An Apprentice to Elves (33 page)

Alfgyfa almost dropped her bread in surprise. It wasn't done, for one master to take on another's apprentice as a journeyman. Not unless the first master died while the apprentice was in the midst of his or her journeywork.

She took her plum pit and tossed it into the coals of the forge to cover her confusion. The heat was so great that it shriveled and caught almost immediately. “A journeyman who can't quench a sword without cracking it?”

“Please,” Thorlot said. “I've seen your work. When you're not trying to invent something new and never done before, you're the equal of many mastersmiths. And frankly, my dear, I can use the help. Not many men will send their sons to 'prentice to a woman smith.” She gestured around her forge. “My own children are drawn to other trades. And I'm old enough to feel the hammering in my shoulders the next morning when I rise.”

Alfgyfa stared at her bread and cheese. Then, decisively, she took a good-sized bite and chewed. The cheese was just as good as it smelled—rich triple cream, with a piquant bite—and nothing beat Otter's loaves. She swallowed and leaned back against the pillar post. “I don't want a long commitment.”

She didn't know where else she might care to be. But having just left one fourteen-year promise behind half fulfilled, she couldn't—just now—stomach another. She wondered if Tin would come back for her. If Tin did, she wondered if she would go back to try to rise to journeyman.

Seven years spent was a lot to walk away from. Seven more years was a long time to swear away.

“We won't swear a contract, then. Just stay and help me for a while, and then decide where you want to go.”

“All right,” Alfgyfa said. “All right. For a while.”

*   *   *

Sometimes the returning wagons brought news. Sometimes there were riders with messages.

Sometimes the news was better than others. The wolfcarls, wolves, and wolfless men had encountered Rhean scouts and dispensed with them. Then they had encountered a refugee force from the western coast, where additional Rheans had landed. (“Because we needed more of them,” Otter muttered.) They'd met a small expeditionary force and beaten it back with few casualties.

With each messenger, Alfgyfa listened intently for names she knew among the list of casualties—and so far, she had been guiltily relieved with each new report. And still, she slept in the half-empty heall at night with her head as often as not pillowed on Amma's flank, and still she refused to admit to herself how much she missed those who had gone, both south and north.

The late flowers bloomed. Amma came into season and was bred, by Mar and also by Wyvern, who came into the heall seeking her—and Alfgyfa held her breath until he left, but Mar didn't find him a threat, and none of the half-grown pups did anything stupid, which seemed like a miracle. Athisla's pups began to choose tithe-boys, and the tithe-boys began to choose names. The one who had tried to flirt with her, she was amused to note, had become the object of fascination of the litter's runt. Still the news came in dribbles, of Northmen and Rheans playing hide-and-seek though the trackless forests and the soft fields of the southern reaches. The Rheans might burn a croft or occupy a town or thunder up on the Northern army only to see them slip away into the woods like autumn mist. The Northmen might garrison a keep or catch a glancing blow to a small Rhean force, but neither ever quite managed to come to grips with the other.

Kathlin bartered very successfully with the aettrynalfar for food and help with the construction of defenses; there were no rich, warm furs in the dark under the world. Otter went about her duties and invented new ones, such as—with autumn looming—organizing the village children to go out into the oaks and gather up all the acorns the pigs had not eaten, so they could be squirreled away against famine. Sokkolfr dragged his chair over beside Otter's in the heall; she did not chase him away, and Alfgyfa did not comment, but watched with a new sort of interest as the two edged up on one another.

And the summer wearied and grew ragged, and the nights came dark and chill.

Until one drizzling morning when hoofbeats drumming casually on the road beyond the gates brought her from the kitchens where she was helping Otter get breakfast together. She peered through the sliding hatch, expecting a messenger, but the horse came at an easy trot, and anyway it came from the north. She caught sight of the animal, splashing through puddles on the muddy route with a heavily cowled and cloaked rider huddled miserably in the saddle, and she blinked with surprise.

It was a svartalf pony, and on its back was a svartalf rider.

