“This I will beg of you, Jarl’s daughter,” he said, “that you will tell me why you wanted to see me.”
The guards gave him admonishing nudges. The prettiest of the veil-bound matrons uttered a little scream of derisive laughter. The Jarl’s daughter turned haughtily.
Of her alone he seemed to be conscious as he advanced. “You admit that I am not blameworthy, yet I see that I have your dislike. Is it because I appear to you no better than a savage? I beg you to believe that I am not one. I beg you to believe that if I had known it was you who wanted me, I would have been as glad in coming to you as the lark in rising to the sun.”
Her gaze moving up and down between his moccasins and his mane of sun-burnished hair, she studied him wonderingly; but she was bred too high to flout him. She said, at last, with an inclination of her head:
“I owe you thanks for good-will. I will also confess that I was made curious by the Song of Fridtjof you were singing. You are the forester—are you not—whom men call the Songsmith? I have heard my brother tell of hearing you sing once, as he happened to be passing a hunter’s cabin. I wished to ask why you sang words about Fridtjof that my father’s minstrels do not sing.”
“That, and more, I will tell you,” he answered. “The end of the song, I made out of my own imaginings. In the unsettled places where I live, one hears only those verses which the old people brought over the ocean under the hatches of memory. I got a habit of finishing out such fragments in the way I thought likeliest to be right. From that my nickname sprang. My foster-father, who had worked at a forge in his youth, said that all the skalds he had met with were like traders, who do no more than pass on what other men have made; but that a singer who melts scraps together and hammers them out in new shapes is a songsmith.”
The figure appealed to the guardsmen, drawing forth laughter and compliment; but that to the Songsmith was nothing beside the fact that in the expression of their mistress curiosity had deepened to interest.
“Why, that is no small thing to do!” she said. “Times out of number, when I have been listening to my father’s skald, I have wished that he could make an ending which would be new even if it were untrue, so that there might be something to keep awake for.”
Calmly oblivious to maidens’ frowns and matrons’ murmurs, she let herself sink again upon the tree-trunk, and made him a sign to come nearer.
“I want to know why you have not brought such an accomplishment to market?” she inquired. “Where is your home?”