An Apprentice to Elves (2 page)

She lay awake, listening to the breathing of Yttrium, Manganese, and Pearl, blinking the burning out of her eyes and
listening
, even though she knew there was nothing to listen for, that no wolves came gladly beneath the surface of the earth except in shallow dens and scrapes they dug for their cubs, or while hunting trolls. Alfgyfa knew the way the wolf-brothers and wolf-sisters gathered whining about the wolfcarls' entrance to Aettrynheim (the aettrynalfar themselves did not name their home so, but it was useless to suppose Skjaldwulf would not); the trellwolves would come no farther than the Room of Bridges, and even there, they flattened their ears uneasily and paced in restless loops, too aware of the weight of stone above their heads to be comfortable. No wild wolf, without a brother to coax or command her, would come as far as Nidavellir.

And yet Alfgyfa listened and
listened
and fell asleep listening, night after night, hearing nothing.

Until, quite unexpectedly, one night—she heard something after all.

She jerked upright in surprise, and then held her breath, restricting her listening to no farther than the confines of the room, for svartalfar had sharp hearing and Yttrium slept lightly. But she had not made enough noise to disturb Tin's senior apprentice, and she was able to put herself in the pack-sense again, straining upward and outward until she found what had startled her: a wolf, a half-grown dog-wolf, thirsty and frightened. And trapped.

There were no words in the pack-sense and no names as humans understood them, but the wolves of Franangford had named Alfgyfa in their own way, as the sharp bite of snow smelled on the night wind. She knew they gave her that name mostly because she was her father's daughter, but she liked it, and she tried, as the heall-women said about hand-me-downs, to grow into it. She offered it to the dog-wolf now and felt his fright increase to alarm.

Not-Wolf!
he said—not to her, but to his absent pack. But wherever he was, they couldn't comfort him, and he whined in miserable defeat.

It was different than speaking to the wolves she knew; this one was not accustomed to human words or human patterns of thought, and she had to struggle to find a way to say
friend. Like-pack
was the closest she could come, and it was clumsy and not quite what she meant.

But she felt his skepticism clearly enough: the idea that any
not-wolf
could be
like-pack
was not something he was prepared to believe.

Well, then. She'd just have to show him.

*   *   *

Kindling light in stone was one of the Masteries of the smiths; journeymen and apprentices were not permitted to learn.

Thus, once she'd slipped out of the dormitory—Yttrium hadn't woken, which felt like the first victory Alfgyfa had had in a very long time—instead of immediately setting out to find the trapped wolf, she turned to her right and followed the corridor, one palm riding along the smooth stone of the wall until she came to the first of the dim sparks that Tin's household kept glowing during the hours of sleep.

The alfar's dark-sight was much better than Alfgyfa's, but Tin had told her that even alfar couldn't see in a perfectly lightless place. And even alfar suffered from diseases and the failing of the flesh as it aged, and their elders tended to be as dark-blind as humans. Thus, each of the lights left glowing during a household's Hours of Quiet marked a cupboard in which was kept a lamp—the perfectly ordinary sort of lamp that could be lit with a tinderbox. Alfgyfa didn't even have to stand on tiptoes to open the cupboard; at seven, she was already as tall as most of the adult alfar around her, although her arms were much shorter than theirs.

She struggled slightly with the tinderbox—even to a skilled hand they were simpler in theory than in practice—but eventually an ember smoked in the dried cave moss and she managed to light a curl of cedarwood from it by blowing softly and evenly. A touch to the lamp wick, and a small, flickering glow warmed the corridor. It steadied when she closed the lantern's pane on its hinges.

The dog-wolf did not feel close by. She wasn't supposed to go exploring alone, and there would be svartalfar awake and working throughout the tunnels once she got farther from Tin's household. Here in the alfhame there was no sun to dictate one's rising and retiring, and each household chose their own Hours of Quiet. It was considered polite for visitors and passersby to mark the existence or lack of lights in a household, and—if they were absent—to avoid noisiness and traffic in nearby corridors.

