An Apprentice to Elves

by Elizabeth Bear

  Fargrimr realized that his own right hand was still raised, the fist clenched for a blow. Carefully, consciously, he opened that fist, spread the fingers wide, and raised the hand high before lowering it slowly. This time, Iunarius’ eyes did flick over his shoulder. Fargrimr imagined men and wolves at his back sliding once more into the shadows of the trees like so many fylgjur, the spirit animals you might see only before you died.

  The Rhean’s smile finally drifted from his face, but Fargrimr thought it was more the closing of a performance than any sign of disconcertment or concern. He stepped away, still careful never to give his back to the Northmen. When he had passed beyond the edge of the pavilion, he paused and said, “Remember that I did you this kindness when I had no need to. Remember that if you give me reason for it, I can do you kindnesses again.”

  He walked away, the long grass and blossoming wildflowers swishing against the bright metal of his greaves. When he passed the godsman, he nodded politely. Freyvithr did not break stride; he merely nodded in return.

  Hreithulfr watched the one man go and the other approach, and huffed like an annoyed mule. “We’ll be talking to him again.”

  Fargrimr sucked his teeth. “I’m not sure I dread that less than meeting him on the battlefield.”

  FIVE

  It was, of course, impossible that a Mastersmith—both Smith and Mother—should go anywhere on her own, or even with only one (human!) apprentice to accompany her. Tin’s retinue included her apprentices, grooms, servants, ponies, a journeyman or two—and scowling Masterscribe Galfenol with her bright-eyed journeyman, Idocrase.

  Galfenol had snapped at Tin, “Well, you can’t expect to go treating with monsters without a scribe, Mastersmith, though I’m sure you’d be best pleased to do so. You need someone to keep you from starting a war.”

  (And so, incidentally, Alfgyfa learned that Galfenol and Tin were old and dear friends, because they bickered and snapped at one another just exactly as did Vethulf and Skjaldwulf.)

  Galfenol might have seemed old for such hard travel, and perhaps she was—but she crouched on the saddle of her shaggy pony as well as any alf. Perhaps old alfar did not become frail, Alfgyfa thought, as she had thought more than once before, but merely work-hardened.

  All the alfar traveled huddled up against daylight, wearing slit masks against bright-blindness even though—below the Iskryne—the snows were long past. Their hoods and traveling cloaks covered every inch of skin.

  The little caravan developed a routine. They would arise after the brightest part of day had passed. They slept under canvas for four days, until they reached the welcome shade of the taiga, and Alfgyfa, being tallest, was tasked with pitching the tarpaulin when they stopped and dragging it down again when they began. While she did that, grooms made the ponies ready, her fellow travelers stowed their own gear, and one of the servants fixed up some breakfast—which, often as not, involved fresh-gathered partridge eggs and mounds of dewberries. The dewberries were tart and wonderful, and Alfgyfa was surprised to discover how much she had missed them underground.

  Having been fed, everyone would mount up (the cook ate while he cooked, and cleaned pots and stowed supplies while everyone else dined) and they would travel until midnight—the softer brightness that passed for midnight in high summer in the high North—when they would pause for a meal and a stretch, and to feed and water and rest the ponies.

  They’d start up again after the sun had spanned a hand or so of the sky, ride on in the cool morning, and take their final ease for the day some time before noon, when the light and heat were mounting. Alfgyfa would raise the canvas, and the whole process of making camp would unfold around her while she worked—ponies hobbled to graze, a small fire lit for cooking, mending, and repairs.

  Tin would check the shoeing on the ponies, and a few times she or Alfgyfa worked a repair or two—either by cold-hammering a shoe, or once or twice actually setting up Tin’s traveling smith kit and doing a little light forging.

  It was work far beneath a mastersmith, though there were a few who specialized in the trickiest sort of farriery, the art of saving foundered horses. Still, Tin seemed to be happy with it, singing to herself as she swung her hammer.

