All round me the trees dripped with the damp November mist that creeps from the river, and the smell of dead leaves was in my nostrils, and for a while I lay still, hardly yet knowing true from false, dream from deed.  So quiet was I that a robin came and perched close to me on a bramble, whose last leaves were the colour of the bird’s red breast, and there it sang a little, so that I roused to life with the sound.  Then swooped down a merlin with flash of gray wings on the robin and took it, and that angered me so that I rose on my elbow to fray it away; and with that the last cloud left my mind and I knew where I was.  Then, too, from where he waited my waking came Vig, my great Danish dog, who had been tied at the thane’s house, and must have left the flying party to seek me.  And he bounded in gladness about me.

Now I found that my bonds were gone, and next that my weapons were left me, and that but for cramp and stiffness I had not any tokens of what had befallen.  And at first it seemed to me that Ingvar thus showed his scorn of me, though soon I thought that he had forgotten me, and that it was Raud who had freed me.

I heeded not the dog, looking only in one place.  But the body of the king was gone, and his arms and mail were gone.  The hoofmarks of Ingvar’s horses were everywhere; but at last I made out that they had gone on through the wood.

Presently the dog growled, looking towards the village, and I heard voices coming nearer, and with them I heard the tread of a horse.  But soon the dog ceased, and began to wag his tail as if to welcome friends, and when the comers entered the clearing, I saw that they were Egfrid’s men, and that it was my horse that they were leading.  My axe was yet at the saddle bow.

“Why, master,” said the foremost, “surely we looked to find you slain.  This is well—­but what has befallen?”

For I must have looked wildly and strangely on them.

“Well would it be if I were slain,” I said.  “Why did you seek me?”

“We found the horse coming homewards, and one knew that you had gone into the wood after the king.  Yet we would seek you before we fled.”

I saw that all were armed, and I thanked them.  But—­

“What ails you, master?” said the leader of the group.

“They have slain Eadmund the king,” I answered, “and they have taken his body away.”

Thereat they groaned, wondering and cast down, and one said: 

“They will not have carried him far.  Let us search.”

We did so, and after a long time we found the king’s body in a thicket where it had been cast.  But his head we could not find, though now I bade my dog search also.  He led us westward through the wood, until we came to a rising ground, and there we could go no further.  For thence we saw the Danish horsemen by scores pressing towards us, searching for cattle and sheep as the army passed southward.  And the farms were blazing in the track that they had crossed everywhere.