An Apprentice to Elves (31 page)

And Alfgyfa knew perfectly well that she could not avoid the svartalfar tonight. She was the daughter of a wolfheofodman. To her, as to Thorlot and Otter, fell the duty of hosting the revel. Even if this heall was no longer her home—and if this heall was no longer her home, then she had no idea where her home might be—she owed these warriors who had come to defend it the ale-cup and her smile.

And she had to talk to Tin. She owed it to Tin, along with an abject apology. She knew that her master—her former master?—had been respecting her own desire to be left alone to think. She had been spending her time in the woods, in the cellars, with the cubs and Athisla, despite the irritation of the tithe-boys. (Athisla liked Alfgyfa. She also liked playing hard to get.) Tin had allowed her this avoidance, but Alfgyfa also knew it had to end before Tin left to return to the Iskryne with the others.

She also knew that there had been several—not tiffs, tiff was the wrong word—
discussions
between Tin and Galfenol regarding her, her fate, and what she was pretty sure everybody everywhere who clammed up when she wandered into a room was referring to as the Problem of Alfgyfa.

She was coming to realize she didn't want to be a problem. Being a problem was uncomfortable and made it impossible to rest. She wanted to be a smith. A blacksmith and a stonesmith, if anyone could be both. And she wanted to learn the witchcraft Thorlot knew and find another witch to teach her more. And if Tin's house wasn't her home and Franangfordheall wasn't her home, maybe she was wrong in trying to have a home at all. Maybe she wanted to wander up and down the Northlands, learning things.

She certainly didn't want to be a woman the way Kathlin was or the way the heall women were, no matter how much she liked Otter and Mjoll. Thorlot was a blacksmith, but Alfgyfa knew she'd only gotten there because she was a blacksmith's widow, and that was not an acceptable path.

She wanted to be a woman, she realized, the way Tin was a woman (and that was a sentence you couldn't even
say
in Alvish; it just degenerated into nonsense), and she might be self-centered and naive, as Galfenol had said, but she knew enough to see the problem—or Problem—with that.

She still gravitated to Thorlot, but there were alfar in the forge all the time now, and in any case, Alfgyfa probably should have been helping in the kitchen. And she knew it. But instead she sent Olrun with a brief note to Tin.

Tin found her a quarter hour later in the herb patch in the kitchen vegetable plot, weeding around the dill. A significant fraction of Alfgyfa's “weeding” was going to wind up in a skillet for the supper: the asparagus was going to need to be chased back with hoes come autumn, assuming there was anyone around to do it by then.

The mastersmith didn't talk. She just hunkered down about an alf-arm's length from Alfgyfa and commenced her own weeding, peering over at Alfgyfa's hands from time to time to see what the human apprentice was pulling out or breaking off, and into which pile she was placing it.

Enough time passed that the long, trencher-shaped basket into which the asparagus was being piled looked like it might be getting too top-heavy to lift before either one of them said anything. It was Tin who broke the silence first, and what she said surprised Alfgyfa.

“I respect your decision to stay.”

Alfgyfa accidentally pulled a whole stalk of dill up. She looked at it, frowned, and tossed it in with the asparagus. A few herbs never hurt to flavor the vegetables. Well, maybe not horehound.

“I didn't expect that,” she admitted, because everything else she was feeling was far too complicated to put into words, and because she felt that at this point she owed Tin—and herself—the truth.

Tin dug her fingers into the earth, humming harmonics without their base note. It was an idle thinking sound, one which had never quite stopped running up Alfgyfa's nerves like a brush made of wire. “Apprentice,” she said. She looked up. “If I had never gone against the Smiths and Mothers—when I was a journeyman myself!—we wouldn't be having this conversation now. If I hadn't continued to go against them, we
could
not have this conversation, for you would never have come to Nidavellir as my apprentice. I have not ossified completely simply because I have more gold in my teeth these days.”

Abashed, Alfgyfa looked down. “I don't want to leave my apprenticeship.”

“It would be a big investment to abandon now.”

Alfgyfa nodded.

“And you don't know, exactly, what it is you
do
want.”

Alfgyfa nodded, more slowly, again.

