“A wolf?” He rose to his feet, bent to pick up a brand. Then as his gaze followed her finger, he dropped the wood impatiently. “It is the fire dazzling you. There is no wolf there.”
Yawning, Erna lifted both her arms to stretch them above her head. “I forgot that I was seeing with the eyes of my mind, instead of with the eyes of my body,” she said. “It stood yonder, where the moonlight ends and the firelight begins. There was a goldlike glow to its fur, and its eyes were as bright embers. It must have been the Other Shape of Helvin Jarl.”
The voice in which he repeated the name was in such contrast to her monotone that it startled himself; he went on with stern restraint: “Do you intend to tell me that Helvin Jarl’s wanderings will lead him here, where I shall have to face him and explain what ailed me to-day?”
She would not curtail the yawn that was stretching her jaws, but she nodded.
Randvar made no attempt to hide his impulse, snatching his coat down from the antler-rack for instant flight.
“It is a good thing that you can do the honors without me,” he said. “I shall spend the night with the birds in Fenrir’s Jaws.”
But Erna’s mouth was again practicable for talking, and she was using it drowsily. “Yes, I know for certain that he will come by here. And I am altogether too sleepy to remember anything about manners. I will lose no time in getting out of your way.” Rubbing her eyes with one hand, she gathered up her knitting with the other, as oblivious to his position as though she had never understood it.
It came back to her foster-son, then, that mental numbness follows as well as precedes the use of double sight. There was nothing to do but throw the cloak upon the floor and himself into a sulk, while she moved through the routine of her nightly tasks, making sure that Snowfrid had covered the jar of venison broth, letting down against the fresh night wind two or three of the bearskin curtains with which the arches were provided.
“If I should ever get so dulled by wine as she by this,” he fumed inwardly, “I should smart for it while her tongue could wag; yet how much better is she than drunk?”
When she had climbed stiffly up the stairs, and the light of her torch-splinter had been swallowed by the upper darkness, his resentment overflowed his lips.