An Apprentice to Elves (26 page)

“That's how they traveled so quickly through stone, then?”

“Something like it,” Osmium said. “That's the theory, anyway.”

“Huh,” Alfgyfa said. She touched the stone again, fitting her finger into one of Osmium's shallow, rippled fingerprints. It was too narrow for her pad, and she could feel the little divot made by Osmium's nail. It was hard as—well, hard as stone.

“And no alf can do that?”

“It's proved damaging to the ones who have tried. Our own stone-shaping shares aspects of what the trellkin did, but it's a somewhat different art.”

Alfgyfa nodded, thinking hard. “So for example,” she said, after a few moments, “the aettrynalfar cannot tunnel with the speed that trellkin could.”

“Not even close,” Osmium agreed, standing up. Or as up as an alf ever got. She rocked from side to side, stretching out her knees and hips. “A trellwitch, one of their best stone-shapers, could push the stone aside as fast as she could walk.”

“That's how they fled Othinnsaesc, then,” Alfgyfa said. She remembered her father telling her of the earth outside Franangford seeming to open up as if doors slid aside, and the trellkin just boiling up out of the earth like geyser water.

Osmium was still watching her with the intent gaze of somebody waiting for the last bell of the ceremony to drop into someone's hand and ring. With Alfgyfa crouched and Osmium standing, their eyes were nearly on the same level.

Alfgyfa frowned over her thoughts. Then she blinked and rocked back on her heels. She stood herself, too fast, and felt dizzy. “That's why they came up aboveground here at all!”

Osmium tipped her head in acknowledgment. “Because Aettrynheim was in the way.”

“And they couldn't just go around it?”

“Our stone-shaping,” Osmium said, “fixes the dimensions in the stone. They couldn't just push an alfhame out of the way—whatever ‘out of the way' means to a troll—the way they could the natural stone.”

“So they had to come up in Father's yard.” Her dizzy sensation wasn't just from standing up too fast. It was the stunning sensation of getting the perfect answer to a question nobody had ever even thought to ask.

Why
would
the trellkind emerge from the earth just at Franangford? Just where men and wolves would come down upon them and slaughter them?

Because something stood in their way underground.

“Can you show me the differences?” Alfgyfa asked. “How your stone-shaping differs from a troll's?”

The alf laced her knobby fingers together, nails like a wolf's blunt black claws interweaving. Alfgyfa was reminded of the rib cage of some winter-killed beast, revealed by spring thaw.

“Not here,” Osmium said slowly. Worriedly. “But if we went to the trellwarrens … then I could.”

Osmium's bright eyes were waiting for her reaction. And for a few moments, Alfgyfa wasn't honestly sure what it would be. Then, a chill shivered from her belly to the top of her head. She let it out with a chuff, and it dragged a grin after it.

“We could get in trouble.”

“So much trouble,” Osmium agreed, grinning back.

*   *   *

Osmium cloaked herself for the surface, and Alfgyfa thought to be grateful that the darkness did not burn her the way the sun burned the alfar. And then they were walking out through the gates, giggling together while they tried to remember the last time Osmium had come aboveground with Alfgyfa. Alfgyfa had been in her seventh year, she thought. It must have been spring, because the hazel and walnut trees were decked in drooping pale-green catkins, and the bark of the white birches shone through leaves that were still translucent and membrane-thin.

Amma had been babysitting them, of course. And they had been giggling just like this, and had let the big wolf shepherd them.

Now it was the two of them walking side by side through the heavy shade of late summer, and the canopy overhead was so dense that Osmium unwound her face covers. She did not put back her hood or pull her smoked spectacles off, but she did straighten up and take great breaths of the open air and cock her head curiously around.

“This is almost like being in a cave,” Osmium said.

Alfgyfa looked around. The scent of unseen blossoms hung between the trees. Birds in a half-dozen colors flitted from tree to tree, and the air was bright with song. A red squirrel skittered up a great trunk, gone so fast it left nothing behind but the quick sound of nails and the rhythmic one-two jerk of a tail.

“A cave that's
nothing like a cave,
” Alfgyfa finally said, failing utterly to keep her laughter out of her voice. “Get a lot of cave squirrels in Aettrynheim? Red or gray?”

