Another man might have stormed off—Vethulf himself most certainly would have. Sokkolfr, whom they called Stone, simply nodded. He was no older than Vethulf. Who was he to be so calm?
A jarl was meant to be foremost in battle, last in retreat—and doubly so a wolfjarl. Vethulf firmed his suddenly sweaty grip on the bindings of his trellspear and straightened his spine.
“No worse than fighting in a trellwarren,” he said.
Eyjolfr surprised him with a smile. “Better,” he said. “No trolls coming up behind you through solid stone. Come, soonest begun is first ended.”
Eyjolfr and Vethulf separated and—each accompanied by his brother—went the long way around the other houses, out of sight of the bear. Each pair chose a place on one side of the gap, and Vethulf knew through the pack-sense when Eyjolfr and Glaedir had found theirs.
Viradechtis joined the thanes before the bakery, her wolves and wolfcarls around her, and the thanes broadened their formation to allow the wolves access. A dog or two snarled at a wolf, but the wolves replied only with cold indifference. The plan was all through the pack-sense, passed from wolf to wolf and wolf to man. Only the wolfless man had to be told in words.
When everyone was in position, Vethulf glanced down and let his left hand brush Kjaran’s ruff. He felt Viradechtis’ readiness, and Glaedir’s.
Go.
Viradechtis and her threat lunged forward, men and wolves snarling, harrying, thrusting with spear-tips, and gliding out of reach again. Vethulf smelled sharp blood as wily old Hroi got his teeth in a bear-paw, just a slash and release. The bear roared, enraged, and surged forward. Now!
Vethulf dove around the corner, past the bear’s flank, behind it. Into the destruction of the bakery, the blood-soaked bread, the rags that had been a man. Beside him, Kjaran, and then—though the wind of the bear’s paw swept by his ear and shoulder—they were behind the beast, and Eyjolfr and Glaedir were there as well.
The big wolf laughed and lunged, but narrow-backed Kjaran was a hair faster. And Eyjolfr got his spear down—twisted around in the tight confines to level it—even as Vethulf pressed forward. All four at once, they struck the bear’s unprotected haunches.
The bear sprang away, astonishingly fast for something so large, bellowing louder than the thunder of the mastiffs’ voices. The men and wolves ran after, stumbling amid torn lath and wattle, tripping on crumbled mud plaster. Vethulf felt the shock up his hands and forearms as he struck the bear again. He realized they were in daylight, the bear surrounded by wolves, and men, and wolfless men, and dogs as fearless as the others. Sokkolfr was on Vethulf’s flank, of a sudden, in the midst of a wave of snarling wolves. Then the bear was facing them, trying to rush back into the shelter of the bakery, and Vethulf set the base of his trellspear against earth and leaned into it with all the strength of his arms.
The impact of the bear’s weight would have torn the spear from his grip, but other hands were beside his, broad shoulders, Sokkolfr and Eyjolfr supporting the spear against the charge. The bear came up the spear snarling, the point entering its chest and emerging behind its left leg, and Vethulf knew it could not survive this.
But it could survive it long enough to shred the puny humans who had killed it.
The spear’s crosspiece cracked under the bear’s charge, shattered and pushed back before it, doing nothing to hold its weight. The bear lunged again, teeth snapping just shy of the men who tormented it. One more push, Vethulf knew, and it would be on them. He felt Kjaran tense, ready to dive past him and into the range of the bear’s teeth and claws. “No!” Vethulf yelled, in the pack-sense and aloud, knowing that Kjaran would not listen with Vethulf’s own life at stake.
Viradechtis hit it from the side, twenty-plus stone of killing fury, her teeth a mouthful of daggers as she ripped through dense matted fur and into flesh. The bear, off-balance and impaled, toppled onto its opposite side and thrashed weakly, ripping the spear from the hands of the shouting men.
Vethulf hardly felt the sting. He staggered back, trying to find his feet, failing, and was only saved from dropping to his ass in the dust when he bumped into the remains of a leaning wall. He put his left arm out to support himself and only then realized that he was bleeding from his upper arm and shoulder.
“Ouch,” Sokkolfr said, touching the slickness. The bear was still quivering. “Come on, I’ll stitch that for you.”
