An Apprentice to Elves (8 page)

Mischmetal was heavier than she expected, strongly set, and pulling on the cloak was like pulling on a mountain. But by dint of throwing her whole weight against the cloak, and the length of the lever arm, Alfgyfa managed to haul the polearm up until its blade almost scraped the ceiling.

Mischmetal was left wide open to her opponent's blow, but Manganese had arrested it successfully. “Hold,” Manganese cried, ending the bout, and grounded the butt of her weapon. Alfgyfa fell on her ass as Mischmetal released the haft of her trellspear, and the weapon, still cloak-entangled, dropped to the floor as well.

Alfgyfa sprawled there—bruised, disoriented, with every adult and adolescent alf in the hall glaring at her—and Girasol piled into her arms.

 

THREE

That child. That foolish, infuriating,
hasty
child.

Tin didn't even know for sure whether she meant Alfgyfa or Girasol. Or both. She could still feel the cold-sick sweat of seeing the line of Mischmetal's swing, seeing the line of Girasol's single-minded trajectory, and seeing with perfect certainty the unavoidable intersection of those two lines.

And yet, somehow, Alfgyfa had avoided it.

It put Tin in her debt, which was uncomfortable. That was not the proper relationship between mastersmith and apprentice. Something would have to be done.

She had been thinking that a great deal recently. The svartalfar were a cautious people, slow-moving, their culture rich with traditions—which Alfgyfa had, when younger, called “boring.” (She probably thought it, even now, but if nothing else, Tin had at least taught her to mind her tongue. Most of the time.) They did not assimilate new ideas quickly, readily, or at all happily. While this was an ideal mindset for waiting out the grinding ice, it was not helpful when change came, when events required a quick response—such as a konigenwolf falling off the crust of the world and bringing a tall, pale boy with her, a boy with fierce, unrelenting honor and a sense of openness, willingness, that Tin had never imagined one of his kind could have.

Tin, the last of her family and her mother's family and her mother's mother's family, had had reason to learn to be quick. She had most
especially
had reason to learn to be quick when an answer to the problem of the trolls dropped into her upturned palms, an answer that meant perhaps no more of her lineage-sisters would die, that Tin herself would live to bear daughters to carry the names of Molybdenum and Electrum out of the darkness of death and loss, that these mothers of the line of Copper in the Iron Kinship should not die entirely.

And it seemed that, having learned to be quick, she was unable to return to being cautious. Or, at least, not cautious enough to suit her fellow smiths.

She had first learned about the exile-kin from Alfgyfa (who called them
aettrynalfar,
a bitter coining that told her much), and what had astonished her was less that the exile-kin had survived than that they were apparently thriving: trading happily with the men of the wolfheall and even the town. The question of how svartalfar and men might exist alongside one another without feuds or warring was one about which Tin had been anxious from the moment that Isolfr returned to the Iskryne to ask for the svartalfar's help. She understood his desperation, and as she came to know him better, understood that indeed he had not violated his oath. And more, that he had not merely
avoided
violating it in the narrow, legalistic sense that most svartalfar understood to be acceptable when maneuvering around uncomfortable promises, but had honored it as deeply as possible. But she also knew that while his first, accidental encounter with the svartalfar might have had no consequences for either race, the second, deliberate seeking-out, with other men in his company—and a konigenmother—meant that the secret simply could not be kept. Men and svartalfar would have to accept that they were known to each other, and they would have to decide how they wished that relationship to proceed.

Some svartalfar (and, almost certainly, some men) favored war. She had heard arguments for svartalfar driving the men out of the North as both species had driven the trolls; arguments for setting garrisons beyond which men would not be allowed to go, and would be killed if they tried; arguments for simply butchering every man the svartalfar came across, in the sure belief that the men would do the same if given the slightest chance.

