"Thyssen," her new husband said politely.

"Torfinn," Count Hamnet returned. He had . . . not too much against the older man, who'd always seemed faintly embarrassed at acquiring his wife.

"Dear Hamnet is going exploring with the wild Bizogot." Gudrid made it sound faintly disreputable. She eyed Hamnet, ready to finish him off. "What is it you're going off to look for?" Whatever it was, by the way she asked the question it couldn't have been more important than a small coin that had fallen out of a hole in a belt pouch.

"The Golden Shrine," Hamnet answered, his voice still flat. Let her make what she wanted of that.

Her lioness eyes widened, for a heartbeat looking only human, and amazed. "But that's a fable!" she exclaimed. "Nobody really believes it's up there, or wherever it's supposed to be."

"Oh, no. That is not so. Many people do believe it." Gudrid looked amazed all over again, and even less happy than she had a moment earlier. Count Hamnet didn't contradict her; Eyvind Torfinn did. "I happen to be one of them myself," Eyvind went on. He turned to his wife's former husband. "Why would anyone think the chances of finding it now are any better than they would have been last year or a hundred years ago?"

"Because the Gap has finally melted through. Trasamund's traveled beyond the Glacier." Hamnet Thyssen usually had as little to say to Gudrid's new husband as he could. Maybe the mead was what loosened his tongue enough to make him say, "So you believe in the Golden Shrine, do you, Earl Eyvind? Why is that?"

As Gudrid had a moment earlier, he got more than he bargained for. Eyvind Torfinn didn't just believe in the Golden Shrine. He knew more in the way of lore than Hamnet thought there was to know. His talk went spinning back through the centuries, back to the days before Nidaros was even a hunting camp, back to empires far older than the Raumsdalian, back to other retreats of the Glacier—though he didn't know of any others where the Gap actually opened.