An Apprentice to Elves (6 page)

When they worked on the raw steel from the crucibles, with each blow impurities showered from the metal in cascades of brilliant sparks. They hammered and hammered until the steel was clean.

She even loved the ceaseless labor at the bellows, where each of the apprentices took turns pumping the leather-wrapped wooden handles for the hours and hours required to refine steel. When Alfgyfa began, she could barely move the bellows. She was not as strong as an alf, and her small human hands barely spanned the broad handles. She would stand on her tiptoes and strain, pushing down with her whole body, until one of the other apprentices came and added his or her weight to Alfgyfa's. But eventually, as months passed—not that the svartalfar measured time in months, the moon being as alien a light to them as the sun—Alfgyfa gained in weight and strength and muscle until she could take her turn with the alfar, unassisted.

She loved too the shaping of the blade, the folding and refolding, the care that must be taken with temperature and the force of the hammer blows.

But she loved most of all the quench—the moment when the forged steel was lifted in tongs, glowing dully, and slid into the cask of oil that awaited it. There was a delicious sort of dread in the moment when she strained her ear for the
plink
or
ting
of cracking metal—of a failed quench, and effort wasted, and metal that could now only be recast and reforged. But what she loved best was that moment when a blank blade was lifted, flaming, from the cask, and the burning oil spattered from it like dragon's tears.

And in all of this, she loved also the incongruities in what Tin told her—told all the apprentices—about smithing. “Blacksmithing is gentle. It is not a thing of brute force, but patience and coaxing. You lead the form out of the metal. You lead the metal to become what it should. If you force it or rush it, the gate will warp, the nail will be brittle.”

Pearl asked, “What about blades?” thereby saving Alfgyfa the trouble.

“Most of what we smith is not blades, child. But yes, a blade that is rushed will be brittle, and it will shatter. If not in the quench, then when a life is at stake.

“You will find,” she added, looking at Alfgyfa, “that this principle applies much more widely than just the forge.”

*   *   *

Tithe-boys were not the bane of Otter's existence, for Otter's existence in the heall was largely too contented (she did not use the word
happy,
not even to herself) to admit of banes. But they were, more frequently than not, a source of ongoing irritation and a damnable nuisance.

Otter was no one's mother. Was not, in her estimation, cut from cloth well-suited to the task of raising children. And yet here she was, along with Thorlot, acting foster mother for this pack of beasts and the wolves that kept them.

In her calmer moments, she'd entertain that thought, then remind herself that it was somewhat uncharitable. At least wolfcarls, by and large, did their own laundry. And they made sure the tithe-boys learned that the heall women had duties beyond playing their personal servants also.

The current batch, gathered in anticipation of the unborn puppies maturing in the belly of the young bitch recently traded from Ketillhill, were a fine example. Two of them were but fourteen—young to come to the heall—and four were the more usual fifteen or sixteen winters. But it was an odd side effect of the end of the trellwar that more young men survived, and so there were more young men seeking their profession in the wolfheallan even as the wolfheallan became less critical to the defense of the North. After years of scraping and scrimping, the Franangfordheall was swimming in tithe-boys.

The trellwolves seemed to handle the change in fortune more economically: recent litters of the older Franangford bitches had been on the small side. The end result was that, in addition to the six newly arrived boys in want of a future, there were three tithe-boys left over from Amma's and Viradechtis' last litters. And these youths were well into the category that Otter would consider men.

None of them was an awful person, precisely. But Canute, Tunni, and Varin had too much idle time on their hands, being too old for lessons beyond swordplay—and, being unwolfed, were in a strange position with regard to the threat and the heall. They didn't belong to the wolfsprechend yet. But nor did they belong to anyone else.

Brokkolfr did his best to manage them. But Brokkolfr was not their mother either, and he too had a limited number of hours in his day. As Isolfr's second—and the better human politician of the two, though no one could match Isolfr when it came to settling conflict between wolves—Brokkolfr had enough to do managing stresses between wolfcarls.

