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Updated: June 13, 2025
"Then I heard from within the sound of wonderful music and the singing of many people; and I went near to listen, for the like of that was never yet heard in our land. And when I was even at the door, from out the church came in many voices my own name, as if it were being mingled with praises and so you woke me." "It is a good dream," said Sighard bluntly.
Then I came out, and the father told me that the king would be here anon. We walked to and fro waiting for him, and presently he came with Hilda's father, Sighard, in attendance.
"Our charge has been made away with, and how we cannot tell. We shall pay for this with our lives." Then Sighard said, "He cannot be far off. Men think! How can he have gone hence? Who would make away with him?" But there was no answer to these questions. The thing remained a mystery. If there was any plot, these three honest thanes were not in it.
Now Offa had turned angrily as he heard Sighard speak to the queen in no courteous wise, but Erling had not heeded his look or what wrath might light on him. Before he could say aught, and it was plain that he was going to speak angrily enough, Offa heard the first words of the Dane, and checked himself. And when he had heard, he said in a cold voice, slowly, "So that tale is true after all.
I will tell her all that you have done, now; and if in after days you may come to us, do so. Bide and tend Sighard and Hilda, and mind that there is sore peril to both of them so long as Quendritha lives. She is shut up now, but all the more has her mind freedom to plan and plot the fall of those who have seen her at her worst.
Sighard joined me, leading his horse; and another thane, a Mercian, came up also. They had been to right and left of me in the line, and had seen the hounds left with me. For a quarter of an hour we stood there talking a little under our breath, but mostly listening with some envy to the sounds of the hunt ahead of us where wolf and boar died at the nets, turning in grim despair on their foes.
Now of all things which I had in my mind, the first seemed to me to be that I must ride eastward with Hilda and see the mother of the slain king, to give what account I might of that charge she had laid on me. But if Sighard had been prevented from getting homeward, it was certain that so should I. Wherefore we should not be watched for on any westward road, and that way, at least, was open.
"Well," said Sighard, looking after Gymbert as he went, "if yon thane had it in his mind to spear you, or to ride over you, or anywise to send you on the tusks of the boar, he went the right way to work. He rode straight at you from behind, as if he meant it." "But for his man here the paladin had gone home on a litter, feet foremost, for certain," said the Mercian.
My comrade is Werbode of old Saxony, one of the messengers also. The third of us is my man, a Dane." Sighard laughed, as if highly amused. "That explains it all. I have been puzzling all the way hither at the divers ways in which you three spoke. Your Dane's tongue is almost good Anglian, and yet not quite.
If they slay us maybe that is no loss, but at least we have done what we should." Without another word Sighard leaped into that awesome pit, and Witred followed him. Then went our three thanes, and Selred and I stood alone in the room. I handed the torch down to the last man, and so saw that from the place where the chair was set a low stone-arched passage led westward into darkness.
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