  And Alfgyfa, for her own part, was disconcerted by the pleasure she took in the travel. She hadn’t entirely realized until it was lifted how much pressure she felt in being the stranger, the outlander in Nidavellir. But here were only alfar who—some more and some less grudgingly—accepted her presence. Admittedly, Master Galfenol was crabby. But that was a general state of being, not something directed at Alfgyfa in particular. Even when she caught an edge of it, she found she didn’t mind.

  She was at home here beneath the sky, she realized. And the alfar were ever so slightly off balance.

  Idocrase sought Alfgyfa out at every opportunity to ask questions about the surface world, and what he was seeing—lichens and trees; birds and insects; reindeer and foxes and quail; the knobbled, blushed golden dewberries that grew on low brambles everywhere. His curiosity was genuine—she did not doubt that for a second—but she sensed unease beneath it, the desire to know about everything so that no danger might go unknown. She didn’t mind. In point of fact, she found that she enjoyed it, as she enjoyed the feeling, which she could not quite shake, that he clung also to her shadow for protection.

  Scribes were not trained in arms. It was anathema—far beyond any taboo Alfgyfa had broken—to offer violence to a practitioner of scribecraft. But you couldn’t tell that to a cave bear, and Idocrase, unlike some svartalfar, was smart enough to know it.

  He wasn’t the only one asking questions, though. Neither Manganese nor Pearl had been topside before. Yttrium was a journeyman now, and she had traveled—both aboveground and through the deep roads—but she seemed very interested in what Alfgyfa had to say about both tundra and, once they reached it, taiga. And though on the one hand they would not presume to ask, and on the other hand they would not lower themselves, Alfgyfa was relatively certain she caught both the servants and the two masters eavesdropping on occasion.

  So she told Idocrase and the others history—both natural and human—as she knew it. She found herself frequently frustrated; she had been only seven when she came to Nidavellir, and while she remembered Skjaldwulf’s stories pretty well, having told them to herself many times, she had but a child’s grasp of many surface things. She knew which plants were edible and how to harvest them, but not which had medicinal value beyond the bitter willow bark you chewed for headaches and sore teeth, and the soaproot that could be used to scrub lice from your hair.

  And Idocrase asked questions. Questions and questions and questions. She always found his questions interesting, whether she could answer them or not. He’d settle down beside her and fold himself up in his cloaks and robes and tuck his hands inside his sleeves and ask something like, “But if you cannot feel the direction of the”—and here he used an untranslatable piece of svartalf terminology for the way the whole world could act as a lodestone—“how do you know what direction you’re walking in?”

  She shrugged—it was a rather different gesture for humans than for svartalfar, but it meant about the same thing—and gestured at the sky. “By the travel of the sun,” she said. “Or, at night, the moon and stars.”

  Idocrase looked at her as if she were not merely insane, but actually rolling around on the ground and howling.

  She wanted to laugh, but it would be the unscalable height of rudeness for an apprentice to laugh at a journeyman. She said, “Truly. She travels always from east to west, just as her brother does.”

  “But … you look at her?”

  “Not directly,” Alfgyfa said, and she wasn’t thinking of some of the stories Skjaldwulf had told when she had been supposed to be asleep and not listening, of the warrior sons of Ivar Snake-witted who cut the eyelids off their bound foes and left them staring helplessly into the sky.

  Idocrase was still frowning, wrestling with an idea that made le
ss than no sense to him. “It’s like language,” she said. “I can’t sing a third harmonic, so my language links words together. I can’t feel the lodestar in my bones, so I navigate by the sun and her brother instead.”

  His face lit, and then he hesitated. She remembered what he had said about being a martyr to curiosity, remembered her own experiences as a new apprentice of asking questions in the alfhame, and wondered how many times he had asked and been rebuffed—or even punished. If he had been put to ’prentice as a weaver, there could have been little place for a scribe’s curiosity.

  “Ask,” she said.

  “Your language,” he said at once. “I have been taught of it, but I would dearly love to learn more. If you don’t mind?”

  “Our languages are very different,” she said in warning.

  “And that is why I would learn more of yours.”

