An Apprentice to Elves (44 page)

Up the beach they retreated, wet sand a benediction under sea-numbed feet. They found their way to the cliff road, and the pass was a relief. Tin held the front lines with human and wolven companions, and as the Rheans drove her back, she realized she was fighting beside Skjaldwulf and the gigantic Stothi. So some of that vanguard who had broken the Rhean assault had survived, at least this long.

A long hill sloped down steeply at the back of the sea cliff, and across this the Iskryner army fanned, making for the forest at the base. There might some brief safety lie.

The enemy was not pressing quite as hard. There was a pause between Tin falling back and the Rheans pressing forward, and the pause was getting longer. “They don't like the forest,” Skjaldwulf shouted above the relentless clash of metal on metal, war cries, screams, and the savage noises of fighting trellwolves.

Tin swept her halberd in a wide feint, giving herself and Skjaldwulf room for three more retreating paces, and then the first reaching black twig-fingers were over their heads, and it was clear the Rheans would follow them no farther.

“Will these woods be inviolate, do you think?” Tin asked Skjaldwulf curiously. She found Rhean behavior even harder to predict than that of the Northmen.

“Eh,” Skjaldwulf said, squinting up the slope toward the top of the sea cliff. “Only until they get one of their commanders out here.” His eyebrows pulled together, then shot up. After a moment, he said, “Mastersmith, do you know if Fargrimr has made it this far?”

“I have not seen him since we left the ice,” Tin said.

“Will you help me look?” She was surprised by the sudden sharp urgency in his voice. “Please. It's important.”

“Of course I will help, wolfjarl,” Tin said.

“Good,” said Skjaldwulf. “Because we may not have much time.”

*   *   *

Fargrimr was crawling when he reached the shelter of the trees. If it hadn't been for the cover of the winter darkness, he knew he would have been dead, and he found himself grimly, bitterly unwilling to give either Iunarius Aureus or Verenius Corvus the satisfaction.
You'll not beat me, you bastards, not this easily,
he thought as his fingers clawed around a tree root; he dragged himself forward and half fell, half rolled behind the tree and out of the enemy's direct line of sight—if any of them could still see him. It was too dark and too cold to take precise or accurate stock of himself, but he stayed still and decided after a few moments that nothing was presently bleeding. His shield arm was still numb halfway up to the shoulder, but he didn't think it was broken.

He was contemplating the next step—
get up, venture farther, find at least one of your men, Fargrimr Fastarrson, that you may not shame your father where he sits in Valhalla
—when an odd, creaky wind chime of a voice said, “Lord Fargrimr?” then called softly, “I have found him, wolfjarl!”

It was the svartalf, he realized, blinking in bewilderment at the darkness layered on darkness where her voice was. But he could not think which wolfjarl she would mean until Skjaldwulf's voice said, “Fargrimr? Are you hurt?”

“I don't think so,” he said. “Just bashed about and starting to stiffen—though of course I may have injuries I have not yet been able to feel.”

Skjaldwulf's pained bark of laughter told him the other man understood. “Listen,” the wolfjarl said, crouching down, “they don't seem to have a commander out here now—at least, nobody seems to be ordering the soldiers forward into the woods.”

“All right,” Fargrimr said.

“But they'll change that as quickly as they can, won't they? They know we came into the woods, they'll send their soldiers in after us?”

“To finish what their mammoth started,” Fargrimr said, wondering why Skjaldwulf felt the need to spell out their approaching doom.

“No, wait, listen,” Skjaldwulf said, touching Fargrimr's shoulder lightly where he might ordinarily have gripped it. Fargrimr appreciated his restraint. “The Rheans haven't been camped outside of Hergilsberg for twelve years. They haven't had time to build their cursed
roads.
”

“Oh,” Fargrimr said and heard the svartalf echo, somewhere else in the dark.

“We need bait,” said Skjaldwulf. “And then we need enough men to be the trap.”

“Yes,” Fargrimr said fervently. “I just need a moment to get my legs under me.”

“You need warmth and food,” Tin said, and threw her cloak around him.

