A Companion to Wolves

  Kari said, “Franangford is holding, although not comfortably. But we must be ready to push forward in the spring, and retake Othinnsaesc, and the thaw is almost on us.”

  Kari looked at Isolfr. Isolfr looked at Hrolleif. “Grimolfr wants us to bring the rest of the pack to Franangford,” Hrolleif said, with a quarter-quirk of a grin for Isolfr’s refusal to take the lead.

  “All but the cubs,” Kari agreed, “and a home guard to keep Nithogsfjoll safe in your absence.”

  “The bitches too?” Isolfr asked.

  “Everyone. Messengers have gone to every wolfheall. The wolfjarls think to let the bitches and their brothers defend Franangford, and quartermaster. That way, more of the dogs will be free for Othinnsaesc. And with so many of the Wolfmaegth rallied—and so many wolfless men—we need the konigenwolves on the lines and in the rear.”

  Keeping order. It was what konigenwolves did.

  Hrolleif uncrossed his arms and frowned. “So it will be. Isolfr, will you and Frithulf see to the comfort of Hrafn and his brother?”

  “I will,” Isolfr said, because there was nothing else he could have said—but inside, his gut twisted around the undercurrents, the things neither Kari nor Hrolleif were saying about what this new strategy meant.

  Kari watched Hrolleif walk away in search of Ulfgeirr and Jorveig, then turned back to Isolfr with a half a shy smile shading his mouth. “They said you killed a trellwitch in the Iskryne,” he offered, as if holding it out for inspection.

  “Come on,” Isolfr said, brushing the implied question, with its freight of awe, aside. “Let me introduce you to my shieldmates. You can bed down with us, if you like. And then we shall find you and Hrafn something to eat and some hot wine to drink.”

  The shy smile turned blinding. “I’d like that.”

  Ulfbjorn, Sokkolfr, and Frithulf were gathered beside the central fire—Ulfbjorn and Frithulf dicing while Sokkolfr mended leathers, drank wine and offered advice. They glanced up as Isolfr and his guest approached, and—startlingly—Isolfr realized that they gained something by association with him. Something that Eyjolfr wanted too, and Yngvulf would not be averse to … Isolfr glanced around the heall, and noticed that Eyjolfr was at the long tables with Randulfr, apparently paying no attention—but Skjaldwulf was watching. The singer gave Isolfr a quick sweet grin before glancing away, a moment before Eyjolfr noticed the interaction and very obviously schooled a frown. Viradechtis, who played Mar and Glaedir against each other like a master swordsman practicing against a post, was not going out of her way to make things easy for Isolfr.

  But if she were conciliatory, she would not be a konigenwolf.

  Hrafn flopped beside the fire with a groan before Isolfr had even made the introductions. He didn’t miss Frithulf’s glitter of avarice when he considered Kari, as rich a source of gossip as he could have imagined. “So,” Frithulf said, patting the skins beside himself as Isolfr went to see about more food and wine, “tell us your story.”

  Which Kari did, eventually, under the influence of a good deal of wine and Frithulf’s skilled prodding. He was clearly uncomfortable talking about himself—but grew animated when talking about Hrafn and how they had survived on their own.

  “So why did you go to Franangford?” Ulfbjorn asked sometime later, after the horns of mulled wine had made several rounds and Viradechtis had come in, washed Isolfr’s face thoroughly, inspected Hrafn—Isolfr noticed Kari almost holding his breath—and flopped down with a long-suffering sigh, her head resting across both Isolfr’s thighs.

  Kari shrugged. “Hrafn wanted a pack. And it seemed likelier that a wolfheall would accept us than a wild pack.”

  Isolfr was listening half in the pack-sense, as he found himself doing most of the time these days, and Hrafn said, Cold, meaning not just the cold of only having his brother to curl up with to sleep.

  “But you didn’t take a wolfcarl’s name,” Frithulf said, his nose almost twitching with eagerness. Sokkolfr met Isolfr’s eyes over his head, and they smiled at each other.

  Kari said, “I didn’t want to forget who I was.” He made a frustrated gesture. “I’m the only person left who can remember Jorhus. And if I let myself become someone else—”

  “That’s not what it means,” Frithulf argued.

  “Of course it is,” Sokkolfr said. “Or are you trying to tell me that you’re Brandr Erikson, just as you were before you were tithed?”

