For a long moment she felt him stiff as an iron bar but trembling as if that bar were hammerstruck; and then he breathed into the gloom: “The sword—the naming-gift of the Aisir-aye, the sword—”
A formless fear sprang high in her. “What do you mean? What sword is this?”
So as they lay in the dark, close together against the frost, he whispered it to her, soft in her ears as if afraid the night would listen. He told how Skirnir brought the broken glaive, how Imric hid it in the wall of Elfheugh’s dungeons, and how Tyr had warned that the time was nigh when he would have need of it.
In the end he felt her shiver in his clutch, she who had hunted armed trolls. Her voice came small and unsteady: “I like it not, Skafloc. It is no good thing.”
“Not good?” he cried. “Why, it is the one last great hope we have left. Odin, who reads the morrow, must have foreseen this day of Alfheim’s undoing-must have given us the sword against it. Weaponless? Ha, we will show them otherwise !”
“It is wrong to deal with heathen things, most of all when the heathen gods offer them,” she pleaded. “Evil must come of it. Oh, my beloved, forget the sword!”
“True, the gods doubtless have their own ends,” he said “but those need not be at odds with ours, I think Faerie is a chessboard on which Aisir and Jötuns move elves and trolls, in some game beyond our understanding. Yet the wise chessplayer takes care of his pieces.”
“But the sword is buried in Elfheugh.”
“I will get in somehow. I have an idea already.”
“The sword is broken. How shall you—we-find that giant who it is said can mend it? How make him forge it anew to be used against his kin the trolls?”
“There will be a way.” Skafloc’s tone rang like metal. “Even now I know one means to find out how, though it is dangerous. We may well fail, aye, but the gods’ gift is our last chance.”
“The gods’ gift.” She began to weep in her turn. “I tell you, naught but harm can come of this. I feel it in me, cold and heavy. If you embark on this search, Skafloc, our days together are numbered.”
“Would you leave me on that account?” he asked, aghast.
“No-no, my darling—” She clung to him, blind with darkness and tears. “It is but a whisper in my soul-yet I know—”
He drew her closer still. Wildly he kissed her, until her head swam, and he laughed and was joyous; finally she could do no else than drive the fears from her awareness, for they were unworthy of Skafloc’s bride, and be glad with him.
But there was a yearning in her love which had not been there before. In her inmost deeps, she felt that they would not have many more times like this.
XIX
A few hours before the next night ended, after a blinding elf-gallop from the cave, they reined in their horses. Skafloc could not wait, when Alfheim was dying. The half moon rode in a cloudy sky, its wan light filtering through icicled trees to sheen on the snow. Breath smoked upwards in the still, cold air, to glimmer like ghosts that fled the lips of dying men.
“We dare go no nearer Elfheugh together.” Skafloc’s whisper sounded unnaturally loud in that quiet, in the shadowiness of that thicket which hid them. “But I can make it alone, on wolf foot, ere dawn.”
“What is your haste?” Freda clung to his arm and he tasted salt on her cheek. “Why not, at least, go by day, when they will be asleep?”
“The skinturning cannot be done in sunlight,” he told her. “And once inside the castle walls, day or night are the same; most of the trolls are as likely to be sleeping as wakeful at any hour. When I am in, there are those who can help me. I think chiefly of Leea.”
“Leea—” Freda bit her lip. “I like it not, this whole crazy doing. Have we no other way at all?”
“None that come to my mind. You, my sweet, have the hardest task-that I admit-waiting here, alone until I return.” He looked at her shadowed face as if to learn every line of it. “Remember, now, make a tent of those hides we brought, before sunrise, to shelter the horses from it. And remember I will have to come back in man shape, with the burden I shall be carrying. Thus I can go by day, safe till dusk, but slower, so I will not get here until sometime tomorrow night. Be not reckless, princess. If trolls come near, or if I am not back by the third evening, be off. Fly to the world of men and sunlight!”
“I can endure waiting,” she said tonelessly, “but to leave this place, not knowing whether you lived or—” she choked “—or died, that may be past my strength.”
Skafloc swung from his saddle into the snow, which crunched underfoot. Quickly he stripped himself naked. Shivering, he fastened the otter skin about his loins and the eagle skin over his shoulders, and flung the wolf skin cloak-like over both.
Freda dismounted too. Hungrily, they kissed. “Farewell, dearest one,” he said. “Until J bring the sword, farewell.”
He turned away, not daring to linger by the quietly crying girl, and drew the grey pelt tighter about him. He dropped on all fours and said the needful words. Then he felt his body shift and recast itself, felt his senses blurred with change. And Freda saw him alter, swiftly as if he melted, until a great wolf stood beside her with eyes glowing green in the dark.
Briefly the cold nose nuzzled her palm, and she rumpled the rough coat. He padded away.
Over the snow he went, weaving between trees and among bushes, loping faster and more tireless than a man. It was strange, being a wolf. The interplay of bone, muscle, and sinew was something else from what it had been. The air ruffled his fur. His sight was dim, flat, and colourless. But he heard every faintest sound, every sigh and whisper, the night’s huge stillness had turned murmurous-many of those tones too high for men ever to hear. And he smelled the air as if it were a living thing, uncounted subtle odours, hints and traces swirling in his nostrils. And there were sensations for which men had no words.
It was like being in a new world, a world which in every way felt different. And he himself was changed, not alone in body but in nerve and brain. His mind moved in wolfish tracks, narrower though somehow keener. He was not able in beast shape to think all the thoughts he did as a man, nor, on becoming man again, to remember all he had sensed and thought as a beast.
On and on! The night and the miles fled beneath his feet. The woods stirred with their secret life. He caught the scent of hare-frightened hare, crouched nearby with big eyes upon him—and his wolf mouth drooled in greed. But his man soul drove the gaunt grey frame ahead. An owl hooted. Trees and hills and ice-scabbarded rivers went by in a blur, the moon trudged across heaven, and still he ran.
And at last, looming against silver-tinged clouds but its towertops crusted with frosty winter stars, he saw Elfheugh. Elfheugh, Elfheugh, the lovely and fallen, now a menace bulking black across the sky!
He flattened himself on his hairy belly and slid up the hill towards those walls. Every wolf-sense reached out, searching around him ... were enemies nigh?
The snaky troll smell came to him. He lowered his tail and bared his fangs. The castle reeked of troll—and of worse, fear and pain and throttled wrath.
With his dim wolf-eyes he could not well see the top of the wall under which he crouched. He heard the guardsmen pace above him, and winded them, and trembled with the longing to rip out their throats.
Easy, easy, he told himself. There they went, they were past him, now to turn his skin again.
Already beast, he needed but to will the change. He writhed, felt the shifting and shrinking, and his brain swam. Then he beat the broad wings of the eagle and rose heavenward.
His sight was sharp now, inhumanly so; and the glory of flight, of wind and skyey endlessness, sang through every feather of him. Yet the austere eagle brain had will to refuse that magnificent drunkenness. His eyes were not an owl’s, and aloft he was a target for troll arrows.