She had no difficulty in hearing Edric this time. Aggressively honest, his words rang out with startling sharpness: “Because it was for you that I went against Edmund, and from faithfulness to you that I afterwards destroyed him.”
Out of the stillness that followed, a voice cried, “Are you mad?” and there was the grating of chairs thrust hastily back. But, after a great wrench, her heart stood still within her as through the madness she perceived the purpose. As well as Edric of Mercia she knew that the young Viking’s vulnerable point was his longing for his own self-esteem, a craving so unreckoning in its fervor that—should he have the guilty consciousness the traitor counted on—rather than endure his own reproach for cowardice he would be equal to the wild brazenness of flinging the avowal in the teeth of his assembled court. Her pulses began to pound in a furious dance as the same flash of intuition showed her the rock upon which the Gainer’s audacious steering was going to wreck him.
For no skulking guilt was in the face of the new King of England as he met the startled glances, but instead a kind of savage joy that widened his nostrils and drew his lips away from his teeth in a terrible smile.
“Now much do I thank whatever god has moved you to open speech,” he said, “for with every fibre of my body have I long wanted to requite you for that faithfulness. Knowing that you were coming to-night to ask it, I have the reward ready. Never was recompense given with a better will.” Leaping to his feet, he hurled the goblet in his hand against the opposite wall so that it was shattered on the stone behind the embroidered hangings. At the signal the tapestry was lifted, and in the light stood Eric of Norway, leaning on a mighty battle-axe. To him the King cried in a loud voice, all the irony gone from it, leaving it awful as the voice of Thor at Ragnarok. “Do your work where all can see you, Eric Jarl, that no man shall accuse me of being afraid to bear my deeds. And let Norman Leofwinesson die with his lord for the slaying of Frode of Avalcomb.”
A roar of hideous sound—a confusion of overturned lights, of screeching servants, of writhing struggling bodies—above it all, the vision of that glittering axe poised in the air—then flashing downward,—Randalin’s recollections blurred, ran together, and faded out in broken snatches.
She recalled a brief space of something like sleep-walking as the soldiers led her through branching corridors to this room, and fetched for her attendant the only woman available, a wench they had taken from trencher-washing in the royal kitchen. She remembered irritably rejecting the woman’s clumsy services and sending her to sleep on her pallet, while she herself walked to and fro with her surging thoughts until sheer physical exhaustion forced her to throw herself upon the bed. After that she remembered—nothing.
“I am glad that I did not disgrace my kin by screaming or fainting,” she reflected now, as she raised herself stiffly. “I am glad I did that much credit to my name.” She flushed as her hand, touching the pillow, found it wet, and for an instant the bearing of her head was less erect. “I do not remember what I dreamed,” she murmured, “but full well I know that it was not because Norman Leofwinesson is slain that I shed tears in my sleep.” For a while she drooped there, her eyes on the open window, outside of which a robin was singing blithely among the cherries. But all at once she seized the pillow with a kind of fierceness, and turned it over and piled the others on top of it, crying under her breath, “How dared he! How dared he! I will shed no tears for him while I am awake. I will remember only that I am my father’s daughter and the Lady of Avalcomb.”
Proudly as became an odal-woman, she followed the page when he came at last to call her to the royal presence. The great stone hall in which the King awaited the arrival of his Norman bride was the same room in which he had feasted the night before, but tables and dishes now were gone, gold-weighted tapestries hung once more over the door by which Eric of Norway had made his entrance, and a rich-hued rug from an Eastern loom lay over the spot where she had seen the axe rise and fall. Crossing the threshold, the commonplaceness of it all clashed so discordantly with the scene in her memory that for an instant she grew faint and clung to the curtains between which she was passing. That death should leave so little trace, that the spot which one night was occupied by a headsman, the next, should hold a bride, made her fancy reel with horror even while she pulled herself together sternly.
“This is life as in truth it is,” she said. “It is well that I understand at last how terrible everything really is, and how little anything matters.” Forcing herself to tread the rug with steady step, she came where the King stood by an open window. He was as changed as the room, though in honor of his bride he wore again state robes of silk and cloth-of-gold, for the fire of the Northern lights was gone out of his face, leaving it dull and lustreless. In the garden below, a minstrel was making hay in the sun of the royal glance by a rapid improvising of flattering verses which he was shouting lustily to his twanging harp, but now the King’s hand rose curtly.
“Your imagination has no small power, friend, yet save some virtues in case you should want to sing to me again,” he advised as he tossed down a coin and turned away.