Tin did not believe so. She believed, and indeed had proof, that Isolfr was both truthful and honorable, and even on days when Alfgyfa exasperated her to screaming-point, she remained grateful for the child's presence in Nidavellir. The girl was a grubby, awkward, stubborn-minded
proof
that Isolfr had honor and would trust in the honor of the svartalfar. And she had liked the other men whom she had met, the wolfcarls and wolfless warriors who had fought with the svartalfar against the trolls. They could not sing, and she pitied them in their mostly deaf grubbing on the crust of the world, but they were honorable and fierce. She did not want to go to war against them, and she was not sure, for all the cunning and skill of the svartalfar, that it was a war the svartalfar would win.

That was an ugly thought, and one she did not share with other smiths, other mothers, other craft-masters. No good would come of that particular speculation, and it might very well provoke her more nervous sisters into the very aggression she was trying to find a way to avoid. Instead, almost from the moment the trolls were defeated, Tin had begun trying to find ways to ensure that men and svartalfar never marched to war against each other.

She had sought allies among her own people, even as she risked alienating all of them by fostering a human cub. The fostering of her own daughter Rhodium secured her the support, if not the approval, of her Kinship. She talked to the smiths of other alfhames. In Nidavellir, she talked to the craft-masters of other guilds. She suspected, though she would not for any price ask him directly, that Master Advocate Tourmaline had accepted her first cautious overtures less from goodwill and more from a desire to have a prime vantage from which to watch her comprehensive failure. If that was true, she had to admit that he had not held on to his petty motivations for long. Once he had understood the root of her concerns, once she had managed to convey something of what she had learned of men from marching to war among them, he had been quick to tease out the ramifications, including some Tin herself had not thought of, and quick to throw himself into the discussions of how the svartalfar could best navigate these narrow and twisting paths.

Tourmaline was also a boon on the days when she and her other closest ally, Galfenol, could not keep from snapping at each other like a teething litter of snow foxes. They had known each other too long and too well, with too much bitterness as all those they loved in common died at the cruel-clawed hands of the trolls. It was dreadfully easy for them to bait each other into argument even when they were in agreement. Tourmaline had a quiet, unsinkable dignity, and he contrived to make it contagious. Tin wished she could fathom the trick of it.

The svartalfar were weapons makers by nature, not weapons wielders, and few of them had any joy in battle, but they were also a proud, vengeful, grudge-holding people, and even Tin's allies, even Tourmaline and Galfenol, looked at her as if she had run frothing mad when she first mentioned the exile-kin.

If one learned to be quick, one also, perforce, learned to be patient. And obstinate. Tin fought with Galfenol and debated with Tourmaline, and argued with—it sometimes seemed, even though it could not be true—every smith in Nidavellir.
They are our kin,
she said.
We must learn to treat with men,
she said.
A time is coming when we will not be able to afford to be so proud,
she said, and she lost friendships for it.

“Hiding will not work any longer,” she said now to Tourmaline and Galfenol, even though they both agreed with her and did not need to be told. “They know we are here.”

“They are respectful,” Tourmaline said, not arguing, merely presenting.

“They are,” Tin said. “But they are a short-lived people, and when Isolfr Viradechtisbrother is dead, and when his daughter Alfgyfa is dead, how long will it be before respect turns to greed?”

“It has happened before,” Galfenol said darkly.

They all knew the stories; every alfling learned them and the lessons they taught. Every alfling (Tin thought in a sudden spasm of irritation) learned to fear what she did not know.

“And that is why,” she said carefully, because she was well aware of the anger still coursing through her, like a serpent looking for something to bite, “I want to ensure that it does not happen again.”

Tourmaline folded his fingers together. “And you suggest we look to the exile-kin for answers?” His tone was politely incredulous.

“Would you prefer we try the Jotunn? Or perhaps the trolls?”

Tourmaline's ears flicked disapproval of sarcasm at her. “Mastersmith, if you suggest following the example of the exile-kin in one matter, it will be assumed by some that you wish to follow their example in all matters. And I, for one, am not prepared to fight that battle again.”

