But Rothgar’s hand had fallen upon the other’s breast and pushed him backward so that he was forced to catch at the chair-arm to save himself from falling. “Never get afraid about that,” he sneered. “Since we slept in one cradle, I have been a thick-headed Thrym and your Loke’s wit has fooled me into doing your bidding and fighting your battles and giving you my toil and my limbs and my faith, but wisdom has grown in me at last. You undertake too steep a climb when you try to make me believe in your love while before my eyes you give to the man I hate my lands and the woman you had promised me and my place above your men—” His rage choked him so that he was obliged to break off and stand drawing his sword from his sheath and slamming it back with a sharp sound. His voice came back in a hoarse roar. “When I reckon up the debt against you, I know that the only thing to wipe it out would be your life. Not taken by poison nor underhandedly, but torn out of your deceitful body as we stand face to face. If I could do that, it might be that my anger would be quenched.” Again he drew his blade half out,—and this time he did not shove it back. His huge body seemed to draw itself together, crouching, as he leaned forward. “Why do you stand there looking as though you thought you were Odin? Do you think to blunt my weapon with your eyes? Why do you tempt me?”
The King had not moved away from the chair against which he had staggered, and the prints of his nails were on its arm. He was as though he had hardened to stone. “To show you that I am stronger than you, though I face you with bare hands,” he said. “To show you that you dare not kill me.”
“Dare not!” Rothgar’s laughter was a hideous thing as he cleared at a bound the space between them. His sword was full-drawn now. “Shout for your guards! It may be that they will get here in time.”
But the King neither gave back nor raised his voice. “I will not,” he said, “nor will I lift hand against you. Never shall you have it to say that I forgot you had endangered your life for mine. On your head it shall be to break the blood-oath.”
Now they were breast to breast. In her mind, the girl in the shadow flung open the doors and shrieked to the sentinels and roused the Palace; in her body, she stood spellbound, voiceless, breathless.
Still Rothgar did not strike. It was the King who spoke this time also. “Among the sayings of men in Norway,” he said coldly, “there is one they tell of a traitor who carried a sword of death against his King, but lacked the boldness to use it before the King’s face. So he begged his lord to wrap a cloak around his head that he might get the courage to ask a boon. When that had been done, he stabbed. Do you want me to cover my eyes?”
With a hoarse cry, Rothgar flung his sword back to his sheath, recoiling,—there was even a kind of fear in his manner: “A fool would I be, to set your ghost free to follow me with that look on its face! Keep your life—and instead I will torture every Angle I can get under my grip, for it is they who have turned a great hero into a nithing—may they despise you as you have despised your people for their sakes!” Invoking the curse with a sweep of his handless arm, he strode from the room.
Randalin did not see when he passed her, for her eyes were on the King as he stood looking after his foster-brother.
“Ah, God, what a terrible world hast Thou made!” she murmured, as she put up her hands to ease the swelling agony in her throat. “No longer will I try to live in it. I will go to the Sisters and remain with them always.”
Through the doors opening before the Jotun there came in a sudden buzz of laughing voices, while a breeze brought through the window a ringing of bells and a clarioning of approaching horns. Upon the girl in the shadow and the King on the dais, the sounds fell like the dissolving of a spell. She ran swiftly to the little door behind the tapestry and let herself out unseen, unheard. The King mounted the throne he had won and sat there in regal state, facing the throng of splendid courtiers trooping in to give him their wedding greetings.