An Apprentice to Elves (14 page)

“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 Skjaldwulf 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.

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.”