*   *   *

It was dreamlike—nightmarelike—moving through the trees in the gloom that would neither lift nor deepen, finding one man, then another, occasionally two men together, all exhausted and stunned and sick with what Fargrimr thought of as grief: the awareness, deep in the body, of all those who had died. In this case also, though everyone was trying to deny a foothold to fear, they were terrified of the mammoths.

Fargrimr did not blame them. He was terrified, too.

Skjaldwulf said, seemingly at random, as they were talking to one of the jarls who followed Gunnarr, “They won't be able to bring their monster war-beasts back among the trees,” and Fargrimr was standing close enough to feel the man's body lighten.

After that, they made sure to mention frequently that the mammoths could not be used in the forest.

They also found wolves, wolves covered in blood, wolves limping, wolves whining softly. Even Fargrimr was worried and hurt by how few of them had been able to keep next to their brothers, and he did not object as Skjaldwulf developed a following of wolves, pressing close around first Skjaldwulf, but then Fargrimr as well, jostling and shifting against each other, but not fighting. And they were
warm,
each of them like an oven; though Fargrimr was careful not to touch them, their warmth seeped into him regardless.

Every time they found a wolfcarl, there was a moment in which Fargrimr—admittedly punchy at this point—swore he could see a wave of
not-mine
rolling over the wolves, and if it broke against a defiant rock spur of
mine!
Fargrimr felt a tiny warm spark of elation in his own heart as that wolf bounded forward.

Pairs, Skjaldwulf sent scouting into the forest. “We need to learn it quickly,” he said. “Look for places to set an ambush.”

Men and wolves grinned back before vanishing.

The wolfjarl of Ketillhill, when they found him, was sitting with his brother's dead body in his arms, both of them rust brown with dried blood. He listened intently as Skjaldwulf explained his bare-bones plan. Then he laid the dead wolf down gently and stood to glare into Skjaldwulf's eyes. “I will bait them for you, as if they were bears. I claim the privilege of tempting these goat-humping nithlings back where their monsters won't save them. Send any man who will volunteer to me.”

Skjaldwulf had the sense to say nothing more than, “Thank you.”

When they found wolfless men, Skjaldwulf sent them to muster under Gunnarr's standard, which had been pitched defiantly just ahead of the tree line. It was safe enough, the Rheans having fallen back toward Hergilsberg—no doubt to amass their forces for the next attack—and there was no other way the Army of the Iskryne could have found enough of itself to be anything much more formidable than the Picnic Party of the Iskryne.

Fargrimr tallied the men of Siglufjordhur as they located them, keep and town and Freyasheall, and was doubly grateful every time man could be matched to wolf. He found himself—not exactly tallying the Franangfordthreat, but he was certainly very aware of it when they encountered Vethulf and Kjaran, who'd mustered together a band of men and wolves already and were delighted to fall in with Skjaldwulf's plan (and delighted, too, to lean up against Skjaldwulf, man on one side, wolf on the other, for a moment of peace in each knowing that the others were safe). When they found Isolfr, Fargrimr had to look away from the almost frantic hug Skjaldwulf caught his wolfsprechend in, the strength with which Isolfr hugged him back. Comfort both given and received. And with Isolfr joining the hunt, their ability to communicate with the wolves doubled or trebled—definitely trebled when a great black shape loomed out of the night and turned into Viradechtis, who knocked Isolfr flat on the ground and washed his face before she would proceed a single footstep farther.

For all that Othinn was the god of wolves, Fargrimr thought, Viradechtis was Freya's beast.

They found most, though not all, of Siglufjordhur. They found most, though not all, of the men of the Franangfordthreat. They found most, though not all, of the Freyasthreat.

They did not find Blarwulf. Fargrimr didn't think they were going to.

Fargrimr told himself not to waste strength in fretting, told himself not to borrow trouble, told himself not to be a fool, but when he glanced aside and found Isolfr Viradechtisbrother there, his braids half unraveled and his face behind its mask of scars unhappy, Fargrimr closed his eyes.

But Isolfr put his hand on Fargrimr's shoulder and squeezed until Fargrimr looked at him again. “Viradechtis says she can feel Ingrun,” he said, and Fargrimr felt his breath ease.

“Blarwulf?”

Isolfr shook his head.

“I did not think so,” Fargrimr said. “We will grieve later. The Rheans are too canny to let us rest.”