“But you also can't leave your father's people to face a war alone.”

“No,” she said, with a feeling that was half resolution and half panic. “I can't.”

“There is,” Tin said, “provision in your contract for a leave of absence due to family crisis.”

Alfgyfa jerked upright—still kneeling, but rocked back on the balls of her feet now. She put a hand to her throat, heedless of the sap and dirt she smeared there. She felt she could not get a breath in or out past the thing in her throat. Hope? Pain? Were they any different?

Gently, Tin continued, “Under most systems of crisis determination, invasion by an alien army would suffice.”

“You mean that.”

Tin nodded—a human nod, serious and focused.

“You keep—why do you keep bending the rules for me?”

Tin laughed. “Because I keep bending the rules, you frustrating little beast. How many times must I say it before it penetrates your skull?”

Another silence. “Is it wrong or right if I say thank you?”

“Either way,” Tin said. “I do not think this basket will hold any more of this vegetable.”

“It may not hold as much as it already has,” Alfgyfa said.

They lugged the asparagus inside—the basket overflowing with asparagus that wouldn't be enough for more than two tables. It didn't matter, really. Nobody ever all got served the same food at a feast like this. If you spotted something really appealing on a neighboring table, you could always wander over and make pathetic eyes at the diners there, if any of the food lasted that long.

Inside the kitchen, Mjoll took custody of the asparagus and Kathlin put Alfgyfa to scrubbing pots. Ordinarily it might have seemed like a punishment—especially as Tin, under cover of diplomatic immunity, slid out the back door—but every other station in the echoing, tumultuous kitchen was filled already. Alfgyfa had known when she walked inside that she was throwing herself into the fray.

She'd shirked enough.

*   *   *

Around the time the roasts were coming off the spits to rest and be carved into joints, Otter appeared to drag Alfgyfa out of the dirty water by her elbow and send her upstairs to dress. Alfgyfa could think of several occasions when she would have been even more grateful for a reprieve from some horrible task—washing svartalf linens in bubbling volcanic pools, for example—but this was probably the most welcome one she'd ever actually received. Her hands stung and her back throbbed, and the sweat had dried on her face in itchy saltscapes.

She didn't quite have time for the bathhouse, so she undid her shoulder brooches and stripped to the waist in the women's anteroom beside it. She dipped water out of the barrel that stayed tolerably warm against the steam-room wall and scrubbed her face, arms, and upper body with the slimy brown lye soap, then rinsed. Her hair wouldn't dry in time if she washed it, so she decided it would just have to do as it was. She'd get Mjoll or somebody to fuss over a braid. She dragged her shift and straps back up, and sprinted for her room.

By the time the sun had moved the breadth of her hand to the west, she was seated on a stool while Thorlot's eldest stood behind her, fussing as predicted. She'd changed to clean linens and an overdress in plaid of green and blue and bright mustard, borrowed from Kathlin since any dresses Alfgyfa might still have at Franangfordheall were going to be much too small. Her shoes were soft leather, not hard boots, and red. Her girdle was hung with a dagger and her sewing case, as well as other things.

Mjoll worked yellow flowers into Alfgyfa's coronet of braids. They were darker than her hair in the mirror Mjoll held up so Alfgyfa could inspect her work, and the pollen they shed dusted her ice-colored locks with gold.

Alfgyfa swallowed, having the strange feeling she was meeting her own older sister. If there were a veil pinned to her hair, she would look like a married woman.

“How do I look?”

Kathlin, who was at work on Thorlot's hair across the room, looked up. She had a strange expression on her face, and took a breath before she spoke. “Like a Valkyrie. No, like Freya herself.”

“I'd need cats,” Alfgyfa said, and they all laughed—Alfgyfa despite the strange ache that sat in her chest, feeling like it burrowed right behind the bones.

The women checked their finery and hung themselves with a last few golden brooches and jeweled hairpins. Then they went downstairs to take up their places as hosts, as loaf givers, and as pourers of ale.

