Hadding could not make out their words. He watched a graybeard warrior speak what must be a last plea, and her naysay it. Slowly, as if the burden were still on their shoulders, the men set up a leather tent. They stocked it with food, drink, blankets, clothes, a stool, and a spear. “No use to her as a weapon,” Hadding muttered, “but maybe of help to her soul.”
The woman’s hand chopped downward. A man dragged a fire drill, with block and tinder, from his pack. Hunkered before the balewood, he got it kindled. She walked off and stood looking northward over the mountains.
Flames hatched. They fledged. Great wings of fire beat red and yellow. Sparks streamed. Air roared. Smoke stormed upward and upward. The westering sun touched it with gold.
The men gathered before Ragnhild. The oldest drew sword and raised it. The others did likewise with whatever arms they bore. The noise of the fire drowned out any speech, but it looked to Hadding as though they said nothing, their throats being too full. They lowered their iron, turned about, and left her standing there.
Hadding waited.
The fire whirled higher and hotter. Ragnhild began to walk around and around it. This brought her close to him as she passed by. He saw that she was fair of hue, with gray eyes, curved nose, firmly held lips, strong chin. Though now and then her fists clenched, she strode unfaltering.
The sun went below the heights. Shadow swept over vastness and pooled in the deeps. The fire guttered low, but must still gleam like a red star across many miles. Wind died away. Air grew swiftly colder. Ragnhild went into her tent. Hadding waited. He kept tautening and loosening his thews, shifting from ham to ham, making any movement he could where he was. Ill would it be if his body stiffened.
A few stars blinked forth, but the sky was blue gray and only the lightest of twilights dwelt below. One could see nearly as far as by day, though clefts and gorges were darkened, cliffs and peaks dim above them. The dying fire growled, spat, hissed.
Ragnhild came back out of the tent. She had not undressed. She stood again with fists knotted, tight and aquiver as a struck harpstring, to stare eastward.
Hadding amidst his boulders heard the noise shortly afterward. Rocks rattled. They slipped aside and downward. Small landslides made a racket like dry waterfalls.
Footsteps sounded, stone-heavy, ever nearer. Breath went stormwind-loud.
Jarnskegg climbed onto the Troll’s Hood.
Taller than three men he loomed, broader and thicker than that, a hill murky against heaven. Skins wrapped bearlike hairiness, with a sharp stench. His mane and beard bristled stiff, rusty black, around shelving brows, pocked lump of a nose, mouthful of greenish snags. In his right hand he bore a club, and tucked under his thong-belt was a sax, both made to his bigness.
He stopped and stood agape. Ragnhild held fast, looking up toward eyes hidden in their bony caves.
“Ha!” Jarnskegg’s voice grated thunderous. “It is you, then, come to your lover.”
Only the embers answered, sparks snapping from their white heart.
The jotun’s left hand reached downward. It shook. Nor were his words altogether steady. “We will be happy, you and I. We both belong in the uplands. I will show you wonderful things. I will stamp on your foes. You shall be queen with me, Ragnhild.”
Hadding slipped a coif onto his head. Above it he set and fastened his helmet. It was of the closed kind, hiding his face behind an iron plate graven with a wolf’s mask. He would need every warding he could have. Shield in hand, he writhed out of the room and around it to the open. Drawing sword, he ran at the giant.,
“Faithlessness!” Jarnskegg screamed, as the earth itself might scream.
“No doing of hers!” Hadding shouted. “Get aside, woman!”
The thurs swung his club on high and back down. Hadding slacked the tightness in his left leg. The right pushed him barely fast enough. The club crashed on stones. Flinders flew. Hadding hewed at the arm behind. The iron bit. Blood welled from a gash, more black than red in this dusk.
Jarnskegg howled and swung anew. Again Hadding slipped free, though by inches. He had long since taught himself how to make the lesser use of his lame right foot, but was not as swift as once he had been.
He sprang close in against a calf whose knee was not much below his eyes. He slashed. Jarnskegg stooped. His left hand snatched. Hadding bounced back from it. His sword sliced across the fingers.
He knew of giants that their sheer weight made them slower than men. Most humans knew it not. They had naught to do with such beings. They had heard, or seen, how fast a giant walked. They seldom stopped to think that that was be. cause the stride was long, not quick.
Back and forth the battle went. Ragnhild stood offside as far as she could get without fleeing. Her eyes were wide, her fists held above a bosom that rose and fell.
Hadding ducked and wove, shifted and leaped. When he saw an opening he sprang in and cut. At once he bolted cleat If that club smote, he would die.
Bellowing his wrath, again and again Jarnskegg swung. The fight surged near the low-burnt fire. Hadding skittered along its edge. The heat from the coals laved him.
Suddenly he yelled in the Old Tongue that he had heard when he was a boy, “Maggot from Ymir’s rotten flesh, Hel herself shall spurn you!”
Never had the jotun thought to hear from a man words out of Jotunheim. Astounded as much as enraged, he blundered forward,
