Hoo, hoo! echoed the troll horns. Freda stiffened. Fear went through her like a dagger. They hunted—and what game could it be save—
Soon she heard the baying of their hounds, nearer, nearer, the huge black dogs with red coals for eyes. O Skafloc! Freda stumbled forward, scarce hearing her own sobs. Skafloc!
Fresh darkness closed on her. She crashed into a bole. Wildly she beat at it, get out of the way, you thing, step aside, Skafloc needs me-Oh!
In the returned moonlight she saw a stranger. Tall he was, with a cloak tossing like wings around him. Old he was, his long hair and beard blowing wolf-grey in that hurried light; but the spear he carried could have been wielded by no mortal man. Though a wide-brimmed hat threw his face into shadow, she saw the gleam of a single eye.
She trod backward, gasping, seeking to call upon Heaven. The voice stopped her, deep, slow, a part of the wind yet somehow moving steady as a glacier: “I bring help, not harm. Would you have your man back?”
She sank dumbly to her knees. For a moment, in the blurry, wavering moonlight, she saw past drifting snow, past frozen miles, to the hill up which Skafloc fled. Weaponless he was, spent and reeling, and the hounds were on his heels. Their barking filled the sky.
The vision faded. She looked to the night shape that stood over her. “You are Odin,” she whispered, “and it is not for me to have dealings with you.”
“Nonetheless I can save your lover—and I alone would, for he is heathen.” The god’s one eye held her as if she were speared. “Will you pay my price?”
“What do you want?” she gasped.
“Hurry, the hounds are about to rend him!”
“I will give it to you—I will give it—”
He nodded. “Then swear by your own soul and everything which is holy to you, that when I come for it you will give me what is behind your girdle.”
“I swear!” she cried. Tears blinded her, the weeping of one set free. Odin could not be relentless as they said, not when he asked for such a mere token, the drug Skafloc had given her. “I swear it, lord, and may earth and Heaven alike forsake me if I do not keep my oath.”
“That is well,” he said. “Now the trolls are off on a false spoor, and Skafloc is here. Woman, remember your word!”
Darkness came back as a cloud bedecked the moon. When it had blown past, the Wanderer was gone.
Freda hardly knew that. She was clinging to her Skafloc. And he, bewildered at being snatched somehow from the jaws of the troll hounds to safety and his darling, was not too mazed to answer her kisses.
XX
They spent no more than two days resting in the cave before Skafloc busked himself to go.
Freda did not weep, but she felt the unshed tears thick in her throat. “You think this is dawn for us,” she said once, the second day. “I tell you it is night.”
He looked at her, puzzled. “What mean you?”
“The sword is full of wickedness. The deed we go to do is wrong. No good can come of it.”
He laid his hands on her shoulders. “I understand you do not like making your kin travel the troublous road,” he said. “Nor do I. Yet who else among the dead will help and not harm us? Stay here, Freda, if you cannot bear it.”
“No-no, I will be at your side even at the mouth of the grave. It is not that I fear my folk. Living or dead, there is love between us; and the love is yours too, now.” Freda lowered her glance and bit her lip to halt its trembling. “Had you or I thought of this, I would have less foreboding. But Leea meant no boon in her rede.”
“Why should she wish ill on us?”
Freda shook her head and would not answer. Skafloc said slowly: “I must own that I like not altogether your meeting with Odin. It is not his way to set a low price, but what he really is after I cannot guess.”
“And the sword-Skafloc, if that broken sword is made whole once more, a dreadful power will be loose in the world. It will work unending woe.”
“For the trolls.” Skafloc straightened until his fair locks touched the smoky cave roof. His eyes flashed lightning-blue in the gloom. “There is no other road than the one we take, hard though it be. And no man outlives his weird. Best to meet it bravely face to face.”
“And we side by side.” Freda bowed her shining bronze head on his breast, and now the tears flowed heavily. “One thing do I ask, my dearest of all.”
“What is that?”
“Ride not out this eventide. Wait one day more, only one, and then we will go.” Her fingers dug into the muscles of his arms. “No longer than that, Skafloc.”
He nodded unwillingly. “Why?”
She would not say, and in their love that followed he forgot the question. But Freda remembered. Even when she held him most closely and felt his heartbeat against hers, she remembered, and it gave a terrible yearning to her kisses.
In some blind way, she knew this was their last night.
The sun rose, glimmered wanly at noon, and sank behind heavy storm-clouds scudding in from the sea. A wolf-toothed wind howled over the breakers that dashed themselves to noisy death on the strand rocks. Soon after darkfall there came for a while the far-off sound of hoofs at gallop through the sky, outrunning the wind, and a baying and yelping. Skafloc himself shivered. The Wild Hunt was out.
They mounted their elf horses, leading the other two with their goods, for they did not expect to return. Lashed across his back, Skafloc had the broken sword wrapped in a wolf skin. His elven blade was sheathed at his side, his left hand carried a spear, and both riders wore helm and byrnie under their furs.
Freda looked back at the cave mouth as they trotted off. Cold and murky it was, but they had been happy there. She pulled her eyes away and held them steadfastly forward of her.
“Ride!” shouted Skafloc, and they broke into full elf-gallop. The wind skirled and bit at them. Sleet and spindrift blew off the waters in stinging sheets, white under the flying fitful moon. The sea bellowed inward from a wild horizon, bursting on skerries and strand. When the breakers foamed back, the rattle of stones was like some ice-bound monster stirring and groaning. The night was gale and sleet and surging waves, a racket that rang to the riven driven clouds. The moon climbed higher, keeping pace with their surge and clatter of gallop along the cliffs.
Now swiftly, swiftly, best of horses, swiftly southward by the sea, spurn ice beneath your hoofs, strike sparks from rocks, gallop, gallop! Ride with the air loud in your ears and bleak in your lungs, ride through a moon-white curtain of hissing sleet, through darkness and the foeman’s land. Swiftly, ride swiftly, south to greet a dead man in his howe!
A troll horn screamed when they raced past Elfheugh harbour. Witchsight or no, they could not make out the castle, but they heard hoofbeats behind them. That thunder soon dwindled; the trolls rode not so fast, nor would they follow where their quarry went tonight.
Swiftly, swiftly, through woods where the wind skirls in icy branches, dodging between trees that claw with naked twigs-past frozen bog, over darkling hilkrest, down into the low country and across bare fields-gallop, gallop!
Freda began to know the way. The wind still drove sleet before it in these parts, but the clouds were thinning and the crooked moon cast glitter on ploughlands and paddocks locked in snow. She had been here before. She remembered this river and that darkened croft, here she had gone hunting with Ketil, there she and Asmund had fished throughout one lazy summer day, in yonder meadow had Asgerd woven chains of daisies for them-how long ago?
The tears froze on her cheeks. She felt Skafloc reach out to touch her arm, and she smiled back into his shadowy face. Her heart could scarce endure this return, but he was with her, and when they were together there was nothing they could not stand.