The Queen, startled so out of her sweet and pleasant dreams, sat up, first in amaze: then, meeting her lover’s wild and unfriendly regard, her proud face darkened and she rendered him back look for look in that kind. He turned with a sudden blundering twist of the body; but she was, as for this time, the swifter, and, leaping up and catching her cloak about her, stood betwixt him and the door. He swerved sidelong from her and came heavily against the wall, face to the wall, his eyes buried in his great hands.
The Queen beheld him awhile in silence. “It is likely thou art some churl’s son,” said she at length; “or some changeling. No man of kingly blood would carry it thus, after honours the like of which I’ve done thee: more’s the pity.”
Styrbiorn moved like a blinded man towards the door; then, finding her in the way, gave back a pace. Then he said, yet with eyes averted and in alien and hard tones half-choked, “Let me go, Sigrid.”
“I’ll let thee go,” said she, “when thou speakest to me like my noble kinsman, not like a baseborn thrall.”
For a moment he paused as if doubting what were best to do, then lifted up his head and strode forward as if he were minded to thrust her aside by force. At hands’-reach he halted. The ghastliness of his look as he stood and looked upon her took from her for a minute all power of thought or motion. Then he opened his mouth and said, “What have I to do with thee, a faithless bitch?”
With that, he turned from her, catching in his two hands the pillars of the bed. Under the grip of his hands and the weight of him flung between them the great oak pillars shook and creaked. He turned again, dazed yet with this nightmare, steadying himself yet with one hand by the pillar of the bed. He looked at her now with eyes like some dog’s eyes asking to be let out: naught else matters.
But the Queen faced him, back to the door, staring. Under the injury of those words she had moved not an eyelid. But instant by instant she seemed stonier grown; her face whitened, even to the lips; and then the blood flooded back terribly. She said in a low tone, the words even and steady like water dropping and clear as the clicking of blades, “But this shall be thy death, then.” Therewith so loud shrieked Sigrid the Queen that the cups rang on the wall and the geese screamed in the King’s garth.
She gave him way now: but he was not quicker in the doorway than those women of hers, hearing this larum, and others running. Styrbiorn, thrusting past them like one straught of his right wits, butted into old Thorgnyr three paces without the Queen’s chamber-door. He swerved past the old man, and Helgi caught at him. He smote Helgi so good a whirt on the ear as laid him out senseless. Styrbiorn came so to his own chamber, yet not so well but that Thorgnyr and Helgi and some four or five women of the Queen’s had seen him in such sort rush out from the Queen’s bedchamber.
Eric the King came now, roused by that great cry, cloaked and with bare sword in one hand and a lamp in the other, along the passage to the Queen’s chamber. They gave back all before him to right and left: not one, neither Thorgnyr nor any other, took heart to speak word to him, but gave back and let him by. He came in, looked on her an instant, then shut to the door behind him. Sigrid fell down at his feet and clasped him about the knees in a great passion of tears. The King suffered that to have its course. Choking and sobbing she let him understand little by little to what vile use his darling nephew, lust-burned and ale-heated, had by violence turned her. The King heard all out, silent and without sign or stir, looking down the while on her head bowed and shaken with her sobbing and crying, on the nape of her neck where the first little hairs shadowed the white skin with their prettily curled growth, and, where her cloak opened at the throat, on that sweet and shadowy place where her breasts pressed one against the other like two doves perched together on the edge of a roof. When she had told her tale, she looked up in his face and cried and said, “Lord, why didst thou leave me?”
Like a great tower and big the King stood over her. He said nothing: only lifted up his jaw a little and so stood looking steadily before him over her head, with set face. Sigrid, frighted with his coldness, rose up, clinging her arms now about his neck, shivering and weeping with her face hidden on the King’s breast. Stone still he stood. His face looked drawn and hard, awful to look on, unsearchable as the brow of night, and sad like the sea under a winter dawn. At length, coming out of that study, he looked down at her again, gently loosed her hands from about his neck and without word said went from the chamber. Sigrid, looking at his face, deemed it wholesomer to speak no word but let him go.
A bleak greyness of morning began now to pale their lamps and the last embers of the long fires in the King’s hall. In a little while there came a man to Thorgnyr from the King bidding him come and see the King straightway. Thorgnyr went, and found the King sitting armed in his chair with a drawn sword laid across his
