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several heavily laden carts. The whole company glittered in the sunlight from jewels and bronze armor and merrily colored clothes. But there was no queen of the Elves with them.
    King William and Wild Edric approached each other with greetings. The King’s was cold for there was no wife with Edric. Edric’s was proud and haughty and not that of a defeated enemy. He did, finally, kneel before the King.
    However he spoke his wife’s apology while on his knees saying, “The queen, my wife, believes the King will understand that there are duties and constraints that come with her office and begs me to give you the time of her coming as required by her station. She will be before you when it is neither day nor night, she will come neither walking nor riding, she will see you neither under the sky nor under a roof, she will be seen by you when it is neither dry nor rain.”
    “God’s very beard!” came your father’s oath. “Will she come as I command or not?”
    “She will come when all these things come to pass, my King,” Edric said. “Queen Godda knows that her primary mission here today is to prove she is who she is. She will come!”
    The King’s doubt remained but he led us into the great hall where a great feast sat spread across the tables. Edric and his company, comely and happy, were good guests. They enjoyed the King’s table with great delight. Their conversation was refined and charming though each declined to talk about the lady Godda. Finally sated, Edric rose and addressed King William saying his company came with entertainments and diversions for the host if it pleased the King. William answered that he would be pleased.
    Edric stepped to the center of the hall and shooed away the thralls that continually kept our drinking horns filled. He then began a story of long ago when Godda’s elves roamed the English isles freely and without fear of man. It was a wondrous story filled with passion and war and revenge and tragedy. It was the tale of how Godda and Edric met and loved. Such was the tale that all the host cried and clutched at their hearts sharing the grief of the two lovers. But, then Edric’s tale turned. His story filled with ribaldry and errors and farce. The hosts’ tears were now of laughter and their sides hurt from an excess of mirth. Finally, your father called a halt to the story unable to withstand Edric’s verbal onslaught. All of us were grateful for the relief.
    “Now, my Lord and all here, some of my friends and I offer you magic and music and magic again,” Edric proclaimed.
    To the hearth came a peculiar man of heavy brow and sparse beard dressed in a thick hide robe glittering with golden thread and sparkling stones. This one carried a harp of wood inlaid with more gold and carved in elaborate monstrous shapes. To his haunting music and rocking dance, Edric sang a song in a strange language. The beat of the music raced faster and grew in volume. The strange man began to twirl. Faster and ever faster he twirled. A wondrous green smoke rose up from his great robe until he fairly disappeared in the cloud. There sounded a great crash from I know not where. The one man, tall and commanding, became two, short and dwarflike, before my very eyes. Men rose up in alarm. Women screamed.
    Wild Edric, joined by the two dwarves, sang a new song of such sweet melody that all the host stilled without words from the singers or from your father. With the new silence Edric’s song ended.
    One of the small men stepped forward as Wild Edric returned to sit by the King. He announced that he and his little friend were knowers of all secrets and the two proceeded to prove it to all the host. His little friend began to leap and bound and contort himself about the hall stopping first near this person and then another. With each stop he would hug or stroke the hair or clasp the hand of a man or a maid. The first of the little men then would tell that one’s name and then another’s secret such as