An Apprentice to Elves by Sarah Monette
“Black,” Osmium said, and flicked a twig at her.
Alfgyfa ducked away. But Osmium’s arms were long. She reached out and up and hugged Alfgyfa hard around the shoulders with a cloth-bundled limb. It felt like being hugged by a tree branch draped in richly embroidered robes. Alfgyfa leaned into it, leaned down, and hugged back. After a while, as they walked, they stopped giggling. They didn’t speak again until they came to the edge of the trees.
They stopped well back in the shade, for Osmium’s benefit, and Alfgyfa waited while her friend bundled herself up again.
The field below was empty except for nine or ten sheep in various shades of black grayed out with mud or white grayed out with even more mud than that. Off to the left, Alfgyfa caught a glimpse of the battlements of Franangfordheall over the tops of a stand of fruit trees that had been nothing more than saplings when she lived here.
When she lived here. And where did she live now?
She pushed the thought away, turning her attention instead to the mound of dressed and mortared stone that sealed the entrance to the trellwarren. It was carved with runes of warning, and even from here, Alfgyfa felt the faint, familiar itch of unease that both attracted and repelled her. She looked at Osmium, who was settling the smoked lenses back over her veils.
“I don’t see anybody on the walls.” It didn’t mean they were unobserved: Franangford had embrasures, and it was impossible to see into the darkness within the walls from the sun-drenched valley below. But it bettered their odds of getting away with it.
“Well,” Osmium said, “it’s not going to get any less creepy from standing here looking at it.”
She stepped out into the sunlight, flicking her hands under cover of her sleeves before they could burn. Alfgyfa thought about Skjaldwulf’s humorous stories of Old Stonefoot, the troll who had been a little too slow ducking underground one sunny morning, and decided to keep the comparison to herself.
Osmium marched boldly up to the dome, as if she meant to walk right past it. Alfgyfa trailed her by three steps—and ran up the hem of her robe when, just behind the curve and out of sight of the Franangford walls, Osmium stopped abruptly.
“Oof,” Osmium said.
“Oof yourself,” Alfgyfa answered. “Have you considered developing stronger habits of communication?”
It was something Tin was wont to say to her apprentices when they were hasty or careless, especially around a forge, and Alfgyfa blushed as soon as the words left her mouth. But Osmium seemed to take them in a good spirit. She hunkered down a little and gestured for Alfgyfa to do the same.
The aettrynalf’s hunker was about the same height as Alfgyfa’s drop down and sit on the ground, so that was what Alfgyfa did. She bit her tongue not to ask questions that might distract Osmium, and instead bent her head to observe.
Osmium put the fingertips of both hands on the mortared stone, as Alfgyfa had seen her do in the caverns. She frowned, and there was a pause. Then she shifted her grip, winced in embarrassment, and said, “The mortar gets in the way a little. And I am just a journeyman.”
A moment later, stone flowed toward her as she spread her hands wide. She did it again and again, as if peeling back layers of dough one by one to reveal the filling of a pastry—but what lay exposed when she was done was a dark, low hole about as wide as Alfgyfa’s arm was long. It was bounded at top and bottom by strips of mortar, and at either end by curls of stone.
The air sighed out of it, dank and smelling faintly of corruption.
“Well,” Alfgyfa said, when they had stared at one another for a good moment’s length, “we’ve come all this way.”
“It would be a shame to go back without vomiting,” Osmium said, and she moved aside to let Alfgyfa go first. Because the human should always precede the alf into a pitch-black hole in the ground. Though, in fairness, Alfgyfa had the stonestars braided into her hair.
She put her hands on the edge of the stone, lay down on her belly, and poked her upper body inside.
The drop wasn’t too bad, she could see once she got the light in. She’d have to reverse and go in feet-first, because there was nothing inside to grip with her hands except the ledge she was lying on. But once she did that, she could lower herself, and the opening would still be at a height for her eyes.
She accomplished that, and Osmium followed. Osmium’s entry involved a sort of face-first worming through the gap, and then turning a somersault between her own gripping hands to drop to the tunnel floor beside Alfgyfa. She dusted herself off, and they looked at one another across the two foot and some difference in their heights.
