Skarphedinn saw how his father laid him down, and laid himself out, and he said this: “Our father goes early to bed to-night, and that is meet, for he is an old man.”
Then for a time Skarphedinn and Kari and Grim stood side by side, catching the brands as they fell and throwing them out at their enemies; and Flosi’s men hurled spears from without, but they caught them and sent them back again. But in the end Flosi bade his men cease throwing their spears, and sit down till the fire had done its work.
One man only escaped from the burning, and that was Kari, who leaped out on a fallen cross-beam, Skarphedinn helping him. “Leap thou first,” said Kari, “and I will leap after you, and we will get away in the smoke together.” But Skarphedinn refused, and would not go until Kari had got safe away, for he had run along under the smoke, his hair and his cloak blazing; and he ran till he came to a stream, and threw himself into it, and so put out the flames; and he rested in a hollow, and got away after that.
But when Skarphedinn leaped to follow him the cross-beam gave way in the middle where it had been burnt, and he was thrown backward into the house; and with a great crash the end of the roof fell above him so that he was shut in between the gable and the roof and could not stir a step.
All night the fire burned fitfully, sometimes blazing up and sometimes burning low, and those outside watched it till dawn. And they said that all in the house must have been burned long ago. Then Flosi told them to get on their horses and ride away, and they were glad to do that. But as they rode from the place they heard, or thought they heard, a song rising from far down in the fire beneath them, and they shuddered and looked each in the other’s face for fear.
“That song is Skarphedinn’s, dead or alive,” they said.
Some of them were for turning back to look for him, but Flosi forbade them, and urged them to ride away as quickly as they could, for there was no man he feared so much as Skarphedinn.
But when, many days afterwards, they sought among the embers, they found Skarphedinn’s body upright against the gable-wall, but his legs burned off him at the knees. He had driven his axe into the gable-wall so fast that they had much ado to get it out.
Nial and Bergthora lay beneath the hide dead, but unburned by the fire, and a great heap of ashes above them; also of the boy only one finger had been consumed.
This is the Story of the Burning, and of the death of Nial.