An Apprentice to Elves by Sarah Monette
“Some would call it civilization,” Orpiment said. Tin suspected he might be arguing for the sake of arguing—or arguing simply because she was a svartalf—but he kept a polite and interested tone, as if he honestly did simply wish to see what she would say to his assertion.
“Some would call the trellkin a kind of civilization, too,” Tin retorted. “But they have a disturbing tendency to eat their neighbors. So too these Rheans.”
For a long moment, Antimony stared at Tin, and she worried frantically that she might have overstepped her remit. Then the aettrynalf Mastersmith actually threw back his head and laughed, his long white braids dragging on the floor beside his chair. When he could catch his breath again, he wiped his eyes and drank water.
Tin could feel the tension in the room relaxing a little.
“You think three-way trade is the most stable, don’t you?” Antimony asked, in a suddenly more friendly tone.
And that was the moment when the roof fell in.
* * *
To Alfgyfa, it felt as if she and Osmium had been climbing an endlessly sloping corridor for approximately forever. But Osmium, with an alf’s sense of depth and direction, assured her that they were descending—and, indeed, when Osmium made Alfgyfa a round stone and she put it on the floor, it rolled upward away from her hand as if it were rolling downhill until it got caught in one of those hasty claw ruts. Osmium also assured her that they hadn’t actually gone very far, and Alfgyfa believed her; it was the off-kilter geometry and the unsteadiness of the lights that made it seem much farther than it was.
“Maybe the stonestar hairnet wasn’t the best idea I ever had,” Alfgyfa admitted when they paused. She swallowed a trickle of burning bile and continued, “Admittedly, I didn’t plan on trellwarrens when I made it.”
Osmium gave her an amused look. “I think it’s a splendid idea, and if you make me one, I’ll make the stonestars.” She kindled another arrow on the wall with her forefinger and started forward again.
Alfgyfa hurried to catch up—hurried carefully, the corridor being what it was. When she wouldn’t have to raise her voice to speak, she asked, “Wait. Stonestars are made with stoneshaping?”
“Well. Drawing light into stones is something stoneshapers do, certainly.”
The corridor ended in a much more open space, not a cavern, or even a room, but a larger corridor into which the one they had been following dead-ended. Curiously, the wall before them was perfectly flat, not furrowed or curved.
Osmium drew another arrow and considered it. The light that glowed there was much dimmer than a stonestar, more like the phosphorescence that smeared from some kinds of cave algae when they were was crushed. Alfgyfa said so.
Osmium said, “It’s not kindled at the focal point of a faceted jewel. That’s what makes a stonestar brighter: the facets amplify the light.”
“Oh,” Alfgyfa said. She dragged her braid over her shoulder and raised it to eye level, squinting into a tiny stone. She blinked, dazzled, and let the braid drop as green-edged spots swam in front of her eyes. “Argh,” she said. “So it is stoneshaping.”
“One aspect of it, yes.”
“So the svartalfar are hypocrites.”
Osmium gave her a puzzled look.
“There are stonestars all over Nidavellir.”
“I’m sure they don’t see it as hypocrisy,” Osmium said, but she had always been kind. “It’s a slightly different art. You don’t mold the stone, after all. You just illuminate it.”
Alfgyfa made the noise Kjaran made when he thought it was time for bed and no one would agree with him. She laid her hand on the smooth flatness before her and changed the subject. “This isn’t a natural wall. It’s not stoneshaped, either.”
“That’s what I wanted to show you,” Osmium agreed. “The trellwitches got this far and no farther. Then they burrowed up, to run for it across the surface.”
Alfgyfa didn’t have a lot of sympathy for trolls, but it was hard not to feel the panic of anything driven from its lair. And driven from its lair onto the teeth of trellwolves, the axes of their brothers. “What stopped them?”
“We did,” Osmium replied. “As you suspected. This is where we gave the stone the argument that allows it to keep its own native shape. No matter what other arguments people may be having with it.”