  “Well, I—”

  “I’m certainly not Njall Gunnarson,” Isolfr said, and the name felt strange on his tongue, unfamiliar.

  “Yes, but your father—” Frithulf stopped so quickly he must have bitten his tongue, flushing red to the roots of his hair.

  “Have some more wine, Frithulf,” Ulfbjorn said kindly.

  “I’m sure I would have felt differently if I’d been tithed,” Kari said.

  Frithulf made a face and pushed the wine away. “Something tells me I’ve had enough.”

  Kari laughed—he had an easy laugh, at odds with his earlier shyness—and then looked up startled as Jorveig appeared by the fireside. Like Ulfbjorn, she was light on her feet for her size.

  “Isolfr,” she said, her hands twitching—as if she wished to reach out and straighten his hair—before knotting in front of her apron. The note in her voice brought both Isolfr and Ulfbjorn to their feet, the other three—even Kari—close behind. “Hjordis sends to tell you the baby is coming.”

  Frithulf and Kari stayed by the fire, but the other two came with Isolfr and Jorveig into the cold dark of winter night, walking with a company of ten wolves—Tindr, Hroi, Viradechtis, and all her seven cubs—over the frozen ruts. There was no moon, and the sky was clear. Stars throbbed in an indigo like velvet, and the aurora burned over that rich darkness, bright as amber held to the light. Isolfr caught a breath.

  My woman is bearing my child. It seemed unreal, alien. He slipped his hand through the slit in his mitten and knotted it in Viradechtis’ ruff. She moaned low in her throat and leaned her shoulder on his thigh as they walked, all her love and worry in her touch. She thought of newborn cubs, damp and milky, the thick, meaty taste of the afterbirth, and the warmth of straw. Your cubs, my cubs. Ours, our pack, ours to raise and teach. If they live, and are strong.

  Yes, he answered, and she tugged free, then turned her head quickly and curled a slick muscular tongue into his palm. Ours.

  If they live, and are strong.

  The night was a blur. It was early, perhaps too early, and despite Isolfr’s assurances that he had attended more than one birthing, neither the midwife nor Hjordis’ mother nor her sister Angrbotha would permit him in the cottage for her lying-in. He paced outside the door, Viradechtis and her pups swarming around his boots in the frozen late-winter mud, until Jorveig, who had come as the wolfheall’s representative at the birth of a heallgot child, told Ulfbjorn and Sokkolfr that the best thing they could do was take Isolfr out, find Angrbotha’s husband, and get Isolfr too drunk to stand.

  Isolfr fixed her with a look that he knew made the worst of his icy pale stare, and even Jorveig backed down enough to allow the three wolfcarls into Angrbotha’s cottage. Not into the close-screened corner where Hjordis lay, where she moaned and occasionally shouted curses—and Isolfr felt pride on her behalf; his woman was no screamer—but by the fire, where Sokkolfr and Ulfbjorn stirred coals and kept the water hot, and Isolfr paced.

  Hroi, canny old creature—he crept behind the screen and lay against the wall near the head of the bedstead, out of the way and almost forgotten. “Hroi says there’s not much blood,” Sokkolfr said softly, when Isolfr glanced at him. “Hroi says her heart is strong.”

  Hroi did not need to tell them when the child was born. The baby’s piercing shriek managed that. Viradechtis whined and glanced about anxiously, counting her pups, until Isolfr soothed her with the information that human babies were supposed to wail that way.

  She thought it was foolish to attract predators with such noise. Isolfr could not help but agr
ee.

  He rose from his crouch by her head when Angrbotha and Jorveig came toward him, a mite wrapped in white swaddling in Angrbotha’s arms, Hroi padding behind. “Your daughter,” Jorveig said, and took the child to give her to Isolfr.

  He almost felt his werthreatbrothers hold their breaths as he extended his hands. The baby was light, light as a wolf cub, surely smaller than Kathlin or Jonak had been—or was it just that he was so much larger now? He looked at his own hands on the baby’s tiny body, their coarseness pale over bone and rough and red with callus and chilblains and scars, and shivered, cold to his heart.

  Cub, Viradechtis thought clearly, standing beside him with her long nose straining toward the babe. The child’s face was a wrinkled red winter apple, her arms squirming under the swaddling cloths. “Is she—I mean, will she—”

  “She’s small,” Angrbotha said. “But made of stern stuff, I warrant.”

  “And her mother?” He couldn’t bring himself to say Hjordis’ name.