Vethulf turned to Eyjolfr. He extended his right hand. “Well fought.”
Eyjolfr returned the clasp. “Bear for dinner tonight,” he said with a grin.
Vethulf felt a returning pang of worry—for Brokkolfr and Kari, for Skjaldwulf and Mar—and could not force himself to return the smile. Coming up alongside the bear, Roghvatr shook his head and swore by the god of smiths. “What a mess,” he said. “There’s the widow and children to house and feed, the bakery to rebuild … And did you look at this thing? It’s half-starved. In the height of summer. What’s going on?”
* * *
The sceadhugenga was much younger than Brokkolfr had expected, even granted that he had no idea how to judge the svartalfar’s age. But Baryta was obviously younger than Antimony, possibly even younger than Orpiment, and Brokkolfr might have worried, except she had the most commanding presence of anyone he’d met, including Grimolfr Skaldsbrother, the wolfjarl of Nithogsfjoll. Every time she looked at him, he felt her glittering glance cut through him. He would not have dared to argue with her even if it had not become speedily apparent that she knew her work and knew it well.
She set Kari’s ankle and gave him something that he said was like drinking flowers. It certainly returned the color to his face and stopped his shivering. Brokkolfr suspected it made him more than a little drunk, for he became remarkably tractable. Brokkolfr was glad of it, as he and Baryta manhandled Kari into a cupboard-bed, and Baryta said firmly, “Sleep, surface creature.”
At that point, Kari would have been hard-pressed to do anything else.
Baryta led Brokkolfr away from Kari’s bed—a real bed, not merely a pallet. Brokkolfr could not fault svartalfar hospitality, though he feared again there would be a price. They passed more fluted stone, carved with such delicacy that Brokkolfr imagined the tools must be as fine as wires. How did the svartalfar smiths make them so fine and yet strong enough to carve stone?
He tried to remember if Kari had mentioned any such carvings in the svartalfar cities of the North and could not. The only work Brokkolfr had ever seen of such intricacy was in the trellwarrens that undermined all Othinnsaesc.
He swallowed against the chill in his gut. This was not a trellwarren, and where that stone had flowed as this did, the designs had no comparison. A trellwarren was disturbing, nauseating, full of headsplitting asymmetries. This was as restful as any herb garden.
Baryta led him to an antechamber whose floor, sloped like a shallow bowl, was padded with elaborate carpets and tassled cushions. They were rich and soft enough for a jarl, but years and use had dulled the colors and worn the embroidery smooth. Not a new settlement, Brokkolfr noted, and wondered.
The svartalf settled among the cushions. At her gesture Brokkolfr, too, sank down gratefully. He had not realized it until now, but his limbs ached with weariness and the aftermath of struggle and fear. He sighed and let his back curve into the cushions.
“Your friend will do well,” Baryta said, “though he will be lame for some months. The break was a clean one and did not involve any of the difficult bones.”
Of course, what the sceadhugenga considered relatively simple might have been beyond the skills of the wolfheall’s best bonesetters. Brokkolfr had seen men—fishermen and wolfcarls both—permanently lamed by broken ankles, even if the flesh rot did not set in and kill them. Kari was blessedly lucky that the svartalfar had decided to help him, and Brokkolfr, as his friend, felt that blessing deep in his own chest. “Thank you,” he said, and was not surprised that his voice wavered.
Baryta turned a bright inquiring eye on Brokkolfr. “And
you? Are you hurt?”
“No,” Brokkolfr said. “Thank you.”
She shook her head. “I am in Antimony’s debt. Thank him for choosing this way to,” and she used a svartalf word, with the harmonics that made Brokkolfr’s teeth ache.
But his attention had been caught by something else. “Him? I thought … I beg your pardon.”
Baryta raised her eyebrows. “Antimony is a male. Why does this surprise you?”
“I thought … Antimony is a metal, isn’t it? And the svartalfar I have seen—women are high-ranking, are they not?”
Baryta exhaled a long breath, almost like the snort of a horse. “It is a complicated question that you ask, surface creature.”
“You don’t have to answer,” Brokkolfr said.
