An Apprentice to Elves (19 page)

“The damned Helspawn winter's on our side, for a change,” Skjaldwulf said, finally. “That will be a relief.”

Isolfr snorted, as if the wolfjarl had said something funny. Under the table, Mar whined, and nobody watched as Skjaldwulf went to crouch beside him. The winter would not be on Mar's side.

God of smiths,
she prayed,
just let everyone I love get through this alive.

It was a selfish, unreasonable prayer, and she didn't care. Were not the gods selfish, unreasonable creatures in their own rights? They ought to understand, then.

Otter rose, at last, and mentioned that she was needed in the kitchens if anyone was to get supper that night. Kathlin went with her—whether to help or gossip, Alfgyfa was uncertain. They could probably both be accomplished simultaneously. Alfgyfa thought that was a pretty good excuse—or, at least, not a shamefully bad one—and anyway her head was spinning with ration weights and travel rates, so she rose as well and followed the other women.

“Can they do it alone?” Otter asked Kathlin as the door to the Quiet Chamber swung closed behind them.

Kathlin smiled—tight, but honest. Alfgyfa saw Isolfr's face in that smile, and perhaps a little of her own. After so long with people who looked nothing like herself, it was a strange sensation, comforting and alien all at once.

Kathlin said, “Father's a better housekeeper than I am. I trust him to know oats from millet, and how much they bulk, and how much of either a man needs to run on. Anyway, it will be our job of work to get the supplies to them at the front, won't it? We'll have to harvest without them. And it'll be a lean winter next if this stretches to two years, because then we'll have to plant without them, too.”

Otter nodded. “I remember. The Rheans will burn the fields if they can. Ruin wells.”

“Destroy the wealth they came to steal,” Kathlin said, disgusted. She shoved her hands in her apron-dress pockets and made fists of them there, stretching the fabric. “Well, it's not like a Northman never went a-viking.”

Alfgyfa followed them into the kitchens, where she decided that Kathlin and Gunnarr could keep their huswifery; Alfgyfa would rather stand with Thorlot in the forge. She was set to kneading bread, a simple task suited to hard muscles, to which even an unskilled cook could only cause so much ruination. She worked beside Thorlot's daughter Mjoll, who was more or less her own age and had been a friend of Alfgyfa's childhood before she was 'prenticed away.

They traded shy sidelong glances for a few minutes before Mjoll said, “I remember you.”

Alfgyfa had never forgotten Mjoll. She smiled back.

The bread was half rye, and the loaves had a wonderful sour smell, that Alfgyfa had not even realized she was homesick for until gritty particles of rye started clustering uncomfortably under her fingernails. It was strange but not unpleasant to stand in a kitchen with other women—even more strange to think of herself as
belonging
there, unquestioned—with the ovens coming up to heat but not yet suffocatingly hot, doing necessary work and—indeed—gossiping.

Alfgyfa learned more about her relatives, both close and distant, than she had known in her entire life. Especially when her cousins came in to help.

It was strange, too, to think of herself as someone with cousins; she was used to being the only one of her entire race in any gathering, used to being too tall and too pale and too weak. And for all her life, her father had been the only blood-family she knew. All the Franangfordthreat was her wider family; she was old enough now to understand the protectiveness she had always felt, bone-deep, in the pack-sense. She began to see why Tin might have complained about her fearlessness, for with this perfect knowledge of safety, why would any child learn to fear?

That was a very different notion of family from the presence of Kathlin and her daughters, Esja, Olrun, and Jorhildr. They all looked like Isolfr, and it was horribly disconcerting, because Alfgyfa knew full well that meant they all looked like
her.
Esja, the oldest, was striving hard to become a miniature copy of her mother, and Jorhildr clung wide-eyed to Kathlin's skirts, but Olrun, at nine, was old enough to want adventure and still young enough to believe she could find it, to believe she could be Brynhildr in the sagas, a woman who could defeat a man in a holmgang and could kill monsters as well.

Alfgyfa, who had been brought up to two completely unharmonious ideas of what women could do, felt a pang of deeper kinship. She found herself inclined to like Olrun; the child was silent and determined and madly in love with the trellwolves—and the trellwolves gave every sign of loving her back.

