An Apprentice to Elves (25 page)

But that was a problem she could do something about.

She sought Skjaldwulf where he worked in the dusty yard, helping the not-quite-weaned cubs become strong by teaching them to sit upright on their haunches in return for bits of meat. It looked ridiculous—as if he were surrounded by a half dozen giant, shaggy squirrels—but he said it strengthened their backs.

He stopped as soon as he noticed her, handed out the last few tidbits, and dried his bloody hands on a rag as he came over. The pups gamboled about his ankles, nipping and jumping and climbing over one another. It seemed as if they had been featureless grubs making small meeping noises as they competed for their mother's teats only a few days before. Now, Skjaldwulf winced as their needle-sharp puppy claws and teeth pierced his breeches and found the skin beneath.

As he came up to Otter, he put on an ostentatious performer's frown. “I see by your face, daughter, that I am in trouble.”

His expression and voice, mock-grave, might have moved her to laughter, tears, or both simultaneously. But she could not bear either, so she raised the back of her hand to her mouth and bit down hard enough to hurt and leave red marks from her teeth.

“Hey,” Skjaldwulf said, and gently drew her hand away. “We have other food, sweetheart.”

“You can't take Mar,” she told him, all in a rush, because if she temporized, she would lose her courage. “He won't survive it.”

He stopped. He squeezed her fingers abruptly, and now it was him causing pain, but she did not flinch. She saw him draw a quick breath, surprised, and then a slower, thoughtful one.

“Of course you're right,” he said. “How do you propose I convince him to stay?”

And that, right there, was the rub. Because Mar was old, but Skjaldwulf was his brother. And Skjaldwulf was not so young himself—though hardly an ancient to be left behind. Every man who could swing an axe would be needed on the war trail.

“You're the wolfjarl,” she answered brusquely. “You think of something.”

Skjaldwulf frowned at her, but then his eyebrows lifted, in surprise or insight. One of the young wolves around him whined, and he turned away from Otter without speaking further, but that did not distress her. No one could know Skjaldwulf for more than a handful of days without understanding that his words and his love were not weighed on the same scales.

Still, she watched him go—the heaviness in his step, his heavy-shouldered posture—and she could have cursed. Not him, and not the wolves. Not even the Rheans, for the moment.

But just the world, the damned world that took a man whom the gods had cut out to be a poet and sent him over and over again into war.

*   *   *

For all her weeks of effort and patience in bringing the svartalfar and aettrynalfar to the table together—if there was even going to
be
a table in that hole in the ground they were determined on using as a conference hall—Alfgyfa was rewarded by being shunted aside with the other apprentices, servants, and humans when the hour of the Alfarthing finally approached. Even Idocrase got to saddle his pony and head out with Tin and Galfenol to the cavern. Pearl and Manganese and Yttrium were left behind, but Pearl and Manganese were busy with practice work in Thorlot's forge, and Yttrium had gotten into a complicated discussion of metallurgy with Thorlot, which was—the final blow to Alfgyfa's stung pride—too esoteric for a mere apprentice to follow.

She wandered from place to place forlornly, trapped inside while a summer storm soaked the courtyards, looking for something to occupy herself and incapable of concentrating on any of the tasks she was offered.

Mjoll took pity on her and set her to mucking out the stables—hard physical labor and just enough mental engagement that her growing anxiety didn't wash her away—but there were enough tithe-boys around that even that extravagantly self-perpetuating task consumed only the morning. Then Alfgyfa was back to sulking about the heall, irritating herself nearly as much as anyone else, until, finally, Brokkolfr huffed at her like an annoyed wolf—except his wolf was never annoyed—and said, “Why don't you go and visit Osmium?”

It was the perfect solution, and the best part was that Alfgyfa realized she didn't even need to get permission. Her master was away, a wolfcarl had told her to get out of the heall's collective hair, and she might be an apprentice but she was also a woman grown. She had every right to walk where she pleased. She wasted exactly enough time to pull on her walking boots and braid her lights into her hair before she was out the gate at a gentle jog.

