An Apprentice to Elves

by Elizabeth Bear

  They might be footsore, but wolf and man were both still running well within themselves, with the pacing trot of hardened travelers, so the Rheans probably weren’t right on their trail. Otter hitched a stride or two to drop the mallet through her belt loop, then trotted to catch up.

  Randulfr reached out and punched her shoulder lightly. “I don’t want to scare you,” he said.

  He wasn’t breathing hard, and only a little strain showed in his words.

  “They’re moving,” she said flatly. She had known; she had warned. This was how the Rheans were: a scouting expedition, a garrisoned and defensible foothold, and then the sudden, stunning expansion and conquest.

  Sweat stuck her hair to her head. It wasn’t warm enough for that, and she hadn’t been working hard.

  “Not yet,” he answered. “They reinforced. And brought … animals.”

  Not horses, or he would have said that. “Animals?”

  “Enormous,” he said. “Not as long as a wyvern, but heavier. Bigger than a white bear. Shaggy. Four-legged, with…” He made a hopeless gesture in front of his face, a cupped hand pulling away.

  Otter’s heart kicked twice, then sank into her belly and drowned. “Mammoths,” she said.

  “Mammoths?”

  “They’re like…” She struggled to find comparisons. “Siege engines that walk.” Randulfr nodded in recognition. “They armor them. They build towers on their backs. How many did you see?”

  “At least four. They swam them to shore. The ships they brought them in were too deep-keeled to come up to the docks.”

  “The docks might not have held them,” Otter said. “Those things eat a mountain. If they have them here, if they brought them—they’re attacking before winter.” It will come like lightning, she thought. Like the flood. And we cannot even fall back into the mountains, because then the winter would kill us if the svartalfar didn’t get us first. She had heard stories about the svartalfar, from men and aettrynalfar both, and while those stories made her curious to meet one, they did not make her at all curious to trespass among the rocks and ice of the Iskryne.

  “We sent a runner east. With luck, the konungur will come here to meet me at Franangford.” Randulfr shook his head, matted gray locks whipping among the dusty blond. “A decade and more, and it still seems wrong to call that canny old bastard trollsbane Gunnarr Konungur.”

  Otter had not known Gunnarr, particularly, before the AllThing that had made him konungur, the Northerner word that meant something like “warlord” and something like “king,” but not quite either. General, war chief … there were elements of all of these in what Gunnarr Sturluson was. He was jarl in his own right of the keep at Nithogsfjoll, where Skjaldwulf, Randulfr, Isolfr, and several others of the Franangfordthreat had served before they came here. He was also her wolfsprechend’s father, and Isolfr’s relationship with him was prickly at best and hurtful at worst.

  She had respect for him as war leader, though. She had seen him willing again and again in the last thirteen years to be the man who made unpopular decisions to stockpile food; he kept the pressure on local jarls and landholders to shore up their defenses and build strong keep walls and listen to the priests sent up from Hergilsberg with their freshly researched innovations in military design.

  Respect or not, she didn’t think he could stand against the Rhean army. That was no reflection on Gunnarr. She didn’t think the gods could stand against the Rhean army. Neither her own good Brythoni gods nor these scratchy uncomfortable Northern ones.

  By the time they came within sight of the dressed stone walls of Franangfordheall, the threat had turned out to meet them. Viradechtis paced forward at the front, dwarfing the dog-wolves on either side of her: black Mar and Kjaran with his mismatched eyes. Tryggvi came shyly behind them, still growing into his place in the pack, but doggedly shadowing his parents all the same.

  And behind them, all four wolfheofodmenn: Isolfr; Vethulf, wearing a hat against the sun no matter how the others teased him; Sokkolfr (Otter would never admit that her heart lifted to see him); and Skjaldwulf, smile-lines deep, shirtless in the summer and troll-scarred, his beard and chest hair equally grizzled.

  Viradechtis was not yet graying even at the muzzle, but Mar wore a full white mask. Otter thought of Hroi—and tried not to think of Hroi. Mar, too, was growing old. Something perhaps he never would have had the chance to do, before the trolls were killed.

  It is only a wolf.

