“I would give all I hope to possess in the world to spare you this. My one fear is that you will come to repent the choice you have made.”
She said without lifting her drooping lids: “Freya came to Rolf over the bodies of slaughtered kin, yet she did not repent it; and between you and me there is no shadow.”
He was thankful then that her eyes were closed. Before she could open them and catch the dread which he felt drawing at his mouth, he had made the narrowing of the trail an excuse to draw away and rein back to his post in the rear.
Narrowing to a thread between leaf-walls, the trail wound through a copse of thorn-trees in blossom. The blending of her kirtle with their woolly branches seemed to give Brynhild’s thoughts a new turn. Over her shoulder, she opened conversation again:
“It would not be difficult for me to hide among these trees. For another reason I am pleased with myself for thinking of this disguise. Without it, I should never have been able to pass out of the hall unmarked. For two days now there has been a gray-cloaked beggar hanging around the doorstep,—a fellow too ill-natured to speak even to the women who gave him food, but so prying of eye that I have felt his gaze from under his hat-brim every time I went out or in. Why, even you could not pass last night without arousing his curiosity! He was staring out of the western gate after you, as you and the good father came up the lane towards me—”
“Staring after me?” Curt as man’s to man was the Songsmith’s voice. “And you have not told me of it before!”
She started at the change of tone. Then she said gently:
“I forgot him in—in the other things we spoke of when we met, my friend. And it did not seem in any wise important to me. A wandering beggar could not know you for a prisoner escaped.”
He did not tell her that a suspicion had risen in him that the beggar was not a beggar. He did not tell her anything for a space, but rode staring fixedly between his horse’s ears. Her question was twice repeated before it reached him:
“What harm could spring from it, Randvar?”