  “Fine,” Jorveig said, Angrbotha nodding agreement. Isolfr sighed.

  “My daughter,” he said, very quietly, and almost glanced over his shoulder to look for Sokkolfr and see if it was real. But Viradechtis nudged his hand again, and Jorveig caught Angrbotha’s arm to restrain her as Isolfr crouched beside the wolf so she could sniff the baby’s face.

  The babe didn’t cry. She opened hazy unfocused eyes when the wolf’s whiskers brushed her, her lips working as if she sought a nipple. Jorveig cleared her throat. “What’s her name, Isolfr?” she said, as Viradechtis sat on her haunches and flipped her tail neatly over her toes.

  Of course, she had to have a name. He rose again, cuddling the baby against his chest. He looked into the little red face, suspecting the babe couldn’t see him any more than a puppy could, and breathed deep to fix her scent. “Water, I need water,” he said, and Angrbotha already had the dipper at his elbow. He laced his fingers through it and let a few drops fall on his daughter’s head, which made her wail like a siren—the more so when he marked Thor’s hammer between her brows with a wet thumb.

  “Alfgyfa,” he said, thinking of Tin and her spear and her baubles, giving him back his life so he could be here, now, holding his child in his arms. Then he looked up at Jorveig, and quirked an eyebrow at her, trying for Ulfgeirr’s rakish charm. “May I see Hjordis?”

  In the morning, Sokkolfr paid a boy to take a message to the keep—“to my mother,” Isolfr corrected, and the boy nodded eagerly—while Ulfbjorn, Tindr and the pups hiked back to the wolfheall to share the news with the werthreat. Isolfr expected silence from his mother, or at best a discreet return message memorized by the same boy. But Halfrid appeared at Angrbotha’s door when the sun was no more than a span above the horizon, a basket of swaddling cloths in her hand and Kathlin and a maidservant flanking her.

  Isolfr, sitting beside Hjordis on the bench before the fire, laughed as Halfrid swept past Angrbotha and took command of the house. His laughter startled Alfgyfa into wailing, and Halfrid shushed him with a frown as Kathlin—so tall now, a woman herself, but with her blond hair still falling free around her shoulders—came forward to claim her hug.

  “Father allowed you to come?” he asked.

  She blew hair out of her eyes. “Father’s in Franangford, and with my betrothed husband there as well, there is no one to say us nay.” She smiled at him. “Jonak says to say he sends congratulations and well-wishes and all the things he ought—he was so pleased with himself for being an uncle he couldn’t sit still to think them out.”

  And Isolfr laughed with her.

  He introduced Hjordis to his family, surprised at her uncharacteristic shyness. But by the time Hrolleif sent a messenger to summon Isolfr to the wolfheall, they were laughing and talking together, and Halfrid and Kathlin stayed behind when he and Sokkolfr had to go.

  It was an uncomfortable leavetaking. They all knew that within the fortnight the Wolfmaegth would travel to Franangford, and the push to reclaim Othinnsaesc. And it was unavoidable that Viradechtis, a konigenwolf whose pups were half-grown and no longer needed her milk, would travel with them.

  But necessity was what it was, and by sunset Isolfr had kissed his mother, and his sister, and his lover, and his daughter farewell, and had followed his wolf back to war.

  Hrolleif didn’t even bother to take him aside. He just congratulated Isolfr on the birth of the girlchild, told him they would be leaving for Franangford two days hence, and sent him to bed along with Viradechtis and her pups in the dark of the records-room. “You’ll not have slept,” he said, with a hard squeeze to Isolfr’s shoulder. “And I need you fresh.”

  Isolfr didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t want to journey to Franangford, either, or face his father once he got there. But it was what it was. Still.

  “Yes, wolfsprechend,” he said.

  Surprising himself, he slept.

  The march to Franangford remained in Isolfr’s memory as a record writ in mud. Thick, gluey mud that caked trellwolf paws and legs and weighed down his boots until it felt as if he was trying to lift the world with each step. Thin oily mud, slick as ice, that brought men down like felled trees. Mud in his hair, mud under his fingernails; everything he ate tasted of mud, and the water they boiled left a fine layer of silt in the pot.

  Their fourth evening out, once camp was set and Frithulf and Sokkolfr were arguing amiably about whose turn it was to clean and cook the rabbits that Kothran had brought them, Isolfr took Viradechtis down to the river and, despite the early-spring cold, insisted that they both wash. Otherwise, he’d have to listen to her trying to worry the mud out of her fur all night, which would mean that neither of them slept.

