“Keep your wrath within bounds, lord, as I kept mine. Do you suppose that after stripping off my pride to wrap it about your cursed secret, I shall allow your folly to undo—”
“Allow? Mother of Heaven! do you know what you are defying?”
“Do you forget that I am not the rabbit-hearted thing I feigned to be—”
“Out of the way!”
“No—”
Short as the word was, it was cut in two by the slam of the great doors at the guard-room’s farther end. One breath Randvar let out in relief, then drew in one in dread and braced himself for the grapple.
But nothing came.
No use to strain his eyes, for darkness was now so thick upon them that it carried a sense of smothering with it. He strained his woodsman’s ear, trained to catch the lightest bending of a twig beneath a fox’s foot, but not so much as the sound of a faintly drawn breath rewarded him. Delicately as a butterfly uses its feelers, he put out a finger, then, and found that the spot where Helvin had stood was empty. More silent than the stealthiest wind that tries to creep unnoted through the forest, he had withdrawn to some quarter of the darkness.
From his head to his feet, shuddering shook the song-maker as his mind strove to follow that withdrawal to its goal, to picture him who stood hidden there. The temptation to let in the firelight to show what thing he faced was so torture-strong that he took his hands off the door-panels on which they were spread out and locked them before him, and gave himself the relief of speaking Helvin’s name in a low voice, entreating, soothing.
No answer came. A windless cavern in the marrow of the earth’s bones had not been stiller. From the living-room without came the rattle of knife and trencher, as the evening meal wore on; the clink of horns with the arrival of drinking-time; by-and-by, snatches of maudlin song. Even the shuffling patter of the thralls the Songsmith caught through the oaken panels, but in the room where he kept vigil, only the thundering echo of his heart throbbing in his ears.