“All right, then,” Hamnet Thyssen said. “Don’t talk foolishness. Everyone on this side of the Gap needs you.” He slipped his arm around her waist. “I need you in a way the rest of the people don’t, though.”

“You think so, do you?” She gave him a sidelong glance and a mocking smile. “So no other men on this side of the Gap would want me?”

That wasn’t true. She was pretty enough that any man might want her. Hamnet answered with guile of his own: “You’d scare most of them off once they found out you might carve them into steaks if they made you unhappy.”

“Foosh!” Marcovefa said again. “I don’t butcher anyone from my own clan—and a lover is about the same as a clansman.”

“Well, that’s a relief.” Hamnet was kidding, but kidding on the square. He and Marcovefa both started to laugh. The world might be coming to pieces around them. Might be? It was. If the Glacier hadn’t come to pieces, none of what happened since would have been possible. But you couldn’t keep looking at anything so large for very long, not without your mind snapping. If something funny came along close by, you’d laugh.

Which didn’t mean the bigger troubles went away. Not looking at them for a little while helped them seem more tolerable, though. Whether they really were . . . was a question Hamnet ignored for the time being.

A SCOUT RODE into the Bizogots’ camp. He pointed north and east. “There’s a band of those musk-ox turds riding south,” he said. “They won’t pass too far from us.”

“How big a band?” Trasamund asked. That was the right question, sure enough. If it was too large, these remnants of half a dozen shattered Bizogot clans would have to fight shy of it for fear even a hard-won victory would leave them too weak to fight again.