“After you,” Alfgyfa said. “You’re the one who knows where we’re going.”
Osmium was better at marking their path, too—as she simply drew softly glowing arrows on the tunnel walls with her forefinger each time they passed an intersection. That glow—and the light from Alfgyfa’s hairnet—were enough for the alf’s dark-adapted eyes to see clearly, even several yards in the lead as she was, so the darkness did not slow them down. Just as well, since the trellwarren itself was more than capable of accomplishing that particular mischief. Even with the practice she’d had in the Nidavellir warrens, Alfgyfa found navigating this one challenging.
But the warrens she was used to were the warrens of the Iskryne. They had been long-inhabited, smoothed, regularized. These tunnels were something else again: ragged, furrowed. She could track the marks of a full set of claws, the path of an actual troll’s hand. The floors were not smooth, but rippled, and the unsettling effect that trellish architecture had on Alfgyfa’s sense of where things actually were in relationship to each other and herself meant that she—and Osmium—had to watch where they placed each foot and each hand. The warrens were taller than alf corridors, but not quite tall enough for a human woman, so Alfgyfa experimented with walking in a half-crouch and with bowing her head and shoulders. She alternated postures when the cramps generated by either got too bad.
The trolls pushing through here must have moved on all fours, in a kind of spidery scuttle. “Was that to move faster?” she asked Osmium, gesturing around at the low ceiling, the claw-marked hand- and footholds gouged out of the walls and floor.
“I don’t know,” Osmium said. “It looks like the trellwitch in the lead just grabbed handfuls of the world and shoved it aside, though, doesn’t it?”
Alfgyfa touched the wall. She stubbed her fingers: it was closer than it had looked. Alfgyfa’s head ached between the eyes with trying to understand. “But shoved it where? Into the other stone? You couldn’t do this, right?”
“I already said that.” Then Osmium halted—with more warning this time—and Alfgyfa was giving her a little more room, so even in the troll tunnel they didn’t quite collide. “I’m sorry. I know you’re struggling with this. I struggle with it, too, and I’ve got a lot more theory than you do. I shouldn’t have snapped.”
“I was being dense,” Alfgyfa said. She was used to short-tempered alfar by now.
Osmium nodded, turned back, and started walking again. “And I’m frustrated because I don’t know where it goes. Sideways. Inside out. Hel take me if I know.”
The next question got out before Alfgyfa could consider it: “Is this what the svartalfar were scared of? Why they exiled the aettrynalfar? Because it scares me.”
Osmium was silent for a long moment in which Alfgyfa could feel every pound of stone above their heads, pressing in from the sides … twisted around some new, unseeable angle into somewhere else. Finally, Osmium said, “What the trolls did—there are consequences, you know. The … warping of a trellwarren, it’s not…” She paused, then audibly pulled herself together: “Every stonesmith has to read the notebooks of Master Gadolinium, who came as close as any alf has to the actual practices of the trolls. It drove her mad—mad like your people’s bear-sarkers. She ripped her spouses apart with her bare hands.”
Alfgyfa had to work enough saliva into her mouth to swallow. “But it didn’t drive the trolls mad?”
“Either that, or they were all born mad,” Osmium said.
They both shuddered, and Alfgyfa cast about for something else to talk about. “It seems…,” she began cautiously. “I mean. Do you think they used the same arts on metal?”
“Trellkin smithed blades in forges like anybody else,” Osmium said. “Ask Kothransbrother.”
Alfgyfa winced. Frithulf’s face and shoulder were heavily scarred with burns from a trellish forge.
“What about shaping stones for insets?” Alfgyfa asked. “Can you do it with precious stones? Pieces that are not attached to the living rock?”
In answer, Osmium stretched out her hand and pinched off a bit of wall. She rolled it between her fingers like pine gum and gave it a twist. A moment later, she handed Alfgyfa a stone spiral shaped to go around a human finger.
Alfgyfa slipped it on her hand. It fit perfectly. Galfenol would have a conniption.
“You’re thinking of the bindrunes in blades,” Osmium said.