  She grumbled but acquiesced, and even indulged him in a silly, splashy game of chase like a puppy. Then, cleaner and warm with exertion, he put his boots on and started for camp. Glaedir appeared at the top of the hill as they were climbing; with a glance at Isolfr—not so much for permission as acknowledgment—Viradechtis took off toward the big wolf at a run.

  So much for the bath, Isolfr thought—and nearly ran into Eyjolfr halfway up the deep gully the river had dug for itself.

  “Isolfr,” Eyjolfr said and put out a hand to steady him, the gleam of his teeth in the dusk not reassuring. “Do you make a habit of wandering away from camp by yourself?”

  “I’m not by myself any more than you are,” Isolfr said steadily. Eyjolfr had not let go of his arm.

  “The companionship of a wolf is not the same.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t you?” Eyjolfr’s free hand came up to trace the line of his jaw. “I think you do.”

  “Eyjolfr—”

  “There’s no need to be shy, Isolfr. We both know we’ve been here before.”

  Isolfr stepped back, only to find himself pinned against a tree. He cast into the pack-sense; Viradechtis and Glaedir were hunting, coursing a spring-skinny deer.

  “Will you always hide behind your wolf?” Eyjolfr said, both hands on Isolfr’s upper arms now, his body pressed against Isolfr’s. “If you do not want me, Isolfr, you should say so. Don’t lead me on and then make a mockery of me in front of the entire werthreat.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Why else would you let Skjaldwulf have you first?” Eyjolfr hissed, and his mouth came down hard, a bruising, punishing kiss.

  Isolfr twisted his head away. “It was Viradechtis’ choice.”

  “Do you really think I will believe that Viradechtis would do anything against your wishes?”

  “Eyjolfr, please. She is konigenwolf. And I would not—”

  Eyjolfr kissed him again, using his weight and leverage to hold Isolfr where he wanted him, using the tree to keep Isolfr from being able to plant his feet. He could feel Eyjolfr’s sex hard against his hip, and the pack-sense was nothing but deer blood and triumph. He couldn’t get enough air, and he tasted blood where Eyjolfr’s teeth had caught his lip. He made a desperate, convulsive effor
t and wrenched free, only to fall over his own feet.

  He landed hard, awkwardly. Eyjolfr said coldly, “I do not appreciate being toyed with, Isolfr.”

  “Please. I didn’t. I swear to you.”

  “No? You don’t find your power heady?”

  Eyjolfr advanced toward him, and Isolfr scrabbled backwards, unable to find his feet or catch his breath. He could—he could fight, with fists or the knife at his belt. He could. And with the fear and fury he felt now, Viradechtis would think him truly endangered, even through the taste of her kill, and she might savage Glaedir where he stood. The big silver wolf would not defend himself against a konigenwolf.

  “You don’t enjoy watching the men of the werthreat make fools of themselves over you?”

  “Viradechtis—”

  “That’s always your answer, isn’t it?”

  “What other answer would you have him give, werthreatbrother?”

  Skjaldwulf’s voice. Eyjolfr whipped around like a startled cat; Isolfr fell back into the leaves, panting. Skjaldwulf stood at the head of the gully, black Mar at his side.

  “Skjaldwulf,” Eyjolfr said, breathing hard but composed.

  “This is no concern of yours. Isolfr and I were merely talking.”

  Skjaldwulf started down, picking his way. Mar bounded past him, shoved by Eyjolfr hard enough to stagger him, and came to snuffle gently at Isolfr’s face and hair.

  “And your ‘talking,’” Skjaldwulf said, “looks very much like something else—something which will get your throat torn out, Eyjolfr, and don’t think otherwise. You are lucky Viradechtis and Glaedir have found that deer, and I suggest you go butcher it. The camp will appreciate fresh meat.”

  “I would not have—”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Skjaldwulf said with terrible mildness.

  It hung there, unbearably. Isolfr shut his eyes, let Mar lick his ear and neck.

  Skjaldwulf said, “He’s not some wench to be wedded and bedded. And he is brother to a konigenwolf and not to a bitch like Ingrun. If you don’t understand the difference, I suggest you ask Randulfr to explain it to you. Now, go on with you. That deer’s waiting.”