An Apprentice to Elves

by Sarah Monette

  Wolves, with their sensitivity to body language and silent cues too subtle for a human to detect consciously, were extremely difficult to lie to. Randulfr had relayed Ingrun’s opinion that Marcus believed what he had told Fargrimr. But Randulfr had also relayed his own opinion, informed by years of navigating the wolf-human borderland, that it was perfectly plausible for Marcus to believe wholeheartedly that he was telling the truth—and still be lying, because he himself had been lied to already by someone he trusted.

  After some time, Fargrimr looked up to see Hreithulfr hunkered beside him, dripping from his shaggy hair and beard. Signy, lean and gray, lounged on the other side of the dead fire. Fargrimr wasn’t surprised that the wolf had snuck up on him—after all, that was her job—but the unexpected presence of the wolfsprechend’s looming bulk set him back a step. He caught himself before he toppled over, though, and said, “You didn’t think to announce yourself?”

  Hreithulfr’s mustache twitched. “You seemed to be thinking.”

  “You seem to be sneaking. What if we both do something else?”

  That made the big man laugh, low in his throat like gravel cascading down a hill.

  “You want something,” Fargrimr said again, as a sort of not so gentle urging.

  “Of course,” said Hreithulfr. “What else is the lot of man?”

  He paused just long enough for Fargrimr to start to simmer, then amended: “I actually came with some advice. Er, suggestions.”

  “Spit it out,” Fargrimr said sourly. Wolfsprechends were better than wives for reminding a man of when he was neglecting his duty.

  Hreithulfr glanced over his shoulder. “The men are cold. They’re tired. They feel lost and out of hope. Blarwulf has been among them, and so have I. But we’re wolfheofodmenn—”

  “—and not all the troops are wolfcarls.”

  Hreithulfr nodded.

  Fargrimr glanced up at the sodden plaid wool blanket that served as his roof. It dripped on his forehead. Just a little. The drop ran down his nose.

  “This is what it means to be jarl,” he said, as he rose into a hunched-over crouch and searched about his feet for his gloves. “Going out into the rain to offer encouragement to men who doubtless hate you.”

  Hreithulfr chortled. “That’s what it means to be a good jarl.”

  In the end, the sun rose. In the end, the rain passed.

  In the end, the bedraggled band of men and wolves moved on in the rich, angled morning light, their pelts and harness steaming.

  * * *

  Tin grew steadily more homesick as the remnants of summer became chill, damp autumn. The Army of the Iskryne snarled and straggled through a series of inconclusive skirmishes and brushing contacts, never letting the Rheans come to grips with them, and they held the northern line, blocking the Rheans from marching north. The relief Tin felt at knowing her home remained safe was laced with guilt, and increasing, burning shame that her people were allowing the humans to be ground into meal against the stone of the Rhean forces, taking the benefit without sharing in the cost—or, for the most part, being aware there was a cost to be borne.

  What the Northmen could not do was keep the Rheans from working westward, across the peninsula toward the sea and Hergilsberg. They simply did not have the numbers, and their sometimes astonishing ingenuity could not make up the lack, no matter how thinly they spread themselves.

  Without the wolves, it would have been even worse.

  The Northmen learned to use the Rhean superstition about wolves like an offhand dagger. If they timed and placed the appearance correctly, a couple of wolves looming out of the mist or dark could startle a numerically superior rank of Rheans into rout. Tin found herself playing the role of a grim woods-spirit once or twice as well, which at least had the advantage of getting her into combat. If you could call it an advantage. She wasn’t sure herself if the waiting was worse than the fighting, when it came right down to it—and that was a question she’d been asking herself for the better part of a century now, so she didn’t really expect to find an answer out here in the woods in the dark, surrounded by the armies of men.

  It was good that the tactic only required a couple of wolves. Because the army was, by and large, composed of wolfless men, for all that nearly every sound-bodied wolfcarl of the North had marched along with them. Even fourteen years after the extirpation of the trolls, there just weren’t that many wolfcarls to go around.

  As summer burned to autumn, the two armies managed to avoid making anything other than glancing contact. And the Rheans held and held and prevented the Army of the Iskryne from meeting the expeditionary force from Siglufjordhur, although Viradechtis assured Isolfr (and Isolfr assured the rest of them) that Signy and her brother and her pack were still alive and well.

