An Apprentice to Elves (9 page)

The alfmoot hurried nothing. Before any proceedings, there had to be greetings. So while Alfgyfa fretted herself against the stony inevitability of svartalf ritual, the alfar in question all milled about, mingling as if this were a social gathering, asking after mates and offspring and latest projects.

Alfgyfa knew them all by name at this point, except for one, the alf sitting beside Masterscribe Galfenol. He wore a journeyman-scribe badge on his robes, along with a number of personal baubles and pilgrim-marks from travel to other alfhames, some of them quite far away. His head stayed bent over his notes, and he was the only person present other than Alfgyfa who was neither a Smith nor a Mother, so Alfgyfa understood him to be serving as the secretary.

She ducked down to get close to Tin's ear and whispered, “Who is that?”

Tin's gaze followed Alfgyfa's. “Journeyman-scribe Idocrase,” she said. “I am relieved to see that Galfenol is capable of swallowing her pride without choking.”

Alfgyfa had learned not to ask repetitive questions; svartalfar were unpredictably either irritable or condescending when asked to explain the obvious. Instead, she looked closely at Galfenol—who certainly did wear a sour face—and saw the careful, crabbed way she held her hands. The journeyman was acting as his Master's hands, then, just as the journeymen to Tin's lineage-sister Invar took it in turns to be their Master's eyes.

Then—as always, without any signal Alfgyfa could detect—the Smiths and Mothers who were there to judge began to sort themselves away from those merely there to gawk. They settled into the low benches, their layers of robes puddling around them until they looked like nothing so much as ranks of candles left burning on the racks of a shrine until they slumped one into the next.

Master Rosemetal—a smith and not so much a mother as the great-great-grandmother of, perhaps, half the population of Nidavellir (
a konigenmother,
Alfgyfa thought)—remained standing. She leaned on her staff as she moved, though not so heavily as to suggest she really needed it. Her hair was probably as long as Master Tourmaline's, but instead of allowing it to trail in rustling braids, she wore hers twisted into a massive, woolly bun bound around the edges with a single narrow plait. The skin of her left hand was splashed with shiny pink burn scars rippled like stretched crepe, the skin of one cheek was creased with the parallel scars of a troll's claws, and most of her cloak chimed with badges of honor and memorial baubles.

Before Master Rosemetal, Alfgyfa felt more than a little awe, though she did her best not to show more than politeness.

“We begin the case for discipline of the smith-apprentice Alfgyfa Isolfrsdaughter,” Master Rosemetal said. “Who would speak?”

Alfgyfa started to step forward, but Tin put a hand on her elbow and moved up in her place. “I am Master Blacksmith Tin of the Iron Kinship,” she said. “Alfgyfa Isolfrsdaughter is my apprentice.”

“Noted,” said Rosemetal, just as if they didn't all know very well who Tin and Alfgyfa both were. Just as if Rosemetal weren't Tin's mother Molybdenum's grandmother's sister.

Pinchbeck also moved forward. “I am Master Pinchbeck of the Accountants, of the Galena Lineage. My apprentice Mischmetal is the alf with whom this apprentice interfered.”

“Noted,” said Rosemetal, as if Pinchbeck weren't a niece of hers as well.

Tourmaline came forward, still carrying his rattling advocate's cane, and he too introduced himself as the arbiter and was recognized. The rituals dragged on while Alfgyfa tried to look alert and interested, though what she really wanted to do was pick at her fingernails until the cuticles bled. Everyone spoke in turn, making predictable arguments in the most convincing harmonics they could muster, their voices ringing about the high spaces of the mootheall. Alfgyfa tried to look peaceable and serene. It probably would have been a more effective subterfuge if she weren't already familiar with every scar on the stonework in the mootheall, from having spent so many hours of her life already studying them.

Then, when everyone had had as many turns to discourse as they pleased and Alfgyfa's feet were aching, Rosemetal turned to the assembled smiths and mothers and raised her staff.

“Is there a consensus?” she asked.