But. Everybody knew that the human child was Mastersmith and Mother Tin's apprentice. If Alfgyfa just gripped the lantern and strode boldly, any alf she encountered would probably assume she was on an errand for her master.

She reached out to the dog-wolf, orienting herself again, and realized that whatever tunnel—if it was a tunnel—that he was trapped in lay outside the usual orbit of alfar life. That was good. She'd be moving away from the populated corridors.

And so she did. Trying to stride with purpose, holding the lantern well out from the skirts of her ill-fitting apprentice robes so its hot sides would not make them stink and smolder, Alfgyfa followed the trace of the dog-wolf's presence. She cajoled him as she walked, in sense-images and emotions, trying both to calm him and to lure him into revealing his name.

Wherever he was, it was dark. He'd been there a while; she could smell the urine and feces from where he'd soiled his pen. But not too many days—he was painfully thirsty, but not yet terribly weak with it. He'd tried climbing the walls, scratching and scrambling, but all his efforts had only left him with nails chipped down to sore quicks.

Alfgyfa winced in sympathy. She tried to let him feel it in the pack-sense, but he only answered her again,
Not-wolf.

But maybe, she thought, somebody else was looking for him.

As she followed his trace, she cast about. Surely his pack and his konigenwolf were seeking him. Could she hear them calling?

She'd never heard of a wolf so far separated from its pack that the pack-sense could not find it. Now, questing outward, thinking her own wolf name as fiercely as she might shout her human one over and over in a game of Echoes, she found a hint of that concerned contact.
Help me find him,
she thought.
Help me bring him back to you.

The konigenwolf's name was green-wood-burning. She smelt of rough smoke and pine needles curling in the heat. She seemed more accepting, both of
not-wolf
and of
like-pack,
and Alfgyfa wondered if she knew something, somehow, of the wolfheallan. The sense of her mind was mature and konigenwolf-whimsical: a strong adult, where the dog-wolf was in that gray twilight between being a cub and becoming an adult. Alfgyfa guessed that the konigenwolf was probably his mother.

The dog-wolf's name was the scratch of mice under snow cover. As Alfgyfa walked toward him, the tunnels became dustier and colder and …
emptier.
No alfar lived here; no alfar had lived here for a long time. She climbed through a hole that was both ragged and smooth, as if the rock had been torn like rotten cloth, then melted. On the other side, the air smelled different, sour like old sweat, but sweet, too, and over it all a sharpness that made her nose sting. It was the same air the dog-wolf was smelling, and she decided to be encouraged by that.

Which was just as well, because the next moment, she misjudged the pitch of the floor and fell, banging both knees and scraping one forearm in her effort to keep the lantern safe. Tears started to her eyes, and she had to stay crouched for a moment, the way the svartalfar mostly did instead of sitting, to keep from crying. Apprentices didn't cry, and wolves did not cry either.

And then, as her eyes adapted to the new patterns of rock and shadow, she forgot about her throbbing knees. The hole had dropped her into a hallway which stretched farther than she could see in either direction, neither perfectly straight nor quite bent enough to be called curved. The floor was lower than the edge of the hole and slanted, which was what had caused her to fall, and she frowned uneasily at the angle; it wasn't steep enough to be a ramp from one level of tunnels to another, but it certainly wasn't level. Or, at least, she
thought
it certainly wasn't level, but the longer she looked, twisting her head back and forth to try to get a sense of the whole visible length, the more uneasy about it she became. If she looked at it one way, it really did seem flat, but if she tilted her head just a little differently, the slant was unmistakable. Finally, she pulled out the pouch of pebbles stone-shaped to be perfectly spherical—a parting gift, shyly offered and just as shyly accepted, from her closest aettrynalf friend, Osmium—and picked through them for the one she liked the least, a dull brown-gray and not even glassy smooth. She set it down in front of her and released it, being careful not to push, and watched in considerable relief as it rolled to her right, gathering speed, and disappeared into the dark.

“All right, then,” Alfgyfa muttered and stood up, leaning on the wall until she was sure she had reconciled what her eyes were telling her with the truth beneath her feet. She was not helped by the way the walls of the tunnel pulsed in and out, unpleasantly like the segments of a worm. But she caught the trick of it at last and was able to turn toward the dog-wolf's unhappy, circling thoughts.

