CHAPTER XVIII
For wrong and hatred
Shall rest them never,
Nay, nor sore sorrow.
LAY OF SIGRDRIFA.
The king spoke very truly when he predicted that Olvir's journey Rhineward would be slow. But at Cologne, the monks of Saint Martin of the Isle took charge of the wounded Franks, and Count Amalwin came to receive the king's share of the war-loot. He brought word of the queen-mother's death and her interment beside King Pepin in the Basilica of Saint Denis. After the burial, Karl moved the court to Worms, and returned into Saxon Land by way of Fulda. It was his command that Olvir should at once join the court, with Rothada and her brother.
So the longships were hauled from their sheds, and raced away up Rhine Stream, through the fair Rhinegau and past Mayence, on along the winding streams to Worms.
Old Fulrad greeted the king's Dane hawk with the embrace of a father, and Fastrada welcomed the lovers with such sweet humility that their hearts went out to her. Olvir himself could not withhold his friendship when he came upon the maiden in the midst of the royal children, and saw how even the boy Karl turned to her as to a mother. Only the most malicious of the court gossips failed to praise the girl for her devoted care of Queen Bertrada and the solicitude she had shown for the orphaned children of Hildegarde.
So it happened that when, in the autumn, the king returned from his planting of fortresses and missions in Saxon Land, he found waiting him a merry family group, of whom Fastrada was the life and centre. To this little group Karl at once joined himself, and, in the pleasant days which followed, he frequently put aside the affairs of state for a sail on the Rhine in Olvir's Raven.
Blind to all else in the happiness of his own wooing, Olvir knew nothing of the report that was fast growing from court gossip to widespread rumor, as to the king's intentions toward the daughter of Rudulf. The awakening came to him and to Rothada without warning.