“Black,” Osmium said, and flicked a twig at her.

Alfgyfa ducked away. But Osmium's arms were long. She reached out and up and hugged Alfgyfa hard around the shoulders with a cloth-bundled limb. It felt like being hugged by a tree branch draped in richly embroidered robes. Alfgyfa leaned into it, leaned down, and hugged back. After a while, as they walked, they stopped giggling. They didn't speak again until they came to the edge of the trees.

They stopped well back in the shade, for Osmium's benefit, and Alfgyfa waited while her friend bundled herself up again.

The field below was empty except for nine or ten sheep in various shades of black grayed out with mud or white grayed out with even more mud than that. Off to the left, Alfgyfa caught a glimpse of the battlements of Franangfordheall over the tops of a stand of fruit trees that had been nothing more than saplings when she lived here.

When she lived here.
And where did she live now?

She pushed the thought away, turning her attention instead to the mound of dressed and mortared stone that sealed the entrance to the trellwarren. It was carved with runes of warning, and even from here, Alfgyfa felt the faint, familiar itch of unease that both attracted and repelled her. She looked at Osmium, who was settling the smoked lenses back over her veils.

“I don't see anybody on the walls.” It didn't mean they were unobserved: Franangford had embrasures, and it was impossible to see into the darkness within the walls from the sun-drenched valley below. But it bettered their odds of getting away with it.

“Well,” Osmium said, “it's not going to get any less creepy from standing here looking at it.”

She stepped out into the sunlight, flicking her hands under cover of her sleeves before they could burn. Alfgyfa thought about Skjaldwulf's humorous stories of Old Stonefoot, the troll who had been a little too slow ducking underground one sunny morning, and decided to keep the comparison to herself.

Osmium marched boldly up to the dome, as if she meant to walk right past it. Alfgyfa trailed her by three steps—and ran up the hem of her robe when, just behind the curve and out of sight of the Franangford walls, Osmium stopped abruptly.

“Oof,” Osmium said.

“Oof yourself,” Alfgyfa answered. “Have you considered developing stronger habits of communication?”

It was something Tin was wont to say to her apprentices when they were hasty or careless, especially around a forge, and Alfgyfa blushed as soon as the words left her mouth. But Osmium seemed to take them in a good spirit. She hunkered down a little and gestured for Alfgyfa to do the same.

The aettrynalf's hunker was about the same height as Alfgyfa's drop down and sit on the ground, so that was what Alfgyfa did. She bit her tongue not to ask questions that might distract Osmium, and instead bent her head to observe.

Osmium put the fingertips of both hands on the mortared stone, as Alfgyfa had seen her do in the caverns. She frowned, and there was a pause. Then she shifted her grip, winced in embarrassment, and said, “The mortar gets in the way a little. And I am just a journeyman.”

A moment later, stone flowed toward her as she spread her hands wide. She did it again and again, as if peeling back layers of dough one by one to reveal the filling of a pastry—but what lay exposed when she was done was a dark, low hole about as wide as Alfgyfa's arm was long. It was bounded at top and bottom by strips of mortar, and at either end by curls of stone.

The air sighed out of it, dank and smelling faintly of corruption.

“Well,” Alfgyfa said, when they had stared at one another for a good moment's length, “we've come all this way.”

“It would be a shame to go back without vomiting,” Osmium said, and she moved aside to let Alfgyfa go first. Because the human should
always
precede the alf into a pitch-black hole in the ground. Though, in fairness, Alfgyfa had the stonestars braided into her hair.

She put her hands on the edge of the stone, lay down on her belly, and poked her upper body inside.

The drop wasn't too bad, she could see once she got the light in. She'd have to reverse and go in feet-first, because there was nothing inside to grip with her hands except the ledge she was lying on. But once she did that, she could lower herself, and the opening would still be at a height for her eyes.

She accomplished that, and Osmium followed. Osmium's entry involved a sort of face-first worming through the gap, and then turning a somersault between her own gripping hands to drop to the tunnel floor beside Alfgyfa. She dusted herself off, and they looked at one another across the two foot and some difference in their heights.

