An Apprentice to Elves (22 page)

There were so many more svartalfar that aettrynalfar. And the aettrynalfar, too, were at risk from the Rheans, she thought suddenly, though neither aettrynalfar nor Rheans were aware of it. The aettrynalfar lived
here,
not in the Iskryne. The Rheans could reach them. And the aettrynalfar, who had forsworn war and murder, had not even the reluctant, troll-inspired martial experience that svartalfar did.

This realization left her feeling unsettled and strange and frightened all over again.

The other thing that gave Alfgyfa's skin a strange, sticky, misfit feel was that while she was definitely noticed—and occasionally nodded to or smiled at—by individual alfar in the crowds she and Orpiment moved through, she was not
remarkable.
Men came here, to this alfhame, regularly enough to be unusual but not shocking. She hadn't realized how weird it would seem to not be an object of fascination.

And are you sorry?

No, she wasn't, not at all; it was just that it was unsettling.

Orpiment sent Agate on ahead to whatever the alfar's original destination had been with orders to make Orpiment's excuses. Then, stopping twice to ask for directions, he eventually led Alfgyfa to the edge of what must have been a sort of public park or stone-garden. Water ran splashing in little fountains among stepped pools of pastel stone, and delicate ivory-colored walkways arched over them. There, they found Osmium, up to her wrists in mending a park bench that looked to have grown organically out of the floor.

Orpiment moved so Osmium would see them when she raised her head, and the two waited quietly. It would not do to startle her, break her concentration, and perhaps leave her hands—bone and flesh—imbedded forever in stone.

Alfgyfa wasn't sure if Osmium noticed them at once or not, because she didn't raise her head. She was glad of the time to study her childhood friend, now a grown alf, robed in a deep blue-green, the draping sleeves rolled up and pushed back to reveal her long, dark, bony arms to above the elbow. She had her first tattoos already, marking her transition to journeyman and adulthood. And she worked with intense focus; from watching Tin, Alfgyfa suspected than an older master would probably work more casually, more easily, but she thought about the possibility of Osmium's hands being left behind in the stone when she pulled away and didn't feel inclined to judge.

And she watched as the stone stretched and sought, rising up to heal a gap knocked in the scrolling decorations on the nearest leg of the bench.

Five minutes or so later, Osmium slid her hands from the stone and raised her head to smile at Alfgyfa and Orpiment. She patted the healed base of the bench as Alfgyfa might pat the dirt near a fresh-planted pea shoot, and stood.

“Alfgyfa,” she said.

Osmium held her arms wide, and Alfgyfa went and crouched to hug her, awkward as this maneuver always was between human and alf. “Osmium,” she replied, feeling uncomfortable and curiously formal. Osmium set her at arm's length—and an alf's arms were very long—and regarded her with a smile.

“You've grown muscles,” she said.

Whatever alienation had possessed Alfgyfa for a moment, she breathed it out then, as she replied, “And you've grown arms.”

Osmium laughed and let her go with a pat not unlike the one she'd given to the bench. “Are you a journeyman, then?”

“It's a long story. I need your help, and Orpiment's. Or, I should say, I need to find out if you are
willing
to help. Or at least to listen.”

“You need never doubt that I will listen. May I offer you a tisane?”

Alfgyfa knew from Osmium's hopeful look—and her knowledge from Nidavellir how new journeymen behaved—that she wanted to show off her lodgings, so she said, “Yes, please.”

Osmium bustled around enough packing up her tools that Alfgyfa thought it might almost be a cover for nervousness. Perversely, that too made her feel better.

Orpiment watched and said nothing.

As they walked, Osmium pointed out bits of the city she had worked on—her repairs and amendments, her elaborations and adaptations. They were all small, as befitted a journeyman's work, but Alfgyfa liked them, and she recognized that some of them were quite clever.

It wasn't far from the park to Osmium's home. Osmium led them to a spiral stair, and they climbed it as it wound the perimeter of one of the pillar-towers. The railings felt smooth under Alfgyfa's hands. They were carved—or shaped, maybe—to resemble ancient, espaliered grapevines naked in winter, the terminal branches twisted together to form the shape of the ascending banister.

