An Apprentice to Elves by Sarah Monette
Mjoll worked yellow flowers into Alfgyfa’s coronet of braids. They were darker than her hair in the mirror Mjoll held up so Alfgyfa could inspect her work, and the pollen they shed dusted her ice-colored locks with gold.
Alfgyfa swallowed, having the strange feeling she was meeting her own older sister. If there were a veil pinned to her hair, she would look like a married woman.
“How do I look?”
Kathlin, who was at work on Thorlot’s hair across the room, looked up. She had a strange expression on her face, and took a breath before she spoke. “Like a Valkyrie. No, like Freya herself.”
“I’d need cats,” Alfgyfa said, and they all laughed—Alfgyfa despite the strange ache that sat in her chest, feeling like it burrowed right behind the bones.
The women checked their finery and hung themselves with a last few golden brooches and jeweled hairpins. Then they went downstairs to take up their places as hosts, as loaf givers, and as pourers of ale.
Alfgyfa’s place would be at the table beside her father. That meant sitting with the alfar, and she had half dreaded it when she allowed herself to think on it before. Once she got through the formal round of drinks and toasts she poured herself, however, it wasn’t so bad. There was just that horrid pang, in the brief moment when her fingers brushed Idocrase’s as she steadied and filled his horn. He tried to catch her eye. She smiled and didn’t let him.
Another pang came when she caught the way Galfenol glared at her accusingly—only once, but once was enough—over the rosemary-scented haunch of boar.
The feast passed in a blur. The boar was delicious. She limited herself very strictly to two horns of ale and none of the mead. She surprised herself by having an appetite, and consuming more of bread and salat and the fresh berries in soured cream than she had eaten in days. This was good, because it kept Vethulf from chiding her about being too skinny and her grandfather from pointing out that food was going to waste.
It was a bad omen to leave the table hungry when an army was going to war.
THIRTEEN
It was like a song when the armies of the Northland gathered to head south.
The sort of song Otter hated, and which Skjaldwulf avoided singing if she was in the great hall. He would play other songs when she was there—songs like the lay of Sigrid, who cut her hair for a fishnet and kept her family from starving. Songs like the lay of Rannveig, who kept her brother and husband from killing each other by throwing her cloak across their swords as they dueled. As Alfgyfa had in Alfhame, Otter remembered. The alf-scribe Idocrase had let slip that little incident, and his obvious pride in Alfgyfa made Otter smile.
Alfgyfa, of course, would be mortified to know that Otter had heard of it—touchy pride, that one—so Otter kept it to herself. And worried instead about soldiers.
Otter had had enough of marching armies for one life. The battle-hardened goddess Aerten, though, was mistress of the winds and fates of war, and it seemed as if she still had plans for Otter.
Now Otter stood on the earthwork beside the open gates of Franangfordheall and watched her family—her second family, this new family she had made for herself, by her own choice—lift their shields and their banners and leave. They didn’t march in step like Rheans, and each man’s armor and gear was different from those of his companions. These Northmen, with their round shields and their square and quarter-circle banners on tall poles slung with crossbars like sail yards, looked nothing like the Brythoni warriors of her youth.
But they were just like them: men with children and homes, orchards and fields, livestock and lovers. And she was terribly afraid they were going to die like them, too.
She kept her chin up and her eyes dry, however, and drove her fingernails into the flesh of her other arm until Sokkolfr, beside her, noticed and took her hand.
“Squeeze as much as you want,” he said.
She took him at his word. He hissed, but said nothing to stop her, and so she squeezed on. Maybe she should make some sort of sacrifice to Aerten; maybe that would change her luck. Or maybe it would just draw the goddess’ attention—which wasn’t the sort of thing you really wanted from a war goddess when what you desired more than anything was peace.
Could the war goddess’ power even reach this far from her own lands? Would Otter be better off praying to some local deity? Gentle Freya, who nonetheless claimed half the battle dead as her own due? The wolfcarls’ god, Othinn, god of wolves, god of war?
Othinn and Aerten were both fond of corpses, and there would soon be corpses enough to serve the pleasure of any deity. So it wasn’t as if whatever Otter could afford to burn would measure much against the feast of souls already in the offing. Maybe if Erik Godheofodman hadn’t been marching off to die, far to the south, Otter could have asked him what she might sacrifice, and to whom.
Perhaps Loki the trickster would be her best choice, for all he was half mad, unreliable, and would sacrifice almost anything for a prank. At this point in time, trickery might just be their only hope.
Skjaldwulf caught her eye as he passed, and winked beneath his helm. Tryggvi trotted beside him, gamboling like the idiot half pup he was and looking back over his shoulder at Sokkolfr. Now it was Otter’s turn to hiss, but she did not ask Sokkolfr to ease his grip—just clutched back savagely on her own account as he watched his wolf trot away to the thing he was supposed to have been born too late to suffer.
Alfgyfa, meanwhile, stood on Otter’s right. The svartalfar were nowhere in evidence, but Thorlot had mentioned that morning that they would not be feeding Tin and the rest anymore. They must have headed north the previous evening, after the worst light of the sun had faded away. They had been at the feast. Otter looked at Alfgyfa’s grim face and did not ask.
