If she wondered why he did not go first to break the road, she did not say so. “Yes,” she answered as quietly as he had spoken, and obeyed him as she answered.
Even before the leaves closed on her bravely carried head, his eyes had lost her through the mist that gathered in them. “For her sake!” his heart cried out a prayer to the old gods and the new. Then he had plunged into the thicket behind her, his hand clinched in agony upon his empty sheath. Riding with one ear set over his shoulder, he still kept on telling himself that it was impossible that it should be a man; that no man without the scent of a beast could have followed their trail, even if human limbs could be strong enough to overtake them.
Because his attention was held so fast by what lay behind them, he gave no heed to the sinister road they were flying over, to its blasted bushes and the bone-white trench of a dead brook that cut again and again across it. He leaped in his saddle at a sharp cry from Brynhild before him.
“Randvar! What place are we coming to?”
So like a bolt it fell upon him that he had pushed into the open after her, and checked his horse beside hers, before he himself realized to what goal the unused trail led. Even then it was not he who put it into words, but she, with her distended eyes upon the pond of murky water in the ring of gray tree-skeletons.
“The Black Pool! Where my father got his death! It is an omen!”
He spoke no word either of denial or of comfort. Throwing himself from his horse, he snatched her from her saddle, half carried, half dragged her to where a pile of bowlders rose like a cairn amid the dead trees. Upon the earth behind it, he pushed her down.
“Hide there!” he told her hoarsely. “Whatever happens, hide there,—and keep your face covered! He comes now whom I would die sooner than that you should see.”
The warning came too late. While he was still speaking, he heard the horses behind him snort and run, saw her eyes flash past him. With a shrill cry, she staggered from her knees to her feet and stood as one frozen there, one rigid arm thrust out in pointing. As an echo to her cry came from the blasted bushes of the trail a note of low laughter, deepening suddenly to a throaty gurgle that was of neither man nor beast.
To that whirlpool of horror, the Songsmith’s mind was drawn in. Reeling with its madness, he plunged forward, bruising his fists on the trees in the effort to rouse himself out of it, dashing his hands against his eyes to break the spell of that blind dizziness. As through rents in a veil of blindness, he saw Starkad’s son creeping towards them, saw wolf eyes glaring above a frothing mouth. With a final despairing effort, he brought his fist down where the jagged stump of a branch stuck out before him; and pain broke the spell. The strength of desperation on him, he leaped forward and closed with the rearing form.