Osmium lived high above the city. Her door was a wonderful ochre orange that reminded Alfgyfa of autumn and butterfly wings. Osmium opened it not with a key but with a stroke of her fingers; Alfgyfa imagined her shaping the stone within to release a latch. The door swung wide as silently and smoothly as if it were a living limb, not a construct on hinges.

Osmium stepped within, and her guests followed.

The tower flat was small and cozy, taking up—by its shape—perhaps a fifth to a quarter of the diameter of the massive pillar. Alfgyfa could see at once how the apartments would be staggered within the tower, rising on a spiral with the staircases. Off to her left, in fact, was an elevated area of
this
flat, serving as a bedchamber and library, which was separated from the entry, living area, and cooking area by shallow steps. The raised floor, Alfgyfa guessed, represented the ceiling of a staggered flat below. This flat's ceiling was low enough, as was usual with alvish domestic architecture, that Alfgyfa had to go crouchbacked; she was long accustomed to doing so in Nidavellir, but having been free of it, even for a short time, reminded her now of just how uncomfortable it was.

The two-leveled room was sparely but comfortably furnished, with dozens of books on shelves that were part of the walls, and thick horsehair cushions in rich tones strewn over benches raised from the very stone of the floor. A low table divided a sitting area from one with hearth and cabinets. There were two great windows, one on each level. They were shaped, she thought, from rock crystal—clear quartz—and they bubbled out smoothly to give a slightly distorted but panoramic view of the dark, light-jeweled city.

Alfgyfa had been careful to watch her feet on the steps rather than the distance to the ground while climbing, railing or no railing, so it was only now that she realized just how high they had come. The overlook was breathtaking but it would be an enormous pain in the rear to discover at the bottom of the steps that one had forgotten something at the top.

This is Osmium's house,
Alfgyfa thought, a little awed by the adulthood that represented. The alfar in general tended toward smaller households of more closely related individuals than men did—more like the little crofts starting to spring up throughout the Northlands now that the troll menace was ended than the great keeps and heallan and their attendant walled towns that had held the winter country for all known history—but the idea of having a private place, a home just for oneself where one was accountable to no one else, struck Alfgyfa as strange and a little bit lonely—and just a little bit attractive.

“Please,” Osmium said. “Sit. Can I offer you refreshment? I have water, or I can make tisane—”

“Water,” Alfgyfa said; the climb had made her thirsty.

Orpiment settled himself. “Tisane, please?”

Alfgyfa sat beside him on the cushioned bench—better for human anatomy than the basket-chairs the svartalfar preferred—and loosened her boot buckles. Her feet remembered to ache as she pulled them free of the leather, so she pressed the soles by turns with the ball of her thumb and watched Osmium.

There was a basin carved or shaped into the stone countertop. Above it, water dripped—fairly quickly—from something very like a stalactite, until the basin was full. From where she was sitting, Alfgyfa could see that it would overflow into a slot in the wall behind it. For now, though, Osmium dipped water into a stone goblet, which she brought to Alfgyfa, her robes swishing across the surface-trade reed mats on the floor. Alfgyfa accepted it gratefully—heavy, damp, smooth—and forced herself to sip the icy water rather than gulping it. The taste—the sharp mineral tang—was so achingly familiar she could not believe she had forgotten about it until this instant.

“The water comes to your house?” she asked.

“It's called a quill,” Osmium said. “Because the pipe I am allowed as a single adult is the diameter of a raven's quill.”

Alfgyfa imagined not being obliged to haul water from the communal wells for every purpose and felt even more awed.

Osmium uncovered a patch of stone on the counter that sizzled when she moved a pan of water over it. Steam rose up, meaning that the stone was hot—was always hot, by the cover. Alfgyfa wondered if the stone-shaping somehow gave it this power, or if more water, hot beyond boiling from the deep thermal springs, was piped up to warm it. Either seemed equally amazing. While the pan came up to simmer, Osmium sorted herbs and bits of dried mushroom into two large mugs. By the time she was done, the water was hot, and she portioned it out.

Osmium returned, gave a mug to Orpiment, and hoisted herself on the table edge so she could face her guests. (And Alfgyfa remembered child Osmium's desire always to climb higher than anybody else.) The edges of her robes swayed as she kicked her feet idly. Together they sipped and sat in silence for a while—a ritual of relaxation, common to men and alfar, before the business began.

