And what he had done had been beyond his imagination too. In amazement, considering what he had already performed, Shef felt his flesh beginning to rise again at the thought of what he had seen and felt. Yet the queen would not return for a while, gone out, she said, to walk along the shore. Better to save his strength. Better to sleep again, warm and well-fed. As he closed his eyes and lay back against the duck-down bolster, Shef thought vaguely of Karli. Better see what he was doing. One of the slave-women would know. He had never asked their names. Strange. Perhaps he was beginning to behave like a king at long last.
In his dream, Shef was standing by a forge, as he had before. It was not the great forge of the gods of Asgarth, which he had once visited, yet it was like that forge in that the whole working space was littered with boxes, logs, rough tables. There were hand-holds nailed here and there to the wall.
They were there, Shef remembered, because this smith was lame. In the body he now inhabited, he remembered the keen pain as they slit his sinews with the knife, the laughing face of his enemy Nithhad, the promise Nithhad had made him.
“You will not run far now, Völund, with your hamstrings cut, neither on feet nor on skis, hunter of the forest. And cut sinew never grows back. Yet your hands are unharmed, and you still have your eyes. So work, Völund, mighty smith! Work for me, Nithhad, make me precious things by day and by night. For there is no escape for you by land or by water. And I promise you, husband of the Valkyrie though you are: if you do not earn your bread every day, you will feel the lash like the lowest dog of a Finn among my thralls!”
And Nithhad had had him trussed up then and there and given him a taste of the leather for proof. Still Völund remembered the pain in his back, the shame of being beaten without reply, the glittering eyes of Nithhad’s queen as she watched. His wife’s ring had glinted on her finger as she did so, for they had robbed him as well as mutilated him.
Shef-who-was-now-Völund beat furiously on the red iron as he remembered, not trusting himself in this mood with copper or silver or the red gold that Nithhad demanded most.
As he limped and heaved himself from side to side he saw bright eyes watching him. Four of them. The two young sons of Nithhad, come to see the fire and the clangor and the sparkling jewels. Völund paused, looked at them. Nithhad let them come freely, sure that his slave could never escape, sure too that no matter how crazy he was for revenge, Völund would never take a revenge for which he could not escape retaliation. In the belief of the North, that would be exchanging one for two, neither sensible nor honorable. A revenge was no revenge unless it was complete.
High above, in the rafters to which his great smith’s arms could swing him, lay the wings Völund had made: the magic wings to take him away. But first the revenge. The complete revenge.
“Come and see,” called Völund to the watching faces. “See what I have in my chest here.”
He reached inside it, pulled out a chain of gold links with a jewel between each one, red, blue and green in complex pattern. “Or see this.” He showed for an instant a box of walrus ivory with carved scenes upon it, inlaid with silver. “See, in the chest, there is much besides. Come, look in the chest, just peep over the side if you dare.”
Slowly the two boys came out into the light of the fire, holding each other’s hands. One was six, the other four, the children of Nithhad and his second wife, the enchantress, far younger than their half-sister, the maiden. Böthvild who also came to eye him sometimes from the shadows. They were fine boys, shy but friendly, not yet spoilt by their father’s greed, their mother’s cunning. One of them had given him an apple the day before, saved from his own meal.