“Not well? What nonsense is here! It was on my tongue to say that not since Treaty Day have I seen you wear such a merry face. For more than two months have you moped like a captive hawk, with sullen temper and feathers adroop, but now—Why, it was the first thing I marked when I looked through the door and saw you bantering with your hunter friends! Comrade, swear to me that your mind-sickness is not homesickness. If I should think that the fetters of my service were eating into your brave heart—”
“I swear I have no homesickness.”
“God is to be thanked for that! Take oath also that I would have no power to straighten the threads if you should tell me what the snarl is.”
The song-maker flung back his hair restlessly from his face of fierce unhappiness. “Jarl, it stings my pride that I have not been able to hide from you the soreness of my mind. Let it pass for the spring sap working in me. I take oath that no man alive can give me aught I want. Be pleased, lord, since it is your will!” As with one hand he put the matter aside, with the other he put aside the fox-skin curtain. After a moment, Helvin yielded and entered.
It was plainly indifferent to the Jarl that Brynhild the Proud should chance to be coming from the iron-bound chests, preceded by a walking heap of rainbow silks. He returned her reverence with a courtly greeting, then turned and made a kindly motion towards the figure drawn up rigid as a spear-shaft in the shadow of the doorway.
“We have seen little of you, my kinswoman, since you made the winter weather an excuse for staying away from our feasts,” he added, “yet do not lose us your remembrance. Will you not give a greeting to my song-maker here? It is not unlikely that he has felt the lack of your presence as much as you have missed his songs.”
Perforce, the Songsmith plucked the cap from his head and advanced. Perforce, her gaze was turned upon him.
“Oh, is it your song-maker?” she said indifferently. “I thought one of the woodsmen had followed you in to get some hunting-gear.” Deliberately she looked him up and down, her gray eyes more forbidding than a gray ice-waste under Northern skies. With a shrug she turned from him at last.
“If you please, brother, I think I would rather not greet him,” she said. “Better that we should look on it as though he were a woodsman after all, who might mistake my condescension and become forward.”
Courtesying as low as her manner was high, she swept past the Jarl and through the door, beyond which the silk-laden page was awaiting her.