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Updated: July 21, 2025
Are you not ashamed to have failed on so easy a riddle?" To her surprise, his gravity deepened almost to horror. "Love-token!" he repeated; and suddenly he laid his hands on her shoulders and forced her gently to give him eye for eye. "Randalin, if I comply with you in this matter, will you answer me a question? Answer with such care as though your life nay, as though my life depended on it?"
"She is a foolish woman," Randalin said impatiently, "and if she do not take care, she will feel it for speaking so. See how his fingers tap his belt for all that his face is so still." His face was curiously still as he regarded the beautiful Elfgiva, and stilly curious, as though he were examining some familiar object in a new light. "You believe then that I had him murdered?" he asked.
You have no cause to reproach me with lack of faith in you, Randalin, for when every happening even your own words made it appear as if it were love for Rothgar Lodbroksson which brought you into the camp, I looked into your eyes and believed them against all else." In the intensity of the living present he forgot the dead past until he saw its ghosts troop like gray shadows across her face.
He did not release them immediately but tightened his grasp as his eyes, grown suddenly keen, searched her face. His voice dropped low. "Randalin, it is very unlikely that Elfgiva's scratches have brought you to this. Do you stand in need of reminding that any man who has angered you has angered me? That my sword lies under your hand?"
"And it is the King's will that you get into a boat and come to him at once." The rush of the crowd to the water-side to question the messenger gave Randalin her chance for freedom; and she was not slow in taking it. A moment more, and she was in the very top of the willow-tree, clasping her hands and wringing them in alternate thanksgiving and terror.
"Gram told us that they had taken you." Gazing at her out of horror-filled eyes, Randalin stood quite still in her embrace. Her story came from her in jerks, and each fragment seemed to leave her breathless, though she spoke slowly. "I broke away," she said. "They stood around me in a ring.
Again she moved back, her beautiful head tilted in birdlike examination. Randalin arose slowly and stood before her with widening eyes. But it was not long that the Lady of Northampton had for her or for the wreath. Now her attention was attracted to the farthest group of guards and huntsmen, whose motions and shouting seemed to indicate some unusual commotion.
Randalin lay along the horse's neck now, and her senses had begun to slip away from her like the tide from the shore. It occurred to her that she was dying, and that the Valkyrias could not find her if she should be carried too far away from the battle-field. Trying to hold them back, she stretched a feeble hand toward the trees; and it seemed to her that they did not glide past quite so rapidly.
"At this gait, he could be dead and in his grave without my knowing it!" Randalin cried in despair, and her voice made it quite clear that "he" no longer meant the King. Since there was no one to see it, she even allowed her head to fall forward on her arms, and let the ache in her throat ease itself in a little sob.
For all that she is the fruit of darkness, it was permitted by the Lord that Randalin, Frode's daughter, should be born with a light in her soul. It was in my prayers that we might be enabled to feed that light as it were a sacred lamp, to the end that in God's good time the spreading glory of its brightness might deliver her from the shadows forever."
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