The summer afternoon was balmy and cool. The storm had blown through, but beads of rain still bowed the heads of flowers and rye grass. Light caught in the droplets as if the meadow plants too wore hairnets of stonestars, and the spiderwebs were tattered veils sewn with jewels. Alfgyfa felt a great weight of foreboding lift from her as she moved.

It was chilly among the trees, but as she was running, it only cooled the surface of her skin. The muscles stayed warm beneath. Coming to the cave mouth, she slithered in. Points of light cast through the jewels in her hairnet swayed and tossed around her as she trotted along the starstone-edged path to the gates of Aettrynheim, amused at herself now that she had ever found the precipice intimidating. At the gates, she rang the bell, and the apprentice horticulturalist who answered let Alfgyfa through the gate and sent a messenger straightaway for Osmium.

In a stroke of real luck, it was Osmium's rest day, and she had just finished breaking her fast. She arrived slightly out of breath and grinning widely not half an hour later, with a pot of ale and couple of mushroom pâté–stuffed buns still warm in the bag.

The aroma made Alfgyfa realize that her bread and cheese had been on the other side of several hours with a shovel and pitchfork, and also a run. And that she hadn't washed her hands after the stable work.

Fortunately, there was a public washroom nearby, so once Alfgyfa had the compost smell of horse shit off her hands there was no impediment to lunch. She sat on a bench with Osmium across from her, using a pedestal marked out for an esoteric alfish game called steinntafl as a lunch counter, and bit into the first of the stuffed buns. Chewy wheat—grown in the warm, well-lit caverns of Aettrynheim—was an uncommon treat for Alfgyfa, accustomed as she was to crumbling rye bread, buckwheat, and oats. And alf-mushrooms were better than any mushrooms grown under the light of the sun, no matter how dim and sweaty the forest that spawned them, especially when those mushrooms had been fried in thyme and butter from Franangford's cows.

Alfgyfa belched contentedly and reached for the ale. Osmium beamed at her.

“How did you know I was hungry?”

“You're an apprentice. You're
always
hungry. And I remember how much you liked our mushrooms.”

While Alfgyfa drank her ale and consumed the second bun, Osmium told her about the notes she'd started to receive from a journeyman-hydrologist—this being apparently an accepted method of courtship among the aettrynalfar. “She writes a good, clear hand,” Osmium said, “and I like her directness. Certainly, I would learn more of her.” She smiled. “And what of you, cave-sister? Is there no one to lure you into indiscretions?”

Alfgyfa thought instantly of Idocrase and felt herself blush painfully red. She had questions she would have liked to ask Osmium, who seemed to know much more about these things than Alfgyfa did, but there was no way she could do it. The words stuck in her throat like sideways bones.

And she was afraid Osmium would be horrified.

She said, “Don't tease. I've been in Nidavellir. When would I have had the opportunity to meet anyone?”

“You have been back at your father's wolfheall for some time,” Osmium said.

“
Tithe-boys,
” Alfgyfa said with loathing. “The only indiscretion they could lure me into is murder.”

“Then what?” said Osmium. “You are clearly bursting at the seams with
some
impatience, and if it isn't matters of the heart, I don't—”

“
Knowledge,
” Alfgyfa said, feeling as if the word were a sword she was drawing out of her own heart. “Stonesmiths in Nidavellir use
tools,
not their bare hands. And there isn't even … when they talk about Master Hepatizon—”

“Vaidurya,” Osmium corrected reflexively.

“Vaidurya. Beg pardon. When they talk about Master Vaidurya, they never say what she did. They never tell us that there's an entire
world
of lore and scholarship that we can't take into consideration in our work, because we don't know it's
there.
And if rumors reach us, well, we're expected to play dumb and curl up our ears and look in some other direction until the urge to find out what trolls and aettrynalfar can do to stone
goes away
!”

Osmium stared at Alfgyfa. Her ears, indeed, were a bit curled at the edges, but Alfgyfa thought—hoped—it might be more humor than aggravation. Osmium's nose wrinkled, then, and she chuckled.

“What?”

“No one will ever accuse you of diplomacy.”

