Then my heart leaped up with gladness, and I turned to seek Heregar; but he was coming, and so I waited.  Then the dame clamoured for her reward, which Harek had as nearly forgotten as had I.

“Mother,” the scald said gravely, “when I work a spell with hammer and nail, the footprint into which the nail is driven is of her who cast the evil eye on me.”

“Why, so it should be.”

“Nay, but you drive it into your own,” he said.

She looked, and then looked again.  Then she stamped a new print alongside the nailed one, and it was true.  She had paid no heed to the matter in her fury, and when she knew that she turned pale.

“Man,” she cried, “help me out of this.  I fear that I have even nailed the evil overlooking fast to myself.”

“Ay, so you have,” said Harek; “but it is you who know little of spells if you cannot tell what to do.  Draw the nail out while saying the spell backwards, and then put it into the right place carefully.  Then you will surely draw away also any ill that she has already sent you, and fasten it to her.”

“Then I think she will shrivel up,” said the old witch, with much content.  “You are a great wizard, lord; and I thank you.”

“Here is a true saying of a friend of mine,” said Heregar, coming up in time to hear this.  “But what has come to you, king? have you heard aught?”

Now when the old woman heard the thane name the king, before I could answer she cried out and came and clung to my stirrup, taking my hand and kissing it, and weeping over it till I was ashamed.

“What is this?” I said.

“O my lord the king!” she cried.  “I thought that yon sad-faced man in Denewulf’s house was our king maybe, so wondrous proud are his ways, and so strange things they hear him speak when he sleeps.  But now I am glad, for I have seen the king and kissed his hand, and, lo, the sight of him is good.  Ay, but glad will all the countryside be to know that you live.”

Then I knew not what to say; but Heregar beckoned to me, saying: 

“Come, leave her her joy; it were cruel to spoil it, and maybe she will never know her mistake.”

So we rode on, and Heregar called Dudda, asking him if he knew Denewulf’s cottage; while in the track stood the witch, blessing her king as eagerly as she had cursed her gossip just now.

“I know not the path, though I have heard of the cottage,” Dudda said; “but it will be strange if I cannot find a way to the place.”

He took us carefully into the fen for some way until we passed through a thicket and came to the edge of a mere, and there were five men who bore fishing nets and eel spears, which had not been used, as one might suppose, seeing that the ice was nigh a foot thick after the thaw and heavy frost again.

And those two men who came first were Ethelnoth, the Somerset ealdorman, and young Ethered of Mercia.  It was strange to see those nobles bearing such burdens; but we knew that we had found the king.