An Apprentice to Elves (5 page)

Because Thorlot—who was what Otter in her childhood would have called the headwoman, being as she was the lover of the Franangford wolfsprechend—was busy with smithing and tinkering—weapons, buckles, pots, pans, hinges, bits, chains, mail, nails (endless nails!), tongs, axes, gates, latches, scissors, pails, candlesticks, pins, needles, chisels, pruning hooks—most of the work of managing and running the household of the heall came to fall to Otter. There was bread to be baked and stalls to be raked and goats to be milked, roofs to be thatched, sick to be nursed (a task Otter particularly loathed), the pantry to be managed and kept in inventory, cloth to be traded for, candles to be dipped, saddles to be mended, meat to be smoked and salted, fodder and wood and food to be stockpiled against winter and against the threat of war. Of course she did not need to do all these tasks with her own hands; there were thralls and hirelings and women and heallbred children and wolfcarls aplenty. But those persons needed managing, too.

It was worth taking up the responsibilities for what the heall provided in return. Otter never would have believed it until she experienced it, that this was a place where, surrounded by trellwolves who could rip her throat out as soon as look at her, she could live in safety and security, with enough to eat, with work for which she was respected, with no one to care that the double-headed eagle branded on her cheek was a Rhean slaver's mark.

At least until the Rheans gathered their forces in Siglufjordhur and marched north. Otter did not believe that when that happened, the Northmen could stand against them, wolves or no wolves.

She had seen the Rheans roll over Brython.

They had sent their expeditionary forces north once already—the sortie that had started her toward Franangford. Encountering more resistance than they had expected, they retreated to the coast and retrenched. They settled in, building their fortifications and roads, turning their toehold into a foothold, the captured keep of Siglufjordhur into a Rhean outpost. They were waiting, but it was nonsense to think that they were satisfied. Otter lived in constant fear of the day they decided they were ready. She knew that when the Rheans at long last came to pluck the Iskryne, this time of safety would be nothing but a pleasant dream. They were patient, and they were not inclined to miss a single berry in the bramble, once they made up their minds that the harvest had come due.

But there was nothing she could do about that truth, nothing she could do about the Rheans. She set them aside and, as best she could, did not think about them.

Instead, she enjoyed what she had while she had it. She enjoyed the food, the work, the warmth. She enjoyed the fact that no one raised a hand to her. She enjoyed that wolfcarls flirted rather than forced, and that when she chose not to lie down for them, they backed away and apologized. It was a while before she believed she had this privilege: there were not so many women in the heall that any went unclaimed for long, except by choice.

And she came to enjoy the wolfheofodmenn, as well. Skjaldwulf was a storyteller, a
skald
in their tongue, a
scop
in hers, and she trusted him as she had trusted no man in all her life. She noticed, too, that when she came to sit by the long fire, as often as not his stories had some element of the heroism of women in them—he told tales of Knowing Freydis, of Lagertha Battle-oak, of Ragnvæig Householder, who managed the defense of the keep at Jomsa after the deaths of her husband and her father. He gave her women being brave, when she badly needed soil for her own bravery to take root in and grow. Perhaps, being a true skald, he knew how much it meant to her.

Sokkolfr, the housecarl, treated her as a partner from the beginning, so polite, as he was polite to every woman of the heall, that it was some time before she realized that it was genuine respect he showed her, and even longer before she dared to offer him friendship in return. She was surprised by her grief when his wolf-brother Hroi died—an ancient of a wolf, truly, for he had been old when he had taken Sokkolfr as his brother. And he died softly, in his sleep, in the cold of late winter when the old so often failed.

It is a
wolf
!
she had scolded herself, rubbing angrily at her eyes.
Not a man!
But she had lived among the wolves and wolfcarls for almost five years at that point, and she had known, even as she told herself she was being foolish, childish,
soft,
that she would miss Hroi—and she proved it for weeks after his death, as every time she came into the kitchen, she looked, as reflexively as breathing, to find him in that warm, perfectly wolf-shaped spot between the bread oven and the hearth. It hurt, almost as much as it hurt watching Sokkolfr working and bartering and building walls, and yet all the time a man without his shadow, as in an old, old story her mother's mother had told her when she was a child.