Despite herself, Alfgyfa felt the sting. “Who was it that brought the aettrynalfar and the svartalfar to this very meeting they've locked us out of?” She drummed her fingers on the table edge, wondering if Osmium had had anything to do with making this one. “Besides, aren't I among friends here?”

“A touch,” Osmium conceded, after a moment's thought. “Anyway, it's not the same thing, exactly.”

“What's not the same thing?”

“What trolls do—did—as compared to alfar.”

“Not all alfar,” Alfgyfa said tartly.

Osmium smiled, showing the first gold inlays of adult skills decorating tea-stained teeth. “Anyway.
Our
tunnels don't make you nauseated, for one thing.”

Alfgyfa wadded up the little sack the buns had come in and stuffed it into her pocket. “Thank goodness.”

“You never considered the difference?”

“I had assumed that was because you cared more about comfort than the trolls did.”

Osmium shook her head, her braids moving over her shoulders like so many beaded snakes. They tended to catch on the ornaments on her cloak. She paused for a moment to shake them loose, unpicking a few strands that had gotten snagged around a pin. “Alvish or Iskryner?”

“Alvish,” Alfgyfa said. The alfar's language was better for talking about theories and hypotheticals in, and there were any number of technical terms that she only knew in Alvish—if they had equivalents in Iskryner at all.

Osmium gave her a little lift of the eyebrows that translated as,
you're serious, then,
and said in Alvish: “It's because the trolls cared less about the integrity of dimensions than we do.”

Alfgyfa thought about that. “I'm not sure I understand what ‘the integrity of dimensions' means.”

Osmium glanced around. “Here, look.”

She hunkered down on her haunches, knees splayed out to either side—an easy crouch that showed the fitness of someone whose profession kept her hopping up and down off the ground all day. Alfgyfa squatted beside her and held her breath as Osmium dug her fingernails into the stone.

Carefully, Osmium lifted her hand. The stone pulled up like thick syrup with it, sliding between her fingers. Alfgyfa thought of wet slip on a potter's wheel. She could see the stone stretching, and the way Osmium made a tiny hole to allow air into the hollow space beneath the surface that she scooped it from. Alfgyfa heard the air hiss into the hollow. This was necessary, she realized, because otherwise lifting the stone would be as impossible as working a bellows that would not draw, or pulling up the dasher in a too-tight butter churn. An empty space could suck like a pursed mouth if air couldn't get into it.

“See where it comes from?” Osmium said, pausing a moment with the stone stretched like pine gum between her hands.

“Sure,” Alfgyfa said. “So that's how the great caverns are made? The stone that was in them is what's shaped into the pillars and the residences?”

“Some of it has to be taken elsewhere, too,” Osmium said. “We can't just create or destroy the stuff. It's more that we coax it from place to place.”

“And that's not what the trolls did.”

Osmium shook her head. “What the trolls did—it's more like they pushed the stone aside. Or pulled it into place.”

Alfgyfa watched Osmium's hands as the alf gently pushed the stone of the cavern floor back flat and smoothed it out gently She burped a little air bubble out of it, even, as if punching down dough, then settled the stone with a pat of her hand. When Alfgyfa ventured to touch it, it was as solid as it had ever been.

“Pushed it aside where, though?”

“Ah,” Osmium said, with a waggling eyebrow that would have done Antimony proud. “That's what makes it all so unsettling, isn't it? The trolls didn't put it
anywhere,
exactly. And they didn't bring it from anywhere. But they didn't create or destroy stone, either. They just put it aside.”

“They didn't have to worry about the integrity of dimensions?”

From the way Osmium's mouth worked, Alfgyfa saw that the concepts she was attempting to describe made her deeply uncomfortable. “It's almost as if they had extra directions. Like they could stack it up in a place we can't even see.”

Alfgyfa thought of the nauseating twists of trellwarrens, the way the floor might seem to slope up when a marble would roll down.

She thought of the round stones Osmium had given her, and how she had used one to help rescue Mouse, to help herself understand how the warren was working. She thought of how it could seem you must be about to walk back through a cross-tunnel you'd come down fifteen minutes before, and then find yourself miles from where you expected.