“Arguments?” Alfgyfa said. She stepped away, trailing her hand along that weird, flat wall. It was so smooth and temperate it almost gave her the impression of skin. I ought to ask if stone shaping can make stones warm as well as bright. Then she thought of the patch of searing-hot rock in Osmium’s kitchen and realized she already knew the answer. “Is that how you think—”
“Alfgyfa!” Osmium cried, but the warning came at the same time as the disaster. Her foot skidded on a slope her eyes couldn’t see. Osmium’s twiggy fingers clutched at her shoulder, but Alfgyfa was already falling, and her momentum pulled Osmium, unanchored and already off balance, tumbling after her. She skidded down the slope, bruised her ribs on a stone, dropped a distance that was just far enough for the beginnings of panic, and hit the bottom with a thump. Osmium landed next to her.
“Shit,” Alfgyfa said, surprised to find herself still conscious. The wind came back into her on the next breath, which was an unexpected blessing. “Os?”
Osmium stirred. “Alive,” she said, lifting her head.
The walls were close on every side, as if they had tumbled into a pit. Stone creaked and settled under Alfgyfa. “I think we landed on a ledge.”
“I think we fractured the ledge,” Osmium said. “Don’t move. Let me see if I can heal it.”
She was reaching for the stone when it collapsed completely beneath them. Alfgyfa screamed, which she hadn’t before—a short, startled exclamation. Osmium echoed her as they dropped—
Shockingly, into light.
They didn’t fall far—ten feet or less—and they struck hard. Alfgyfa heard both their shouts cut off by the impact, had a confused sensation of movement, heard scraping. Forced herself to open her eyes.
Found herself looking at six alfish faces, startled—no, stunned—leaning over her from every side. Including Tin. Antimony. And, gods help Alfgyfa and Osmium both, Galfenol.
Well, there was a table in the conference chamber, after all. Alfgyfa and Osmium had landed in the middle of it.
And the hard stone, smacking Alfgyfa right between the shoulder blades, left her winded, stunned, and completely unable to answer when Galfenol was the first to recover herself in her surprise. The Masterscribe rose up from her cushion with a roar and demanded, “Troll droppings and spider-husks, ’prentice, what exactly is the meaning of this?”
Alfgyfa closed her eyes again and groaned.
* * *
Tin, enormously to her credit, tried very hard to intervene. To smooth things over. To shunt these two irresponsible young persons off into a side corridor and get the meeting back on track. But it wasn’t going to happen, and Alfgyfa knew why. Knew that it wasn’t just because she and Osmium had fallen through the ceiling (although that was very, very bad), but even more because they wouldn’t have fallen through the ceiling if they hadn’t been on an illicit visit to a trellwarren.
If anyone had ever bothered to draw a line that apprentices oughtn’t to cross, she was uncomfortably sure that was it.
And it looked bad, Alfgyfa knew. It looked downright horrible, especially when stone-shaping was an issue of such contention between svartalfar and aettrynalfar. When it was the very basis of a schism that had endured for five hundred years.
Tin, also enormously to her credit, made a serious attempt to keep Antimony and Galfenol from dividing Alfgyfa and Osmium up for separate but equal dressings-down. But Galfenol wasn’t about to take no for an answer, and if Alfgyfa was Tin’s apprentice, she had also just dropped a large chunk of a cavern roof in Galfenol’s lap. And Galfenol outranked Tin by age and wasn’t at all hesitant to apply that to the situation like a crowbar.
So when Galf
She kept her head high as Galfenol led her to an antechamber of the main cavern. She managed to maintain that posture even as the old alf, snuffling a little with rage, turned on her and said in deadly level tones with almost no trace of harmonic, “It looks bad.”
Alfgyfa, who had been physically braced against a shout, actually stepped forward a little. “I beg your pardon?”
