Poul Anderson - The Broken Sword

She swung around, her face alight. “You care about me?

“Why, of course, as about the whole of Alfheim.”

“And ... Freda?”

“For her I care more than for the whole rest of the world, gods and men and Faerie together. I love her.”

Leea turned forward again. Her voice fell colourless: “I will be able to save myself. I can always tell Valgard you forced or tricked me.”

They came out on the first floor. It was a bustle of scuttling guards, uproar and confusion. “Hold!” bawled a troll when he saw them.

Leea’s countenance flared like fire-gleam off ice. “Would you halt the earl?” she asked.

“Pardon-your pardon, lord,” stammered the troll. “ ’Twas only that-I saw you but a moment ago, lord—”

They went out into the courtyard. Every nerve in Skafloc shrieked that he should run, every muscle was knotted in expectancy of the cry that would mean he was found out. Run, run! He shook with the task of walking slowly.

Few trolls were outside. The first white streaks of the hated dawn were in the east. It was very cold.

Leea stopped at the west gate and signed that it should be opened. She looked into Skafloc’s eyes with a withdrawn blind gaze.

“From here you must make your own way,” she said softly. “Know you what to do?”

“Somehow,” he answered, “I must find the giant Bolverk and make him bring it form anew for me.”

“Bolverk-evil-worker-his very name is a warning. I have begun to guess what sword this is and why no dwarf would dare reforge it.” Leea shook her head. “I know that stubborn set to your jaw, Skafloc. Not all the hosts of hell shall stop you—only death, or the loss of your will to fight. But what of your dear Freda on this quest?” She sneered the last words.

“She will come along, though I will try to persuade her to shelter.” Skafloc smiled in pride and love. The dim dawn-light touched his hair with frosty gold. “We are not to be parted.”

“No-o-o. However, as to finding the giant, who can tell you the way?”

Skafloc’s face bleakened. “It is not a good thing to do,” he said, “but I can raise a dead man. The dead know many things, and Imric taught me the charms to wring speech from diem.”

“Yet it is a desperate deed, for the dead hate that breaking of their timeless sleep, and wreak vengeance for it. Can you stand against a ghost?”

“I must try. I think my magic will be too strong for it to strike at me.”

“Perhaps not at you, but—” Leea paused before going on slyly: “That would not be as terrible a revenge anyway as what it could work through-say-Freda.”

She watched the blood drain from his cheeks and lips. Her own went whiter. “Do you care for the girl that much?” she whispered.

“Aye. More,” he said thickly. “You are right, Leea. I cannot risk it. Better Alfheim should fall than-than—”

“No, wait! I was going to give you a plan. But I would ask you one thing first.”

“Hurry, Leea, hurry!”

“Only one thing. If Freda should leave you—no, no, do not stop to tell me she won’t, I merely ask-if she should, what would you do?”

“I know not. I cannot dream of that.”

“Perhaps-win the war and come back here? Become elf again?”

“Belike. I know not. Hurry, Leea!”

She smiled her cat-smile. Her eyes rested dreamy upon him. “I was simply going to say this,” she told him, “that instead of raising just any dead man, call on those who would be glad to help you and whose own revenge you would be working. Has not Freda a whole family, slain by Valgard? Raise them, Skafloc!”

For a moment he stood moveless. Then he dropped the sword-bundle, swept Leea into his arms, and kissed her with numbing power. Grabbing anew the burden, he sprang through the gate and rushed into the forest.

Leea stared after him, fingers on her tingling lips. If she was right about what sword that was, the same thing was about to happen that had happened aforetime. She began to laugh.

Valgard learned that his likeness had been seen within the castle. His leman, looking dazed and atremble, said forlornly that, something had cast a spell on her while she slept, so that she remembered naught. But there were tracks in the snow, and the troll hounds could follow dimmer trails than this.

At sunset, the earl led his warriors on horseback in pursuit.

Freda stood in her thicket, staring through the bare moon-ghostly woods towards Elfheugh.

She was cold on this second night of her waiting, so cold that it had long since passed feeling and become like a part of herself. She had huddled in the shelter among the horses, but they were cool and elfly, not the warm sweet-smelling beasts of home. Strangely, it was the thought of Orm’s horses that brought her loneliness back to her. She felt as if she were the last living creature in a world of nothing but moonlight and snow.

She dared not weep. Skafloc, Skafloc! Lived he yet?

A rising wind blew clouds ever thicker across the sky, so that the moon seemed to flee great black dragons which swallowed it and spewed it briefly back out. The wind wailed and roared around her, whipping her garb, sinking teeth into her flesh. Hoo, hoo, it sang, blowing a sudden sheet of snowdrift before it, white under the moon, hoo, halloo, hunting you!

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.