An Apprentice to Elves

by Sarah Monette

  “A stool is more stable with three legs,” Tin said. “Of course, the problem is that my people have long lives and longer memories. We will not forget the bad blood between the … the aettrynalfar and the svartalfar for centuries hence. And it will take us those same centuries to get used to thinking of men as allies and friends. But for exactly that reason, now is the time to forge connections—links woven of as many threads as possible, so that when a few inevitably snap, the rope stays strong. War—”

  “War with the Rheans is a more immediate concern,” Vethulf said. “Is there any chance the alfar will assist us?”

  “We must assist you, in my estimation,” Tin said. “Or fight you, when the Rheans push you back into the mountains in much the same way we once pushed the trellkin down on you. But I am having some difficulty in convincing the Smiths and Mothers of the truth of that.”

  She looked at Brokkolfr. “You did not answer my question. Do you think the aettrynalfar would accept me as a sole emissary? Or even as a private person coming on my own behalf?”

  Whatever Brokkolfr might have been about to say was interrupted by Alfgyfa. “They would accept me,” she said.

  In the silence, the scritch and scrabble of the alfar scribe’s pen was clearly audible.

  Alfgyfa was red-faced, but she said doggedly, “I have grown up in both alfhames. I have friends in both. I believe the aettrynalfar will see me.”

  “Alfgyfa—” Isolfr began, but Tin raised a hand. The bullion at her cuff rustled stiffly.

  “It could work,” she said.

  Otter didn’t miss the speculative way in which Gunnarr regarded his granddaughter. Kathlin nudged him, and he averted his eyes, but not without a little smile.

  Isolfr nodded, at first stiffly. Then he must have thought things through, or reminded himself that his daughter was fifteen, not seven, because he nodded again with better grace. He said, “If Alfgyfa thinks she can do it, then I support her.”

  Wolfjarls, heofodmenn, and konungur might put things to a vote if it suited them, but in this case there seemed little reason for it. Gunnarr glanced around the table and nodded. “Good luck, then, granddaughter. And while we are on the subject of alliances—”

  Skjaldwulf cleared his throat. “Then on to the other problem. Do we advise Fargrimr to hold Freyasheall, and mobilize to relieve him when the inevitable siege descends? Or do we advise him to withdraw and let the Rheans have the heall as well as the keep they already hold?”

  Isolfr slid his hand forward on the table. Skjaldwulf nodded to him. Isolfr said, “Viradechtis can reach Signy, even from here. She will tell her daughter what must be done.”

  Skjaldwulf acknowledged Randulfr. “Pack-sense and wolf-mind,” Randulfr said—Otter thought, for the benefit of those in the room who were neither heallbred nor wolfcarls. “That doesn’t give us a lot of precision.”

  “No,” Isolfr said. “But she can let her know whether to hold fast or to flee, and that we are coming.”

  Otter’s head was crowded with all the things she wanted to counsel and was too damned shy to speak about. Still, she admired the matter-of-factness with which he made that statement, even as she worried at its foolishness. There was absolutely no doubt in Isolfr’s mind that the heallan and keeps were going south. The only question was what tactics they would apply once they arrived, and what Fargrimr was to do in the meantime.

  The wolf is the pack, she heard clearly, but not with her ears. She glanced around, startled, and saw Viradechtis gazing up at her from between chair legs. Otter flinched in surprise.

  But she understood. If she could possibly help it, Viradechtis would leave none of her pack to face their enemies alone.

  “Siglufjordhur is my home,” Randulfr said. “Home of my youth, and den of my pack. Once we have decided, I would bring a more detailed message than Viradechtis can send.”

  Around the table, nods. Randulfr could run south, alone except for Ingrun, and quickly, just as he had run north, and the army could follow.

  “It is your home. What do you think of defending Freyasheall?” Gunnarr asked.

  Randulfr shook his head. “I have seen the Rheans, and I do not think we can hold it against so many.”

  Otter’s throat tightened with everything she wanted to say. She tried to make her hand slide forward on the tabletop. It had just started to budge when a thump on the wood made her flinch and jerk right back.

  “We should at least try!” Vethulf said. He hadn’t been acknowledged—hadn’t even put his hand forward—but that was no surprise.