“It looks,” Galfenol said, “bad. Very bad. It looks as if this Journeyman Osmium lured you into the trellwarren to corrupt you with the aettrynalfar’s”—her lip curled in distaste at the mocking name the poison elves used for themselves—“magic. With anathema.”
“Osmium is a childhood friend!” Alfgyfa protested.
“A childhood friend who is teaching you taboo troll witchery.”
“She isn’t teaching me anything.”
“You say that like it matters,” Galfenol replied tiredly. She still had not raised her voice, which was in many ways more unsettling than shouting. “Do you understand what I mean when I say it looks bad?”
“To you?”
“No. I don’t approve, but that’s neither here nor there. It looks bad. Do you understand?”
“To the Smiths and Mothers,” Alfgyfa said.
“Finally, you show a glimmer of intelligence. Yes, to the Smiths and Mothers. To those who make the decisions. You’ve damaged our chances at getting the Smiths and Mothers to agree to an alliance with the aettrynalfar, and you’ve damaged our chances to get the Smiths and Mothers to agree to an alliance with your father’s folk as well. You’ve destroyed any hope of anything happening this year. And all because you couldn’t wait.”
“But the alliance with my people doesn’t have anything to do with stone-shaping.”
The look Galfenol gave her stung like salt rubbed across raw flesh. “Learn to look beyond the end of your own nose, ’prentice! Do you not understand that there are those in Nidavellir—and they are no small number—who would rather kill your people than ally with them? To these alfar, when word gets back that you, Mastersmith Tin’s human apprentice, the one human allowed within our halls, were caught experimenting with the exile-kin’s forbidden arts, it will be confirmation that your people cannot and should not be trusted. It will make their hatred stronger.”
Alfgyfa’s wide and varied experience of trouble had taught her not to say anything unless she’d been asked a question, but—“Why is it a matter of alliance? How can you justify standing aside and not helping my people when you have the wealth and arms to do so easily? When you know that without your help they will be defeated?”
“Tell me,” Galfenol said. “Would your folk intervene in every conflict between svartalfar? How do you think that would play out?”
Badly, Alfgyfa thought, even before she had a chance to chew it over. Fortunately, the svartalfar culture of argument valued considered response over immediate retort; she forced herself to remember that, to moderate her tone, and to say, with only a little belligerence, “If Nidavellir were attacked by ettins, or by other svartalfar, my father would do everything he could to bring assistance.”
Galfenol regarded her for a long enough time that Alfgyfa knew that she, too, was marshaling her answer. Finally she replied, “I do believe that you believe that. And moreover, I believe that your father would indeed do as you say.” She drew a breath. “As Mastersmith and Mother Tin is doing for him, right now, in her turn.”
“It’s not enough,” Alfgyfa said, thinking of the maps spread out in the wolfheall’s Quiet Chamber, thinking of the crease between her father’s eyebrows that was beginning to look permanent.
“That is not your judgment to make,” Galfenol said, “if you’re capable of judgment at all, which I doubt. Honestly, Alfgyfa, trellwork?”
“Stone-shaping,” Alfgyfa said.
“A difference in sound, not in heft. You know it is forbidden.”
“But I don’t know why! Not what the trolls did, I understand that, but the stone-shaping. It’s not that different fr—”
“It’s unnatural.”
“So is turning a lump of iron ore into a sword!” Alfgyfa shouted back, knowing it was the wrong thing to do, the wrong thing to say, but unable to contain her frustration and fury a moment longer.
Galfenol’s bead eyes were suddenly gimlets. “Are you arguing theory with me, ’prentice?”
“No, Masterscribe,” Alfgyfa said hastily. Arguing the theory of any discipline with a scribe was a terrible mistake.
“That’s good,” Galfenol said. “Because the alfhames are full of those who think the aettrynalfar should be burnt from their warrens with fire, and the warrens salted and sealed. And here you are, an apprentice—on the verge of rising journeyman!—to a svartalf smith, studying that blasphemy, and I’d hate to think you thought you had a theoretical defense to mount.”