“Trying to find a way to circle around and grab hold of something I understand,” Alfgyfa said, making a face. “And I know a lot more about metalsmithing than I do about stonesmithing.”
“I know very little about metalsmithing,” Osmium said. “But the basic principle is the same: you can move the metal—make it thicker in one place, thinner in another. Or you can physically pull it out,” and she nodded to the spiral on Alfgyfa’s hand. “But at the end, you will be able to account for all of it. Or you would, if anyone asked.”
“Whatever shape you make the ingot into, it’s still the same ingot,” Alfgyfa agreed.
“Yes, like that. Not like this,” and she waved one long arm at the clawed, unbalanced tunnels around them.
They walked a little longer in silence. “Where are we going?” Alfgyfa asked, finally unable to keep the question behind her teeth any longer.
“Not far,” Osmium said, the corners of her mouth rising.
“How do you know what’s down here?”
Osmium said, “Alfar secrets,” the way she used to when they were children and Alfgyfa asked a question she should already have known the answer to.
Of course. Aettrynalf apprentices probably snuck in here all the time. Not a thing Tin or anyone else could do had managed to keep Alfgyfa out of the Nidavellir trellwarrens, and she wasn’t even a stoneshaper.
“Right,” she said, and nearly broke her toe on another ripple where the trolls had left the world badly folded in their wake.
ELEVEN
Fargrimr and his people walked and camped, and left as little trail as possible. They knew through the pack-sense from Viradechtis that the Northern army was still gathering. They suspected from experience—and had discussed through many long nights of strategizing over the past years—that the Rheans would not follow them into the wolf-haunted woods. Skjaldwulf Marsbrother had learned all too vividly of the superstitious dread with which the Rheans regarded their own ancestral wolf-goddess. That, and their belief that men who kept company with wolves were witches, would have sufficed even if no other reasons presented themselves.
And there were, as Otter had been at pains to point out from the wisdom of her cruel experience, so many other reasons. The trees broke up the Rheans’ nigh-impenetrable shield-wall turtles. Forests rendered their close-marching tactics untenable. And the taiga gave the Northmen every advantage of ground.
Regrettably, Otter had also been at pains to point out—also from her own experience—that the depths of the taiga would not protect the Northmen forever. You couldn’t farm in deep forest, and you couldn’t eat pinecones and live on the run for season upon season. Forest could be cut down or burned, and roads built to pierce it.
Still, Fargrimr knew, the forest and the winter were the Northmen’s allies as sure as were the wolves. (He was almost moved to regret the loss of trolls. Leading a trellwarren down on the Rheans would have been a neat and satisfying use of natural resources.) His best hope currently was that perhaps the Rheans would decide to salvage Freyasheall—all the wood, he hoped, would have burned, but the stone was still sound—and that the rebuilding operation would delay them through the summer. If they were not in too much of a hurry, if they were willing to consolidate gains rather than pursuing a fleeing enemy into a wilderness that was friendly to that enemy and inimical to them.…
Fargrimr kept company with that hope right until the first Rhean found them.
And found them in a most peculiar fashion, from what Fargrimr could gather as he was being roughly woken to deal with the matter. While he rubbed sleep from his eyes, a wolfcarl messenger told Fargrimr that the captured Rhean had walked right up to a sentry with the green boughs tokening peace in his hands and surrendered himself, saying he wished to parley with Fargrimr Fastarrson.
He must be a messenger from Iunarius, Fargrimr thought, heaving himself to his feet. He tightened his breast band and pulled on his trews while he tried to think through this new problem. By the time he’d laced his boots, an earthenware mug of hot mint and willow infusion laced with honey had appeared at his side, placed there by a crop-haired, self-effacing thrall. No more fires, Fargrimr reminded himself. He must pass the order tonight.
He didn’t quite have the strength of character to pour the tisane out, however. Before he drank it down—the warmth of the mug took the morning chill from his fingers, at least—Fargrimr collared a young man who had been stitching up a pair of breeches nearby and sent the youth off: “Tell my brother that I may have need of him and his sister. Tell them to come through the woods in concealment to within sight of the east sentry position, and to be ready. But they are not to come to me until I signal it.”