  The one-eyed godheofodman Erik bestirred himself on his observer’s stool. “The word from Hergilsberg is this: that many boats have passed. They have not tried the city itself, but the city has been able to do nothing to stop them coming. And Freyasheall, held strongly, would serve them as a fine staging ground for an assault on Hergilsberg.”

  “If we can turn the Rheans back at Freyasheall, that won’t be a problem,” Kathlin said, and there were nods of agreement.

  You have to say something. You have to say something now. Otter put her hand forward on the table, though her heart thumped painfully to do it. When Skjaldwulf acknowledged her, she gathered herself and said, “There’s an option we haven’t considered, that might save many lives.” She swallowed hard. “We can’t attack them directly. They are too many. When they conquer a country, they make the children of that country theirs, eventually. They make them serve in the army to become citizens instead of thralls. Their legions are bigger than all of us. They will just keep coming from over the water until they fill up the space, and we are gone.”

  “You think we should pay tribute,” Vethulf said, although he did not sound angry.

  “I think we will pay tribute,” Otter said; she heard her voice shake, but there was nothing to be done about that. “The question is only whether first we grease their palms with blood.”

  “All the men in the North—” Alfgyfa began.

  Randulfr did not interrupt her, but he shook his head, and she silenced herself. Then he said, “There are not so many men in the North as all that. It may not be enough.”

  “Then we can’t break a siege?” Skjaldwulf asked, his voice neutral.

  Everyone looked at Gunnarr.

  “Given what Randulfr and Erik report as their numbers?” Gunnarr shook his head. “We have not the strength of arms to win this fight. So we must, somehow, be smarter.”

  Otter closed her eyes against a swell of preemptive grief. Smarter at defeating conquest than Rheans were at forging it, when that was all they lived for.

  When she opened her eyes again, no one at the table was still looking at her. But she could feel the weight where their gazes had been.

  * * *

  Alfgyfa sat quiet through the rest of the council, struggling to follow the conversation as it devolved into strategies and logistics—which were apparently different things, given how Erik, Gunnarr, and Vethulf in particular were talking, but both of which seemed to revolve rather strongly around supply lines and getting large amounts of food from one place to another, at least based on what Erik, Kathlin, and Otter had to say. As for Alfgyfa, she listened, and watched, and tried desperately to learn the nuances as the others drew in sand trays and spread polished stones across a map Erik produced and unrolled. It showed the whole of the inhabited North from the Iskryne’s ragged crown across the top to Hergilsberg at the bottom of the southern peninsula, and was on such a grand scale that it had been drawn on two complete hides of vellum scraped translucent and stitched together along an edge sliced true. During one of the breaks Brokkolfr and Isolfr enforced, Idocrase crept out of his corner to stare at it, and he and Alfgyfa shared an awed and covetous glance.

  “The damned Helspawn winter’s on our side, for a change,” Skjaldwulf said, finally. “That will be a relief.”

  Isolfr snorted, as if the wolfjarl had said something funny. Under the table, Mar whined, and nobody watched as Skjaldwulf went to crouch beside him. The win
ter would not be on Mar’s side.

  God of smiths, she prayed, just let everyone I love get through this alive.

  It was a selfish, unreasonable prayer, and she didn’t care. Were not the gods selfish, unreasonable creatures in their own rights? They ought to understand, then.

  Otter rose, at last, and mentioned that she was needed in the kitchens if anyone was to get supper that night. Kathlin went with her—whether to help or gossip, Alfgyfa was uncertain. They could probably both be accomplished simultaneously. Alfgyfa thought that was a pretty good excuse—or, at least, not a shamefully bad one—and anyway her head was spinning with ration weights and travel rates, so she rose as well and followed the other women.

  “Can they do it alone?” Otter asked Kathlin as the door to the Quiet Chamber swung closed behind them.

  Kathlin smiled—tight, but honest. Alfgyfa saw Isolfr’s face in that smile, and perhaps a little of her own. After so long with people who looked nothing like herself, it was a strange sensation, comforting and alien all at once.