Alfgyfa's place would be at the table beside her father. That meant sitting with the alfar, and she had half dreaded it when she allowed herself to think on it before. Once she got through the formal round of drinks and toasts she poured herself, however, it wasn't so bad. There was just that horrid pang, in the brief moment when her fingers brushed Idocrase's as she steadied and filled his horn. He tried to catch her eye. She smiled and didn't let him.

Another pang came when she caught the way Galfenol glared at her accusingly—only once, but once was enough—over the rosemary-scented haunch of boar.

The feast passed in a blur. The boar was delicious. She limited herself very strictly to two horns of ale and none of the mead. She surprised herself by having an appetite, and consuming more of bread and salat and the fresh berries in soured cream than she had eaten in days. This was good, because it kept Vethulf from chiding her about being too skinny and her grandfather from pointing out that food was going to waste.

It was a bad omen to leave the table hungry when an army was going to war.

 

THIRTEEN

It was like a song when the armies of the Northland gathered to head south.

The sort of song Otter hated, and which Skjaldwulf avoided singing if she was in the great hall. He would play other songs when she was there—songs like the lay of Sigrid, who cut her hair for a fishnet and kept her family from starving. Songs like the lay of Rannveig, who kept her brother and husband from killing each other by throwing her cloak across their swords as they dueled.
As Alfgyfa had in Alfhame,
Otter remembered. The alf-scribe Idocrase had let slip that little incident, and his obvious pride in Alfgyfa made Otter smile.

Alfgyfa, of course, would be mortified to know that Otter had heard of it—touchy pride, that one—so Otter kept it to herself. And worried instead about soldiers.

Otter had had enough of marching armies for one life. The battle-hardened goddess Aerten, though, was mistress of the winds and fates of war, and it seemed as if she still had plans for Otter.

Now Otter stood on the earthwork beside the open gates of Franangfordheall and watched her family—her second family, this new family she had made for herself, by her own choice—lift their shields and their banners and leave. They didn't march in step like Rheans, and each man's armor and gear was different from those of his companions. These Northmen, with their round shields and their square and quarter-circle banners on tall poles slung with crossbars like sail yards, looked nothing like the Brythoni warriors of her youth.

But they
were
just like them: men with children and homes, orchards and fields, livestock and lovers. And she was terribly afraid they were going to die like them, too.

She kept her chin up and her eyes dry, however, and drove her fingernails into the flesh of her other arm until Sokkolfr, beside her, noticed and took her hand.

“Squeeze as much as you want,” he said.

She took him at his word. He hissed, but said nothing to stop her, and so she squeezed on. Maybe she should make some sort of sacrifice to Aerten; maybe that would change her luck. Or maybe it would just draw the goddess' attention—which wasn't the sort of thing you really wanted from a war goddess when what you desired more than anything was peace.

Could the war goddess' power even reach this far from her own lands? Would Otter be better off praying to some local deity? Gentle Freya, who nonetheless claimed half the battle dead as her own due? The wolfcarls' god, Othinn, god of wolves, god of war?

Othinn and Aerten were both fond of corpses, and there would soon be corpses enough to serve the pleasure of any deity. So it wasn't as if whatever Otter could afford to burn would measure much against the feast of souls already in the offing. Maybe if Erik Godheofodman hadn't been marching off to die, far to the south, Otter could have asked him what she might sacrifice, and to whom.

Perhaps Loki the trickster would be her best choice, for all he was half mad, unreliable, and would sacrifice almost anything for a prank. At this point in time, trickery might just be their only hope.

Skjaldwulf caught her eye as he passed, and winked beneath his helm. Tryggvi trotted beside him, gamboling like the idiot half pup he was and looking back over his shoulder at Sokkolfr. Now it was Otter's turn to hiss, but she did not ask Sokkolfr to ease his grip—just clutched back savagely on her own account as he watched his wolf trot away to the thing he was supposed to have been born too late to suffer.

Alfgyfa, meanwhile, stood on Otter's right. The svartalfar were nowhere in evidence, but Thorlot had mentioned that morning that they would not be feeding Tin and the rest anymore. They must have headed north the previous evening, after the worst light of the sun had faded away. They had been at the feast. Otter looked at Alfgyfa's grim face and did not ask.