An Apprentice to Elves (10 page)

His kindness made her want to bolt, but she mastered herself and stood firm. She studied his face, wanting to be sure she would know him again. Dark and bony as any svartalf, and he'd chosen the pattern of his adulthood tattoos to extend the lines of his eye-folds and flared nostril-edges into branching curlicues like the tendrils of a climbing vine. They sparkled faintly as he tipped his head back in order to see her better. The svartalf master-inkers had disciplines, Alfgyfa knew, where they imbedded fine particles of gold or platinum in the skin to give that glittery shimmer. A platinum charm shaped like a pen nib depended from his largest earring. Or perhaps it was an actual pen nib. Alfgyfa could see scratches along the oblique edge as if it had been honed.

Svartalf eyes caught the light. His flashed green—unusual—though when he cocked his head to the side, there was a flicker of gold.

Suddenly, Alfgyfa felt the exhaustion of too-long standing roll up her body. Her knees buckled, and she caught herself on a bench. She settled into it with a sigh, trying to make the whole process look intentional.

“Water would be welcome,” she admitted.

A rustle and the sweet-pitched clatter of badges. The gurgle of water. He was back, offering her clear water from the font in a rock-crystal cup cut as fine as a sparrow's egg. It was shaped like a partially opened blossom. Flaws in the quartz made it milky at the base, but the petals might have been wrought of the water they contained. Condensation beaded chill against Alfgyfa's hand as she sipped. The water sourced from the heights of the Iskryne and the walking ice that surmounted them, and it tasted of all the rocks it had filtered through—brash and deep, bright and earthy. She sipped, gasping as her teeth protested the chill, then pressed the cup to her cheek and temple for the cold comfort it offered.

“Thank you, Journeyman,” she said.

He fanned out his robes—red and gold, embroidered with a pattern like tree limbs intertwining, or arteries branching between veins—and settled opposite her. “I am curious about you,” he said.

Of course he was. They all were—and the alfar who hated her most virulently were perhaps the most so. She had grown accustomed to covert stares, in Nidavellir. Not among the alfar she dealt with regularly, of course—she suspected
those
had long since started seeing her as a sort of funny-looking alf with a speech impediment—but when she ventured into the reaches of the alfhame where she did not have usual business, she caused a stir.

It was almost refreshing to deal with someone who just came out and said what she knew they all felt. And it explained why he was being so attentive. She sipped more water—less icy, as some of the chill crept into her flesh—and felt her shoulders relax. She hadn't realized how much her head hurt until she put the cup to her temple and the pain began to ease.

“About me?” she asked. “About Alfgyfa Isolfrsdaughter of Franangford, apprentice to Mastersmith Tin of the Iron Lineage? Or about men in general?”

“Men in general,” he answered. “For now.”

She finished the water and set the cup aside. The gentle click of stone on stone ran up the bones of her fingers. “I may not answer.”

“You have that right.” A smile flickered at the corners of his leathery lips, making the platinum dust under his skin shimmer.

“Then I give you the right to ask,” Alfgyfa said. She leaned back into the bench, which was not made to fit her body, and curled herself into something resembling comfort.

He too resettled himself. “First, then, let me speak a little of myself. I am of the Rockworm Lineage. My mother's name is Cerium, and my line-mother was Thulium. I was born in Nidavellir, and I have just returned from a journeyman-span.”

This was alfish politeness. She couldn't be expected to speak with him unless she was formally told his antecedents, both mother-line and craft. The journeyman-span was another seven years atop the apprenticeship, during which a journeyman would travel and work with many masters. At the end of this time, he would be considered qualified to work independently, and eventually to attempt his master-piece—though whether or not he was
ready
for such an undertaking was left as a decision to the individual artisan. Often, a span of a decade or two would pass between independence and mastery.