  Kathlin said, “Father’s a better housekeeper than I am. I trust him to know oats from millet, and how much they bulk, and how much of either a man needs to run on. Anyway, it will be our job of work to get the supplies to them at the front, won’t it? We’ll have to harvest without them. And it’ll be a lean winter next if this stretches to two years, because then we’ll have to plant without them, too.”

  Otter nodded. “I remember. The Rheans will burn the fields if they can. Ruin wells.”

  “Destroy the wealth they came to steal,” Kathlin said, disgusted. She shoved her hands in her apron-dress pockets and made fists of them there, stretching the fabric. “Well, it’s not like a Northman never went a-viking.”

  Alfgyfa followed them into the kitchens, where she decided that Kathlin and Gunnarr could keep their huswifery; Alfgyfa would rather stand with Thorlot in the forge. She was set to kneading bread, a simple task suited to hard muscles, to which even an unskilled cook could only cause so much ruination. She worked beside Thorlot’s daughter Mjoll, who was more or less her own age and had been a friend of Alfgyfa’s childhood before she was ’prenticed away.

  They traded shy sidelong glances for a few minutes before Mjoll said, “I remember you.”

  Alfgyfa had never forgotten Mjoll. She smiled back.

  The bread was half rye, and the loaves had a wonderful sour smell, that Alfgyfa had not even realized she was homesick for until gritty particles of rye started clustering uncomfortably under her fingernails. It was strange but not unpleasant to stand in a kitchen with other women—even more strange to think of herself as belonging there, unquestioned—with the ovens coming up to heat but not yet suffocatingly hot, doing necessary work and—indeed—gossiping.

  Alfgyfa learned more about her relatives, both close and distant, than she had known in her entire life. Especially when her cousins came in to help.

  It was strange, too, to think of herself as someone with cousins; she was used to being the only one of her entire race in any gathering, used to being too tall and too pale and too weak. And for all her life, her father had been the only blood-family she knew. All the Franangfordthreat was her wider family; she was old enough now to understand the protectiveness she had always felt, bone-deep, in the pack-sense. She began to see why Tin might have complained about her fearlessness, for with this perfect knowledge of safety, why would any child learn to fear?

  That was a very different notion of family from the presence of Kathlin and her daughters, Esja, Olrun, and Jorhildr. They all looked like Isolfr, and it was horribly disconcerting, because Alfgyfa knew full well that meant they all looked like her. Esja, the oldest, was striving hard to become a miniature copy of her mother, and Jorhildr clung wide-eyed to Kathlin’s skirts, but Olrun, at nine, was old enough to want adventure and still young enough to believe she could find it, to believe she could be Brynhildr in the sagas, a woman who could defeat a man in a holmgang and could kill monsters as well.

  Alfgyfa, who had been brought up to two completely unharmonious ideas of what women could do, felt a pang of deeper kinship. She found herself inclined to like Olrun; the child was silent and determined and madly in love with the trellwolves—and the trellwolves gave every sign of loving her back.

  Amma loved everybody, and she recognized Olrun as a cub. “Any cub,” her brother Brokkolfr had more than once said, with varying amounts of rue, “is Amma’s to love.” While Brokkolfr was engaged in the council, Amma contributed to the order in the kitchen—and the flow of work—by permitting Olrun to hug her and pet her and ride on her back, and when Otter solemnly gave Olrun a wide-toothed comb, Amma lay still for that, too, her tail thumping mightily on the flags of the courtyard.

  Viradechtis had remained behind in the council chamber. She was a little more wary than Amma—she could hardly be less—but from what Alfgyfa could read in the pack-sense, the konigenwolf recognized Olrun as kin to Isolfr—blood-sister’s daughter didn’t quite translate, but pack-sister’s daughter did; Viradechtis understood Olrun to be like Athisla’s pups, or Amma’s, and thus, because Alfgyfa knew that analogies were never left incomplete in wolf logic, she had accepted Kathlin as another subordinate bitch in her pack.

  Alfgyfa did not say so to Kathlin, when she reassured her that Olrun would come to no harm among the wolves. “They know she is a child,” she said instead, “and there is not a trellwolf in the Wolfmaegth who would harm a child.”

  Kathlin, stirring stew in a great cauldron with a wooden spoon until steam and sweat dripped from her forelock into her eyes, said, “Isolfr loves Viradechtis deeply.”

