“Anything, Raumsdalian?” Totila asked. The Red Dire Wolves’ jarl sounded worried, for which Count Hamnet could hardly blame him. Now his clan, along with what was left of Trasamund’s, stood on the front line against the Rulers. Any blow that fell would probably fall on him.

He relaxed – a little – when Hamnet Thyssen shook his head and said, “No.” Hamnet let his hood drop down off his head and undid the top toggle on his fur jacket. It was warmer inside the tent, though more from the body heat of the people it sheltered than from the brazier’s feeble little fire.

“I sense nothing amiss – nothing close, anyhow.” Liv was the shaman from the Three Tusk clan. She was close to thirty, with golden hair (short and greasy and dirty, as the Bizogots’ hair commonly was), cheekbones as proud and sharp and angular as the Glacier, and eyes of the deepest blue Count Hamnet had ever seen.

He’d studied those eyes from very close range indeed. He and Liv were lovers. She was the only woman he’d met since Gudrid left him who made him . . . oh, not forget his former wife, but remember she wasn’t the only fish in the sea. And if that wasn’t a miracle, Hamnet Thyssen had never met one.

Totila went right on worrying. “Would you?” he asked. “Or could their magic mask their moves so you wouldn’t know till they got right on top of us?”

“It could,” Liv said seriously, at which the jarl gnawed on his lower lip. Hamnet understood how he felt. He himself had fretted over the way things went in his county down in the southeastern part of the Empire. And his domain never faced danger close to that which hovered above the Red Dire Wolves like a teratorn soaring through the air in search of a fresh corpse to gnaw.