  She had had much time to think about the differences between her language and theirs. Much time and much loneliness. “Your language is made of layers,” she said, demonstrating with her hands. “You put meaning on top of meaning and meaning under meaning. My language is made of beads and copper wire. I have to string meaning next to meaning, and do it in the right order, or it all becomes nonsense, just as if you sing the fourth harmonic meaning in the second place.”

  She paused and squinted sideways at him, to see if he was following her.

  He looked both intrigued and dubious, as if he thought he understood what she was saying but wasn’t sure he believed it. “Tell me your lineage in full,” he said. “In your language. Go slow. I won’t understand it, but maybe I can hear what you mean.”

  “All right.” She cleared her throat to get the harmonics out and said in Iskryner, “Alfgyfa Isolfrsdaughter Viradechtisbrother of Franangfordheall, daughter of Hjordis, apprentice to Mastersmith Tin of the Iron Lineage.”

  “Alf-gy-fa,” he said carefully, even more carefully damping out all the harmonics from his voice. “Is that how your name is said in the tongue of your mother?”

  “Yes,” she said, trying not to think how long it had been since she’d heard anyone say it that way.

  “And that is truly how your lineage is said?” With a gesture indicating the profusion of syllables.

  “Yes. Everything you have a harmonic for, we have a word for.”

  “So many words,” he said, tufted, curling eyebrows shooting up. “How do you keep track of them all?”

  “Practice,” she said. “How do you remember all the sigils when you write?”

  This was a topic that she had been curious about for years, ever since she learned that there was a svartalf spelling like rune-magic, except they worked their bindrunes as palindromes—the same front to back as back to front. And if a bindrune was sometimes a challenge to read, with every letter laid over and linked to the next to make an all-but-abstract design, how much more difficult was it when those designs must be perfectly symmetrical?

  This was a thing scribes specialized in, and as there was magic in blacksmithing, so there was a similar subtle craft in a scribe’s spells. Where she might use a wolf’s bone, or a bear’s, or an elk’s—or that of a loved one—to bring strength and resilience to a casting and to achieve a certain talismanic effect, a scribe would write a word in a certain ink, on a certain substrate, in a certain way.

  “There aren’t so many,” Idocrase replied, dismissing his own skill with a flick of black claws. “We use bases. Common roots. And modify them.”

  “Show me?” Belatedly, she thought of a possible complication. “I mean, if it’s not a proprietary secret of your guild.”

  “We teach apprentices,” he said, with a sidelong smile that was gone almost before she saw it was there. “So no, it’s hardly a secret.”

  One of the marvelous things about svartalfar, as far as Alfgyfa was concerned, was how many of them seemed to enjoy talking about theory and practice and how things worked and how they could be made to work differently and perhaps even better. She knew humans who took joy in that—Thorlot, for one, and Vethulf, for another—but it seemed to her that in svartalfar, it was more rare to find someone who did not have that quality than someone who did.

  Idocrase cast about him—she handed him a stick, and together they scraped the pine needles from a patch of soft earth. “Here,” he said, with a sweep of the stick. “So if I wish to spell something to prevent or heal illness, for example, I would write the word health and bind it with harmonics for strength. And then I would mirror it, so—see, you shape the characters of the word in certain ways, and create…” He made a gesture with the stick, so a clod of loam flew off the end. “The word creates a shape. And the shape is the same either way you read it, just as the word is the same as the thing it means.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a true palindrome?” she asked, excited.

  “Just a symmetrical shape,” he said, drawing patterns in the earth as he spoke. “You play the letters to make it so, more than the word. Though the harmonic-marks help with that, of course. And if you can find a true palindrome, the spell will be much more powerful. Harmonics reinforce.”

  “Of course.” Alfgyfa watched him, the quick surety with which he worked, the graceful lines that trailed his stick. She put her thumbnail against her teeth and bit it to hide her growing excitement and to keep the words shut within. What if somebody wrote those runes into a necklace? Or a blade?

  It didn’t seem to her like an original idea. Inlays and patterns, after all, were worked into most svartalf forge-crafts. But she’d never seen one with a bindrune inlaid. Maybe the smithcraft conflicts in some way, she thought. And then she grimaced, because her next thought was, Or maybe the Smiths and Mothers decided a thousand years ago that nobody ought to experiment with it, and no one has argued that decision since.

