“You never say anything else!” Gudorm screamed. “I’m sick of it!” He leaped up and ran out. Nor did he come back until after dark, when the rest were asleep.

In the morning-Braki took him off alone. Gudorm told his foster father how he hated this rough and lonely life and was bound that he would take Svipdag’s offer. Braki put it a little more mildly to the thursir.

They made Gudorm swear that he would utter no word to anyone about Hadding. Hardgreip said he must not leave yet. She seethed strange things in a kettle, cut runes in an ash stave, daubed them with blood from a nick she made in his thumb, and sang eerily beneath a crooked moon. “If you betray us, a doom will come on you that is not good,” she told him.

“We had no need of your nasty witchcraft,” he said, white-faced, “and I will be well rid of you.”

Thereafter he rode off with Braki, and from Braki’s home back to Zealand. Svipdag met him without much warmth but with full honor, while Gro watched. The king paid him for his father’s death and, Gram’s jarls being all dead or fled, made Gudorm, young though he was, jarl over the whole of Den-mark. Men said to each other that belike this lad would more trustworthily keep the peace and gather in the scot than someone might who was full grown.

Now Svipdag led a fleet over the Sound and up the Baltic shore to the Skerrygarth. Rowing through that many-islanded water, deep into Svithjod, he landed, struck swiftly, and took Uppsala. There he held a great slaughter to the gods, and began overrunning the whole kingdom. Houses burned, men fell slain, women were made booty, until one by one the shires yielded to him.

His thoughts about Gram’s child by Signy were few and short. It was not with its mother. Nobody could tell him where it might be, nor felt that it mattered. What danger was in a mewling babe? Belike she had left it at some poor croft, where neighbors would hardly mark it among the other bantlings. If it lived to grow up, it would know nothing more than how to grub a meager living out of the ground. Svipdag soon forgot about it.

V