Coldly! For the first time Randvar recalled their dispute of the morning, looked at the firebreathing Valkyria, and smiled in spite of himself.
At the same breath, she darted him a glance that was half startled and half menacing. The flaming of her color was not more marked than the stiffening of her spine as she caught his expression.
He sobered in haste. “Jarl’s sister, no faintest intention had I of making mockery!”
She deigned him no answer whatever. With awful precision she planted the sword in the earth beside her, with awful deliberation gathered up her silken skirts, without a backward glance swept from the prison-chamber. Twice he called after her without avail,—so disastrous may a victory be!
Like a fog, sullen rage settled upon him then. When the old chiefs asked him what Starkad’s daughter was doing with the sword, he clipped his answer as close as might be:
“Olaf, Thorgrim’s son, lent it to her to cut his luck-thread with.”
When they questioned him about her displeasure, he conceded no more than an ungracious movement of his shoulders. Old Mord was impelled at last to scowl at him over the cloak-end with which he was mopping his face.
“Olaf the French,” he observed, “was fostered in a land where they have the good custom of teaching manners as well as courage. Sure am I that such a training would have bettered you, Rolf’s son, more than you think. I have, however, a good hope that even as autumn thunder ripens the grain, this tempest may have ripened your green judgment; so that hereafter you will be less quick to sneer at the caution of old men, and more slow to stake your all on any belief. Though the Skraellings keep faith with you, remember this—that you came near losing your life through your lord’s folly, who accepted such entertainment without any regard to the effect it might have upon your state. If you had offended him so that he had the wish to murder you, he could not have gone about it better.”
Mopping his face, he continued to speak at intervals in praise of discretion; but Rolf’s son lost what followed by reason of the ringing of that one sentence in his ears—“If you had offended him so that he had the wish to murder you, he could not have gone about it better.” ... It seemed that Helvin had thought himself offended ... that murder had looked out of his eyes....
His head falling forward upon his breast, Randvar stood as one listening to an evil voice within him.