An Apprentice to Elves (39 page)

Where in all the red hells are those girls?

Sokkolfr swung again, a cleaving blow that splintered Varghoss' shield jaggedly across. Varghoss seemed unstaggered by this one, but he did not have the chance to trap Sokkolfr's sword again. He took up his final shield and came at Sokkolfr.

Sokkolfr ducked, trying to deflect the blow at an angle and save his shield. It was ineffective, and the painted otter had the worst of it. He too rearmed, and now there would be no more shields. If a blow landed after these two were destroyed, it would strike flesh.

Otter heard small feet running. Three girls, staggering under loads of bundled blankets and linens, the smallest dragging a sheet behind her in the dust.

“Give them here!” Kathlin said, and suddenly Mjoll and Thorlot and even Alfgyfa—always slowest to catch something unspoken among the women of the heall—seemed to realize what was happening.

Otter clutched after a blanket, felt harsh wool between her fingers. Sokkolfr, armed with his final shield, stalked Varghoss across the holm. Varghoss angled himself and punched with his shield even as Sokkolfr swung.

With a better shield, it might have been an effective tactic. As it was, the shield all but exploded on contact with Sokkolfr's sword. But perhaps Varghoss had counted on that. In any case, he seemed prepared for it, because he used the ruined shield to batter Sokkolfr's sword down and returned the blow without disentangling himself from its wreckage.

The blow cracked Sokkolfr's final shield and sent Sokkolfr reeling. Otter heard Thorlot gasp at the distinctive
ting
of a breaking blade. Varghoss swung again, and Sokkolfr, shieldless, got the stump of his sword up in time to parry. Varghoss grunted and heaved another blow, seeming to try to bury Sokkolfr under the force of the assault. Both men had a grip on their parrying blades now, and it seemed impossible that they should go much longer without serious injury.

Alfgyfa waved away a blanket and unslung her cloak instead. The women crowded forward, led by Otter and Thorlot.

Sokkolfr's parrying blade darted in low while Varghoss' was still high. His blade tip scored the younger man's thigh, and red blood welled sharply. A long splash streaked across the bull hide.

“Hold!” cried Varghoss' shield bearer, Brokkolfr echoing not even a moment behind. But Varghoss did not hold; he swung again, the overhand blow with his sword a diversionary tactic to a short, sharp stab with his parrying blade. Sokkolfr somehow eluded both: Otter did not see how.

She screamed a Brythoni war cry she would have sworn she did not remember and hurled herself forward, the blanket outstretched in her hands. The earth in the furrow around the hide crumbled under her foot, then the hide itself dented. Other women surrounded her. She swung the blanket up and wide, toward Varghoss. Felt it snag and tangle. Alfgyfa was on her right, tossing that cloak. Thorlot whipped sheets about to tangle blades, and from the other side of the holm came Kathlin and Mjoll. A moment, and the men joined them, too, jumping the hazeling to wrap their arms around Varghoss and restrain him until he stopped fighting their embrace.

The linens and weapons lay tangled on the hide. Sokkolfr—Sokkolfr stood panting for a moment and then turned to Otter, his broken sword forgotten on the ground.

She hurled herself into his arms. “Careful,” he said. “The blood.”

“Fuck the blood,” she answered. He would have tried holding her with his right arm only, and keeping the left—still bleeding—away from her dress. But she pinned his arm between her elbow and her side, forcing him to bleed on her dress so that he would stop being stupid about it. She thumped him on the chest with her other fist and buried her face in his shirt.

*   *   *

After the wounds were tended, after the holm was dismantled and the earth shoveled back into the furrows, after luncheon was served to everyone except for Varghoss—who had vanished with such thoroughness that even his tithe-mates, their young wolves still clinging to their shadows, did not know where he might have gone—Alfgyfa went to seek out Otter.

She found the other woman mixing wort for brewing and wordlessly stood by to help sling the cauldron on its heavy arm back to the fire, so it could boil again. When that was done, they stepped away from the fire and stood side by side, wiping the sweat off their faces.

When Alfgyfa judged they had been quiet long enough, she said, “That was smartly done.”

Otter shook her head. “The boy won't thank me.”

