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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.”

Brave men, well-proved soldiers, were Childe Wynd’s three-and-thirty, but they cried out aloud to him, and some let go of their oars and sprang shoulder-deep in the sea that they might drag their lord back from this noisome horror that would destroy him. Prince Wynd’s heart gave a great stound, and back rushed the blood into his face, that had been so pale and grim, and none was quick enough to come between him and what his heart had told his mind, and what his mind most gladly willed. As though he were kissing for the first time the one he loved, and she the fairest of the land, so did he bow his head in courtly fashion, and three times kiss with loving lips the Laidley Worm of Spindleston-Heugh. And at the third kiss a great cry of wonder rose from his men, for lo, the Laidley Worm had vanished, as fades an evil dream when one awakes, and in its place there stood the fairest maid in all England, their own dear Princess Margaret. With laughter and with tears did Childe Wynd and his sister then embrace; but when the Princess had told her tale, her brother’s brow grew dark, and on his sword he vowed to destroy the vile witch who had been his gentle sister’s cruel enemy. With tears and with laughter, and with gladsome shoutings the folk of Bamborough came in haste to greet their Prince and Princess, and to speed them up to the castle, where the King, their father, welcomed them full joyously. But there were angry murmurs from the men of Northumbria, who called for vengeance on her who had so nearly ruined their dear land, and who had striven to slay both Prince and Princess. Childe Wynd held up his hand: “To me belongs the payment,” he said, and the men laughed loud when they saw his stern face, for those were days when grim and bloody deeds were gaily done, and blithe they were to think of torture for the Witch Queen. Cowering in a corner of her bower in the turret, white-faced and haggard, they found her, and dragged her out to Childe Wynd. But no speedy end by a clean sword blade was to be hers, nor any slower death by lingering torture.

“Woe be to thee, thou wicked witch!” said the Prince; and she shivered and whimpered piteously, for well she knew that in far-off lands across the sea Childe Wynd had studied magic, and that for her were designed eternal terrors.

“Woe be to thee, thou wicked witch,
An ill death mayst thou dee;
As thou my sister hast lik’ned,
So lik’ned shalt thou be.

I will turn you into a toad,
That on the ground doth wend;
And won, won, shalt thou never be,
Till this world hath an end.”

To the fairy days of long, long ago belong Prince Wynd and the Princess Margaret and the wicked Witch Wife. But still in the country near Bamborough, as maids go wandering in the gloaming down by the yellow sands and the rough grass where the sea-pinks grow, they will be suddenly startled by a horrible great dun-coloured thing that moves quickly towards them, as though to do them a harm. With loudly beating hearts they run home to tell that they have encountered the venomous toad that hates all virtuous maidens, who once was a queen, her who created the Laidley Worm of Spindleston-Heugh.