In any case, right now, standing in the spring mud with a collapsed hide-stretching rack in ruins before her, Otter was feeling anything but charitable toward tithe-boys. And great grown nearly men tithe-boys least of all.

Among their other failings, they did have a tendency to show off for Thorlot's daughter Mjoll and the other young women of similar age. And Mjoll, for all her general good sense, was still young enough to be flattered, even though she liked the tithe-boys no better than Otter did.

Which was why, after she came to tell Otter about the incident in the yard, Otter had asked her to stay inside and see to the porridge for the next little while. Mjoll had blushed blotchy red, and Otter knew she didn't need to say anything more.

Otter drew herself up and looked across the mud of the kitchen yard to Tunni, Varin, and—always the ringleader—Canute. The other two boys—great, grown boys! She would indeed start thinking of them as men, if only they would act like it!—clustered slightly behind Canute, the tallest. They were all trying to look nonchalant. Or as nonchalant as one
could
look with mud-stained breeches and a bloodied nose.

Cause in a wolfheall, Otter had learned, was a tricky thing. The pregnant bitch from Ketillhill was a nondescript agouti tawny named Athisla, and this was her second litter, her first at Franangford. She was sly, and a bit of a trickster—Frithulf's brother Kothran had taken to her immediately, and there was some excitement in the heall anticipating just how clever the cubs in this litter might be. Her brother Ulfhundr was young and timid—for a wolfcarl—and very much under his wolf's paw, as the wolfcarls said.

If Mjoll was flattered by the tithe-boys' attention, Athisla actively sought it. She knew they were going to be competing for her puppies, and just as she'd encouraged scuffles between her potential mates before her heat, Otter was sure her sly dun snout was in back of this mess somewhere, even if Otter herself would never understand exactly how.

You could learn a lot about wolves if you paid attention in a wolfheall, even if you'd never be able to speak to them yourself. And you learned even more about boys, whether you wanted to or not.

She sighed and looked at the three boys. They quieted, watching her warily back. She said, “Would anyone care to explain what happened here?”

They all exchanged glances. Canute straightened up slightly and said, “We were … roughhousing.”

“Canute,” she said. “Come over here.”

He started toward her with a glance to his two friends. Tunni and Varin hesitated, then trailed along as raggedly as the sheep at the edge of the herd who were just begging to be picked off by predators. Otter raised her eyebrows at them—
are you sure you want to be part of this discussion?
—and they dropped back somewhat, but kept coming. She would commend their loyalty, if not their brains.

She studied Canute while he crossed the yard, red mud sucking at the soles of his boots. He might have eighteen winters on him, but he wore them like a scarecrow's coat. He tugged the hem of his outgrown jerkin down as he walked. It wasn't too tight, merely too short, as if, like a shaded sapling, all his winter's resources had gone to growing height rather than breadth. If he gained the breadth to match his height, he would be a bull of a man. And probably still an idiot.

Canute stopped before her, close enough that she had to crane her head back for a view of the underside of his chin and the sharpness of his cheeks and jawline. His hair was a streaky brown-blond under the mud matted into it. What she could glimpse of his expression was equal parts rebellious and crestfallen.

“You were fighting,” she said.

“Roughhousing,” he argued. He wasn't sullen, at least. It was a plain statement of fact. “Fighting is if you want to hurt somebody.”

She reached out and flicked some drying mud off the raveling braid sewn onto his cuff. He tried to look abashed, and then he thought about it a little more and tried
not
to look abashed. Neither effort was particularly successful.

“Be that as it may,” she said dryly.

He stepped back, in order to get a better angle on
her
expression. It had the side benefit of clearing his up somewhat, too, and removing the interior of his nostrils from her direct line of sight.

“Whether you meant to hurt anyone or not, you did cause damage.” She gestured to the drying rack with the back of her hand. She knew the gesture made her look foreign; the Northmen were more likely to point with a chin. And yet it stayed with her. She continued, “Who's going to clean this up?”

