Dawn broke as white as Hunding’s face, where he stood atremble before Uffi. Hurt king’s men lay or sat on the dew-heavy sward around the guesthouse. Women had come from Uppsala to help tend them. Soon they would be brought back into the town. Early bird calls seemed louder than their few weary words. Thumps and rattles sounded dully from within, where warriors went about cutting the throats of wounded Danes and ransacking the dead. A breeze blew chill.

For half the night, since he got the news, Hunding had raged and ranged around. Only now had he found his brother. “This was the, the foulest unfaith,” he stammered. “You’ve cast our honor on—the dungheap.”

Uffi scowled. “Naught did we ever owe that wolf but revenge for our grandfather, our father, and all the harm he did our folk.”

“He felled Svipdag and Asmund man against man, in open war, after Svipdag killed his own father. He wrought no worse in Svithjod than we in Denmark. We won fame for what we did, fighting such a hero. Then he came here willing to make the peace that you, you, offered. And all along it was false. You were plotting his murder from the first.”

“Be still!” rasped Uffi. “I’ll hear no more of that yammer.”

“You shall hear nothing further from me,” Hunding told him. “I disown you. Never more will I stand at your side, nor will any man who is true to me.”

He turned and stalked off, shuddering. Uffi glowered after him. Suddenly the king’s shoulders slumped a little He made himself very busy giving orders about the care of men and booty.

Day brightened. Guardsmen who had known Hadding by sight came one after another to tell him they had not found the Dane-king among the fallen, neither his own nor servants who had gotten in the way of a blow. At last Uffi howled, went in, and threw the lichs aside like a dog burrowing after a bad-get None of the gaping gray faces was the one he hated.

He straightened. For a while his throat was too tight for him to speak. “The wolf has sneaked free,” he thereupon croaked. “We must set the hounds after him.”

For days riders went everywhere in the shire, searching, asking, uttering threats and offering rewards. They caught a few Danes who had also gotten out, and sent their heads back to Uffi. But nowhere did even the most skilled trackers find spoor of Hadding. Uffi slaughtered kine and thralls in the shaw, calling on the gods to make his foe be dead. More could he not do.