She said nothing, for there was nothing to say. But she took it upon herself to see that Sokkolfr had food to eat that was easy and appetizing and required no thought—even though that took creativity, it being winter. And she listened, when he found it in himself to talk.

When Sokkolfr took a new brother, a gangly wheaten-coated pup of Viradechtis' whelping—clearly Kjaran's get by his odd eyes, palest blue and gleaming gold—Otter was surprised by her own delight, by the warmth it gave her to see them together, Sokkolfr and Tryggvi, a man and his shadow, and she found herself smiling more readily at Sokkolfr, even as she laughed at the way Tryggvi leaned into her legs to ask to have his ears rumpled.

The wolfjarl Vethulf was a shouter and a stormer. Vethulf-in-the-Fire some of his shieldmates called him, and it suited him, with his blazing red hair and his blazing temper. No one could be more unlike Skjaldwulf or more unlike Isolfr. At first, Otter had been afraid that he would hurt one of them—or that he would take his temper out on the nearest convenient woman, as she was long accustomed to men doing. But no matter how loudly he shouted, or how inventively he cursed, he never raised his hand to his lover or his wolfsprechend … or to Otter herself. Slowly she came to believe that he never would, although she still did not like to have him between her and the door.

Even more slowly, she came to understand that Isolfr did not resent her for her share of Skjaldwulf's affection. He was hard to read, his face marked—she had been told—by the claws of a trellqueen. And he didn't talk to her, not as Skjaldwulf did or Sokkolfr did—or even as Vethulf did when he wasn't yelling.

She had assumed at first that he scorned her—a Brythoni slave woman, why should he not? But some months after Thorlot had made friends in her forthright fashion, she had remarked, “I would not have approached you—many women do not care for the company of a woman smith and I haven't the time to waste on them—but Isolfr said I should.”

“Isolfr?” Otter had asked, blinking over the bucket in which she scrubbed shirts. She could blame the lye soap, surely, for the sting of her eyes.

Thorlot was a big woman, her eyes very blue in her forge-roughened face, her ginger hair streaked at the temples with enough gray to show that she was older than Isolfr.
Isolfr
was not much older than Otter, though the scars on both Otter's face and the wolfsprechend's hid their youth. Thorlot gave Otter a bright, thoughtful look and said, “Isolfr worries.”

“About
me
?”

“You are Skjaldwulf's daughter, and you are far from your home. Of course he worries. And Isolfr knows what it is to be the white raven.”

She met Otter's eyes steadily, trusting her with this truth—a truth that turned Otter's understanding of Isolfr upside down. Not resentment, but shyness; not contempt, but concern. And Thorlot the shieldmaiden guarding his back.

Isolfr had worried, and Thorlot had extended kindness. She would have died for them that afternoon. As she thought of what the Rheans would do to them, she knew that her fear was not for herself: the Rheans couldn't take this away from her, because she knew it was only a respite. But they could take Isolfr and Thorlot away from each other.

That was a bad day. That was the day Otter realized she had begun again to care.

 

TWO

Whatever her other frustrations in the house of the svartalfar, Alfgyfa loved the work. The smithing work, anyway: there were other tasks that delighted her less, such as caring for her foster brother Girasol, Tin's son, once he arrived.

He was Tin's second child. Her first, a daughter named Rhodium who was a little younger than Alfgyfa, had been sent fostering to a household of the Iron Lineage in another alfhame, for complicated alfish reasons that Alfgyfa tried not to listen to. Girasol, being a less valuable male, would stay with his mother. His father and his facilitating parent, though certainly known, never seemed very important. Alfgyfa, whose experience had all been the other way around—she knew who her mother was, of course, but it was her father who was the center of her world—found it disconcerting, but she never doubted that Tin loved her son.

It must be said that svartalf babes, for a mercy, were not so helpless as human ones. They clung under their mothers' robes with strong spidery fingers almost from the moment they were born. Perhaps that was the secret to the svartalfar's unearthly strength: there was simply no part of a svartalf's existence when it was not engaged in some physical task that was desperately essential for life. When Tin wished a reprieve from Girasol—when she would be working close in to fire and steel, for example—she reached into her robes and pried his tiny fingers free of her flesh, then handed him off to one of the apprentices.