The dissension that had led to the exile of Mastersmith Hepatizon and her followers had come very close to being battle in truth rather than merely in harmonic metaphor, and there were some in Nidavellir who remembered it personally, not merely as stories told by older relatives as Tin herself told stories of the trellwars to Girasol. But humans lived so quickly, their lives flaring and going out while svartalfar brooded over old grudges like dragons over gold. The svartalfar might easily
still
be rehashing the last debate of the Smiths and Mothers over Hepatizon's ideas when the human army—no one in it who had been alive to know Isolfr as anything more than a name—came marching up to the gates of Nidavellir armed with steel and flame and began another war.

“No,” she said slowly, carefully; she understood his point. No one's interests would be served by allowing that old argument to envelop their current situation like the smoke from a fast-burning fire. But if they could not look away from the past, they were as doomed as the trolls.

Galfenol said, “We cannot start at the end, Mastersmith.”

Tin frowned at her, but for once Galfenol did not insist on having the words pried out of her with crowbars. She continued: “What you speak of is the
result
you desire—and, in truth, I desire with you. But we have to start at the thin end of the wedge, not the fat end. Not asking the exile-kin for advice or studying them to find answers, but something smaller, simpler.” Her eyes were bright with cunning and a particular malicious joy that only Galfenol could bring to matters of politics. “Something that will appeal to the deepest instincts of our people.”

Tourmaline looked like he was preparing to be alarmed. “By which you mean?”

“Trade,” said Galfenol, and her smile widened to show the inlays on her teeth. “
Greed.
”

She was right, and it was a clever suggestion, since svartalfar and exile-kin alike could be guaranteed to be interested in trade and all the delicate negotiations of wealth and honor that trade brought in its wake, and so Tin did not say that in truth she
had
been presenting the thin end, albeit of a different wedge.

Even to her allies, she did not say that she wished to talk to Isolfr Viradechtisbrother about the war the Northmen were fighting with their own kind. They would say that was no business of the svartalfar, and if the men slaughtered each other, so much the better.

Tin knew differently.

Alliance
was a word with many and difficult harmonics. It was not a word that svartalfar used readily, preferring relationships based on blood or trade. But it was a word that Tin had found herself thinking more and more often.

An alliance was what the svartalfar had with the men of the North.

Now she just had to persuade the Smiths and Mothers to live up to it, and to do that, she needed Alfgyfa to stop sowing strife every time she turned around.

Would you rather your child was dead, Mastersmith? Truly?
Tin shuddered, with a jangling shimmer of baubles, and went to try to extract Alfgyfa from this newest disaster.

*   *   *

The svartalf mootheall was drearily familiar. It wasn't
called
a mootheall, of course. That was Alfgyfa's private crumb of rebellion, since the svartalf word was one of those that she had no hope of pronouncing correctly, its essential meaning bound up in the fifth level of harmonics.

It was a broad space, the roof a chambered span much, much bigger than anything Alfgyfa could remember seeing at the Franangford heall or even her very dim memories of the Franangford keep. It was high, too, which the svartalfar didn't usually trouble themselves to build. But here, the fan vaults and groins supporting the enormous ceiling served a purpose.

That high vault helped sound carry when the chamber was full of svartalfar, there to joyously and ceremoniously argue some point of policy until her human head swam.

They didn't need it today. The turnout to watch the discussion of what was to be done about Tin's weird apprentice was on the small side. No more than two dozen interested parties joined a mere filet of the Smiths and Mothers—the ones most specifically charged with the disciplining of wayward apprentices.

Mischmetal was not there, but her master, Pinchbeck, was.

Alfgyfa asked Tin about this quietly. Tin answered, “It could be either good or bad. They may have thought, given her spiteful temper, that Mischmetal would prejudice the case against you. Or they may have thought it best to seek a compromise that she would fight against.”

Alfgyfa bit her lip in order to hold her tongue on a sharp question about why was it that Mischmetal wasn't the one needing defense. She found it vastly unfair that she was to be placed on trial for protecting a child. But as Pearl had pointed out when she complained to him, Alfgyfa had interfered in a private combat. And she had placed Mischmetal at risk of injury in so doing—although Manganese had managed to avoid doing harm, Alfgyfa could not be credited with that. It was svartalf reasoning and as inarguable as rock. But it was still unfair.