  This time, though she could not admit it, she knew that she was lying.

  Viradechtis and Ingrun met first, sniffing and then rearing up to wrap forelegs around each other, yipping and barking, throwing one another like wrestlers on the soft flowery earth so that it shook against the soles of Otter’s low boots. The males sniffed and circled, tails wagging, waiting their turns to greet Ingrun while all around Otter, sweaty wolfcarls hugged and insulted one another.

  Under the simple happiness of the reunion lay tension, though—the strain overlaying voices and faces was unmistakable. Sokkolfr slung an arm around her shoulders, apparently without thinking about it, and Otter leaned into the contact before she realized it.

  “Your timing is perfect,” Vethulf said grumpily, clasping Randulfr’s arm.

  “Blame me for the Rheans, why don’t you?”

  Vethulf snorted and tipped his hat back. “I will.”

  Isolfr elbowed him aside, though, and said, “What my wolfjarl is trying to say with his customary tact is that your timing actually is perfect. Viradechtis says that my father’s party will be here a little after sunset, if they push on”—not so difficult, bright as it would be—“so you might as well save up the news and tell it all at once, so we all hear the same story. And she also tells me that Alfgyfa and Tin and a selection of the svartalfar are traveling from the Iskryne and should be here tomorrow.”

  “How in Hel’s name did they know?” Randulfr asked.

  Isolfr shrugged. “They might not. Alfgyfa’s apprenticeship should be about over. Perhaps it’s just a convenient visit with some news of her career.”

  Something about his face, though, and his expression behind the trellscars, told her that he wasn’t saying everything, and that what he wasn’t saying troubled him. Isolfr, who kept five things behind his teeth for each thing he said, wore that expression a lot, but she knew how much he loved his daughter, how much he missed her.

  “Nothing’s ever just convenient,” Vethulf said ominously.

  Skjaldwulf dropped an arm around his shoulders and squeezed him with such abiding, irritated affection that Otter blushed. Whether Skjaldwulf noticed her embarrassment or not, his gaze settled steadily on her, and he gave her one of his lopsided, half-apologetic smiles.

  “Otter,” he said, “can you make the kitchens ready for a dozen guests tonight? And find bedding for them.”

  “Fit for a konungur, even,” she agreed, smiling lopsidedly back. “I’ll get the tithe-boys gathering fuel for the bathhouse, too. And we’ll cook something that keeps, in case he shows up for breakfast instead.”

  * * *

  It was coming on high summer, and the nights were white. While this occasioned some suffering for the svartalfar, it made life significantly easier for Alfgyfa, who did not have to sleep in the snow or ride in the dark. They continued to rest through the brightest hours of day—at first under canopies and then, as they reached the taiga, under the broad bowers of spruce and pine. In one small blessing, they were past the worst of the mosquito season—the puddles of meltwater had largely dried—and Alfgyfa slept strangely well in the open air, though she had almost forgotten what it felt like.

  She did dream. And once they came within the range of the pack of Franangford, what she dreamed of was wolves. She dreamed of running with them. Of being of them, part of the pack-sense, sleek and shadowy, slipping through the pines like so many ghosts. Of the careful, intentional ignoring it took for one pack to move through the territory of another without conflict. Without meeting. By commun
icating without so much as acknowledging one another’s existence, for such was the politeness of wolves.

  But she wasn’t dreaming of Viradechtis, or the Franangford wolfthreat. It was three days’ dreaming before she realized that she was dreaming what green-wood-burning was showing her.

  (Greensmoke, she had named her in the long hours and days and years that she had thought about the wild wolves after that single meeting as a child. It was not her place to name a wild wolf, but humans were lazy, as Tin was always telling her, and she knew, from growing up around tattletale packmates, how to keep the thought inside the walls of her own private-mind.)

  Perhaps she merely dreamed what Greensmoke was experiencing; the wild konigenwolf might not have enough experience with wolfcarls to know that the focus of her attention was causing her to whisper into the back of Alfgyfa’s mind.

  The wolves were following.

  Idocrase, Girasol, and Tin all noticed her nervousness, and each responded to it differently, Tin by giving her more work, Girasol by sticking close as a burr.

