Again the eyes of the king flash, but he does not look on the queen.
"Who would deem it mischance?" he says. "No man. And I were dishonoured evermore."
"Not your arrow, not yours, but another's--mayhap yonder Frank's. He is a stranger, and would care naught if reward was great; then afterward he should be made to hold his peace."
And at that she smiles evilly. A stray Frank's life was naught to her if he was in her way.
"Say no more. The thing is not possible for me; it is folly."
"Folly, in truth, if you let Ethelbert keep you from the realm which waits you. Were he gone, there is not so much as an atheling who would make trouble there for you."
"Peace, I say. Ethelbert is my guest, and more than that. He shall go as he came--in honour. What may lie in the days to come, who shall know?"
"He who acts now shall see. Until the Norns set the day of doom for a man, he makes his own future. Surely they set his end on Ethelbert when he came here."
So she says in the old heathen way, but Offa does not note it. It is in his mazed mind that Ethelbert wrongs him by living to hold back the frontier of Mercia from the eastern sea.
"He is my guest, and I may not touch him," he says dully. "All the world would cry out on me if harm came to him here. And yet--"