They strode onward with the same unwearying swiftness. “I was Hadding,” knew he who had returned.

“Thus were you born to the house of the Skjoldungs,” said the Wanderer. “Thus did you live, a man of flesh, bone, and blood, hero, father of kings, but still a man. You shared the gladness and grief, wounds and weal, victory and vanquishment, love and loss that are the lot of humans, and at last you died as they do.

“Yet the soul in Hadding was yours. He had the freedom to choose that is every man’s, but being you, he took what you would have taken. And I launched his life on Midgard into such waters that it would likely in some wise follow the course that you follow among the gods. I helped him steer clear of the worst that had befallen you, and helped him again when black wizardry would have overwhelmed him before he had won what was his. Otherwise he who was you wrought his own fulfillment, which was likewise yours. He won a name that will live as long as the world stands, and that honor is also yours.”

“You sent him on strange ways.”

“Yes, for I wanted him to know fully who and what the one was who befriended him in his need. He had seen too much of trollcraft, too early and too closely.”

“Not all of them who wielded it were his foes.”

“True. Such was the way he must go, like to the way that you and your kinfolk had gone. In the beginning, the untamed earth, ruthless, reckless, and shameless. Then war and wild farings, the way of the Aesir. Then the flowering of the soul that is yours, which shall grow beyond ours.

“For you alone among us will live without blame; and the spaewife who made known to me what shall be has foretold that at the downfall of the gods, you will go home to your Vanir; and when the new world rises from the sea and Baldr comes back from the dead, you will be there to help build its peace.”

They stopped, for they had reached the foot of the rainbow. Its trembling bridge soared to the walls of Asgard.

Before they betrod it, Odin laid a hand on his fellow’s shoulder. “But first,” he said, “here and now, will you renew the oaths we swore? At the end of his life, Hadding gave himself to me. Thereby you took what I offered you, and we are in brotherhood again.”

“Yes,” answered Njord, god of the sea, “from this day to the last, we are brothers.”

Dedication

To
Diana Paxson
farer in lands afar

Afterword