  * * *

  In the bright warm air of Franangford’s summer, Otter found as many excuses as she could to work outside. She was grateful for her place here—it would not be too much to say that she loved her place here—but especially in the hard depths of winter, she missed the balmier, rainier climate of her home. The North grew brutal as the light failed, and men and women—and wolves—huddled by fires, manufacturing light and warmth when they were no longer to be found in the wild.

  But the summers were glorious. Work that left her hands and forearms lean and sinewy sent her into the yard of a morning with a spring in her step and then gratefully back to her bench at night to sleep without remembering. Days that did not end, merely dimmed, and the welcome dark of the heall, cunningly built with only angled light filtering through the open spaces under the ridge-cap. Hours of drenching sun to dust her arms and cheeks with freckles. (Sokkolfr proclaimed himself endlessly fascinated by the freckles. Otter was, she was surprised to realize, slowly allowing him to appreciate them from a lesser distance—and even, once or twice, trace them with a fingertip.)

  She volunteered for every outdoor job that did not require skills she did not have or a big man’s weight and strength—and although she could do nothing about the weight or the strength, over time, she managed to acquire many of those skills, when there was someone to teach her.

  And so it happened that on one particular Thors-day she was thigh-deep in ryegrass, pounding woven-willow wickets into the soft earth with a mallet and lashing them together to make a temporary sheep fence. She was not far from the great crude cairn that sealed the entrance to—or the exit from, more appropriately—the trellwarrens that stretched underground from here to Othinnsaesc. Otter had never been inside, nor wished to, just as she had never seen, nor wished to see, a troll. The trellwars had been over well before she came to Franangford, and her knowledge of trolls consisted of the scars she saw on the Franangfordthreat (Isolfr’s face, the wolf Hlothor’s entire side, from his head to his hip, scarred ragged and deep) and the songs and tales that she preferred to avoid when it could be managed politely. Or even merely unobtrusively: there was so often something that needed seeing to in the kitchens when Sk
jaldwulf was about to sing of war.

  Even with how careful she was to know as little as possible about it, the sight of the mound gave her a crypt-shiver. Turning her back on it was worse. She could too easily imagine all those ropy green bodies hitching themselves out of the ground on weirdly angled limbs, moist earth clotted in the furrows of their skin, teeth bared, claws reaching.

  She faced the cairn while she worked, and tried not to think of it as a barrow.

  Which meant that she was the first to see the tawny pair of Randulfr and Ingrun coming up the southern road at a tired, footsore trot. Road dust had caked her coat and his skin to the same gritty color. Ingrun limped, and Randulfr would never have allowed that if the news weren’t vital.

  Otter touched the brand on her cheek; she wasn’t aware of it until she felt the roughness of old, dry scar under her fingers. Then she gave the wicket one more good shove, to be sure it was seated, and vaulted over it, running with long strides to meet the wolfcarl more than halfway.

  She didn’t drop the mallet. Tools were too valuable to leave lying around on the ground. And if something (a miles with his bronze sword drawn) was behind Randulfr, she wanted a weapon at hand.

  Bitch and man picked up the pace as they saw her. They showed no surprise at her presence, but of course Ingrun would have smelled her a half mile off, with the north wind prevailing. The heall, too, would have warning that they were coming—no wolf walked in Viradechtis’ territory without the konigenwolf knowing it—but Otter’s fingers tingled with nervousness nonetheless.

  Randulfr had been with his brother Fargrimr in Siglufjordhur. And Siglufjordhur was where the Rheans kept their toehold in the North.

  She jogged a hooking path to fall in beside him, thistles snagging at the wool of her breeches. Ingrun nosed her hand—warm and slimy, but they were old friends, and Otter retaliated by wiping the snot on the wolf’s dusty ruff, leaving a muddy smear on them both. She remembered when she would have been terrified of the giant animal, but it was like a memory of another life, like a story told to her by someone else. Not anything that felt like it belonged to her.