Hastily, she threw open the little portal beside the gate, that being what she could manage by herself, and went out into the rain.

The portal was big enough for a single horse, which meant it was more than adequate for the diminutive alf-pony. And by the time it trotted up to the gate and the rider dismounted, she had identified both animal and alf, and was surprised to find her hands cold with more than rain and her heart fluttering with excitement as she ushered them within.

“I was not expecting you back,” she told Idocrase, as she led him into the kitchens. The pony had been turned over to the one remaining groom, a man too old for combat, who tended the few horses not deemed fit for the war trail.

She crouched to build up the fire. The alf was wet through. His clothing steamed as he came closer.

He shuffled his feet beneath his robes. “You didn't come to see us off.”

The dust had rubbed off one toe of her shoes; the other was scuffed in two places. “I didn't think you'd want to see me.”

He snorted, flicking two fingers from his thumb in a svartalf gesture that, roughly speaking, meant whatever she had just said was too soaked in idiocy even to consider, or acknowledge beyond dismissing.

“It seemed to me that a scribe should be here,” he said. “That a history of a foreign war is as good a Master-piece as anything.”

“So you're here for your ambition,” Alfgyfa said, exactly as if she believed him, while her heart leapt and struggled.

“Something like that,” he agreed, and gave her a shy, sliding smile.

 

FOURTEEN

“It's a duty,” Tin had said, and kissed her son and given him to Pearl. “I'll be back as soon as I can.”

Girasol had clung to her hand, but nodded wisely when she peeled his fingers loose. “You have to do this for Alfgyfa.”

Children,
Tin thought now, craving his warm weight in her arms. And kept on nursing her tired pony forward.

To be one alf traveling with humans was very different, Tin found, than to be one of many alfar traveling with a single man. Or girl. Or even an army of the strange, exasperating creatures.

When there were many alfar, the ways of alfar prevailed. Humans found her people intimidating, and—Tin had to admit—the alfar played to that intimidation. Moreover, in the past, the alfar had always inevitably been among the humans because the humans desperately needed alfar help. Tin might have once said that the difference was that alfar solved their own problems—but she was an older, wiser alf than she had been. And she could not ignore the knowledge that the last real problem the alfar had had, they had solved by pushing the entire population of the Iskryne trellheims down upon the humans.

Whom those trolls had then nearly overrun.

Tin remained impressed by the bravery of the wolfcarls in general and Isolfr in particular in those dark times. They had stood their ground even before the alfar arrived at Isolfr's back to relieve them. They had been losing, but losing more slowly than seemed possible, given the overwhelming force of trolls they had faced. And once the alfar
had
arrived, the humans had rallied from a position of such near defeat that Tin would not have believed they'd have the resilience if she had not seen it with her own eyes.

And now here they were, less than twenty years after the trolls had been driven from the North, already forging out to settle in little crofts and cottages throughout the wilderness that had been denied them for the duration of the trellish menace. Already forgetting why they had needed wolfcarls for so long. Already looking for other things to fight—each other, if they couldn't have trolls. Svartalfar, Tin was rather concerned, if they couldn't have each other.

Which was why, however bad things looked with the Rheans, she wasn't ready to count the Northmen out yet.

On the other hand, the Rheans were humans too, not trolls, and Tin expected they could be counted on to be just as stubborn and just as resilient. But still there was one thing that gave Tin a possibly overoptimistic sense of hope. Isolfr was here. Where there was Isolfr, there was Viradechtis. And where there was Viradechtis, there was a rather high percentage of miracles.

On the trek south, she had the new experience of camping with a human army on human terms. Of sleeping in human fortifications—if you could even call the temporary bivouacs they threw up where they grew too tired to stagger another mile by so luxurious a name as “fortifications.”

She even (mostly) ate what the human cooks boiled up out of what the human supply line shipped south: mostly oats and salt meat, with the addition of vegetables none the better for having been loaded into wagons and trundled over the rugged tracks that passed for Northern roads.