  Tin wondered if the decisive battle might come with the autumn. The thought of it kept her up nights. The men of the North were fearless warriors, but the Rheans were something different, something new to the North of the world; these were men for whom war was a craft, a profession—men who had learned to fight one-minded, like trolls. And there were so cursed many of them.

  Head to head, the Northmen would be slaughtered.

  They needed to find the war band from Siglufjordhur. They needed to close the pincer and flank the enemy. Cut his supply lines. Keep him from reaching back to the sea.

  If the men of Siglufjordhur could even stay alive that long, Tin thought tiredly. If there was anything out there to connect with by the time they managed to break through the Rhean line.

  She knew it for the despair of a long conflict without open battle even as she thought it. If there were no one to connect with, no one to serve as the anvil to the hammer of their attack—if Randulfr and Blarwulf and Hreithulfr and their sisters and brothers and the rest of the Freyasthreat died—the wolves would know. The army would be able to amend their plans. And Viradechtis would not keep such a thing secret from Isolfr, even if she could.

  Wolves did not lie.

  Thereby rendering themselves unique and, she thought bitterly, superior, in comparison to humans. And to alfar.

  * * *

  At cold twilight, when Fargrimr’s wolves and men were wedged on a thin spit of land between a vertical escarpment of sandstone and a steep grade down to a stream running white and ragged over boulders, the Rheans caught them.

  The Northmen and wolves had time to prepare, at least, and the terrain was in their favor. Freyvithr, the priest from Hergilsberg, was actually the first to notice the pursuit. He turned—he had been at the back of the press—and shouted. The shout carried on the breeze, was taken up, redoubled. Fargrimr heard it from the front and came around.

  After weeks of running, perhaps it was the gods’ notion of humor that the Rheans found Fargrimr’s little band at the worst of all possible moments. Or maybe, Fargrimr thought as he turned and skinned his sword, it was just that the Rheans’ gods were better. He unslung his shield from his back and shoved his arm through the strap, fisted the grip. He thought of dropping his pack and then thought the better of it. This was not a bad place to defend—narrow, bounded on both sides by impassable terrain—but it could not be held for long. All the Rheans needed to do was send a group sideways through the wood and up the hill to the top of that escarpment. Then they could drop logs and boulders down on the Northmen to their hearts’ content.

  They’d just foraged food and some scraps of bandage at a village a day’s walk south. And it wasn’t as if Fargrimr could afford to abandon his supplies to the Rheans. Who knew where more food would come from?

  He didn’t have long to think on it, either way.

  The wave of Rheans advancing up the stony bank beside the roiling river was not wide, but it was deep. He checked their standards reflexively, but none of them showed Verenius Corvus’ crow. No hope of respite there. Fargrimr tossed his left arm to settle his shield without dropping his eyes from the Rhean line.

  They didn’t charge like any army Fargrimr had ever dealt wi
th. He’d seen shield walls before—fought shield walls before—but this was different. The Rheans advanced in lockstep, their strange rectangular shields aligned as if they were latched together. His own buckler felt light on his wrist—all those hours with lead-rimmed practice shields had paid off—and his sword grip fitted his hand like a lover’s. But even as he stepped up to form a wall with a wolfcarl named Olfbrit on one side and a young Siglufjordhur fisherman’s son named Fell on the other, he felt … gods of the fishes, he felt underprepared.

  Morale, he told himself. You cannot win if you do not believe that you can win.

  The Rheans came on. Not at a run. Not screaming cries to their gods or shouts intended to instill fear in their enemies’ hearts. But patiently, inexorably. To the beat, Fargrimr realized, of a drum. And the chant of sharp-edged but unexcitable voices.

  The drum wasn’t a half-bad idea, come to think of it.

  He shook it off. No time for long-term planning now.

  Sweat dripped into his eyes. He wished he had a helm. It was taking the Rheans forever to come up the bank, wasn’t it?

  There they were, looming out of the blue gloaming. Maybe thirty steps down the bank. Fargrimr guessed, counted backward from thirty. Twenty-eight, twenty-seven.