Amma loved everybody, and she recognized Olrun as a cub. “Any cub,” her brother Brokkolfr had more than once said, with varying amounts of rue, “is Amma's to love.” While Brokkolfr was engaged in the council, Amma contributed to the order in the kitchen—and the flow of work—by permitting Olrun to hug her and pet her and ride on her back, and when Otter solemnly gave Olrun a wide-toothed comb, Amma lay still for that, too, her tail thumping mightily on the flags of the courtyard.

Viradechtis had remained behind in the council chamber. She was a little more wary than Amma—she could hardly be less—but from what Alfgyfa could read in the pack-sense, the konigenwolf recognized Olrun as kin to Isolfr—
blood-sister's daughter
didn't quite translate, but
pack-sister's daughter
did; Viradechtis understood Olrun to be like Athisla's pups, or Amma's, and thus, because Alfgyfa knew that analogies were never left incomplete in wolf logic, she had accepted Kathlin as another subordinate bitch in her pack.

Alfgyfa did not say so to Kathlin, when she reassured her that Olrun would come to no harm among the wolves. “They know she is a child,” she said instead, “and there is not a trellwolf in the Wolfmaegth who would harm a child.”

Kathlin, stirring stew in a great cauldron with a wooden spoon until steam and sweat dripped from her forelock into her eyes, said, “Isolfr loves Viradechtis deeply.”

It was not exactly a question, but Alfgyfa leaned on her loaf and answered anyway: “They are not monsters. They are not even, quite, animals like the cave bears. It is said everywhere that men who live with wolves become like wolves, but it should also be said that wolves who live with men become like men. Viradechtis loves Isolfr in return.”

She had seen the difference in Greensmoke and the wild wolves. They were every bit as intelligent as their heallbred cousins, but where she was accustomed to minds that moved with hers, theirs more often moved away or against. Mouse's inability to understand that
not-wolf
could be
like-pack,
years ago, had been perhaps a warning, if she believed that any god would have bothered to warn her. (Mouse still did not believe
not-wolf
could be
like-pack,
but he had decided that Alfgyfa was something other than
not-wolf,
something she couldn't put words to at all.)

Kathlin nodded. “You grew up with the pack.”

“So I did,” Alfgyfa said.

“Me too,” Mjoll allowed, wiping escaped strands of her hair from her face with the back of her hand, “though I can't hear them the way she does. I'd say it hasn't harmed me any … but I think it made me unfit for wifing.”

Kathlin smiled. “Perhaps it's wifing that's unfit for you, when it comes down to it.”

She didn't sound bitter, or even regretful, and Alfgyfa wondered. Was she content with her far-trading husband? Was she content that he was so often gone? Alfgyfa was still wondering how to raise the subject when Mjoll picked up a wooden paddle and went to move the bread around in the oven. Kathlin glanced at Thorlot and Otter, who were across the kitchen. While Mjoll was away, Kathlin said, almost under her breath, “I wanted to hate the wolves for taking my brother away from me, but I never could.”

Alfgyfa looked at Tryggvi where he was sprawled in front of the hearth, locked in fierce contention with a marrowbone. He, too, had apparently grown bored in the Quiet Chamber, and wandered in an hour or so after Amma. He rolled onto his back, the bone between his forepaws while he gnawed and tongued the end. His hind feet dangled lazily above his soft, furry belly.

“No,” Alfgyfa said, “do not hate them. It is not the wolves who kept you apart.”

Kathlin looked away, which was enough acknowledgment of the truth. She glanced over at Olrun, who was straddling Amma's back as if the wolf were a pony. The wolf reclined, laughing at her cleverness in not allowing herself to be, exactly, ridden. Alfgyfa could see in Kathlin's expression that the child would, at least for the duration of this visit, be allowed to run free among the Franangfordthreat.

By the time the last loaf was kneaded in the kitchen, the ovens were going full blast, leaving Alfgyfa dizzy with heat. There was a rain barrel outside, closer than the well. She stepped outside and drank deeply from the dipper, then rubbed the dough off her hands while hens rushed to flock around her feet and peck up the particles.

