Hamnet Thyssen explained in slow, simple words, partly in Raumsdalian and partly in the Bizogot language. He wished the Empire were doing more to fight the Rulers, the mammoth-riding invaders who’d swarmed through the Gap after the Glacier melted in two. The stocky, swarthy, curly-bearded invaders made ferocious fighting men and even more fearsome wizards.

Everyone thought so except Marcovefa. Her own powers equaled or exceeded those of the Rulers’ sorcerers. Hamnet often wondered why that should be so. His best guess was that the scattered folk who dwelt up on the Glacier did without so many material things. They had no crops. They knew nothing of wood. They knew no animals larger than foxes. They couldn’t work metal—even stone was sometimes hard for them to come by.

No wonder, then, that their magical skills were strong. They had to have something going for them up there in the perpetual cold and the perpetually thin air. Thus wizardry flourished alongside desperate poverty. So it seemed to him, anyhow. Marcovefa didn’t think of herself or the folk among whom she’d grown up as poor. But then, she’d had no standard of comparison till she came down to the Bizogot steppe with Hamnet and his comrades the summer before.

She laughed at his worries now. “It will be as it is, that’s all,” she said. “All we can do is try to make it turn out the way we want it to.”

“Well, yes,” Hamnet said. “I don’t think of that as all.”

Marcovefa laughed again, louder this time. “But it is. Soon enough, nothing will matter any more, because we will be dead.”

She made Ulric Skakki laugh, too, on a different note. “Later, I hope—not sooner,” he said. “I don’t plan on dying for quite a while yet.”