“You plant well, King,” said Thorgnyr, shaking his head. “Pray Gods the mould prove not barren and unapt.”
A man of the King’s bodyguard came in and louting before the King asked would he see Styrbiorn. The King bade admit him straight. Styrbiorn came swiftly in, saw Thorgnyr, and came to a full stop betwixt the carved jambs of the doorway. He looked from the King to Thorgnyr, from Thorgnyr to the King. His face grew grim and the hair of his head was raised a little, like the heckles of a savage dog in the presence of an enemy. “It is the worst of shames,” said he, “if you, Lord, will discourse thus friendly with that old man. Let lead him out and hew him before the doors; that were a good deed.”
The King gazed sternly at him, but spake no word.
“Lord,” said Styrbiorn, standing still in the doorway in the light of the fire, “I came to ask a boon of you. And this it is, that you find me twenty ships, Lord, and suffer me go a-harrying. And give me leave too to slay your outlaw Lambi the White, which these shagamuffin bonders and that old man did openly name for king. And that was the biggest shame ever heard tell of.”
Thorgnyr’s eyes were bent on the young man from under their deep-jutting eaves. His face was calm and his brow unruffled, but none might see the eyes of him watching from those dark sockets where the fitful firelight never pierced.
“Kinsman,” said King Eric, “thou art young. Therefore at thine injustice and want of judgment I wonder not: years and knowledge shall mend it. For the rest, not twenty but sixty ships shalt thou have, and a full tale of men thereto, and it is my will that thou be three winters abroad. There shalt thou, being king-born, learn the trade of kings. After that, if out of so many and great scapes thou come back safe and sound, I think I shall find thee a man grown, and a right son of thy father’s, and a right kinsman of mine. And that shall be the best day of all my life’s days, when I shall receive thee in thy father’s stead, joint King with me in Upsala.”
When the King his uncle had so spoken, Styrbiorn’s face put off in an instant his fierce and dogged look and he looked upon the King with so open and merry a smile as must have made even an ill-willer wish to love him, and his hair bristled no more but lay down as it should upon his head. He came forward into the room.
“As for this Lambi,” said the King, “he is naught: a fly: a gob of spittle: I regard him not at all. I forbid thee, on thy life, to fight with him in Sweden or the coasts thereof. But if ye hap together in the outlands or on the main seas, why, let it befall as Fate shall will.”
“King,” answered Styrbiorn, “you have nobly dealt with me. And I swear to abide by all you bid me.”
The King said, “I will now that ye twain be friends, thou and Thorgnyr. I will you to handsel friendship to each other, here in this place.”
Thorgnyr held out his hand; but Styrbiorn paused, then stepped a pace backward. “I’ll give him my hand,” he said, “when I can give it with a good will. Another day.”
“Well,” said Thorgnyr, “at least I love open honesty.”
“The lad hath been sore tried,” said the King when Styrbiorn was gone. “I do see greatness in him.”
Thorgnyr looked at the King from the inscrutable dark of his deep-thatched eye-sockets. “Ay, Lord,” he said. “But the end tries all.”
III
Queen Sigrid the Haughty
Styrbiorn now fared abroad according to the King’s command. And summer wore, and winter, and when winter was well past King Eric came south to Arland to guest with Skogul-Tosti, the father of that Sigrid who was with Styrbiorn on King Olaf’s howe, and saw visions there as is aforesaid. Tosti was a great friend of the King’s, and made him noble entertainment; and when the King had sat there three days with his folk that were with him Tosti prayed him sit another three, and when those were done he prayed him yet three days more, so that nine days all told they feasted it in Tosti’s hall.
Skogul-Tosti was a portly man and a stately, and the most open handed of men in all things which belong to housekeeping, and a showy man in his dress. It liked him better that his worthiness should call him to that reputation, to be the greatest man in all the countryside he might overlook from his home-mead at Hawkby, rather than he should exercise larger dominion over lands and folk and yet be called but the King’s man, and the tool of a greatness not his own. He was the greatest of warriors, and spent much time a-warring. His wife was named Gudrid. She was a stirring woman, of the kin of the Earls of West Gautland. She was fair to look on, but folk deemed her over proud and grasping and somewhat hard of heart.
At