  The Rheans reached the Northmen’s shield wall at six. And then it was noise and chaos. He punched with his shield arm to block. Swung hard overhand. The blade bounced off one of the stubby Rhean swords, and the vibration numbed Fargrimr’s hand.

  The Rheans stepped forward again. The shield walls thudded hard. To Fargrimr’s left, someone screamed.

  What happened next was a hammering rain of blows. At Fargrimr’s shoulder, a man he could not identify screamed. A voice rose up, a chant invoking Freya as the goddess of battle. Freyvithr, closer to the action of combat than Fargrimr ever would have guessed, ended his prayer with a ululation, like a wolf, but like no wolf Fargrimr had ever heard.

  The drum thumped, deep in Fargrimr’s chest. The Rheans stepped forward. Shield struck shield with a crash that made Fargrimr’s teeth ache. The Northmen’s shield wall strained. Fargrimr leaned forward, into it. His foot slipped on river-rounded stones. They scattered behind him. His right hand moved as if of its own volition, the sword rising and dancing at the end of his arm. A parry, a diversion. A thrust past the buckler that ended in the wrist-numbing impact of blade on shield.

  The Rhean wall surged. The Iskryner wall met it. They were locked together now, shield on shield. Olfbrit staggered under a blow, and Fargrimr stepped sideways to cover him, to seal the gap in the shield wall. His sword slashed out to defend his own body while his shield bought the stunned wolfcarl a moment to gather himself. Then Olfbrit was back, locking shields, leaning his weight into the wall.

  Another Rhean plunge, another shock of shield on shield as if a wave broke over them. A hard wave, a wave of iron and stone. Fargrimr’s knee bent, but he held the line. Took the blow. Stepped forward and threw his weight behind the shield. Was met, tossed back. Tilted the edge of his buckler to receive a blow. Riposted, felt his sword bite flesh. Yanked it back before it could become stuck in bone.

  That man fell back; another stepped into the gap. Beside Fargrimr, Olfbrit stumbled again. Went down this time, and there was nothing Fargrimr could do to help him. He was under their feet now, and either he was dead or he would stay down until the line of battle trampled over him.

  Staring over the shield edge Fargrimr saw the wild blue eyes of a man with crooked teeth and a peeling, sunburned nose. How in Niflheim do you get sunburned when it’s been cold rain and overcast for a week? Fargrimr thought, though not in words exactly—it was more like a wolf-thought, just a flash of wondering—and then he was back in the fray, sword narrowly diverting a blow aimed at his head. The man grunting across the shield wall had a helm, and Fargrimr resented him for it. He resented that Rhean bastard and his big square shield and his helm that matched uniformly the helms of the men standing on either side of him. He resented the Rhean’s breastplate and his vambraces and his greaves and his very existence, his fucking existence on this fucking riverbank, and the fact that it was the reason that Fargrimr himself was standing here in wet, squidgy socks that wanted to pucker up between his toes.

  Toes.

  It struck him like a glimpse of a hawk on the sky between treetops. The Rheans wore sandals. Greaves, shields, breastplates … but sandals with open toes. Fargrimr ducked down, stomped out, levering his buckler at an angle over his torso. The Rhean slashed at him, then staggered back with a curse as Fargrimr’s hobnailed boot crunched onto his inadequately protected toes. The line cracked, those shields like a wall caving inward.

  Success so stunned Fargrimr that it was a voice over his shoulder that called the rally. “FORWARD!” Freyvithr, he thought, and the knowledge that Freya still watched them brought energy to his step forward and his next blow.

  Someone screamed. Maybe it was the man with blue eyes. He had straightened and sealed the line in the moment of Fargrimr’s hesitation. Behind the gilded edges of his helm his complexion had gone red as a beet. Fury or frustration? Hard to tell when they both came with gritted teeth and a swinging sword.

  Fargrimr beat the sword down. The men at his back pushed him forward, into the press. They were there to brace the shield wall; a battle such as this often became a game of push-and-rush. Fargrimr darted a lunge over the enemy’s shield. It was parried, and then he had to slip aside a blow from his opponent’s neighbor when that worthy saw him open.

