the enemy sorcerer. A lion doubtless eyed a fat sheep the same way. This fellow in his fancy clothes didn’t know he was a fat sheep, but he was about to find out.

With a harsh shout—or maybe it just seemed so to Hamnet’s ears, since he knew little of their language—the Rulers rode forward. Their shaman still held the lead. They started to shoot when they were still well out of range. Or so Hamnet would have thought, but their arrows landed among the Bizogots and Raumsdalians. A Raumsdalian soldier who’d joined Trasamund’s band clutched at his throat and slid from the saddle.

When Trasamund’s men answered the enemy archery, their shafts did fall short. The Rulers’ wizard held up his hand as if defying not only arrows but the whole world.

Then a red-shouldered hawk perched on that outstretched hand. Its talons closed on—and in—the wizard’s flesh. Somehow, his screech of pain resounded over the battlefield. He beat at the hawk with his free hand. Its hooked beak nipped his fingers. It pecked at his face.

Marcovefa laughed. With the shaman distracted, archery went back to normal. The Bizogots and Raumsdalians were well within range of the Rulers now. Men and beasts on both sides began to fall. The mammoth trumpeted in anger and distress when an arrow pierced its sensitive trunk. The Rulers on the great beast’s back managed to keep it under control, though. It was well trained—and they were experienced.

And their shaman proved not the worst of wizards, either. Even though he was bleeding, he managed to make the red-shouldered hawk fly off. A moment later, lightning crashed down out of a clear blue sky not far from Marcovefa’s horse. The beast snorted and reared at the thunderclap. Hamnet hoped she could stay on—she was anything but an experienced rider. She managed—awkwardly, but no equestrian judges stood around doling out style points.

As the horse came down on all fours, Marcovefa laughed again. Count Hamnet wondered why. Then he realized that lightning bolt was intended to blast her black and smoking, and that she’d successfully turned the stroke. Sorcerous judges would have given her as many points as the rules allowed.

The Rulers’ shaman realized the same thing at about the same time as Hamnet. He threw up his blood-splashed hands in what had to be despair. He’d done everything he knew how to do—and it didn’t work. What could he do now but wait for Marcovefa’s revenge?

Hamnet nocked an arrow, drew the bowstring back to his ear, and let fly. The string lashed the leather brace on the inside of his wrist. The shaft caught the shaman in the chest, right between two glittering chunks of crystal. The man threw up his hands once more. He slumped down against the riding deer’s neck.

“I would have given him worse than that,” Marcovefa called.

“He’s dying. What’s worse than that?” Hamnet asked. Marcovefa’s feral smile suggested that she knew several answers. Count Hamnet was just as glad he didn’t know any of them.

He didn’t have time to worry about them, either. Without the shaman to protect the Rulers’ ordinary fighting men, they didn’t last long. Few of them even tried to surrender: they sold their lives as dearly as they could. Hamnet had seen the invaders behave that way more often than not. Say what you would about the Rulers, they didn’t lack for courage.

The warriors on mammothback charged again and again, but the Bizogots and Raumsdalians simply rode out of their way and kept shooting arrows at them from the sides and rear. After a while, the last enemy soldier slumped down on the mammoth’s back, either dead or too badly hurt to go on fighting. The mammoth itself must have been almost mad from pain; it had nearly as many arrows sticking out of its hide as a porcupine had quills.

“I feel sorry for the poor thing,” Ulric Skakki said as the mammoth lumbered off toward the south. “Not its fault the people who trained it are a pack of dire wolves who walk on two legs.”

“Maybe not,” Hamnet said, “but if my neighbor has a dog that tries to bite me, I’m going to kill it before it can.”

“We ought to kill that mammoth—put it out of its misery,” Ulric said.

“Go ahead,” Count Hamnet told him. The adventurer gave back a reproachful look.

“You want it dead?” Marcovefa said. Before either Ulric or Hamnet could answer, she pointed at the mammoth and chanted something in her peculiar dialect. The huge beast walked along for another couple of strides. Then it fell over. Its sides heaved only once or twice before they stilled. It was, without a doubt, dead.

“Good God!” Hamnet said. “How did you do that?”

“I put—how do you say it?—a clog in its heart,” Marcovefa answered. “Nothing can live with that. Not vole, not fox, not man, not mammoth. It is a very easy spell to make. Can be countered, but easy to make.”

Hamnet Thyssen looked at her. “You can kill anyone you want, whenever you want?”

She shook her head. “No, no, no. Spell takes some time—you saw that. And I have to see the man—or the animal—to use it. And it can be countered. Even one of your puny amulets will stop it most of the time. I didn’t know if the Rulers warded their mammoths that way. They didn’t ward this mammoth. Shall we butcher it? Plenty of meat.”

Some of the Bizogots were already riding over to do just that. Hamnet wasn’t wild about mammoth meat. It was tough and gamy. But it was meat, and it was there. He had a little sausage and some hard bread in his belt pouch. A bellyful of meat—even tough, gamy meat—didn’t sound bad at all.

And it didn’t turn out bad at all. He ate and ate. “You can stuff yourself like a Bizogot, by God,” Trasamund said admiringly.

“I’ve got used to going without,” Hamnet answered. “When there’s plenty, I make the most of it.”

“Here.” A Bizogot used a hatchet to split a bone that had been lying in the fire. “Want some marrow?”

“I won’t say no.” Hamnet scooped some out with a chunk of meat so he wouldn’t burn his fingers. The marrow tasted stronger than any that came from cows or sheep or pigs or horses. But it was good. He suspected even teratorn marrow would be good, though he hoped he never got desperate enough to find out.

“Let me have a bit of that.” Ulric Skakki didn’t worry about whether the marrow was hot. He reached in, grabbed what he wanted, and stuffed it into his mouth. Maybe his fingers and palm were even more callused than Hamnet’s. Maybe he was just hungrier.

Marcovefa sighed and patted her stomach. “Up on the Glacier, we don’t have feasts like this. Unless—” She broke off with a sly smile. “Seems a shame to waste the warriors, but when you have game this big, I suppose I can see why you don’t bother with them.”

“You . . . eat people?” Per Anders didn’t know what things were like up on top of the Glacier.

“Not really people—never anybody from my clan, and those are the only true people,” the shaman answered. She smacked her lips. “But two-legged meat, once you cook it well, is the best there is. Better than mammoth, better than mutton, better than duck, better than anything.”

Per glanced toward Count Hamnet. Was he slightly green, or was it only Hamnet’s imagination? “You can tell her to stop teasing me now,” he said. “No matter how she goes on, I won’t believe her.”

“You’d better,” Hamnet answered. “She means it.”

“Don’t you start!” Per Anders was determined not to believe.

“By God, Anders, I’m not joking,” Hamnet said. Ulric and Trasamund nodded to show Hamnet meant it. Hamnet went on, “They don’t waste anything up there, anything at all. They can’t afford to. And that includes waste the meat that comes off an enemy’s carcass.”