It wasn't very nice.

She stuck close to Isolfr, Vethulf, and Skjaldwulf, both to make herself a part of their councils and to enjoy the company of the queen-wolf and her consorts. It was also—Tin admitted, though only to herself—because she felt that fraction safer surrounded by men whom she knew, rather than men who were potentially hostile strangers. Like every alfling, she had grown up on stories of the terrible things that men could do.

Even sleeping as she did beside Isolfr's pallet, she never let her halberd roll far from her hands.

They had ridden south with hopes of harrying the Rheans before the Rheans consolidated their gains and mustered up more forces. Gunnarr the konungur and Erik Godheofodman believed that they could knock the Rheans back before still more troops arrived on the deep-keeled Rhean ships to hold the line.

It was a complicated proposition. The Army of the Iskryne—for so they started calling themselves—was understrength, compared to the endless tide of Rheans flooding their shores. It was underdrilled and underdisciplined, though the Northmen themselves could not see this. The Rhean supply lines might be longer, but the Northern ones were tenuous … and at the grasping end of the Rhean supply lines were the endless bread baskets of the south—rich enough that in a normal year, they lured bored Northmen a-viking when the harvests at home were done. Meanwhile, the Northmen robbed each bite they put in their mouths from the bellies of their wives and children, and Tin could tell that every one of them knew it.

Given all that, Gunnarr and Erik's plan was to harry, harass, and try to beat the enemy back. To hold them until winter became an ally of the North and an enemy of the Rheans. And the harrying part was a better success than any of them had had any right to expect.

The Army of the Iskryne
did
have several advantages. One was that winter was coming on. Another advantage lay in the landscape itself: the Rhean formations were devastating on open ground, but their effectiveness was broken when the Northmen could fall back into a trackless forest. The roads were a problem, the towns and villages vulnerable. However, the land between them was all to the advantage of the North.

But the most devastating weakness the Rheans betrayed was their fear of the trellwolves. The Rheans thought them the avatar of some soft Southern god. Tin could tell that Viradechtis found this amusing, inasmuch as she understood the human concept of gods. The great wolf's comments didn't translate into words, exactly, but Tin got the idea that Viradechtis was confident that any Rhean god would make an easy meal.

This superstitious fear placed the wolves at great risk, however, because the Rheans would kill wolves in preference even to men of rank if they could.

The Army of the Iskryne made contact with the first vanguard of the Rhean occupation approximately a hundred and seventy miles north and west of Siglufjordhur. The war leaders had been hoping to meet up with Fargrimr and Randulfr before the Rheans. Viradechtis knew what direction her daughter was in, however, and it was south and east of here. The Siglufjordhur warriors were cut off.

“Well,” Vethulf said, “it isn't as if it changes our strategy.” He was holding a pewter cup of steaming ale up to his nose as he hunkered beside a campfire. The nights were swiftly growing longer, and also growing chill.

“I don't want to still be out here at the dark of the year,” Skjaldwulf replied.

Tin remembered the cold winter march with some of these same humans to liberate Othinnsaesc from the trolls. She tossed another dry branch on the fire and tried not to wonder how long the exile she had imposed on herself was going to last.

*   *   *

Fargrimr was running before the storm. (And the swords of the Rheans, of course, but at this particular moment, Rheans were somewhere under whirlwinds on his running tally of disasters.)

He and his brother and his band—he couldn't exactly call it an army when he could name every single individual here—marched miserably through the driving rain. Heaped pine needles underfoot oozed water into every step. Without the wolves for outriders, Fargrimr was sure that they would have lost half a dozen men in the rain. He said as much to Randulfr, sodden and ridiculous beside him.

Randulfr laughed, rain dripping from his narrow nose. “They'd not thank you to compare them to sheepdogs, I think.”

Ingrun raised her lambent eyes to Fargrimr and curled a lip, but her tail was wagging. Fargrimr wondered when, exactly, he'd become somebody to whom the sarcasm of wolves was evident.