Alfgyfa nodded to her father, who walked beside Skjaldwulf, with Vethulf on his other side. And beyond him—Otter was startled to notice—deeper in the press of the crowd, rode a figure on a shaggy pony, swaddled in robes and hooded against the midday sun.
Otter turned to Alfgyfa. “Is that Tin?”
Alfgyfa nodded. “She told Galfenol that she would make her own decisions. Galfenol told her that she wouldn’t be bringing any human apprentices back to Nidavellir again, and Tin shrugged and said they’d discuss it later.” She paused. “Not that I know any of that, of course, and I certainly didn’t overhear the conversation at all.”
Otter still didn’t quite know what to make of Isolfr’s daughter. She’d grown up beautiful, although Otter doubted she either noticed or cared; she’d also grown up fearsomely strong. After a couple of her absentminded feats of strength, the tithe-boys got a lot quieter in her presence. She was blunt-spoken and unafraid to assert herself—unafraid, as far as Otter could tell, of anything, even when she should be. Otter would almost have simply treated her like a man, except that Alfgyfa would come and wash dishes or help with the laundry just as readily as she’d shoe a horse.
Every wolf in the heall loved her, just as they had when she was a little girl.
And she was standing on the earthworks with the rest of them, trying not to look like her heart was breaking.
At last, even the carts of provisions following the men walking away vanished into dust. Otter took her hand back from Sokkolfr and studied her fingernails. The old scar of the brand on her face itched worse than the mosquito bites speckling her arms.
“Can you think of anybody we wouldn’t miss?” she asked Sokkolfr conversationally.
“Thinking of hanging someone for Othinn?”
“Not Othinn,” she answered, amused that he knew her so well. “But if we could just get our hands on a Rhean—”
He slipped an arm around her shoulders and hugged her. For once, she had no urge to bolt away, but leaned into him instead. He pressed his lips to her hair. He did not ask her who, which she was dreading. Instead, he said, “Why not Othinn too?”
She shrugged. “You think the gods would notice if we dedicated the same sacrifice twice?”
* * *
She had to ask Brokkolfr when they got back the first night—she’d been able to feel him and Ulfhundr killing themselves not laughing at something, but not a trace of what it was. Amma and Mar and Athisla and the cubs were all out in the stable yard having the dry mud picked out of their coats before they were allowed in the hall, and Brokkolfr smiled brilliantly and said, “Athisla is trying to learn from Amma how to be a good mother.”
Athisla’s presence in the pack-sense, like Kothran’s, was endlessly smarter-than-you; Alfgyfa got the joke immediately.
“They’d both be so offended if we laughed,” Brokkolfr said.
“Yes,” Alfgyfa said, and managed not to.
The tithe-boys took some educating on the subject of hunting with wolves as well. They were not yet sorting themselves out into bond-pairs, though one of the little grays showed a strong preference for the youngest tithe-boy.
The pups were too young to run down deer or moose, and Mar was too old—and nobody was about to encourage Athisla to hunt such large prey while she was nursing. So they kept to the rodents—but even squirrels were challenge enough for a pack of puppies, and even squirrels filled the stew pot with savory meat, once Otter was done with them.
Alfgyfa wished she could hunt with the wolves, though she had to admit she would probably have been worse at it than the tithe-boys. Better than the puppies, she hoped. They enjoyed the hunting, but so far they mostly served to flush small game into the waiting jaws of the older wolves.
She could feel them, though—the heall wolves and the wild wolves, who were still drifting through Viradechtis’ territory. If the konigenwolf didn’t come back, Alfgyfa thought, the wild wolves might stay. She tried not to consider that potential future too intently, preferring instead to allow the wolves’ visceral joy in hunting and running and simply living to fill up her senses when she allowed herself to think of them.
So she was only very slightly less surprised than the others when Greensmoke’s pack left the first deer carcass outside the heall gates in the brief darkness that now separated day from day. It wasn’t the last such, either, and when Alfgyfa looked Mar in the eyes and asked him, This was your idea, wasn’t it? he just wolf-grinned at her smugly with his worn-out teeth.
Otter and the other women of the heall knew how to salt and smoke the extra meat. Now, between all their other duties, they also taught Alfgyfa. And when Athisla’s cubs were not out hunting, Mar and Amma—with Sokkolfr’s guidance and Olrun’s enthusiastic assistance—took them down to the root cellars or out to the granaries and taught them the fine art of mousing.
Wolfheallan did not usually have much of a vermin problem.
This was good, because the heall could not afford to feed so much as a family of field mice on charity. In addition to everything else, there were the tithe-boys to be fed, and the tithe-boys ate like—well, like adolescent boys, not to put too fine a point on it. At least they were slowly learning to hunt themselves, under Brokkolfr’s patient instruction. Usually that was Kari’s job, and Alfgyfa could tell Brokkolfr really wished his friend were there to handle it. The net gain was only a slight improvement on that provided by the wolves and older men, except in that the youngest of the boys, Igull—the one the gray cub seemed to favor—who came from a crofter family, was more than competent with the woodsman’s short bow.