She cocked her head, the crystals in her long braided sideburns catching the light. “But curiosity is the mark of,” another svartalf word, which she translated, “those who are awake. And if you are awake, then I may make a bargain with you.”
“There are stories about svartalf bargains,” Brokkolfr said uneasily, and Baryta crowed with laughter.
“So there are, surface-creature-who-wakes. But I have in mind only information. For I, too, wake, and I am curious. So we will trade questions. I will ask first, so that if you do not wish to answer, you will not be left owing me.”
“Should I not be speaking to Mastersmith Antimony?”
“Antimony has gone to view the destruction you have wrought, and will not be back for some time. He does not move as swiftly as once he did. But fear not. I will not cause your debt with Antimony to mount.”
Brokkolfr hesitated, a hundred stories telling him he was being a fool. But Baryta seemed scrupulous, and one thing he knew from having seen the svartalfar and men speaking to each other during and after the trellwar: along with information, one could also trade goodwill.
“All right,” he said. “What question would you ask?”
“You have met svartalfar before.” She smiled, showing inlaid teeth almost as elaborate as those of Isolfr’s friend Tin. “How is this so? We are a secretive people.”
Brokkkolfr paused, marshaling his thoughts. “We would never have entered the caves if we had understood they were the home of a clan of svartalfar. We had no idea you were here.”
He remembered Realgar’s reaction when Kari had let slip the comment about svartalfar staying, and frowned, wondering again: was it possible that this alf-clan had been here all along, secreted in the deep caverns, burrowed in away from the surface and the sun—and no one had ever known? If so, just how greivous an offense was this trespass? He also remembered what he knew of svartalfar from watching Tin and her allies during the war. He knew that they had held a special honor for Viradechtis.
“My wolfsprechend—one of the leaders of my threat, a man bonded to a konigenwolf—”
“A Queen Wolf!”
Brokkolfr nodded. So that was not different. Did this count as Baryta’s second question, or would that seem ungenerous? “He is her brother, as I am Amma’s brother.”
Baryta’s face furrowed, and Brokkolfr imagined his own expression often looked the same, as he attempted to ferret out the hidden complexities of her words. She said, “Your wolf is a she.”
“My sister is a she,” Brokkolfr said. “But not a konigenwolf.”
Baryta nodded. “Continue, please.”
“Isolfr, my wolfsprechend, is a hero of the svartalfar of the Iskryne. He and his sister, and their allies, including my friend”—had he any right to call Kari friend?—“and a smith named Tin slew a trellqueen in a warren the Iskryne clans wished to appropriate. In return for this service, the Iskryne clans agreed to come to our defense against the trolls who were migrating south and attacking our towns.”
Baryta opened her eyes wide over the crooked twig of her nose. “The Iskryne clans have come south!”
“Well, it was the svartalfar driving the trolls out,” he said. “They needed the room. It was only fair they help deal with the problem.” She grimaced at something in what he said but gestured for him to continue.
“We thought when we first encountered Orpiment and Realgar that they must have stayed behind when Tin and her people returned north.”
“Hmm.” She nodded. “That is a good and fair answer. And you have given more than promised.”
From what Isolfr and Frithulf had taught the werthreat about svartalfar, Brokkolfr remembered that the race of smiths cherished generosity as highly as any thane or wolfcarl cherished valor.
“Ask your question, Ammasbrother,” Baryta said.
“Antimony,” he began, and then hesitated. “But it’s not just about Antimony. I know your councils are made up of smiths and mothers; I have heard Tin say so. As our councils are made of warriors.”
“It is so,” Baryta said. “But that is not much of a question, if you know the answer. You would leave me in your debt.”
“I guess my question is, then, what is Antimony?”
That sparkle of her inlaid teeth again. “Antimony is a smith. A mastersmith, in point of fact, and one of our eldest. But he is also by-honor a mother, as he has adopted children in need and is raising them as his own. He is one of our most honored elders.”
Baryta had felt free to ask ancillary questions, so Brokkolfr did not stop himself. “By-honor?”
The sceadhugenga used one of those windy, harmonic svartalfar words. “Andetnessa. By-honor,” she said. “Andetnessa ne-sooth. By-honor-if-not-in-fact. A matter of perceived reality in contrast to objective, in a positive context. He performs the service and offers the sacrifice of a mother, so he has the honor of one.”