“We will grieve later,” Isolfr agreed softly.

They kept searching the night for men and wolves, and if more were found than not, still there were those who stayed lost, and they did not have the time to mourn.

They did, near the vague lightening of the sky that meant dawn, find Tryggvi.

He looked as tired as Fargrimr felt, tail dragging, ears dragging. Like the rest of them, he looked like he'd been rolling in blood; some of it was clearly his, from the ugly arc of a wound on his left shoulder. The tip of his tail started whisking back and forth when Skjaldwulf called his name.

And he was carrying in his mouth, as a toad carries the jewel in its head, a medallion worked with a familiar crow.

*   *   *

The crow banner certainly looked to be keeping up with the others. Perhaps Corvinus had tasted the wine of betrayal and found it bitter. Perhaps he'd expected better things of the Northmen.

They crouched, Fargrimr and an alf and half a dozen wolfheofodmenn, whom he found he trusted to understand the situation far more than he trusted his fellow jarls, in a clearing well back from the tree line, around a cairn of Tin's little stone-lights, which, though they sadly did not provide the warmth of a fire, also did not provide the betraying scent or smoke.

They'd been fighting the Rheans long enough to learn to read their damn battle standards. The crow on one side, the three arrows on the other, and a creature that had to be Iunarius' device in the center, though none of them could make any sense of it. “This doesn't look to me,” Tin said, poking the medallion with one long black claw, “like Quintus Verenius Corvus leaving your enemy's flank open to attack.”

“No,” Fargrimr agreed. “This looks like Quintus Verenius Corvus pushing forward as hard as he can. I lost track of them on the ice—were the crows…?”

“If they'd mysteriously held back,” Vethulf said blackly, “it would not have needed the bear-sarkers to cover our retreat.”

Fargrimr reorganized the battle in his head and cursed. “We did know he was faithless.”

“It is what we expect of civilized people,” Skjaldwulf said, and Fargrimr was grateful for the irony like a flensing knife, cutting through skin and fat to the muscle underneath.

“They think us routed,” Vethulf said. “Why keep faith with a defeated enemy?”

“Are they wrong?” said the wolfjarl of Ketillhill bitterly. “What was that”—with a wave of his hand toward the ice and the dead—“if not a rout?” Fargrimr did not fault him for taking the death of his wolf hard, but it was yet becoming increasingly tempting to split the skin over his cheekbone with nothing but knuckles and strength.

“Routed, maybe,” Skjaldwulf said, “but not defeated.” He smiled like a wolf. “Not just yet.”

Something cracked in the darkness nearby. Heads snapped up, but Fargrimr could tell it had been an intentional noise because it was followed by solid footsteps. He was on his feet, rushing to the edge of the circle of stone-light, by the time Randulfr and Ingrun staggered into it, leaning on one another.

“Surprise,” Randulfr said, with the smirk of someone who has just won a point off a sibling.

 

NINETEEN

Fargrimr turned his head to watch the cold gray light of dawn seep between the trees.

“Sunreturn,” Isolfr commented, and went back to scraping a whetstone along the edge of his axe until Tin looked at him in fond frustration, took both away, and sharpened it herself.

“Already? I'd lost track,” Randulfr said.

“If only the svartalfar were coming,” Fargrimr said, and felt the worse for it immediately. Because Tin raised her head with a grim smirk, and Fargrimr remembered too clearly the bitter cold of that winter campaign, fifteen years before, when they had driven the trolls from Othinnsaesc.

“If they left today,” Tin said, “it would still take them a month to get here. Or more.”

Randulfr looked up from where he was combing burrs and blood out of Ingrun's fur. She sighed gustily and rested her head on his knee. He, too, glanced at the dawn. Not enough rest; not enough food. But here they were, and it was time to put their plan into action.

Tin reached inside her robes, found some jerky, and offered it to Randulfr expressionlessly. He took it and began to shred it between his hands, coaxing Ingrun to eat. She was almost too tired to chew. He kept coaxing her, and slowly her ears began to perk up.

“One more fight, sweetheart,” he said to her. “Then we can lie down in a featherbed and stay there.”

She heaved herself up. Fargrimr imitated her, then offered a hand to his brother. Randulfr, usually so light on his feet, rocked and grunted.