She found herself entering tunnels such as she had never seen before. The stone seemed melted in places, puddled—as if it had flowed of its own accord rather than being worked. Alfgyfa thought of hot wax, but mere wax would not have made her so nauseously uneasy.

She walked and walked, until she began to wonder if there was enough oil in the lamp to light her way home. She paused to consider, but in the moment when the echoes of her footfalls died away, she heard, faint but very sharp, the
skrit
of a wolf's claws on stone. She knew that sound perfectly, and it decided her. It was closer to go ahead than to go back, and if her lantern
did
die while she was in these unsettling tunnels, she would at least have a wolf for company.

Not that the wolf seemed to want company. He was sore and bruised, limping with an injured joint and a painful spine. Underneath his great thirst—his throat rasped and his head pounded with it—his hunger also nagged at him, lesser but still twisting in his stomach. She felt the moment when he smelled her flesh, and the thought—
meat
—that accompanied the scent.

Not meat,
she told him, and felt his ridicule of such a patent misstatement.
Like-pack.

Which was even more ridiculous. How could she be like-pack, when she wasn't even a wolf?

Edging cautiously through the lantern-faded dark—if Mastersmith and Mother Tin had impressed nothing else upon her, it was the dangers of old corridors, with their blind ways, deadfalls, and collapses—Alfgyfa found the edge of the pit into which the dog-wolf had fallen.

And more.

She heard him scritching below, uncertain now—because what kind of meat argued that it wasn't meat?—and she could feel his konigenwolf more strongly. She was counseling her male to wait, and Alfgyfa felt the cold touch of her searching mind, quick and hesitant as a straining, twitching, cold nose brushed on tender bare human skin.

The konigenwolf was willing to wait while Alfgyfa assessed the situation, though Alfgyfa could feel her close and knew that if green-wood-burning thought her cub was threatened, she would act. A chill rolled up Alfgyfa's spine, something she had never known from the attention of a wolf before. They had always been tender, tricky playmates—though protective and bossy, to be sure. But now she understood that green-wood-burning did not know her; did not trust her; and did not fear her at all.

For the first time in her life, Alfgyfa was scared of a wolf, just a little.

She peered over the edge of the pit. The lantern did not cast good light down, and there was no tilting it without spilling precious oil all over the trapped wolf. She couldn't even make out what color his coat was—but she could see mice-under-snow moving down there, the restless, weary pacing he could not stop, no matter how sore and hungry and thirsty he was.

An icy draft cut down through the corridor. Raising her head, squinting beyond the ring of light from the lantern, Alfgyfa could see a tunnel rising at a slant above her. Beyond its mouth, the silhouette of dark branches tossed against a still-dark but faintly paler sky. Stars dusted it like frost starring a window, and seemed as cold.

A trellpit.
A trap left over from the war between the svartalfar and the trolls, which the svartalfar had not closed up because this tunnel was of small use to them, being open to the sky. Alfgyfa eyed it. She might, she thought, manage to climb it if she left the lantern behind. She was not a wolf; she could brace her hands and feet against the opposite walls like nimble roots and push herself up the slanting chimney. But would that help her get the wolf out of the pit? Was there anything up there she could use to haul him out?

The chimney seemed very smooth-sided, and was probably slick with ice from snowmelt. If she fell, she'd just wind up in the pit with the wolf and no way out. And possibly a broken leg or hip to go with it. And then he
would
eat her, and she wouldn't blame him at all.

Well. Maybe a little.

Alfgyfa had been lectured about her recklessness often enough to know that by svartalf standards she was very reckless indeed, but this seemed risky, even to her.

Still. There was a way to get him water, at least.

Green-wood-burning,
she thought, trying to capture the tang and inflection of the smell in the konigenwolf's thoughts. She pictured a great shaggy head pushing snow into the tunnel, and with care she showed the front paws not proceeding past the lip. She pictured it as a question, not a command. She knew better than to try to tell a konigenwolf what to do.