“Can one be anything by-honor?”
She did something that might have been a shrug but—under the drape of her layers of robes—more resembled a bullfrog inflating and deflating itself. “One can only become a smith by skill,” she said. “Of course, skill is earned, like honor. But it sounds as if your wolfsprechend has become a svartalf by-honor, through his service to … to the Iskryne clans.”
There was something funny in how she said “Iskryne,” and Brokkolfr didn’t think he was imagining it. Discomfort, veiled anger. These emotions looked and sounded different on a svartalf, but they weren’t unreadable. Just different.
“Your question,” he said.
“You are male.”
That wasn’t a question. “Yes.”
“And your companion is male.”
“Yes.”
“Does your kind have females?”
Brokkolfr gaped at her for a moment. “Yes, of course.”
“There is no of course about it,” she said. “Trolls have no males, save those who breed their queens. I thought perhaps you creatures were the same way, but in reverse.”
She had thought no such thing; he saw it in the creases around her eyes as they deepened.
He wasn’t quite sure how to accuse a svartalf of teasing him; it seemed better simply to answer her question. “Our women are not as powerful as yours,” Brokkolfr said, “but we certainly have them. In fact, there is a woman in the town near my heall who is a smith. She is a widow, and widows sometimes stand in their husbands’ stead.”
“Huh,” said Baryta. “But not a mastersmith.”
“We do not have mastersmiths as you do, even as we do not have sceadhugengas.” He stumbled slightly over her title, but she seemed pleased that he had made the effort.
She said, “Your question.”
A sensible man would have asked through trickery or kept his own counsel and learned by observing. But Brokkolfr was very tired of being sensible. “Are your people the enemy of the Iskryne clans?”
It drew her up short. The silver-shod butt of her staff scratched on the stone between cushions and carpets.
“Rather,” she said, “the Iskryne clans hold us in enmity. These caverns are our exile, for practices the old ones found to be anathema. It is why we call ourselves aettrynalfar—poison elves—in commemoration and defiance.?
?? A pause, in which the sceadhugenga made a sound like humph. “And now you come from the surface, with news that the Iskryne-folk have begun inhabiting and reworking the very trellwarrens that we were once persecuted for seeking to understand? They will spurn our smithcraft, and yet inhabit the dungheaps of trolls?”
Brokkolfr had heard svartalfar raise their voices to cry across a battlefield or be heard in open council. He had never heard the words of one shake with rage before. He drew a breath and thought about how Skjaldwulf would handle this.
Fortified with the semblance of calm, he said, “I have a feeling there’s something here I do not understand.”
She spoke with the same sort of brittle pride he had heard from wolfcarls whose families disapproved of their lives. “We practice forbidden arts here. Did you not observe?”
“No,” Brokkolfr said. “I am ignorant in this as well.”
That hushed her. Momentarily at least. She cocked her head left-and-right and said, “The stone shaping, wolfcarl. The beauties of our lair. You have noticed?”
How could he not? He nodded, thinking of airy stone, filigree, chrysoprase roses that shone with a light of their own.
“It is a trellish art, and some would say unclean.”
It … staggered him. Not that svartalfar had politics—he knew that—but that they had these politics. These divisions. These excuses for conflict.
“Who does it harm?” he asked.
This time, the sound her gnarled stone staff made was an intentional sharp rap, and the tiny bells along its length jingled sweetly.
“The soul of the stone? So say our northern cousins. Our ancestors believed that the art of shaping stone with the hands was worth learning.” She shrugged. “Of course, they also forswore warfare and murder.”
He wasn’t sure he understood her. “Your people are sworn not to…?”
“To kill,” Baryta said. “The mother of our mothers, the mastersmith Hepatizon, who named herself Vaidurya when her sisters cast her out, taught that each death remained in an alf’s song, making her darker and weaker. She taught that it was killing that was poison, not the working of trolls, that if we believe the world is the song of the First Mother, then how can we say we have the right to silence so much as a note of it? We follow her teachings. We hide; we do not kill. And now you and your threatbrother have found our hiding place.…”