There was not, apparently, as five of the smiths and mothers began singing at once, discordantly, so Alfgyfa could barely pick out words in the clangor of mismatched harmonies. The voices rose and others joined them, supporting or arguing each theme. None sang loudly, but in the massive echoing chamber of the mootheall, the result was a dizzying whirl of echoes and overtones that made Alfgyfa want to slap her hands over her ears and curl up on the floor.

Once or twice, when she was much younger, she had done just that.

Now she stood very still, spine straight, and tried to let the vibrations resonate through her harmlessly. The smiths and mothers would proceed to a long series of disharmonic songs in counterpoint, comprising an argument that would only end when every single alf in the hall was singing some variation on the same melody.

That could take a while.

Alfgyfa settled herself to wait, tossing the thick braid that always wanted to creep over her left shoulder back to hang down her spine again. Maybe she should braid a chain into it, like an alf. Something in a white metal, and heavy with teardrop rubies that would catch light in her hair like a spatter of blood, to make Yttrium disapprove of her bloodthirstiness. The weight would hold it behind her back, where it was supposed to be.

She let her eyes drift closed, throat relaxed, mouth half open to pick up the nuances of the sound. She would have cupped her hands to her seashell-pale human ears, but didn't want to draw attention to how small and inadequate they were. Still, she thought she could pick out the three main melodies.

Tin sang the plainest melody: a simple winding tune that could have been a round—that invited others to make it a round by joining in. It didn't present a complicated argument, either; it said only that a child had been in danger and that Alfgyfa had acted selflessly to save him. Alfgyfa bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling—then had the smile startled off her when Tourmaline, of all alfar, joined in, adding harmonics of maturity and the untranslatable term that meant something like “overdelivering”: that Alfgyfa had provided more than she had promised—or, in this case, more than had been required.

Alfgyfa was touched by this expression of goodwill. She would have been humbled, if she had allowed herself to feel anything that might leave her so vulnerable before the Smiths and Mothers.

But Tin and Tourmaline weren't the only ones singing. And when Alfgyfa concentrated on the others, each note was like a the sharp prick of a needle into a fingerpad.

Master Pinchbeck sang the counterharmonies as aggression, as if they were a blow. She was angry, and within the constraints of svartalf society, this was where she could show it. She sang her apprentice endangered, face lost for both apprentice and master. She sang Alfgyfa's irresponsibility and her heedless shattering of a sacred taboo.

The third thread, though, that one troubled Alfgyfa far more, because it was the one that sang her as a mistake. And not just her: if she was picking it out correctly, at least one alf—an alf she did not know, and not a wizened old creature, but a young spry black-haired Master of the Singers' Guild—reached back into the deep years of Alfgyfa's birth and questioned why the smiths and mothers (and Tin, sang the bass harmonics like the sound of far-off thunder, suspect Tin, Tin the corrupted) had allowed Isolfr to leave the caverns, which he had invaded without invitation, and live and get this abomination that was inflicted on them now.

It was factually inaccurate, Alfgyfa knew. She had been conceived before Isolfr met Tin, and she would have been born even if her father never returned from the Iskryne. Though her life—and her mother's life—would have been very different if her mother, Hjordis, had not been able to give Alfgyfa up to the heall and marry her new man, Alfgyfa would still have existed.

But would she have been Alfgyfa? Her very name arose from Tin's kindness in letting Isolfr live. The gift was that he had seen his daughter born and been allowed to know her. The gift was that he had not died in the Iskryne.

She would have been some other girl, and—her heart ached to think of it—she would not have a smith's calluses. She would not live under the ice-jeweled mountains that crowned the brow of the world. She would not know that she could speak to wolves. The thought of losing that—no, of never having
had
that—Viradechtis and Mar and Kjaran and Amma, especially Amma who loved babies so much that she mothered every single one that came into the wolfheall, be it child or cub or kid or filly.
No,
Alfgyfa thought and straightened her spine where it was beginning to hunch.

Not to mention that if the svartalfar had killed Isolfr then, they most likely would all have been eaten by trolls by now.

