“Yes.” Count Hamnet wondered whether the countercharm would have been useless against Liv’s sorcery, or Audun Gilli’s. He didn’t think so, though he wasn’t sure.

“Now I know more of what the Rulers do. I know more of how they think. I want to fight them. I want to beat them,” Marcovefa said.

“You’d better want to. And you’d better do it, too,” Hamnet said. “Without you, we haven’t got much chance.”

“Foosh!” Marcovefa said—a dismissive noise. “Their magic is not so much. You shouldn’t have such trouble with it.” She paused. “Of course, the magic you people down here know isn’t so much, either.”

“That’s why we need you,” Count Hamnet said. “If anything happens to you . . .” He shook his head. He didn’t want to think about that. He would lose his woman. In the ordinary run of things, with the sorrows he’d known in his love life, that would have been disaster enough and then some. Since the Bizogots and the Empire would likely go under the Rulers’ yoke in short order, his love life, for once, wasn’t his biggest worry.

The lewd glint in Marcovefa’s eye said she thought he was thinking about it. “You find some other woman to give you what you want,” she teased.

“Where will I find another woman who can give me the Rulers driven back beyond the Gap?” he asked.

She pointed north. “Same place you found me—up on top of the Glacier.”

“I didn’t want to make that trip once. We wouldn’t have tried to climb the ice then if the Rulers weren’t going to kill us if we stayed on flat ground.” Hamnet shuddered at the memory of that fearsome ascent. “We wouldn’t have had a chance if that big avalanche hadn’t made the slope less impossible than it usually is.”

“It is not easy,” Marcovefa admitted. “If it were, my folk would have come down from the Glacier long ago. Our enemies drove us up there, too—so our songs say. I believe them. No one would have gone up there unless he had to.”