“Not today,” Alfgyfa said. The “boy” was several years older than she was, but she could not think of him as anything other than a boy. “Maybe in ten years.”

“Maybe not even that many.” Otter looked at her. “You're right; time mends many spirits.”

“So the svartalfar say,” Alfgyfa said. She laughed. “In them, time seems rather to anneal many grudges.”

They stood companionably together for a moment, watching the wort simmer. Alfgyfa said, “What'll happen to Varghoss?”

“He's a wolfcarl,” Otter said. “He's our problem. And he's a boy. I cannot blame him for doing stupid things when he's half-crazed with grief. But I don't want him here. If he wants to stay in the heallan, he'll probably be traded away to whoever has a litter coming soon.”

If any of us are left after the war to manage the trade.

But she didn't say that. And Alfgyfa didn't let on that she'd heard that unspoken rider.

She fingered the new rent in her cloak—not yet stitched up—and said, “I can't stay here.”

Otter looked at her. “Going back to the alfhame?”

“Hah! As if they would have me without Tin. No. But the army needs smiths, don't they? I'll go meet them.”

“You're a fool,” Otter said without heat, a casual observation of an obvious fact.

“I want to be with Tin and my father.”

“What about Idocrase?”

Alfgyfa blinked at Otter, unable to believe Otter had actually said the thing that Alfgyfa had so carefully avoided thinking of.

Alfgyfa forced herself to shrug casually. “Perhaps Idocrase will decide that there's a Master-piece to be written on the conduct of the war?”

Otter rolled her eyes, but Alfgyfa knew her well enough by now to pick out the hint of a smile behind it.

“I'm going south,” said Alfgyfa, with finality. “The Rheans are already bleeding north, obviously. We have to stop them at the source. Maybe I can help.”

But that wasn't it, exactly. There was something inside her, demanding that she go. She touched her chest with a loose fist, because she couldn't find the words to express it, and at that gesture, Otter's face softened.

“So that's how it is, is it?”

Alfgyfa, still at a loss for words—and how unlike her that was—bit her lip and nodded.

At that, Otter visibly drew herself together and looked Alfgyfa in the eye.

“There's only one way to stop the Rheans,” she said, and the ache in her voice told Alfgyfa everything—that Otter knew what she was asking for. “We have to cost too much for them to keep on coming. Tell our defenders that when you go.”

There was nothing anyone could say to that, or to the bleakness in Otter's expression.

So Alfgyfa nodded, and hugged her, and turned away.

*   *   *

Idocrase found Alfgyfa while she was packing, rolling extra socks tight and wedging them into a pack beside food, blankets, a fire starter, a closely woven canvas tarpaulin, a penknife sharp enough to shave or perform surgery with, and other necessities of the road. She had laid out on her bed a fur cloak that would double as a sleeping roll, and she had mittens and a scarf tucked away against need. A long knife lay sheathed upon the cloak. A short bow and a quiver hung beside the door: never let it be said she couldn't learn from hard experience.

The scratch at the door frame made her heart leap. She'd told Idocrase what she meant to do right after she had told Thorlot. They were the two whom she didn't want hearing it from anyone but her. They were the two she didn't want to hurt under any circumstances.

She couldn't help hurting them.

Maybe that was adulthood: doing what you thought you ought to do, even when it was awful.

He'd said he needed time to think it over. She'd been afraid he meant time to cut her loose.

But she knew that scratch, and when she turned, he was smiling slightly up at her.

She meant to say something calm and heroic-sounding. What came out, on a squeak, was, “You've decided to come with me?”

“You're still planning on going alone if I don't?”

She nodded, with a lie of a shrug that said it was nothing to her either way.

His smile turned into something else, but she still couldn't call it a frown. “You're a grown thing,” he said. “I believe you can get yourself safely south hundreds of miles across frozen, wolf-infested country overrun with enemy soldiers. And you will travel faster without me.”

His tone was teasing, proud. And yet she flinched. Tried to hide it, but he must have seen it, because he reached out and laid his fingers on her wrist. “I have to go back to Nidavellir. There's something else I need to do.”

She blinked at him, uncomprehending, a twist of panic in her breast.

“Mar died to save me,” he explained.

