An Apprentice to Elves (40 page)

What was worse was that in these conditions their track was as obvious as if they had dragged plows through the forest behind them. There was no subtlety to their movement, and Fargrimr knew as well as any of the war leaders that the Rheans were on their tail like wolves following the musk ox herds, waiting—just waiting—for the weary or weak to stray.

What had encountered him and his men—before he was relieved by the konungur's army—could have been no more than an expeditionary force. It had been devoid of heavy infantry, devoid of trebuchets, and devoid—most tellingly—of the terrible shaggy tusked beasts of war that Randulfr had learned from Otter were called mammoths.

It had still been more than enough to roll over the entire complement of Siglufjordhur as no more than a tough morning's work, though, and that fretted at Fargrimr like a knot he could not unpick.

Despite that, he was pleased to be reunited with the Franangfordthreat, and he could tell that his brother was as well. And jarl of Siglufjordhur and wolf-bitch's brother—and the Freyasheall wolfheofodmenn—were invited to Gunnarr's councils, which was pleasing, and a little flattering, as well. Along with Erik of Hergilsberg—who seemed pleased, himself, that Fargrimr had brought his agent Freyvithr back to him, though who really knew what the old bear-sarker thought—and all the wolfjarls and warlords of the North.

All their conferences and shared intelligence came to one thing, though: the Army of the Iskryne ran west, away from the main Rhean army, toward Hergilsberg, south of where the secondary Rhean force was thought to have landed.

A benefit of having so many wolves and wolfcarls embedded in the group was that the army could not become separated. It might seem a small thing, but the wolves' sense of smell and their ability to know where each member of the wolfthreat ran, meant that the wolfcarls saw to it that no wolfless man became lost—accidentally or through desertion. There was not a great deal of that latter, fortunately: the Northmen were far too aware that they were fighting for their homes and the freedom and the lives of their families.

On that first morning after they rejoined, Fargrimr nevertheless dropped to the rear of the army to check for stragglers. He found himself pacing Skjaldwulf, who trotted beside his borrowed wolf and occasionally winced a complaint at knees that had seen more than their share of miles. Ahead of them jogged a ragged line of men, mostly wolfless, who blew great horsy clouds of steam from their mouths and nostrils into the chill.

The conversation turned quite naturally to the enemy as bard and sworn-son and wolf jogged along together, occasionally knocking the heavy frozen mud from their feet. Skjaldwulf had more experience of the Rheans than anyone in the North save Otter, and Fargrimr was eager to get his opinion about the offer tendered by Marcus Verenius. He outlined the situation briefly, then waited while Skjaldwulf thought.

Skjaldwulf listened and then spent a fair amount of time jumping from root to hillock, trying to avoid the deepest mud—worse here at the back where the army had tramped it over. As the old wolfjarl was generally laconic and thoughtful, Fargrimr chose to regard his slow-spokenness as time spent in thinking.

He wasn't disappointed. When they slowed again to kick their boots clean, Skjaldwulf picked a knot of half-frozen sap from a spruce, popped it into his mouth to chew, and said, “Well, it seems to me that this is natural. The downside of the Rhean meritocracy Iunarius is so proud of is that ambitious men will try to sabotage their leaders.”

“Won't some see that they can rise with their masters?”

“Of course,” Skjaldwulf said. “But say the master has enemies. Say he's in a fragile position—”

“You might want to discard him for someone else's favor.”

“Or see him fail and make yourself look smarter, so you're promoted into his place.”

Fargrimr thought about that. He continued thinking about it even as they began again to trot. Finally, as they forded a shallow stony river, he shook his head and said, “Honorless.”

On the far bank, the lupines had long since shed their blossoms, and the grass was crisping at the edges in new, sudden cold. When they ran, it was merely chilly. But whenever they slowed, the cold nibbled at Fargrimr's ears and fingertips. His lip had split, and he cursed himself mildly for neglecting to smear it with beeswax or bear-grease or the compound of both those and mint leaves that the women of the keep made for winter.

Of course, he first would have had to have figured out where it was packed, and who was carting it.