  It was not exactly a question, but Alfgyfa leaned on her loaf and answered anyway: “They are not monsters. They are not even, quite, animals like the cave bears. It is said everywhere that men who live with wolves become like wolves, but it should also be said that wolves who live with men become like men. Viradechtis loves Isolfr in return.”

  She had seen the difference in Greensmoke and the wild wolves. They were every bit as intelligent as their heallbred cousins, but where she was accustomed to minds that moved with hers, theirs more often moved away or against. Mouse’s inability to understand that not-wolf could be like-pack, years ago, had been perhaps a warning, if she believed that any god would have bothered to warn her. (Mouse still did not believe not-wolf could be like-pack, but he had decided that Alfgyfa was something other than not-wolf, something she couldn’t put words to at all.)

  Kathlin nodded. “You grew up with the pack.”

  “So I did,” Alfgyfa said.

  “Me too,” Mjoll allowed, wiping escaped strands of her hair from her face with the back of her hand, “though I can’t hear them the way she does. I’d say it hasn’t harmed me any … but I think it made me unfit for wifing.”

  Kathlin smiled. “Perhaps it’s wifing that’s unfit for you, when it comes down to it.”

  She didn’t sound bitter, or even regretful, and Alfgyfa wondered. Was she content with her far-trading husband? Was she content that he was so often gone? Alfgyfa was still wondering how to raise the subject when Mjoll picked up a wooden paddle and went to move the bread around in the oven. Kathlin glanced at Thorlot and Otter, who were across the kitchen. While Mjoll was away, Kathlin said, almost under her breath, “I wanted to hate the wolves for taking my brother away from me, but I never could.”

  Alfgyfa looked at Tryggvi where he was sprawled in front of the hearth, locked in fierce contention with a marrowbone. He, too, had apparently grown bored in the Quiet Chamber, and wandered in an hour or so after Amma. He rolled onto his back, the bone between his forepaws while he gnawed and tongued the end. His hind feet dangled lazily above his soft, furry belly.

  “No,” Alfgyfa said, “do not hate them. It is not the wolves who kept you apart.”

  Kathlin looked away, which was enough acknowledgment of the truth. She glanced over at Olrun, who was straddling Amma’s back as if the wolf were a pony. The wolf reclined, laughing
at her cleverness in not allowing herself to be, exactly, ridden. Alfgyfa could see in Kathlin’s expression that the child would, at least for the duration of this visit, be allowed to run free among the Franangfordthreat.

  By the time the last loaf was kneaded in the kitchen, the ovens were going full blast, leaving Alfgyfa dizzy with heat. There was a rain barrel outside, closer than the well. She stepped outside and drank deeply from the dipper, then rubbed the dough off her hands while hens rushed to flock around her feet and peck up the particles.

  As she was so engaged, a lanky tithe-boy sidled up to her. “You’re Alfgyfa,” he said.

  She inspected him. He was a little older than her own age. Tall, he seemed to have been made with an assortment of mismatched body parts left over when the rest of humanity was assembled. And that wasn’t his fault, but the way he stood a little too close to her was.

  “I am Alfgyfa,” she replied. In her head, she heard Tin and Thorlot both telling her to be polite, like a chorus, and bit her lip. “And who are you?”

  Over his shoulder, she saw two other tithe-boys sniggering by the woodpile, where they were obviously supposed to be splitting logs. Whether he’d bragged to them or they’d put him up to it, none of this endeared him to her.

  “Canute.”

  She’d had enough bullying encounters with svartalfar and their sharp, clever tongues that the ensuing silence threw her off balance. He just stood there, looking awkwardly down at his hands (over by the woodpile, his friends were falling over themselves laughing, and Alfgyfa decided she liked them even less than she liked him), and finally, because she did genuinely feel a little sorry for him, she said, “Do you have a name picked out?”

  The unborn pups belonged to Franangford’s fourth bitch, Athisla, whom Alfgyfa didn’t know. They wouldn’t be on the ground for another week, or possibly two. Plenty of time—too much time—for tithe-boys to get into trouble and set up pecking orders that would be the envy of any hen. She remembered that, too. And these boys were all old for the tithe; they must have gone unchosen from the last litter.