With mastery came not merely the right to work independently (and the right to learn the Masteries of one's craft), but also the right to keep apprentices of one's own, and train journeymen, and run a shop that employed other alfar. Some alfar never bothered with a master-piece, content to seek bench-space from masters rather than directing their own shops. Some tried and failed at a master-piece several times before creating something that was seen as new and valuable by the Masters of their guild.

She said, “You can count seventeen thaws, then?”

“Nineteen,” he said. “I came to 'prentice late. My mother had started me as a cloth maker, as is the way of our line, but it turned out I was not suited. I could not be trained out of reading when I was supposed to be carding, or spinning, or making combs. I am fortunate that Masterscribe Galfenol believes that for working with words, it's better to have a strong aptitude than an early start.” His smile was self-effacing, half hidden under his nose-tip as he angled his chin down. “I have always been a martyr to curiosity.”

“That, we have in common,” Alfgyfa said.

“What do you miss most?” he asked. “About your home?”

She considered.
Amma. Osmium.
But that was too personal to say, and she wasn't about to admit to missing the aettrynalfar. “Nidavellir is my home now,” she said, careful politeness. “But I do miss trees. The sky. I miss being able to go out into the forest and run for hours on soft pine needles, in the open spaces under the boughs. The trees are so large they shade out everything that might grow beneath them. They are like … like caverns made of wood.”

“As alive as stone,” he said. She had learned the inside-out nature of alfar similes: to them, the stone was as alive as the mountains—huge, and slow, and perhaps not aware exactly. But not a dead unfeeling thing, either.

“What are you most curious about?” she asked, in her turn, when it became obvious that he was waiting politely for her conversation. Tin had taught her the rules, even if Alfgyfa had had little chance to practice.

“The people,” he said. “Their customs. Their traditions.”

“My people.”

He nodded. His rings clicked when his fingers steepled shyly.

Alfgyfa wondered who her people were. She thought of the alfar on one side and men on the other, and how the differences between them created gaps into which she had fallen, again and again. And into which—she admitted to herself, bruised with honesty—she would probably always fall.

She said, “We live in the cold above the soil. It makes us … hard, and fast to decide and act, for we do not have the time to argue over each note of the song as the smiths and mothers do.”

She angled her head deliberately toward the recess chamber. He didn't laugh, but she caught the dip and flick of his ears that meant he wanted to. He said, “We—svartalfar, I mean, not you and I—we have customs.”

Of course, those weren't his words exactly. Rather, he said “we” with the harmonics that meant
a whole people, greater than a clan.
And the word “customs” carried half its meaning in notes so deep Alfgyfa couldn't even hear them.

He continued, “I know that men do not have these traditions as we do, but it does not seem, from what those who fought in the Trellwar will say, that your communities”—another complicated word that translated only roughly and then as something like
kinship-grouping-and-surrounding-allies
—“are just as close-knit as our own. And I have wished to imagine it and cannot. If you do not have tradition as we do, what is it that holds your people together? How do you trust each other?”

It was an important question among the svartalfar, who would cheerfully cheat each other if they could—and one purpose of the endless rituals and lists was to channel the possibilities for false-dealing into the very narrow avenues where it would not cause feuds and vendettas such as svartalf history was littered with. A svartalf trusted her neighbors because they did their laundry the same way, because they dried their herbs the same way, and because when they sat down to dicker, they both understood exactly what was and wasn't at stake.

His question was a good one, and Alfgyfa was well aware that she probably wasn't the best person to answer it, given that her view of human society was odd and getting odder by the day. But she remembered how travelers guesting at Franangford—mostly wolfcarls from other wolfheallan, but the occasional wolfless man who for whatever reason didn't care to chance his luck in town—would sit around the hearth in the evening and share news and gossip and later the younger members of the Franangfordthreat would start pestering Skjaldwulf to offer something from his seemingly endless memory chests.

“Stories,” she said. “We tell stories.”

*   *   *

No decisions were made in that session—no consensus could be reached, which left Tin equal parts frustrated and grateful. And restless. She returned home well into the Hours of Quiet and knew she had no hope of sleep.

