It chanced that the man appealed to was Mord the Grim; the old counsellor justified the nickname by the look he bent on Rolf’s son.
“Are you forward in this direction, also?” he inquired. “Starkad’s daughter will not think that news so much worth having.”
Brynhild drew a step nearer and answered for herself: “I should think it a sad story if I did not want news about a brave man’s fate. To come from a circle of merrymakers into a group of such menace—Though it were no more than a thrall that was bound here, I should wish to know what this betided him! I beg you to tell me as quick as you can.”
Like a nurse who would scare away an inquisitive child, Mord made his voice ominous. “You guess well that we are not in play, young maiden. The fellow has given himself as a hostage for the Skraellings’ good faith. If he has made any false step in truthfulness or judgment—” A motion towards the sword at his side completed the meaning. “I warn you that you will get sorry sport here. Be pleased to return to your playmates.”
With peremptoriness thinly disguised as courtesy, he stepped forward and swung back the branches that she might pass out of the prison-chamber. From the other side of the hemlock wall came like an invitation the rippling laughter of the gossips, the shouts of the dice-throwers. For an instant it was as though she stood on the threshold between two worlds.
It did not take her more than an instant to choose between them. Even disdainfully, she put aside Mord and the merrymakers.
“Do you think me fit only to watch throws for light stakes? I prefer to watch your game with the Fates,” she said, and joined the sinister group under the pine.
In his bound wrists, Randvar’s pulses leaped; but the three advice-givers raised a chorus of protest, of entreaty, of command. What would have resulted is doubtful if there had not come suddenly from the river-bank sounds that struck them dumb,—an outburst of voices rising high above the hum of the slope, a clangor of weapons, a piercing cry:
“The Jarl is attacked!”
In the wink-long hush that followed the outbreak there was discernible a distant noise of savage whoops and yells.