It was he who espied her—her bright head like a star hung low in the gloaming—and slackened his pace to stand looking at her.
Following his friend’s gaze, Bolverk spoke with his buoyant laugh: “Small wonder you stare, comrade, at seeing Freya’s ghost filling Freya’s blue kirtle!”
The song-maker roused himself with a deep breath that was like a sigh. When he moved forward again, the springiness was gone from his step.
“Would that I did not see the ghost of Freya whenever I looked at my wife!” he said. “Like goblin-bells they start out of space and clang in my ear, the words Erna spoke that night by the Tower fire,—‘Freya loved Rolf in spite of all, but it was the effort of doing so that wore her out before half her life was lived.’”
A second time Randvar came to a stand-still; and as the sun from the wood, so had the light fled from his face and left it a place of shadowy dread.
“Suppose,” he said, “that my quarrel with—the Jarl—come to no round end one way or the other but, as oftenest happens, drag on and on in uncertainty.... Suppose the Jarl’s sister wearing out year after year between these walls of solitude ... eating into her memory, the murder of her father ... burning into her eyes, the thing we saw at the Pool ... gnawing at her heart, her fear for me.... Suppose it should not be her love that gave way—”
“Nor her life!” Bolverk finished hastily. “Nor her life!”
But the weight did not lift from the Songsmith’s bent shoulders. He said slowly: “When grisly thoughts had dwelt long enough in her brother’s mind, it was not his body that they killed, but his reason.”
Gasping a dread word, Bolverk caught him by the arm. In heavy silence they walked the rest of the distance that lay between them and the cordon of fires.
Giving them greeting and at the same time demanding their news, a score of voices broke in upon their reverie. In a moment, the song-maker was the centre of a cordial group that listened eagerly while he told how the Skraelling chief had received him, and approved boisterously the new trading treaty which the chief had granted to the new colony at the Tower.