He was, in that way, much less trouble than a babe in a sling.

But it must also be said that svartalf babes, for a tribulation, were not so helpless as human ones. His fingers might be delicate—almost unimaginably fine, like the teeth of a reindeer-horn comb. But they were also unimaginably strong, and they pulled Alfgyfa's hair and left bruises on her arms and shoulders where he perched. And he was much more mobile than a human infant, and from a younger age. He could quite outscamper her, and the other apprentices never let her forget the times she had to come to them to retrieve him from some unlikely perch.

She also tended the shaggy little ponies of Nidavellir, as the alfhame was called. They were beasts no larger than a dog-trellwolf, often spotted of coat, round-bellied and hard-hooved. But they could do the work of any cart horse or reindeer Alfgyfa had known, hauling ore and victuals in carts to and fro. They were perfectly at home in the tunnels, and you could see them trotting cheerfully along the wider thoroughfares of the alfhame as if they trotted along some grand boulevard under a bright spring sun. Their hooves clopped bright echoes, and in their harness stonestars glimmered, and bells rang down the long passages of worked stone.

But child-minding and animal husbandry were not all of her duties—or even the most of them. And before long, Girasol grew to the age where he was 'prenticed himself, and then Alfgyfa was no longer the youngest and least of Tin's household. As the seven years of her apprenticeship passed, so she learned. Smiths did all sorts of work, but Alfgyfa loved best the blades—axes, swords, even knives for cutting vegetables. She loved the work of making crucible steel: taking iron ore and mixing it with burned bone—from trellwolves, ancestors, bears, sometimes even trolls, depending on the purpose of the blade—for strength and resilience. When a svartalf died, her remains were wrapped and scented with great ceremony, then burned in a refining fire with ore. The charcoal that remained of the bones became part of an alloy with which blades or baubles were made for those who wished to remember her.

Alfgyfa thought this was an excellent form of funeral, and even better than burning in a boat, as Ingrun's brother Randulfr had once told her was the tradition of his home country.

Along with the ore and bone, the crucible—a cylindrical pottery vessel—was filled with chips of glass and sand. (This sand and glass would bond to the slag, and help leave the remaining steel pure, once it was hammered clean. Sometimes, for particular weapons, the glass and sand were chosen from significant sources as well. There was a blade in the entrance hall of Tin's home that had been wrought by one of her foremothers, and the fragments of glass for its refining had been salvaged from a cobalt-tinted window broken in the attack that started a clan feud. When the feud was ended, the weapon was hung up forever.)

The filled crucible was then covered and sealed up with clay slip, just like the clay slip Alfgyfa had already learned to use to fix a handle to a drinking cup before it was fired.

Many mastersmiths shared one furnace cavern. When it was time for the ore to be refined, each crucible was marked with the seal of the particular smith who had filled it—or, more likely, who had caused it to be filled by her apprentices. The crucibles were buried in charcoal in a cave that touched the surface: one designed so it caught the wind and channeled it into the heart of the fire—and the heat and fumes of the furnace rose up chimneys so the fire, in its own turn, created a draft and drew ever more breath.

At its height, the air feeding the blaze whistled through the mountainside so that it was like lying under the belly of a dragon. The whole of the warrens grew warm when the smelter was fired. And even after the furnaces were cool enough to approach, Alfgyfa loved that one must go into them only in thick shoes padded with wool and leather, which burned and crackled and scorched around one's feet. The crucibles glowed yellow-white when the apprentices pulled them from the ashes, and Alfgyfa loved that, too.

Alfgyfa loved also the forge. She loved the singing of the hammers—Mastersmith Tin's, and those of her journeymen Jade and Nickel. She loved when she was allowed to pick up her own hammer and stand in a circle with the other apprentices around an anvil. The Master or one of the journeymen would tap a spot on cherry-colored iron, and the apprentices' blows must fall in the same place, in quick sequence, one after the other like the patter of the raindrops that these caverns would never know. Alfgyfa loved swinging her hammer with all her might, feeling the pull across her shoulders, and the quick elastic slam into hot metal, and then the tug and skitter as she whipped her hammer away before the next one fell.