The Jotun smiled grimly. “Is that the expectation you are stringing your bow with? It will fail you as surely as the hair of Hother’s wife failed him. The wager shall be as you have made it; and may I lack strength if I do not deal with him—” He paused, blinking like a startled owl, as his royal foster-brother leaped to his feet and fronted him with shouts of laughter.
“You dolt, you!” Canute cried. “Do you not see it yet? Frode’s child is a woman!”
Rothgar’s jaw dropped and his bulging eyes seemed in danger of following. “What!” he gasped; and then his voice rose to a roar. “And the Englishman is her lover?”
“You are wiser than I expected,” the King laughed. “I intend to call you Thrym after this, for it is unlikely that Loke made a greater fool of the Giant. Your enemies will make derisive songs about it.”
Stamping with rage, the Jotun hammered his huge fist upon a tree-trunk until bark flew in every direction. “King, I will give you every ring off my hand if you will give me leave to strangle her!”
“You remind me that I will take one of your rings now,” Canute said, reaching out and opening the mallet-like fist that he might make his choice. Then, as he fitted on his prize and held it critically to the light, he added with more sympathy: “I will arrange for you a more profitable revenge than that. I will make a condition with Edmund that the Etheling’s odal shall not be included in the land which is peace-holy, and that to ravage it shall not be looked upon as breaking the truce. Then can you betake yourself thither and sit down with your following, and have no one but yourself to blame if you fail a second time. Only,”—he thrust his knuckles suddenly between the other’s ribs,—“only, before we get serious over it, do at least give one laugh. Though she be Ran herself, the maiden has played an excellent joke upon you.”
“I do not see how you make out that it is all upon me,” Rothgar said sulkily. “It did not appear that you got suspicious in any way, until I told you myself what she talked like. You did not have the appearance of choking much on her stories.”
The King seemed all at once to recover his dignity. “I will not deny that,” he said gravely; “and have I not said that I expect to be angry about it presently? Certainly I do not think she has treated me with much respect. That she did not tell you, is by no means to be wondered at; it might even count as something in her favor. But me she should have given her confidence. That she should dare to offer her King that lying story about her sister’s death—” His face flushed as though he were remembering his emotion on receiving that same story; and his foster-brother’s observation did not tend to mollify him.