Then Osmium raised her head from the steam of the tisane she'd been enjoying. It still wreathed her face and dampened the black hair that hung in curls across her forehead. Beside Alfgyfa, Orpiment shifted.

“So,” Osmium said. “Tell me what help you need.”

And Alfgyfa tried. But the complex of problems—svartalfar, Rheans, Northmen, wolves, politics, traditions, alliances—kept getting away from her. And the more she tried to explain it, the more she realized that she didn't have a good understanding of the problem at all, let alone any idea of how to fix it.

“Slow down, Alfgyfa,” Osmium said, and she guessed from the wry lift to the corner of her mouth that Osmium was remembering child Alfgyfa, who had never been able to talk fast enough to catch up with the ideas in her head.

“Maybe,” Orpiment said, “it would be better if you just explained the problem—by which I mean,
your
problem—rather than also trying to think up solutions.”

Alfgyfa looked at him, surprised and relieved. Of course; one reason you asked for help was because you didn't understand all the options. She said, “Well, Antimony and the other Masters refused to talk to the svartalfar.”

“That seems reasonable to me,” Orpiment said. “When you consider that they drove our foremothers out to die.”

“Not them,” Alfgyfa said. “Their foremothers too.”

Orpiment made a gesture of irritated acquiescence.

Alfgyfa gathered her thoughts together again and said, “My master, Mastersmith Tin, is among the svartalfar at Franangford. She is not like the svartalfar your people remember.”

“What do you mean?” asked Osmium, raising a hand to forestall Orpiment's half-formed objection.

“She is my father's friend,” Alfgyfa said. “She has kept me as an apprentice for seven years. She brought the svartalfar to the defense of the Northmen, when the trolls—driven down on us by svartalfar—would have slaughtered my people and ruled the North of the world.”

Osmium tapped long black nails on stone. “Why does she want to talk to Antimony?”

“She…” Alfgyfa struggled with it a moment longer, then shrugged as much of an alfar shrug as she could manage. “This is the part I don't really understand. I'm not even a journeyman yet—she only tells me what she thinks I ought to know.”

Osmium coughed, and Orpiment started laughing. “Perhaps the svartalfar's ways are not so different from our own after all,” he said, his eyes gleaming like quartz in the dark folds of his face.

“She's worried,” Alfgyfa said, because that sounded better than what she sometimes thought was the truth:
she's afraid.
“Because the trolls are gone, I think.”

Orpiment and Osmium shared a look, a look Alfgyfa was perfectly familiar with, even if usually it meant
her kind are all barbarians,
rather than
she is almost certainly insane.

Alfgyfa had never seen a troll, knew them only from stories and the scars on her father's face. But she understood the terror of them that had ruled both her people and the svartalfar for generation after generation—the terror that had ruled the aettrynalfar, too, even though, so far as she knew, no troll had ever found its way to Aettrynheim. She understood why they were having trouble imagining that the trolls being gone could ever be something anyone would
worry
about.

But she'd also heard Vethulf talk about the wyvern that had nearly killed him when she was two and how their best guess was that it was a sort of horrible analogy to lost livestock. She'd heard all the wolfcarls tallying run-ins with cave bears, and she knew that number was climbing slowly but steadily. And she knew—how could she not?—that good relations between the svartalfar and the Northmen were fragile, like a spark just barely caught among kindling. If nothing was done to nourish it, it would die.

But she felt she must be careful to give no impression of svartalf weakness. That would be a betrayal of Tin, for the aettrynalfar were not allies of the svartalfar, even if they were allies of the Northmen, and the svartalfar had a whole cascading classification system for degrees of enemy, which ranged from
destroy without hesitation
to
trade with profitably but never, ever trust.
In seven years of watching Nidavellir's interactions with the other svartalfhames, Alfgyfa had not been able to teach herself to identify the fine gradations, but she
did
know that, for all that Tin wished to speak to the aettrynalfar, that desire did not mean they had crossed the boundary from
enemy
to
neutral acquaintance.
She tried instead a truism: “Things are changing. And I have come to the impression that she is concerned about the alliance between men and svartalfar.”