As they came up the stone-tumbled riverside, Skjaldwulf staggered. Fargrimr reached out to steady him and was startled by a sharp painful whine from the borrowed wolf, Tryggvi. Skjaldwulf doubled over, clutching himself, as if someone had knuckled him in the soft part of the belly. The sound that came from his mouth wasn't speech: it was a high savage whine that hurt Fargrimr's ears. The sound of an animal mortally, lingeringly wounded.

Fargrimr ducked down and got his shoulder under Skjaldwulf's arm, which required prying his arm loose from around his belly. Fortunately, the wolfjarl was helping, insomuch as he could, and Fargrimr got him halfway upright again.

“Your heart?” Fargrimr asked, trying to keep stark panic from his voice—because that was what he thought when a man with gray streaks in his beard doubled over in the midst of a strenuous day's activity.

Tryggvi whined, hard and sharp. The young wolf shoved his head between Fargrimr and Skjaldwulf, which was less help than it might have been. Ahead of them, some of the back ranks of the army were starting to take notice. Maybe someone would send for a chirurgeon. Fargrimr could only hope there was somebody within earshot with some sense.

Skjaldwulf shook his head. “My
brother,
” he gasped—and collapsed where he stood, so he might have broken his head on the stones if Fargrimr hadn't cushioned him.

The ones they left at home were supposed to be safe,
Fargrimr thought, from an awkward position with stones digging into his shins, a larger rock pressing, not comfortably, against his ribs, and a wolfjarl, white-faced and unconscious, across his thighs. He knew it was mere foolishness, but it hurt all the same, that Skjaldwulf had come all this way, had left his own wolf behind him so that he should not be killed by the journey or the winter or the war, and yet the wolf had died. And not peacefully.

You could not outrun your wyrd, his father had always said, but that was not a comfort, either.

*   *   *

Tin found Skjaldwulf huddled beside a fire—a risk, that, but a bigger risk was losing a wolfjarl—bent low over a tin cup full of steaming water laced with honey, brandy, and (by the smell of it) a spoonful of good sweet butter. Vethulf sat beside him, leaned shoulder to shoulder, unspeaking. Kjaran curled against his other hip, and Viradechtis and Tryggvi lay alongside. Isolfr crouched nearby, tending the fire, doing an admirable job of not even once glancing up to check on how Skjaldwulf was doing.

Of course, he wouldn't need to. His wolf would tell him far more than his eyes could see.

Tin shuffled up behind Isolfr, consciously making enough noise that he would hear her coming. A quick twitch of his head served as acknowledgment, so she knew she would not startle him.

When she was close enough to speak for his ears alone, she gave him a low tone. “I came as soon as I heard.”

He settled on his haunches. The axe she had given him glittered on his back. It occurred to her with a pang that he had not been much more than his daughter's age when they had first met.

They aged so fast, these humans.

He breathed out hard.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Better than I would be in his place,” Isolfr said.

“What happened?”

He spat onto the coals. “Viradechtis says Amma says Rheans. It's confused; Amma's also upset about something to do with Sokkolfr and one of the tithe—I mean, the new wolfcarls. And one of the cubs was killed, too.”

Tin glanced across the fire. The konigenwolf had raised her head, and gazed at Tin with bottomless amber eyes.

“I am so sorry for your loss,” Tin said, raising her voice to be heard by all. She kept her eyes on Viradechtis, though; after all, it was the queen-wolf's mate who had been killed.

The wolf dipped her ears ever so slightly, an acknowledgment, and continued her inscrutable gaze.

Skjaldwulf, though, stirred himself from within. He looked up, blinked, and seemed to realize there was a mug cooling between his palms. He lifted it and drank, three swift swallows, deep enough that he tilted his head back for the last of them. Color faded back into his cheeks, and only then did Tin realize how pale he had been. The humans she had met always seemed ice-white to her, though she had heard—from Skjaldwulf, in point of fact—that some came darker. Almost as dark as svartalfar, he said. It was unsettling to be reminded that they could bleach still paler.

“Thank you,” he said. He looked at his hands and the mug. “It's not unexpected.”

“That doesn't make it easy,” Vethulf replied. His tone had its characteristic edge, but Skjaldwulf gave him a grateful smile anyway. Here, Tin thought, were two men who understood each other.

“No,” Skjaldwulf said. “It doesn't.” He looked back at Tin. “Will you sit awhile?”