  Idocrase wondered whether they were, as he put it, trespassing and so Alfgyfa explained about allemansratten, every man’s right. He was fascinated to discover that humans had a custom permitting others to pass over and through meadow and forest and stream, to fish or to forage for wild food or to hunt game, to sleep for a night in a field—so long as no crops were harmed and no property was damaged.

  “And we have guest-right,” she said. “Although it would be a bit much to expect any crofter to house and feed this many. A keep, though, or a heall—that would be a reasonable boon to ask of a larger settlement.”

  He was watching her curiously. She looked back, head cocked, and he reached out and picked a sap-sticky pine twig from her hair. “Your people do have traditions,” he said, “not just stories,” and she remembered the conversation they’d had after the alfmoot.

  She was surprised by the warmth she felt at his touch. “I didn’t say we didn’t. But they aren’t the same.”

  “No, I can see that,” he agreed, spinning the twig gently between his fingers. “Would many of your people agree that your customs should apply to the svartalfar? That we should have guest-right?”

  “Humans and svartalfar are not enemies.”

  “Are we friends?” His face was oddly intent.

  “I hope that we are,” she said cautiously.

  It was, at least, not the wrong answer. “I hope so, too,” he said, and then Galfenol was yelling for him and he gave her an odd duck of the head and scuttled away.

  * * *

  Gunnarr Konungur was in fact in time for supper. There was nothing startling about that: he had the reputation of a trencherman. Much as he liked his food, the traveling required of his role as konungur kept him lean—or possibly it was the need developed by traveling that put so much will in his appetite. Gunnarr was up and down the country most of the time, less the sort of royal progress Otter had learned to anticipate as a girl in Brython and more the wearing of a shepherd dog making sure his flocks were well guarded and in order. He often brought men and materials to help with building, weapons for those who needed them, warriors to assist in the drills, women to weave cloth for warm winter clothing. The konungur’s people helped with the harvest and required that a certain amount of food be set aside against need.

  It was, to put it mildly, a different system.

  Gunnarr did not much resemble his son. He was darker, though not dark, and his seamed face bristled with gray and auburn stubble. He let a beard grow long on his chin, however, and wore the sort of mustache that trailed off to either side in spikes.

  Unexpectedly, among his usual retinue of men at arms and weaving women, however, Gunnarr traveled in the company of a godheofodman. Erik of Hergilsberg was the leader of the priesthood and a great supporter of the efforts against the Rheans. They had met before, Erik and Otter, and she respected him no less now. Even now, in his age, he wore a bear-cloak, with the scarred face and body to show he had earned it in battle. His gray hair trailed woolly and long around a bald pate and his nose had been broken so often it seemed to have been mashed into his beard. He had a hug for Otter, when he saw her, that was surprising in its delicacy and care, and his smile split his beard.

  The true surprise, though, was that along with the rest of his entourage, Gunnarr traveled with his daughter. Kathlin Sun-belit, Kathlin Gunnarrsdaughter, was renowned for her honey-colored beauty—said to be the image of her mother, Halfrid, when Halfrid had been young, though Halfrid was even paler. Otter, who had always been small and dark and felt even smaller and darker among the tall, fair Northmen, was almost flattened by Gunnarr’s daughter. Kathlin had broad shoulders and a straight, narrow nose that matched her handsome mouth. Her long neck rose like a swan’s from the neckline of her kirtle, which was dyed a deep, appealing blue that sparked the color in her eyes. Her smock was dark red and pleated, the straps pinned before the shoulders with the oval brass tortoise brooches these Northerners called dwarves. Three strands of amber and one of water-sapphire dangled between them.

  Otter envied the dress, and the road-stained red leather boots Kathlin wore beneath it. Marriage had apparently not been unkind to Kathlin, who was also renowned for her husband Ole. He was a farship trader, one of the intrepid souls who plied the seas from Hergilsberg and other Southern ports to bring spices, silk, smoke, and stranger things home from the wide world. Otter guessed the water-sapphires would have been from him; the traders used them to find the sun on cloudy days, and so navigate across open water far from any sight of land. Otter wondered if Kathlin missed him when he traveled, away for months or more, or if she took his absence as a relief from the burdens of marriage and maintaining a man.

