“It will be all the same in the end. I have done all I can in protecting your vitals. Safe into the fray you will go; safe out of the fray you will come,—if you do not let your flesh get cut so that you bleed to death. Stand still that I may see if I have brought back the life-warmth.... Yes ... yes, the cold is entirely gone.” When she had pulled herself up stiffly by his arm, she released him. “Scant time will you have to jump into your clothes. The sun is not far away when the top of that chestnut-tree stands out so boldly.”
“That is true!” he assented, and cleared at a bound the distance between himself and his clothing.
For a while there were no other sounds to be heard save the simmering of the kettle and the song of Snowfrid overhead, sweet as the lilt of a meadow-lark in a field of golden grain.
As he rose from swallowing his last mouthful of broth, the girl came clattering down the stairs, waving over her head a great sword whose hilt was of iron inlaid with silver, and whose sheath was made from a rattlesnake-skin.
“I knew that though you should forget to say farewell to me, you would remember to wait for this,” she said. “I took it up-stairs last night and polished it a long time after you were all asleep. Does it not look well?”
“I did not remember it,” Randvar admitted, “so little used am I to anything more than a hunting-knife.” Taking it from her as she unsheathed it, he felt its edges critically, and feigned to test them on one of her yellow braids. “The hilt cleaves to my hand like the palm of a friend. I shall feel more self-respecting to go among strangers with my father’s sword at my side. Perhaps some of his good-fortune will come from it to me.” His brown face reddened, and he turned it away suddenly to watch the girl’s nimble fingers fastening at his hip the sword-belt which she had drawn across his shoulder.
But Snowfrid jumped up with her usual liveliness, crying, “If your luck is most good, it may even happen that the Jarl will make you a guardsman like Bolverk,” and he bestirred himself to tease her as usual.
“Pooh! If he cannot do any more for me than that, I shall come home again!”
The emphasis with which her hands planted themselves upon her hips boded ill for him, but Erna came between them to make sure that the strap which held his harp to his back was also secure. When that had been seen to, there was no further excuse for lingering.
Stretching out his arms to his foster-mother, he said: “Live as well as you can, and do not worry about Eric or me. Your luck will take care of me, and I will take care of him.”