Tin was considered something of a radical by her people, but she nevertheless found Alfgyfa a revelation. Tin's sole human apprentice learned fast and did not want for application to her studies, but she lacked discipline. She was not meticulous. Instead of mastering a skill through repetition, she would practice until she'd achieved some approximation of ability, and then she would attempt variations. Even
innovations,
which Tin had been raised to believe were the sole province of those who had achieved formal Mastery of a trade.

It wasn't a belief system she'd ever been over-respectful of, or interested in enforcing. Tin had been responsible for a few innovations as a journeyman in her own right, and that had been scandal enough. But now one of those innovations had last been seen staring sullenly at the hem of Tin's robes, apparently insensible to the fact that she'd placed her own ascension to journeyman in jeopardy.

And Tin was forced to realize that what passed for youthful rebellion and radicalism in a svartalf was in fact simply the normal process of learning, where humans were concerned. Sometimes she despaired.

But she was committed.

And—as she paced and fretted and jangled her robes—she was committed to getting Alfgyfa out of this mess, and getting her pointed, once again, toward the goal of this whole costly and no doubt foolish endeavor: becoming the first—and if this were any indication, the only—human Mastersmith.

Supper had long ago been cleared. Tin walked the halls after her apprentices should have been in bed and she herself as well, twisting her ringed fingers together and sucking on her teeth and in general making a nuisance of herself to the housekeeping staff. She needed to find a solution—not an exception to tradition, nor a hole in it, but a way to make the rules work for her. For Alfgyfa.

For the peace they needed to cement, and the alliance that had to be strong and whole when the Rheans finally made up their minds to come back to the Iskryne in force. The alliance between Tin and Isolfr had been forged in one war against an alien threat—a war, she knew, for which the svartalfar bore some responsibility, and in which the men had borne the brunt of the damage—and she would not see it broken by another.

One difficulty at a time, she told herself. Like setting gems. First, she couldn't let the Smiths and Mothers decide to dissolve Alfgyfa's apprenticeship. Second, if they dodged that blow, she couldn't let the Smiths' Guild decide to postpone Alfgyfa's ascension to journeyman as a punitive (they would call it “teaching”) measure. She especially couldn't allow them to decree what was called “doubling back,” laying a second seven-year apprenticeship on the miscreant's shoulders. It was a significant matter to double a svartalf's term of apprenticeship. For a human, who might live no more than fifty winters—a mere seventy, if he or she were extremely lucky—another seven-year term would be insurmountable. She would have to send Alfgyfa home to her father in disgrace, and again the alliance would be strained, if not broken—the same result as if the Smiths and Mothers simply dismissed her on the spot.

And third,
whatever
happened, she couldn't allow it to affect judgment of Alfgyfa's journeyman-work.

It was halfway to breakfast; the kitchen apprentices were serving a light meal for the household staff and the smithing apprentice whose job it was, today, to see that the forges were stoked and brought up to temperature before the work began. Tin had stopped in to warm herself with bread and mushroom broth while she considered the problem at hand.

She was half dozing in a chair by the fire, watching one of the kitchen cats lie lazily atop a bale of kindling, the tip of its calico tail twitching, when the answer came to her with such force she nearly spilled the remainder of her broth. Why did it seem that you could think and think and think on something, only to find the answer as soon as you set it down? It worked for troubles of the forge as well as troubles of the mind—and in Tin's experience, the greatest frustration was that it didn't work at all unless you performed the fruitless tail-chasing portion of the process first.

The second stage in an alf's education was called
journeyman
for a reason. Often, a journeyman would move between the workshops of two, three, even four masters, learning different skills and ways of managing workflow in each shop, hopefully absorbing the strengths and remarking the weaknesses of each master. But there was also another, older tradition, by which an apprentice on the brink of making the transition could be sent (or taken) to travel for remedial or additional education
before
being elevated in rank.