  Whatever the status of Kathlin’s marriage, Otter thought she had never seen anyone so happy to greet anyone as Isolfr was to greet Kathlin. Her presence even seemed to mellow his discomfort at being confronted with his father. Which was saying something, because Isolfr and Gunnarr generally got along like two porcupines trying to share a branch in a spruce tree.

  Kathlin had brought along three of her five daughters—the ones in the middle, aged twelve, nine, and six, which range (Otter thought) spoke of good planning. Or surprisingly consistent luck. She had not brought her husband, however, as he was away trading, seeking supplies to help fortify the Northlands against invasion. Gunnarr was clearly as much protection as his daughter needed—and Kathlin as canny a leader as her father: she had Skjaldwulf charmed before Mjoll so much as brought bread and butter to the table, and Skjaldwulf had no interest in women as bed partners and every reason, some twenty years or more in the holding, to dislike and distrust Isolfr’s family. Even on short acquaintance, Kathlin reminded Otter even more of Isolfr than of Gunnarr—though she seemed outgoing where he was shy. She watched them together, the tiny fragments of personal conversation they managed between Kathlin’s daughters on the one hand and the rowdy werthreat on the other, and she wondered, though she knew she would never ask, what the householder thought of the wolfsprechend, if Kathlin saw the likeness between her work and his. Otter also watched Gunnarr watching his children’s reunion, caught the slight smile ruffling his beard, and thought that the clever old bastard had planned exactly this. Kathlin was there to mediate between Gunnarr and Isolfr, to keep the waters tranquil.

  And she was already well started to manage it. Otter couldn’t tell if Kathlin knew her father’s plan or if she was just as happy to see Isolfr as Isolfr was to see her.

  As chatelaine of Franangford—or as near as anyone was ever going to get—Otter was well aware of the power she had either to support the peace Kathlin was brokering between Gunnarr and Isolfr, or to undercut it (for a chatelaine could do either, and have surprisingly widespread effect). She did not like Gunnarr and she was not entirely sure she trusted Kathlin, but she knew how miserable it made Isolfr to be fighting with his father, and she could see—anyone could see, unusally for Isolfr who kept most of what he felt of
f his face—how happy he was at this reunion with his sister. Otter decided to support rather than undercut; she mentioned as much to Sokkolfr, who laughed in that way he had, like a wolf—no sound, all something about the eyes.

  “Every one of us would be immensely grateful,” was all he said.

  * * *

  The last three miles to the Franangfordheall seemed to take far longer than all the rest of the journey put together. Alfgyfa could feel each beat of her heart up in her throat, taste it thick and coppery in her mouth.

  The wolfthreat was waiting for her. She could feel them all—the eagerness and welcome of those who knew her, and the curiosity of the young wolves born since she went away. There was Viradechtis first, konigenwolf, Father’s sister, then Mar and Kjaran right behind her. Kothran and Hrafn and Glaedir, Hlothor, Stigandr … Ingrun? Ingrun had been in Siglufjordhur when Alfgyfa left, and although that had been a very long time ago, she couldn’t quite imagine that the invaders from the south had simply packed up and left.

  But she got distracted by Amma, out in front of all the others, Amma, whom Alfgyfa remembered though she had no memory of her own mother, strong and loving and kind. Alfgyfa felt her there, so present and eager, and felt all the apprehension inside her burst like a winter log-jam when the spring freshet rose behind it.

  Alfgyfa had been at the front of the group, the ponies walking single file. She couldn’t recall afterward if she had lifted the reins, or if her shaggy little mount—a huge draft horse by svartalf standards—had simply felt the excitement surging through her. But he snorted and flicked his white-daubed heels and, with a toss of his braided mane, broke into a canter.

  The gelding would have been the color of soot, except he looked as if someone had splashed whitewash on all four of his legs to above the knee, and there was a single patch of white on his rump that made his tail streaked like a storm cloud. He had a white star like a thumb-smudge between his eyes and one final ragged patch of white no bigger than Alfgyfa’s hand under the fall of his mane.