“After you,” Alfgyfa said. “You're the one who knows where we're going.”

Osmium was better at marking their path, too—as she simply drew softly glowing arrows on the tunnel walls with her forefinger each time they passed an intersection. That glow—and the light from Alfgyfa's hairnet—were enough for the alf's dark-adapted eyes to see clearly, even several yards in the lead as she was, so the darkness did not slow them down. Just as well, since the trellwarren itself was more than capable of accomplishing that particular mischief. Even with the practice she'd had in the Nidavellir warrens, Alfgyfa found navigating this one challenging.

But the warrens she was used to were the warrens of the Iskryne. They had been long-inhabited, smoothed, regularized. These tunnels were something else again: ragged, furrowed. She could track the marks of a full set of claws, the path of an actual troll's hand. The floors were not smooth, but rippled, and the unsettling effect that trellish architecture had on Alfgyfa's sense of where things actually were in relationship to each other and herself meant that she—and Osmium—had to watch where they placed each foot and each hand. The warrens were taller than alf corridors, but not quite tall enough for a human woman, so Alfgyfa experimented with walking in a half-crouch and with bowing her head and shoulders. She alternated postures when the cramps generated by either got too bad.

The trolls pushing through here must have moved on all fours, in a kind of spidery scuttle. “Was that to move faster?” she asked Osmium, gesturing around at the low ceiling, the claw-marked hand- and footholds gouged out of the walls and floor.

“I don't know,” Osmium said. “It looks like the trellwitch in the lead just grabbed handfuls of the world and shoved it aside, though, doesn't it?”

Alfgyfa touched the wall. She stubbed her fingers: it was closer than it had looked. Alfgyfa's head ached between the eyes with trying to understand. “But shoved it
where
? Into the other stone? You couldn't do this, right?”

“I already
said
that.” Then Osmium halted—with more warning this time—and Alfgyfa was giving her a little more room, so even in the troll tunnel they didn't quite collide. “I'm sorry. I know you're struggling with this. I struggle with it, too, and I've got a lot more theory than you do. I shouldn't have snapped.”

“I was being dense,” Alfgyfa said. She was used to short-tempered alfar by now.

Osmium nodded, turned back, and started walking again. “And I'm frustrated because I don't
know
where it goes. Sideways. Inside out. Hel take me if I know.”

The next question got out before Alfgyfa could consider it: “Is this what the svartalfar were scared of? Why they exiled the aettrynalfar? Because it scares me.”

Osmium was silent for a long moment in which Alfgyfa could feel every pound of stone above their heads, pressing in from the sides … twisted around some new, unseeable angle into somewhere else. Finally, Osmium said, “What the trolls did—there are consequences, you know. The … warping of a trellwarren, it's not…” She paused, then audibly pulled herself together: “Every stonesmith has to read the notebooks of Master Gadolinium, who came as close as any alf has to the actual practices of the trolls. It drove her mad—mad like your people's bear-sarkers. She ripped her spouses apart with her bare hands.”

Alfgyfa had to work enough saliva into her mouth to swallow. “But it didn't drive the trolls mad?”

“Either that, or they were all born mad,” Osmium said.

They both shuddered, and Alfgyfa cast about for something else to talk about. “It seems…,” she began cautiously. “I mean. Do you think they used the same arts on metal?”

“Trellkin smithed blades in forges like anybody else,” Osmium said. “Ask Kothransbrother.”

Alfgyfa winced. Frithulf's face and shoulder were heavily scarred with burns from a trellish forge.

“What about shaping stones for insets?” Alfgyfa asked. “Can you do it with precious stones? Pieces that are not attached to the living rock?”

In answer, Osmium stretched out her hand and pinched off a bit of wall. She rolled it between her fingers like pine gum and gave it a twist. A moment later, she handed Alfgyfa a stone spiral shaped to go around a human finger.

Alfgyfa slipped it on her hand. It fit perfectly. Galfenol would have a conniption.

“You're thinking of the bindrunes in blades,” Osmium said.

“Trying to find a way to circle around and grab hold of something I understand,” Alfgyfa said, making a face. “And I know a lot more about metalsmithing than I do about stonesmithing.”