“Now, as I told you, Gram is gone, slain in battle against King Svipdag. Before leaving for that war, he sent Gudorm back to me for safekeeping. He felt the lad was too young to go along with him. Svipdag’s a ruthless one who’d most likely have him killed lest later he seek revenge. Gram had a second wife who bore him this second son, the bairn Hadding. When she got the news, she also sent her child to me, with a trusty man and a wet nurse.

“Gram and I were good friends, who’d fought side by side in the past. But I’m no more than the leading yeoman in an outlying shire of the Danish kingdom. If Svipdag’s men come ransack my steading and neighborhood, I can do nothing. It seems me best that I hide the boys away with you. You’ll find that the Skjoldungs are not an unthankful. breed.”

“Hm, hm,” growled Vagnhöfdi, tugging his beard. “We here are strangers to humans, ill fitted to rear the sons of a king.” He was not being lowly, which was not in him. His hundreds of years had made him canny.

“Gudorm is close to manhood,” Braki said. “As for Hadding, belike from time to time I can smuggle in whatever he may need, or come myself to help teach him. I’ll leave his nurse, too.”

“No,” said Vagnhöfdi. “My daughter has lately borne a child, which died. The milk still aches in her.”

He did not, then or ever, say who the father had been. Maybe he did not know. Maybe she did not. She had met someone in the woods who kindled her—another giant? A god, with something in mind that went beyond lust?

The thrall wench gasped, then broke into sobs of gladness, off on the rim of the men’s ring.

“I must think on this,” the jotun added. “Stay the night and we will talk again tomorrow “

The sun went down. He and his woman sought the high-piled skins on which they rested, and drew other pelts over them. Braki and his troop laid whatever each of them had brought along on the floor.

“Ugh,” muttered Gudorm in his ear. “Must I truly den in this filth and loneliness?”

“Take what you can get,” answered Braki curtly.

Little Hadding was silent. Hardgreip had clasped him to her dugs. His eyes at those white hillocks, watching the fire die down, were blue and bleak.

III