“If we come back tomorrow, we can fight the lions and the bears and the dire wolves and the foxes and the teratorns for the scraps,” Ulric Skakki said. He was bound to be right. The beasts wouldn’t leave so much flesh lying around for long. But right now those mammoths could still kill.

“We can butcher the deer that went down. They won’t give us any trouble,” Hamnet said.

“And the horses,” Liv added.

“And the horses,” Hamnet agreed without enthusiasm. He wasn’t fond of horse meat, and nothing would ever make him like it. But nothing went to waste on the Bizogot steppe. With meat to be had, the nomads would take it.

Marcovefa looked at the Rulers’ swarthy, curly-bearded corpses. “They would be tasty,” she said. “Plenty of flesh on them—they didn’t go hungry.”

Well, almost nothing goes to waste on the Bizogot steppe, Hamnet thought. Marcovefa’s clan, up atop the Glacier, thought nothing of eating dead enemies. Life there was even harsher than it was here.

He shook his head. “People down here don’t do that.” Or if they did do it, they never talked about it. Who could say what went on in poor clans in harsh winters? Even the folk who might have talked wouldn’t; the strongest taboo possible lay on admitting one had tasted man’s flesh.

“Seems a shame to let them lie there for your birds and big foxes.” Marcovefa used the name she’d made up for dire wolves.

They’d gone round that pingo before. Instead of doing it again, Hamnet asked: “How strong was the magic the Rulers threw at you?”

“Nothing special,” she answered. “If my folk could ever come down from the top of the Glacier, they would show the Rulers and everyone else what real rulers are.”