No spell was known to them that could work against a ship whose masts were made of the rowan tree.  Then, casting aside magic, the Witch Queen dispatched a boat-load of armed men to meet the ship, to board it, and to slay all that they could.  Little cared Wynd and his men for a boat-load of warriors, and few there were left alive in the boat, and those sore wounded, when Wynd’s ship came to anchor in the shallows under the dark cliff.

But here a more dangerous adversary met Prince Wynd.  Threshing through the water came the horrible, writhing thing that Northumbrians knew as the Laidley Worm; and ever as they would have beached the ship, the huge serpent beat them off again, till all the sea round them was a welter of froth and slime and blood.  Then Childe Wynd ordered his men to take their long oars once more and bring the ship farther down the coast and beach her on Budle sand.  Down the coast they went, while the Queen eagerly watched from the battlements, and the Laidley Worm followed them fast along the shore, and all the folk of Bamborough scrambled up the cliff side, and, holding on by jagged bits of crags and tough clumps of grass and of yellow tansy, kept a precarious foothold, waiting, wide-eyed, to see what would be the outcome of the fray.  As near the sandy beach of Budle as they durst venture their ship came Prince Wynd and his thirty-three men, then the rowers sat still, and the Prince leapt out, shoulder deep, into the water, and waded to the shore.  Like a wounded tiger that has been baulked of its prey but gets it into its power at last, the Laidley Worm came to meet him, and all who watched thought his last hour had come.  But like the white flash of a sea-bird’s wings as it dives into the blue sea, the Prince’s broad sword gleamed and fell on the loathsome monster’s flat, scaly head, and in a great voice he cried aloud on all living things to witness that if this creature of evil magic did him any harm, he would strike her dead.  Then there befell a great wonder, for in human voice, but all hoarse and strange and ugly, as though almost too great were the effort for human soul to burst through brute form, the Laidley Worm spoke to her conqueror:  “Oh! quit thy sword and put aside thy bow!” it moaned—­so moans the sea through the crash of the waves on nights when the storm strews the beach of the North Country with wreckage—­“Oh! quit thy sword, for, poisonous monster though I be, no scaith will I do thee.”  Then those who heard the wonder felt sure that the Worm sought by subtilty to destroy their Prince, for still as a white, dead man he stood, and gazed at the brute that shivered before him like a whipped dog that would fain lick his master’s feet.  But again it spoke, in that terrible, fearsome voice of mortal pain: 

     “Oh! quit thy sword and bend thy bow,
       And give me kisses three;
     If I’m not won ere the sun go down,
       Won I shall never be.”