“If you don't mind.” She hunkered on a rock close enough to the fire that the rime had melted off it. Isolfr handed her a mug without asking. The warmth was welcome. The deep caverns never got cold enough to freeze, and svartalfar were not well-used to the cold. Tin especially hated the way it crept up into her nose and cracked the tender tissues there so blood leaked and clotted.

She inhaled the steam from the mug, which made her feel better. Brandy, though, was something to be approached cautiously. She took a tentative sip and found it delicious.

Isolfr stopped poking the fire and settled down beside her. The three men, three wolves, and single alf sat in silence, staring into the fire, while twilight gathered and the chill in the air deepened to biting cold.

“What will you do?” Vethulf asked after a while, slightly guiltily.

Skjaldwulf started. He looked over at his shieldbrother and smiled. It wasn't an expression of happiness, but rather something tender enough that Tin glanced away. “Well, not leave you and Isolfr, dolt. That's one thing.”

Vethulf snorted in pretended offense, but his relief was patent enough that Tin suddenly understood something about the sharp spines that stood out a mile all over that wolfjarl. On her other side, she thought she felt something, some tension, some unhappiness, flow away from Isolfr as well. She was too old to comment on either, however, and sipped her hot buttered brandy instead.

Viradechtis reached across Kjaran to nose Skjaldwulf's knee, and he laid a hand behind her ear and stroked her thick ruff gently. He glanced at Isolfr and said, “There's a war on. Who's to say that any of us are going to get to do anything?”

Tin sucked her teeth and was spared further comment by the heavy treads of Gunnarr Konungur and Erik Godheofodman coming across the crusted mud. The earth was finally starting to freeze hard, but everywhere it was rutted and furrowed by the feet of soldiers and pack animals. The ridges between the divots crunched when the boots of big men came down on them.

Skjaldwulf visibly gathered himself. He drained the rest of his mug and handed it back to Isolfr. A glance between them contained an offer of more and the refusal.

“Just tea,” Skjaldwulf qualified. He turned his attention to the oncoming men. “If you're bringing more grim news, it had better be the sort of thing that cannot wait until morning.”

“A runner,” Gunnarr said. He accepted the cup his son handed to him, and Tin was pleased to see the matter-of-factness in the transaction. That would not always have been the case. Erik, too, was offered drink, and accepted. Both men, she noticed, were polite enough to acknowledge the wolves as well. “From Hergilsberg.”

“They are besieged,” Erik added. He sucked a long swallow from his cup and scratched under his eye patch with a blunt, trail-dirty finger.

“Iunarius' men?” Vethulf leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“It seems,” Gunnarr agreed. “They must have gotten around us. Left the expeditionary force we tangled with yesterday to distract us and given us the slip.”

Isolfr huffed into his beard. “Well, it explains how we managed to catch back up to Fargrimr and the Siglufjordhur contingent.”

Skjaldwulf seemed to consciously unhunch himself. He sighed deeply and stretched his boots toward the fire. “How long can they hold out?”

The men and Tin looked to Erik, whose monastery was at Hergilsberg. From the height of his greater expertise, he tapped his fingers on the sides of his mug and thought. “If it stays cold? Longer than if not, I expect. This weather can't be kind to those skirts and sandals.”

“Do you think they'll fall back?” Isolfr asked.

Gunnarr said, “After ten years of preparation? They haven't withdrawn yet. Just consolidated and advanced, over and over again.” He drained his cup and handed it back to Isolfr. “They mean to siege and stay, I warrant. It's what they did at Siglufjordhur. These aren't raiders. They're settlers. And they're patient as starvation.”

Tin curled her fingers closer to the mug cast from her namesake metal, savoring the warmth and solidity of it. Skjaldwulf rose, steadier on his feet than she would have expected. “We should summon the other jarls and heofodmenn.”

“Already done,” said Gunnarr. He found a flat rock to rest his drink on and dug some lumps of bread and crumpled cheese and a fistful of dried apples from the folds of his mud-spattered clothing.

As if there were nothing in the world to trouble him, he applied himself to the food, rinsing mouthfuls of dry bread down with sips of watered brandy, and waited for the rest of his council of war to arrive.