The others all nodded, Signe a little unwillingly. A speculative look came into Bjarni’s blue gaze; to a warrior, everything that wasn’t a prize to be seized was a potential challenge to be overcome.

“Don’t even think it,” Rudi said, and Eric nodded vigorously.

Signe smiled grimly. “Did you see the hilt of her sword, my friend?”

Bjarni nodded, obviously puzzled. “A very good weapon, if narrower than we like in Norrheim, I suppose for thrusting strokes against the joints in plate. And well-adorned, the silver setting off the back horn.”

“Those twelve silver bands aren’t adornment, Bjarni King. They’re a death-tally and public warning,” she said.

“Holmgangs?” Bjarni said, using his folk’s word for a duel.

“Technically,” Eric laughed, but this time it was utterly without humor. “I saw a few of those . . . you couldn’t really call them fights, though the victims were experienced swordsmen. They were executions. Slow executions. It was more like a cat playing with a mouse than combat. And one of the few occasions I’ve seen her really smile.”

“Brrr!” Bjarni said. Then, with blunt practicality: “And what’s my part in this plan you make, my blood brother?”

“Never fear, you’ll hear it soon.” He turned to Eric and Signe. “I brought two thousand Drumheller cavalry with me when we crossed the Rockies at Castle Corbec,” he said. “Medium horse, lance and saber and bow, mail hauberks and plate for the arms and legs.”

“About what we Bearkillers were using ten, fifteen years ago,” Eric said thoughtfully. “I liked what I saw of them there. Trained in cataphract tactics like ours, too?”

“Precisely; well trained and drilled. Also Drumheller is not part of Montival and will not be, and they did fight the Association, when they tried to take back that western part of the Peace River country the Lord Protector grabbed off in their despite, the spalpeen. County Dawson, it is now; about which they are still bitter, so. So I’ll be brigading them with your Bearkiller A-listers, giving out it’s the best tactical fit—the which is true—and to avoid unnecessary memories of a painful and awkward sort.”

“That ought to work,” Eric said thoughtfully. “We’re more mobile than the Association knights, we don’t need a light cavalry screen as badly, and we have a lot more punch in a charge with the lance than pure horse-archers.”

“It’s fair pleased I’ll be if it does work,” Rudi said frankly. “Fitting this collection of puzzle pieces, not to mention the odds and sods trickling in from everywhere between Dawson and Ashland, into an army I can use without it coming to pieces on a battlefield like a soggy biscuit in hot tea is a nightmare of purest black, and we’ve little time.”