“No, Masterscribe,” Alfgyfa said. “I wasn’t studying it, anyway. Osmium was just showing me.”
Galfenol’s expression showed clearly that as far as she was concerned, showing and studying weren’t different enough to require distinction. “She should have known better.”
“But it was my idea!” The reflex to protect Osmium was as strong as it had been when they were children and Osmium was tiny and spindly and reared so much more strictly than Alfgyfa was.
Galfenol actually clapped a hand to her forehead and hopped a step in frustration. “A proper apprentice to a proper mastersmith would never have the idea in the first place! Would follow tradition. Would wait until she was a master herself before engaging in ‘experiments’ and chancy explorations!” She blew her breath out and visibly regained her hold on her temper. “You’re clearly not ready for the end of your apprenticeship. You’ll have to come back to Nidavellir. You won’t rise to journeyman this year. But maybe once you do, something can be salvaged.”
“That will be too long,” Alfgyfa said, the sullen resignation with which she endured lectures replaced by sudden, desperate, choking panic. “The Rheans are here! They’re here now!”
“All the more reason to return to your apprenticeship,” Galfenol said briskly. “You’ll be safe under the Iskryne.”
“But all my people—”
“It can’t be helped.” Galfenol dusted her palms. “We’ll return to Franangfordheall to collect the others and our things. Then start back home tomorrow.”
“You’ll leave them defenseless.”
“Child,” said Galfenol tiredly, “they are, in point of fact, quite well defended. And you are not Feldspar One-Army, to hold off a horde of surfacers with your halberd and a handful of crushed quartz crystals. My mind is made up. We’re going home, and we’ll try this again when tempers have settled.”
Alfgyfa just stared. She couldn’t have gotten words out if she’d tried. She hadn’t realized how much she’d depended, in the back of her mind, on the svartalfar caravan wintering here to protect the heall, and she couldn’t believe that Galfenol would take away that protection just like that, without any warning or consideration. It was unfair and unreasonable, and she was almost painfully shocked by it, as if it were a physical blow. Galfenol was halfway back into the council chamber when she noticed Alfgyfa was not following.
She turned back. “’Prentice?”
“I’m not going,” Alfgyfa whispered.
“What?”
“I’m not going,” she said again. Not shouted, but very definite. “I’m staying in Franangford. I’m not going back to the Iskryne with you.”
She turned on her heel and stalked away, boot nails clicking on stone. She couldn’t hear Galfenol doing anything behind her, and she wasn’t going to turn around to check. She’d lost enough dignity
“Oh, Masterscribe,” Tin said tiredly. “What have you wrought?”
* * *
Osmium caught up with Alfgyfa about a quarter hour after she broke out onto the surface. Alfgyfa thought she’d probably promised the others to come after and keep Alfgyfa safe—as if Alfgyfa had not spent her entire childhood running wild in these woods, as if Alfgyfa could not reach out with the lightest touch of her mind and feel Greensmoke on one side and Viradechtis on the other.
Despite that edge of resentment, despite the fact that she was perfectly capable, angry or not, of getting herself home safe, and despite the fact that Alfgyfa wasn’t about to admit it, she was terrifically glad to have Osmium’s company. She didn’t miss Galfenol one bit, and she had made up her mind not to miss Nidavellir either, no matter how tempting it became. But she was starting to realize that she’d also just walked away from Tin, and Pearl, and Girasol. And Idocrase.
Another thing she refused to admit, even to herself: that last was the hardest of all.
Osmium, having caught up—Alfgyfa might have slowed her stride so the alf didn’t have to scuttle, but they were definitely pushing each other a little—stumped along beside her for a good three miles without talking. They had a long walk ahead of them. The trelltunnels would have been shorter and quicker, but Alfgyfa wasn’t about to go barging back through the ruined council chamber and a gaggle of this-alfar and that-alfar to save a few miles. Or even a few dozen.
And she wasn’t keen on the idea of climbing back up into the trellwarren anyway.