“Yes…,” she said doubtfully.

“I owe Mar a life-debt.”

And when she still stared at him, his free hand described an arc of self-reproach. “Of course you don't know. I owe Mar a life-debt, Alfgyfa. Which means Galfenol and my clan-mother owe the konigenwolf a life-debt. Which means, not to sharpen the point on the pen or anything, that Nidavellir owes Franangford a life-debt.”

“That's why Tin went south,” Alfgyfa said, so shocked with realization that she lost the thread of a conversation she was really quite interested in.

Apparently her revelation was more interesting to Idocrase, too, because he shook his head and blinked. “What?”

“Tin. Because I got in trouble rescuing Girasol that time…”

Idocrase was just staring at her. Not because he was surprised by her epiphany, she realized. But because he was surprised to realize that it
was
an epiphany.

“
Yes,
” she said in exasperation. “I did just figure that out, thank you.
No,
I hadn't realized until now.”

He laughed, and kept laughing, while she crossed her arms and glared. When he could stop, he knuckled his eyes and said, “I'm sorry. It's just that you're so at home among us, and then—” He shrugged. “I forget there are things that everyone knows that you just don't.”

She kept glaring, but her heart wasn't in it. “And you know everything about human society.”

“That's not the point! I know nothing about human society! But if I'm going to keep spending time with you, I expect I'll learn.”

That hit her hard enough to drop her hands to her side. “Didn't you just say you were going home?”

“Oh, by the deeps,” he said. He dropped down on the floor, all of a sudden, in a puddle of robes whose bullion embroidery caught red-metal glints off the fire. “I'm going home because I'm going to bring you an army, Alfgyfa.”

He stared up at her. His bushy eyebrows twitched with concentration. As if he were willing her to understand.

And suddenly she did, and her knees went weak with the revelation. She thudded down in front of him, cobbler-style, though her mannish trews and tunic made it a less graceful picture than did his robes.

She stared at him. He raised his long hands before his breast, doubled up into a nut, and let them flare apart like opening wings.

“It seems like the least I can do.”

“Because of your life-debt to Mar.”

He nodded, smiling.

“And then you're coming back here.”

“If it's where you'll be,” he said. “If you'll have me, I mean to say.”

She stared at him. He dropped his eyes to his hands. His mouth opened, but he bit the words back. She saw the force of will with which he made himself wait. Her heart thrummed with something too terrified and bright to be called joy.

She reached out, her hand broad and pale and graceless against his, and touched the backs of his fingers. “I'll make terrible mistakes,” she said. “I always do.”

“I feel sure,” he said, “that you will not be alone in that,” but he was smiling as he said it, turning his hand so that their hands were palm to palm.

She knew svartalfar did not kiss, and in general she found this a very sensible choice. She closed her fingers carefully, as gently as her work-hardened grip could manage, around Idocrase's hand, knowing that it was presumptuous of her, apprentice that she was, the sort of thing that Master Galfenol called “brass-faced” and curled her lip at.

She'd never thought about how sensitive the skin of her palms and fingers was, even with her calluses and burn scars. But she could feel the softness of his skin, much softer than hers—a scribe had to be careful of his hands, and writing calluses were not the same as hammer calluses—the bones and tendons across the back of his hand. For a moment, she had the terrible, nonsensical fear that Idocrase was going to agree with her imaginary Galfenol, but then, shyly, his fingers trembling just a little, Idocrase returned her grip.

 

SIXTEEN

The weather turned, brutally. Fargrimr had expected it sooner or later, but the cold that swept in a day after the rain was hard and sudden even by the standards of the Northlands. It froze the earth beneath their feet so fast that the army's boots crunched through a hard layer of frost into soft mud beneath. The mud then froze against the edges of the boots, leaving the army heavy-footed and exhausted even if they stopped regularly to knock their feet clean against tree roots.

And that was nothing to the suffering of the horses and the reindeer. The mud froze on their hooves and ice shards worked their way into the crevices of their feet. The Army of the Iskryne, Fargrimr guessed, would lose a half a day's travel before the earth froze hard enough for them to move easily across. And Fargrimr knew too well that this early in the season, the freeze was likely to result in a thaw, and deeper mud and more.