“The world is flesh dissolving off a skull,” mumbled the troll-woman. She clanked her chain and lay back, shuddering. “Birth is but the breeding of maggots therein. Already the skull’s teeth stand forth uncovered by lips, and crows have left its eyesockets empty. Soon wind will blow through all the bones.” She howled as Imric closed the door. “He is waiting for me, he is waiting on the hill where the mist blows ragged, for nine hundred years has he waited. The black cock crows—”
Imric locked the door anew and hastened up the stairs. He had no joy in making changelings, but the chance of getting a human baby was too rare to lose.
When he came out into the courtyard he saw that bad weather was brewing. A wrack of clouds drove across heaven, blacknesses from which the moon fled. Mountainous in the east, with runes of lighting scribbled across, a storm stood on the horizon. Wind hooted and howled.
Imric sprang to the saddle and spurred his horse south. Over the crags and hills they went, across dales and between trees that writhed in the rising gale. The moon cast fitful white gleams across the world, and Imric showed as another such phantom.
He raced with his cloak blowing like bat wings. Moonlight glittered on his mail and his eyes. As he rode along the strands of the lower, flatter Danelaw country, surf clashed at his feet and spray blew on to his cheeks. Now and again a lightning flash showed that waste of running waters. Thunder bawled ever louder in the darkness that followed, boom and bang of great wheels across the sky. Imric urged his horse to yet wilder speed. He had no wish to meet Thor out here in the night.
At Orm’s garth he reopened Ailfrida’s window. She was awake, holding her child to her breast and whispering comfort to him. The wind blew her hair around her face, blinding her. She would suppose it had somehow unlatched the shutters.
Lightning burst white. The thunder that went with it was a hammer-blow. She felt the baby leave her arms. She snatched for him, and felt the dear weight once more, as if it had been kid there. “God be thanked,” she gasped. “I dropped you but I caught you.”
Laughing aloud, Imric rode homeward. But of a sudden he heard his laughter echoed through the noise by a different sound; and he reined in with his breast gone cold. A last break in the clouds cast a moonbeam on the figure which galloped across Imric’s path. A bare glimpse he had, seated on his plunging steed, of the huge eight-legged horse that outran the wind, its rider with the long grey beard and shadowing hat. The moonbeam gleamed on the head of a spear and on a single eye. Hoo, halloo, there he went with his troop of dead warriors and howling hounds. His horn called them; the hoof-beats were like a rush of hail on a roof; and then the pack was gone and rain came raving over the world.
Imric’s mouth grew tight. The Wild Hunt boded no good to those who saw it, and he did not think the one-eyed Huntsman had merely chanced this near to him. But—he must get home now. Lightning seethed around him, and Thor might take a fancy to throw his hammer at anyone abroad. Imric held Orm’s son in his cloak and struck spurs into his stallion.
Ailfrida could see again, and clutched the yelling boy close to her. He should be fed, if only to quiet him. He suckled her, but bit until it hurt.
IV
Skafloc, Imric named the stolen child, and gave him to his sister Leea to nurse. She was as beautiful as her brother, with thinly graven ivory features, unbound silvery-gold tresses afloat beneath a jewelled coronet, and the same moon-flecked twilight-blue eyes as he. Spider-silk garments drifted about her slenderness, and when she danced in the moonlight it was as a white flame to those who watched. She smiled on Skafloc with pale full lips, and the milk that she brought forth by no natural means was sweet fire in his mouth and veins.
Many lords of Alfheim came to the naming-feast, and they brought goodly gifts: cunningly wrought goblets and rings, dwarf-forged weapons, byrnies and helms and shields, clothing of samite and satin and cloth-of-gold, charms and talismans. Since elves, like gods and giants and trolls and others of that sort, knew not old age, they had few children, centuries apart, and the birth of one was a high happening; still more portentous to them was the fostering of a human.
As the feast was going on, they heard a tremendous clatter of hoofs outside Elfheugh, until the walls trembled and the brazen gates sang. Guards winded their trumpets, but none wished to contest the way of that rider and Imric himself met him at the portal, bowing low.
It was a great handsome figure in mail and helm that blazed less brightly than his eyes. The earth shook beneath his horse’s tread. “Greeting, Skirnir,” said Imric. “We are honoured by your visit.” The messenger of the Aisir rode across the moonlit flagstones. At his side, jumping restlessly in the scabbard and glaring like fire of the sun itself, was Prey’s sword, given him for his journey to Jotunheim after Gerd. He bore another sword in his hands; long and broad, unrusted though still black with the earth in which it had lain, and broken in two.
“I bear a naming-gift for your foster son, Imric,” he said. “Keep well this blade, and when he is old enough to swing it tell him the giant Bolverk can make it whole again. The day will come when Skafloc stands in sore need of a good weapon, and this is the Aisir’s gift against that time.”
He threw the broken sword clashing on the ground, whirled his horse about, and in a roar of hoofbeats was lost in the night. The elf-folk stood very still, for they knew the Rsii had some purpose of their own in this, yet Imric could not but obey.
None of the elves could touch iron, so the earl shouted for his dwarf thralls and had them pick it up. Led by him, they bore it to the nethermost dungeons and walled it into a niche near Gora’s cell. Imric warded the spot with rune signs, then left it and avoided the place for a long tune.
Now some years went by and naught was heard from the gods.
Skafloc grew apace, and a bonny boy he was, big and merry, with blue eyes and tawny hair. He was noisier, more boisterous than the few elf children, and grew so much faster that he was a man when they were still unchanged. It was not the way of the elves to show deep fondness for their young, but Leea often did to Skafloc, singing him to sleep with lays that were like sea and wind and soughing branches. She taught him the courtly manners of the elf lords, and also the corybantic measures they trod when they were out in the open, barefoot in dew and drunk with moonlight. Some of what wizard knowledge he gained was from her, songs which could blind and dazzle and lure, songs which moved rocks and trees, songs without sound to which the auroras danced on winter nights.
Skafloc had a happy childhood, at play with the elf young and their fellows. Many were the presences haunting those hills and glens; it was a realm of sorcery, and mortal men or beasts who wandered into it sometimes did not return. Not all the dwellers were safe or friendly. Imric told off a member of his guard to follow Skafloc around.
Sprites whirled in the mists about waterfalls; their voices rang back from the dell cliffs. Skafloc could dimly see them, graceful shining bodies haloed with rainbows. Of moonlit nights, drawn by the glow like other denizens of Faerie, they would come out and sit on the mossy banks, naked save for weeds twisted into their hair and garlands of water lilies; and elf children could then talk to them. Much could the sprites tell, of flowing rivers and fish therein, of frog and otter and kingfisher and what those had to say to each other, of sunlit pebbly bottoms and of secret pools where the water lay still and green—and the rush through the falls in a roar and a rainbow, shooting down to cavort in whirlpools!
Other watery places there were from which Skafloc was warned away, quaking bogs and silent dark tarns, for the dwellers were not good.
Often he would be out in the forest to speak with the little folk who lived in it, humble gnomes with grey and brown clothes and long stocking caps and the men’s beards hanging to their waists. They dwelt in gnarly comfort beneath the largest trees, and were glad to see the elf children. But they feared the grown elves, and thought it well that none of these could squeeze into their homes—unless of course by shrinking to gnome size, which none of the haughty elf lords cared to do.