"But the jarl is merciful, as ever."

"When one finds a coiled adder, one slays it. One does not say,
'Bide alive, because I saw you too soon to be harmed by you.' Mercy
to the beast that might be, but not to the child who shall some day
set his hand on it."

"Eh, well! The wind is off shore, and it is a far cry to succour,
and Ran waits the drowning."

"I know not that Ran cares for women."

"Maybe a witch like herself. They are coming!"

Now through a winding gap in the line of dunes comes from inland a
little company of men and women, swiftly and in silence. The two
men range themselves on either bow of the boat, and stand at
attention as the newcomers near them, and so wait. Maybe there are
two-score people, led by a man and woman, who walk side by side
without word or look passing between them. The man is tall and
handsome, armed in the close-knit ring-mail shirt of the Dane, with
gemmed sword hilt and golden mountings to scabbard and dirk, and
his steel helm and iron-gray hair seem the same colour in the
shadowless light of the dull sky overhead. One would set his age at
about sixty years.

But the woman at his side is young and wonderfully lovely. She is
dressed in white and gold, and her hair is golden as the coiled
necklace and armlets she wears, and hangs in two long plaits far
below her knees, though it is looped in the golden girdle round her