He fixed his clothes; assembled his weapons; dragged a comb through his hair and suffered it to be braided neatly by a thrall—tight-tugged and painful. Gulped a second cup of boiled mint water and sucked a goose egg. Standing over smokeless, low-flickering coals, he collected his wits. At least whoever had built the cook fires had built them not to smoke, only shimmer.
After a moment or two, Fargrimr decided that any uncollected wits he had left were unlikely to be rounded up with another five seconds’ grace. He signaled to the wolfcarl messenger to lead him to their guest.
The men hadn’t brought the Rhean into camp, and Fargrimr approved the caution of the sentries. If it was decided to let the Rhean live—and leave—he would be able to report on little except where he had found them. It was best for everyone concerned that troop strength and equipment remain a mystery to him.
The Rhean stood, under guard but at ease, with his shoulder leaned against a spreading beech. He was unarmed and without a breastplate or even a shirt, though he wore the Rhean skirt of crimson leather strips and a red-dyed tunic, with a bright brooch on one shoulder. His chest was all but hairless. His toes were bare in sandals.
I hope they neglected to bring boots for winter, Fargrimr thought. It was probably a forlorn hope: the Rheans had certainly been occupying Siglufjordhur keep and town long enough to learn the climate. On the other hand, Siglufjordhur was on the coast, and by the standards of the North, quite warm.
“I am Fargrimr,” he said in Rhean, when the man’s strange, opaque black eyes rose up to meet his. This Rhean was not so dark as Iunarius, but he was darker-complected than any other Fargrimr had seen. That did not conceal the fact that he was quite shockingly young.
Or maybe Fargrimr was just getting old.
He continued on in his own language, because he had no hope of making himself understood in the Rhean tongue. He needed some people who spoke Rhean—people like Otter, perhaps, who might have reason to chance their luck with the Northmen. “What do you want with me, Rhean?”
The Rhean cleared his throat. He crouched and laid his branches on the ground, which Fargrimr knew for a delaying tactic. When he stood again, he met Fargrimr’s gaze and spoke well, if with a strong accent. “I am Marcus Verenius. I come as a messenger from Quintus Verenius Corvus, who is my uncle.” He touched the bro
Fargrimr had, in the little time it had taken him to organize himself and come here, envisioned many scenarios that might have brought the Rhean to his scraped-out camp. He had inspected and discarded so many different possibilities. This, truly, had not been among them.
“An alliance?” he asked, too startled to scoff properly. He managed to bite his tongue before it slipped the rein completely, and took his time about inspecting the Rhean.
The man had run hard, that much was obvious. Salt crusted white across his cedarwood-colored cheeks and on his uncovered chest. It had taken some courage to leave his armor and weapons behind to lighten his load, Fargrimr thought—even with the knowledge that no shield and sword would avail a single man much in the camp of the enemy. Marcus Verenius’ black hair, cropped like a thrall’s, was spiked with drying sweat. He was stretching his feet and calves by rocking against his sandal straps. Fargrimr imagined standing still under guard after a hard run wasn’t doing the man any favors.
“Let’s walk,” he said. He looked at the wolfcarl. “Ulflaf, get this man some water, please, and some bread and salt.”
The wolfcarl blinked at him, but nodded. He trotted off, his lanky amber-colored brother a puff of smoke at his side. The Rhean watched him go so intently that Fargrimr almost saw the hackles of his neck smoothing.
The Rhean sighed when the wolf vanished into the trees.
Fargrimr said, “Your uncle. This Quintus…”
“Verenius Corvus.”
“Quintus Verenius Corvus. You mean he wishes me to turn coat?”
The messenger smiled knowingly, an expression that seemed awkward on his young face—like a child wearing his father’s shoes. He held out his now-empty hands as if to demonstrate his harmlessness. “Quite the opposite.”
Ah, there was the scoff. Just a little delayed in travel, apparently. Fargrimr deemed himself reasonably accomplished for limiting it to raised eyebrows and a snort. “That is not how one negotiates from a position of power, boy.”