He blinked at her. Behind him, Tunni and Varin giggled. So much for loyalty. She made herself a note to talk to Skjaldwulf about them before Vethulf noticed there was a problem and took it into his head to perform some corrective action of his own.

“I am?” he said uncertainly.

Not entirely stupid, then. “You are,” she said. “And you're going to scrub your shirts and trews out, too. And scrape the mud off those hides.”

Varin and Tunni giggled all the more, biting their lips to hide their mirth.

She turned to them, tilting her head back. “And you two,” she said. “Don't think I somehow missed your part in all this. While Canute is cleaning up the mess you've made in the kitchen yard, you two can shovel out the stable yard. And when you're done with that, I imagine you, too, will have some laundry to do. And all three of you are going to take that broken drying rack to Sokkolfr, and he is going to teach you to repair it.” Sokkolfr would not thank her, but if it could teach the tithe-boys to think about where they put their great, careless, “roughhousing” feet, it would be worth it.

And she would find something for Ulfhundr, too, something boring and fiddly and worth the nuisance his sister was proving herself to be.

*   *   *

As her apprenticeship approached its ending and she contemplated the vigil and test that would attend her elevation to journeyman and the setting of the first status-marking inlays in her teeth, Alfgyfa reckoned it out and realized that she had spent as much of her life here in Nidavellir, a strange tall pale creature among the alfar, as she had among the wolves and men of the Franangford wolfheall. More, for she had been some time at her mother's breast before that, even though she did not remember it, and her mother had been of the bondi, the townsfolk: a crafter.

She might be more alf than woman, then. But she wasn't very much alf, either, and even when the other apprentices treated her well—even when they forgot she was not just odd-looking, white-skinned, and strange-eyed, but alien—their very forgetting reminded her, because though they treated her sometimes as one of their own, she wasn't. She couldn't see in the dim light as they could, nor effortlessly lift an anvil that weighed twice as much as she—though one of her own weight,
that
she could heft if she could get her legs under it—nor sing five-part harmony in her own throat. Her words in the alf-tongue came always stilted and flat and without the nuance she slowly learned at least to hear even if she could not reproduce it.

She did learn to manage an approximation, however. As she witnessed Girasol's early attempts to learn to speak, Alfgyfa realized that it was a
skill,
not something inborn. She set herself to learn. Practicing on her own in the trellwarrens for months, she taught herself to produce two harmonics. An overtone and an undertone allowed her to add some of the nuance and layers of meaning that one alf-word would contain when spoken by Tin or any of the others in the household.

She guessed, after long practice and many attempts, that a third set of harmonics might just be physically impossible for her. The alfar must have some sort of resonant chamber in their throats that caused the full range of base note and four harmonic pitches. She was a human, and she would never be as at home with the alfar as she had been among the wolves.

The trellwarrens were a mercy to her because she could be absolutely alone there, as nowhere else in the alfhame. And for a girl who had been accustomed, from a very early age, to run wild in the wood alone, secure in the knowledge that she was protected by the stewardship of the konigenwolf and her pack, the constant society of the alfhame was sometimes painfully wearing.

And most wearing of all was the ritual.

Everything a svartalf did was attended by some sort of liturgy, ceremony, or observance. The coal for the forge fire always had to be stacked in the same pattern and lit the same way, with the same words said over it. The floor always had to be swept in the same pattern—there was a chant for floor sweeping—and the spices and vegetables in a dish always had to be measured precisely the same way, and added to the skillet in exact order. It was meant, Tin gave Alfgyfa to understand, to provide a meditative structure to the tasks of the day.

Alfgyfa found it mostly stultifying. And the laundry seemed to collect all the worst of it together.

If it had only been a matter of the laundry itself, Alfgyfa would have liked it quite a lot. The big cavern was open to the sky. As a result—at least in the seasons when there was more daylight than dark—she usually attended it in different hours than the svartalfar, who found it inconvenient to wrestle mountains of sopping wet linens about while wearing the long robes and veils that sheltered them from the sun. So the laundry cavern was a place of some privacy for her.