Berries were gathered for pies, for jams, for drying, and for pemmican. Roots were dug and dried, in some cases pounded for flour. Pulses and legumes began to ripen as the days shortened, and those too must be dried if they were not used immediately. There was fruit to slice and lay on stretched gauze in the sun, to turn and turn again until it grew leathery and sweet.
Kathlin and Mjoll, it turned out, shared something more than a knack and less than a calling for the organization of single tasks into a coherent plan, and on them it fell to make sure that everything got remembered and, having been remembered, got done. In this way, as empty carts returned from the army’s train, the women of the heall and town filled them up again and sent them back to feed their wolves and men. Some foraging could be done on the trail, of course, but not enough to keep them all fighting fit. And as these were men moving through their own home country, in defense of it, they would not be foraging as vigorously as they otherwise might from the fields and larders of crofters and farmers along the way.
Between times, Alfgyfa took Lampblack out for rides—to keep him fit, she said, but they kept her soul fit, too. And once in a while she slipped out to visit Greensmoke, Mouse, and the others in the gloaming that was all that passed for night.
Alfgyfa stayed so busy she sometimes even slept without nightmares. And sometimes, briefly, forgot to be afraid: for her father, for Tin, for all the wolves and men of the heall and the North united.
* * *
Alfgyfa kept expecting the wild wolves to start drifting north after the svartalfar, but they stayed and stayed, and she still heard Greensmoke in her dreams. She got the sense that some conversation had occurred between Greensmoke and Viradechtis, and that some wolfish bargain had been struck. Greensmoke’s pack would hold the lowland territory around Franangford—rich, by their standards—while Viradechtis traveled. On what terms, though, was a mystery to Alfgyfa.
She tried not to worry about it. She also tried not to dwell on her redoubled exile, though it was hard. In fact, she was spending so much energy not dwelling, she wondered if it wouldn’t have resulted in a net savings just to let herself worry and fret and pick.
She missed Tin. She missed her father. She missed Nidavellir, of all the great stupidities of life. She missed Girasol, and she missed Tin’s other apprentices and journeymen.
She boggled herself by missing Idocrase most of all.
She had Osmium, though, and Mar and Amma. And Thorlot, with whom she had been spending just about every waking hour when she wasn’t helping with the food stores—and who by some miracle hadn’t gone south with the army, however badly her skills might have been needed there. If Alfgyfa wasn’t sure she was still exactly an apprentice blacksmith in svartalf reckoning, by human standards, she was highly skilled, and they had everything about their trade in common (and Isolfr, as well, though neither of them could bring herself to mention him). Both women—Alfgyfa suddenly freed of the demands of apprenticeship, and Thorlot equally suddenly freed of the demands of feeding and clothing and arming and caring for a heall full of wolfcarls—reveled in the sudden opportunity to stay up much too late in the bright summer nights, drinking the ale Otter brewed and trading stories of tricky smithing problems.
And they had a great deal to talk about, because in the human world, smithing was men’s magic. Thorlot responded to Alfgyfa’s collegial presence as if she’d been waiting her entire life for a chance to talk it all over with another woman. By those same human traditions, the bindrunes that Idocrase had been teaching Alfgyfa were women’s magic. And it seemed to both of them slightly daring and yet inevitable that they would attempt to combine the two forms.
The blades
One day, weeks after the men had gone to war, Alfgyfa had finished hammering and forging her latest attempt at a sword of folded crucible steel carved with a sigil she had designed to protect the wielder. She had rendered the words avert harm into a palindromic bindrune as Idocrase had taught her—missing him fiercely all the while—chiseled them into the flat of the blade, and inlaid them with an alloy that would turn black when etched. Now she lifted the heated blade from the forge one last time and brought it across Thorlot’s smithy to the narrow trough of oil, for quenching.
Otter probably would have wanted to plunge it into a Rhean soldier, if they had one handy, but though the human method of tempering featured prominently in the more horrific sagas as a means of imbuing a blade with power, Alfgyfa had never met a smith who was prepared to attest that it would do a hot blade no harm.
Holding her breath, Alfgyfa laid the blade in the trough, turning it with the tongs. The oil hissed and smoked; ideally, this would cool the outer metal faster than that inside, so the blade would bind itself in a springy corset of hard, easily sharpened, tight-set metal over an inner core that was softer and less brittle.
Ideally.
But as she lifted the blade, Alfgyfa heard the unmistakable sharp disappointing ting of a crack forming deep within. She looked at the blade—beautiful, long, perfectly proportioned—and muttered a curse.
Thorlot set a basket down on the table beside the doorway to the smithy. The shelter had reed walls, thick and warm in winter, that were currently rolled up to let the summer breezes blow the swelter of the forge away. She said, “Broke another one?”
Alfgyfa blew a lock of hair out of her eyes in answer. It was stuck to the sweat of her forehead and fell back into place immediately when she stopped blowing.