Breath of God

“Oh, yes. They do indeed,” he said in a voice like stone. Were Audun Gilli and Liv sharing a bedchamber in Eyvind’s home? How could they be doing anything else? And where does that leave me?

Alone.

He knew the answer. He knew it, and he hated it. Spacious though this place was, it would be far more crowded than an i

“Is that woman Marcovefa, the one who speaks the strange dialect… Is she really from a tribe atop the Glacier?” Eyvind Torfi

“Oh, yes.” Count Hamnet nodded. “Do you understand her?”

“Not so well as I wish I did, but well enough. Some of the Bizogots who live near the western mountains talk the way she does,” the scholarly earl replied. Ulric Skakki had said the same thing, but Ulric had lived among those clans. Eyvind, as far as Hamnet Thyssen knew, had just studied them. However he knew what he knew, he did know it.

“If you can follow her language, can you follow why her magic is so strong?” Count Hamnet asked.

“Well, I haven’t seen much of it with my own eyes, you understand, so anything I know of it is at second hand,” Eyvind answered. “I’d only be guessing, and my guess would be that her sorcery is strong because her folk don’t have much else. If they need to do something up there, they have to do it with spells. I gather they don’t know how to smelt metal any more. They have no crops. They don’t even have large beasts to tame. What does that leave them but wizardry?”

“I had the same notion,” Hamnet said slowly. “In a way, it makes sense. In another way, I wonder if it’s too simple.”

Eyvind Torfi

“You never tried climbing up to the top of the Glacier, either,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Even with the avalanche that made it easier for us, it’s still nothing I’d care to try more than once.”

“I believe you,” Earl Eyvind said. “How does it compare to a stretch in His Majesty’s dungeons?”

“I’ve never tried climbing the Glacier, Your Splendor,” Kormak Bersi said before Hamnet could reply, “but I wouldn’t care to do more than one stretch in a cell.”

“I didn’t care for even one,” Hamnet agreed. “His Majesty is a great many things” – most of which he couldn’t stand -”but an i

“Which, I have no doubt, is an understatement the size of a mastodon.” Eyvind Torfi

“Yes, by God!” Again, Kormak spoke before Hamnet could. Hamnet didn’t mind; he couldn’t have put it better himself.

Eyvind Torfi

Trasamund had a drinking horn – actually, a silver rhyton in the shape of a mountain sheep’s horn – of beer in his hand when he saw Hamnet. “It is you!” the jarl boomed, rushing over to fold Hamnet into an embrace that made him think of a hug from a short-faced bear. “Ulric said Eyvind had got you loose, but Ulric lies the way most people fart – he can’t help himself.”

“I know some people who break wind through the mouth, but I’m not one of em,” Ulric Skakki said with dignity. He sent Hamnet one of his crooked grins. “I hope I’m not, anyhow.” His cup was smaller and plainer than Trasamund’s, but he chose wine to fill it. He could rough it with the best of them, but he didn’t when he didn’t have to.

Liv was also there, and she came up to Hamnet, too. Taking both his hands in hers, she said, “I am glad to free you again. I wish you no harm, no ill – only the best. I am sorry we didn’t end up fitting together the way you hoped. I hoped we could, too. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you wish they would, that’s all.”

How was he supposed to answer that? It was gracious, and he believed it, but it still felt like a sawblade thrust through his liver. “Sometimes things don’t,” he agreed in a voice rough as shagreen. He squeezed her hands once, then let them go.

“That was well done,” Ulric Skakki said quietly. Liv nodded.

For a moment, knowing how useless and how foolish it was, Hamnet hated both of them. “Well done or not…” he said, and made for the tap-man. As he came up, the fellow raised a politely curious eyebrow. “Wine,” Count Hamnet told him. “Whatever you’ve got that’s sweet and strong.”

“Coming up, sir,” Eyvind Torfi

Of course, the determined drinker would still regret it the next morning or whenever he finally sobered up. Right now, the morning seemed a million years and a million miles away from Hamnet Thyssen. The wine in his cup might not have been a great vintage, but it was sweet and it was strong. Hamnet wondered what the southern wine growers got that they thought worth as much as their marvelous elixir. A poet could do something with that conceit, he thought. No poet himself, he made do with savoring the smooth, blood-red richness as it slid down his throat.

“So what are you going to have to do for Sigvat to keep from decorating his dungeons again?” Ulric Skakki asked, sidling up to him.

“Nothing much,” Hamnet asked. Unlike the tapman’s a moment before, Ulric’s elevated eyebrow was redolent of skepticism. “Nothing much, by God,” Count Hamnet said again. “Just drive off the Rulers, that’s all. They’re inside the Empire, in case you haven’t heard, and they’ve beaten the stuffing out of an imperial army and a bunch of imperial wizards. Believe it or not, that even got His Majesty’s attention.”

“And they said it couldn’t be done!” Ulric said in mock – Hamnet supposed it was mock – astonishment. “He won’t do anything to you if you don’t manage it, either, I’m sure. Maybe cut off your fingers and toes one at a time and then start in on anything else that still happens to stick out. Like I say, nothing much. D’you suppose your balls’d count as one cut or two?”

“I hadn’t worried about it – up till now.” Hamnet spoke the last three words in as shrill a falsetto as he could muster.

He caught Ulric Skakki by surprise. The adventurer’s laugh was high-pitched, too – almost a giggle. “You’re not supposed to do things like that,” Ulric said severely.

The others who understood Raumsdalian were laughing, too. Marcovefa chose that moment to walk into the dining hall. “What is the joke?” she asked. “Why do I always come in right after the joke?”

Some of that was in her own tongue, some in the regular Bizogot language. “Hamnet made it,” Ulric said, and pointed to the newly released nobleman.

“Say it again,” Marcovefa told him.