  The momentary rally stalled. There were too many Rheans. Too much weight behind their wall. The press forced Fargrimr back a step. He cursed, saw the straining face of the man across the shield wall. Kissing-close. The thunder of metal on metal all around them.

  The Rhean spat something at him. Words, maybe, if those sounds meant something in the Rhean tongue. Fargrimr lost another step. One more, two more, and he knew his band would break, scatter before the Rheans like dead leaves before a storm wind. It would be a rout. It would be their death. Men and wolves would be cut down as they ran, butchered to the beat of that accursed drum.

  But suddenly the pressure eased. The Rhean wall fell back a step. Shouts, screams rose over the crashing, heaving clamor of battle. Not in the front lines. And not Northern screams.

  Rheans. The line pulling back as the drums changed their beat. Still in lockstep, shields still overlapping like an eagle’s feathers. Like a dragon’s scales. But dropping back now. Falling away.

  Fargrimr should have rallied the band in pursuit, and he knew it. But there he was, standing on the pebbled bank, staring over the rim of his shield while the Rheans withdrew in the most orderly fashion imaginable. They even dragged their wounded and dead. In moments, there was nothing on the winding bank except Fargrimr, Fargrimr’s threat, and some puddled blood, drying sticky. Where the Rhean army had trampled, a few scattered arrows stood angled between stones.

  It made no sense. Until on the far bank of the tossing river, mere yards and a murderously runoff-drowned ford away, the shapes of wolves formed out of the twilight. Wolves, and among them men.

  And among them, the lean grizzled figure of Skjaldwulf, his red-haired partner-wolfjarl at his side. Behind them, rank on rank of wolfcarls and wolfless men lowered bows.

  “Halloo!” Skjaldwulf called, waving one hand wildly. Fargrimr could barely hear him over the struggling water. “I see we’ve come just in time!”

  FIFTEEN

  On the eve of the turning day, as the year tipped from summer to winter, there came a bitter wind and an icy rain. Otter’s toes chilled through her shoes and socks on the heall’s cold flagstones. Mjoll baked fresh bread with saffron and sultanas embedded in it for the holiday; Alfgyfa churned butter golden as the sun before returning to help Thorlot with the forge. Otter and Kathlin made soup of boiled bones and parsnips, into which they threw handfuls of hastily harvested greens. In the morning before the thaw, Otter knew, she and everyone else would be outside salvaging whatever was
left of the frozen vegetable garden, which would still be edible if it was used that very day.

  Athisla lay in the roofed, open-arched walkway between the kitchen and the great hall, watching her pups and the tithe-boys gambol about outside in the rain with youthful indifference to its vast unpleasantness. Each cub had chosen his brother, and to Otter’s great relief, that gangling lad who had been named Canute had kept the affections of the little gray fluffball Brokkolfr had named Feigr. It had settled him, and Otter could find it in herself to pity him. No one understood better than she how hard it could be, moving through life with no path to a future established.

  The boy went by Varghoss now, though Otter thought that constituted less of an improvement. In any case, he was still ringleader of the tithe-boys—or the young wolfcarls, as six more of them were now.

  She helped Kathlin and Esja and Mjoll bring in soup and bread, and set the serving kettle and the soup bowls on the table. There were only two dozen or so place settings now, counting the children’s table. Otter tried very hard not to notice how quickly the work was done, but when she stood back to inspect her progress, the empty hall looked hollow.

  A fire flickered at the closest hearth, and the warm smell of stock and vegetables and herbs trickled from the serving vessel. But it was not enough to warm the corners of the great hall.

  Otter straightened her back and went to the main entrance, where there hung a brass bell almost as large as her head. She picked up the striker and gave it three sharp raps to summon the heall’s remaining residents in to supper.

  The peal sounded strangely deadened by the rain.

  The first into the hall was Sokkolfr, who—unlike the former tithe-boys—had been clever enough to stay inside out of the rain. He gave Otter a quick squeeze as he passed, just an arm around the shoulders, and she was surprised at how much her skin missed his warmth after he had stepped away. Without volition, her body took a step as if to follow him. She mastered herself, though, and instead went to the tun by the kitchen door, lifted the cover, and dipped up a horn of ale.