As she was so engaged, a lanky tithe-boy sidled up to her. “You're Alfgyfa,” he said.

She inspected him. He was a little older than her own age. Tall, he seemed to have been made with an assortment of mismatched body parts left over when the rest of humanity was assembled. And that wasn't his fault, but the way he stood a little too close to her was.

“I am Alfgyfa,” she replied. In her head, she heard Tin and Thorlot both telling her to be polite, like a chorus, and bit her lip. “And who are you?”

Over his shoulder, she saw two other tithe-boys sniggering by the woodpile, where they were obviously supposed to be splitting logs. Whether he'd bragged to them or they'd put him up to it, none of this endeared him to her.

“Canute.”

She'd had enough bullying encounters with svartalfar and their sharp, clever tongues that the ensuing silence threw her off balance. He just
stood
there, looking awkwardly down at his hands (over by the woodpile, his friends were falling over themselves laughing, and Alfgyfa decided she liked them even less than she liked him), and finally, because she did genuinely feel a little sorry for him, she said, “Do you have a name picked out?”

The unborn pups belonged to Franangford's fourth bitch, Athisla, whom Alfgyfa didn't know. They wouldn't be on the ground for another week, or possibly two. Plenty of time—too much time—for tithe-boys to get into trouble and set up pecking orders that would be the envy of any hen. She remembered
that,
too. And these boys were all old for the tithe; they must have gone unchosen from the last litter.

He shook his head. “I don't think I'll be chosen.”

“Well, you certainly won't if you think like that,” Alfgyfa said, exasperated. “What pup would want a headful of
can't
and
daren't
and
won't
?”

Canute stared at her with a strange dawning look on his face. Belatedly, Alfgyfa wondered: was this
flirting,
not bullying? Was he trying to
flirt
with her?

Was he
insane
?

Anyway, she had bread to score. She turned and headed back inside, but stopped just inside the door and said over her shoulder, “Pick a name. It might just come in handy. You wouldn't want to be in a hurry and accidentally wind up calling yourself Ulfwulf or something.”

His jaw was still hanging open when she shut the door.

*   *   *

By the time the council broke, the evening meal was ready—and every single wolf who had originally been in the Quiet Chamber had found his or her way into the kitchens in order to beg for scraps. Even Viradechtis, who wandered in last and flopped down companionably beside Ingrun and Tryggvi. Tryggvi had been exiled from his choice spot beside the fire by the arrival of Mar.

There was always a little wolf fur in the heall food. You learned to eat around it after a while.

After carrying in the roasts and loaves and stew with the help of the thralls, the women brought around the first horns of ale. They then took their places and were served ale in turn.
This is what women do,
Alfgyfa thought, and tried not to compare it to meals in Tin's household, because there was no point.

Alfgyfa was seated with Kathlin, Gunnarr, and Kathlin's three daughters. Esja was only four years younger than Alfgyfa. When not perfecting her skills of huswifery, she preferred horses to all other topics of conversation—so Alfgyfa's worries about being disdained were thrown away. They had a wonderful time comparing the qualities of Lampblack to those of Esja's rusty dun mare, Coppergilt. Olrun was mostly engaged in sneaking Kothran bites of food under the table. Jorhildr probably wound up feeding even more to Kothran, but that was because she spent the meal fussing with the food on the plate she shared with her mother, and most of what was meant to go in her mouth wound up on the floor.

The more frightening but also more thrilling part of dinner for Alfgyfa was the opportunity to spend time with her grandfather. She sat and ate bread she'd kneaded herself and let Gunnarr pick and choose the best bits to go on the wooden trencher that she shared with Esja. The food was very different from the food in the alfhame.

Spring onions were much prized, and featured in a salat with soft greens and goat cheese and beets that everyone was careful to divide up so all who wanted it got a share. There were no mushrooms at all—when Alfgyfa asked, Kathlin said that they were more a food for autumn—and enough kinds of game that Alfgyfa could have eaten her fill just by taking a single taste of everything. She'd forgotten how the wolfheall dined: on tithed food given by local jarls in exchange for the wolfcarls' protection, on the truck gardens and dairy beasts and hens kept by the heallwomen, and on the game the wolves brought down.