The argument shifted and turned. Voices joined and fell away. Tin kept up her simple line, and Tourmaline supported it. Alfgyfa's feet grew numb. Her ankles ached. The stone floor began to look restful and soft. She twisted her fingers together and tried not to listen, not to anticipate. It seemed more voices were coming to join Tin, but also that the harmonics around what Pinchbeck was singing grew more complex. Alfgyfa shifted her weight, trying to ease a cramped calf.

Suddenly, brutally, she felt that her apprenticeship had been wrong. A bargain struck without her. A deal made when she was barely toddling. She shuddered and rocked on the balls of her feet. As much as she loved the feel of the hammer in her hand, she should never have come to Nidavellir.

She argued with the Mastersmiths. She asked why.
Why
this and
Why
that?
Why
is thus and such done in such a particular way? These were questions that would have seemed commendable among the aettrynalfar, who had never once failed to answer, and answer again and again until Alfgyfa understood. But here, those questions made Alfgyfa the source of poison.

Tin had left her side, moving forward to claim as much space as the circle would give her. Alfgyfa shook with the weight of tradition and ritual and expectation, and the deep brutal unfairness of it all. She had done—

She had done her best. She had done what she had done, and she had done it for Girasol. Mischmetal didn't even enter into it, no matter what Pinchbeck claimed. And it was not in any way Alfgyfa's fault that her father had chosen not to abandon his wolf—his only true lifemate, no matter what Hjordis or Thorlot or Skjaldwulf or Vethulf might be to him—when she pursued a trellkitten into the alfhavens.

Alfgyfa lurched forward, not really aware of what she was doing until she found herself standing in the crowded circle of smiths and mothers, right beside Tin. Her mouth opened, her heart and her voice both rising up her throat, and she said: “My father should have sent me to the aettrynalfar, instead. At least they know how to behave in a civilized manner!”

The alfmoot stared at her in silence, their bright bead eyes suddenly hatefully alien. She kept her chin up, though more than that she could not do. She wasn't quite sure how he got there, but Journeyman Idocrase was suddenly standing beside her. He didn't speak, but he took her wrist—what had happened to his pen?—and uncurled her clenched fingers: open hands, she remembered Tin teaching all of them, alflings and human cub, were always less threatening than fists. Slowly, pace by pace, as one would gentle a nervy mare, he coaxed her back from the circle. He soothed her with his fan-stick hands.

Master Tourmaline stood from the benches, his hair breaking over his shoulders. He sighed like a gust over a cavern mouth, on two sets of harmonics. He glanced at the other smiths and mothers. Some of them were hunched forward with their eagerness to speak, but no one would interrupt Tourmaline. Though he could not, of course, bear children, he was so great in age and so high in rank among his craft that he was treated as an honorary mother even by the inmost circle of Smiths and Mothers themselves.

“Smiths and Mothers” was a shorthand you couldn't be in Nidavellir more than half an hour without hearing. The form dated back probably millennia, to a time when only blacksmiths sat on the ruling council; in present times it really meant “all the masters of the crafts and all the ranking mothers.” Within that quite large body of svartalfar, the workings of rank and of politics within the crafts and lineages winnowed the field until it got down to ten or twelve svartalfar (each both a master and a mother) who did most of the decision making. They, too, were called the “Smiths and Mothers,” but always with quite audible third harmonic emphasis, indicating a title rather than merely a descriptor. It had taken Alfgyfa years to understand it, and of course she could not pronounce it at all.

Master Tourmaline said, “I move to adjourn for private discussion.”

“Done,” answered Rosemetal, before anyone could protest. “Let the committee talk about this under less contentious circumstances.”

*   *   *

An adjournment meant that Alfgyfa was excused. And she certainly knew what she
should
do. She
should
go back to Tin's household and make herself useful—or at least busy—there. But now she watched the smiths and mothers, including Tin, sweep themselves up like a pile of dust and slip off to the inner chamber. It was a miracle how they managed to move in a group like that without treading on one another's hems. The other alfar did not linger.

And she alone was left standing in the middle of the enormous, empty, echoing mootheall.

Or, no, not quite alone. Something rustled behind her. She turned, hand raised defensively, and found herself looking down at Journeyman Idocrase. Again.

“Would you like water?” he asked gently.