"Nevertheless, I doubt that it was wise to join hands with an English
traitor."

The older man said in a tone of slowly gathering anger, "I told you to make
the bargain, and I stand at the back of my counsels. Have you become like the
wind, which tries every quarter of the sky because it knows not its own mind?"

While the young man warned in his heavy voice, "You will have your will in
this as in everything, King Canute; but I tell you that if you keep the
bargain, you will act against my advice."

Randalin had been mistaken in her deductions. It was not the brawny body that
was King of the Danes; the leader's spirit lodged in the slender frame of the
youth with the cloak of yellow hair.

He raised from his hands now a face of boyish sullenness, and sat glaring over
his clenched fists at his counsellors.

"Certainly it would become a great misfortune to me if I should act against
the advice of Rothgar Lodbroksson," he made stinging answer. "He is as wise
and long-sighted as though he had eaten a dragon's heart. It was he who gave
me the advice, when the English broke faith, to vent my rage upon the
hostages. Men have not yet ceased to lift their noses at me for the
unkingliness of the deed." His eyes blazed at the memory. They were not
pleasant eyes when he was angry; the blue seemed to fade from them until they
were two shining colorless pools in his brown face.

The son of Lodbrok shrugged his huge shoulders in stolid resignation; but the
wrinkled forehead of the older man became somewhat smoother. There was nothing
Jotun-like about his long, lean features, yet his expression was little