While Isolfr settled himself to wait, Viradechtis went into labor. She spent hours dragging furs and pillows from her enormous bed to the back corner of the storeroom, behind the barrels of salt-fish, and growling at any wolf or wolfcarl who came too near.
Leitholfr, the only other whole-bodied wolfheofodman remaining in Bravoll, sent one of the boys tithed to the most recent Bravoll litter to find Isolfr, and when Isolfr came, at a dead run, Leitholfr looked up from the death-vigil he was keeping by Signy with a strained smile. “I will come with you if you wish it, but … .” His mobile face fell into stillness, and he touched the dull, matted fur of Signy’s head with such distracted, heartbroken love that Isolfr said, against the clamoring panic rising in his chest, “No, it is not necessary. It is her third litter, after all.”
“Aye,” Leitholfr said. “Signy has borne ten.” He shook himself. “It is your wolfjarls who should be with you.”
“And they knowing even less than I do,” Isolfr said and managed from somewhere to find a smile. “If something seems to be going terribly amiss, I shall ask at least for your advice, but otherwise, no. Please. Stay with your sister.”
They separated with a glance that lasted a little too long, and Isolfr caught himself looking over his shoulder at the older wolfsprechend as he bent again over his wolf. She shifted her head to press it against his knee, and Isolfr quickly looked away. A thought struck him, one that was a little bit stunning. Vigdis had not chosen a new bondmate, but she also showed no signs of leaving Skald and the wolfheall. She couldn’t keep Nithogsfjoll without a wolfsprechend for long, especially once the war was over.
Could she be waiting for Leitholfr? Was a trellwolf—a konigenwolf—wise enough to plan that far in advance? It left him with a shiver up his spine when he thought about it too hard, and instead, he went to Viradechtis’ side to keep her from shredding the furs she was arranging into a nest.
The new Bravoll wolfheall was a stone building, more a keep than a roundhall like Nithogsfjoll, with rooms and corridors and three levels—four at the corner towers. All that fastness would benefit nothing if the trolls undermined it, of course, and right now all it meant was that he had corridors and stairs to hurry.
Viradechtis looked up as he came into her chosen den, teeth bared, and then relaxed, hackles dropping, shoulders slumping, when she caught his scent.
“You have been busy, I see,” Isolfr said, and she laughed back at him, even through her discomfort. He rumpled her ears and she leaned into him, and he knew that things were right between them again. She wanted him here, trusted him to be here, and for the first time in days—months?—he wanted to be exactly where he was, doing exactly what he was doing.
All at once, everything seemed easier.
She made a low whuffing sound, neither a sigh nor a moan but a demand, and nosed at her pile of bedding. “I know,” he said, and crouched beside her, helping her arrange the furs. “No soft dirt floors here. I’m sorry.”
She gave him a canny look, and if wolves could frown he would have sworn it was one. He caught her irritation, a brief flash of warmth and familiar smells, cold-iron and cold-ice. He stroked her ears as she sank down onto the furs and the blankets, panting.
He was homesick, too.
Yearling brothers came to the door periodically during the afternoon and evening, their eyes as wide as war-shields, to ask if he needed anything or wanted anything or if the konigenwolf wanted anything. He smiled at their awe and asked several times for fresh water for Viradechtis and once for supper for himself. And Viradechtis paced and grumbled and told him how bored she was, as well as uncomfortable and aching.
Cubs, he reminded her, and Cubs, she agreed with a long-suffering sigh that nearly made him cough ale out his nose.
Perhaps Freya was still looking down on them; it could have been much worse. There were six pups, the largest dog a brindle, and the second-largest and third-to-last born a gray bitch who—blind, grubbing, rowing with undeveloped legs—promptly began shoving her brothers away from Viradechtis’ teats. “Konigenwolf,” Isolfr said, and sat back among the bloody furs. There was no mistaking it, even so soon; now he understood how Grimolfr and Hrolleif had known from the moment of Viradechtis’ birth what she would be.
“You have done well,” he said, as his wolf flinched from another contraction and then turned to nose her pups. Viradechtis looked at him quizzically, angled eyes bright, panting. He touched her nose, and she grinned, as if to say, not done yet.
The fifth pup was stillborn, the cord wrapped around its neck, and nothing Isolfr could do would rouse it. Grimolfr could have saved it, he thought, as he swaddled the small body in scraps of the furs Viradechtis had mauled and laid it outside the storeroom door. But Grimolfr wasn’t there and perhaps even he couldn’t have cheated Hel for that pup.
The sixth—small, perfectly formed, the pale color of spring butter—was a second bitch. Isolfr shook his head and said, “If the whole pack is of your line, little girl, where shall we go for breeding stock?”
Viradechtis laughed at him, and settled herself for a long, smug adoration of her five living pups: the gray bitch, the tawny bitch, two dog-pups as black as Mar and the big brindle.
In a coincidence, as beloved of poets, Signy died before the sunset, but not before Isolfr gave the gray pup her name.
They burned Signy and the dead pup together. Isolfr stood at Leitholfr’s elbow, ready to support him, but the former wolfsprechend seemed almost relieved that the vigil was done. It had been a long, cruel winter for him, and Isolfr knew how much of his wolf’s pain he had felt. And he needed to be strong, now—there would be time for grieving in the spring, when the army returned. When they knew that they would live.
Messengers came with some regularity, and it was to Leitholfr and Isolfr that the seemingly endless, fiddly task of arranging the logistics fell. In the wake of two years of war, provisions were scarce, and travel in winter a nightmarish near-impossibility. They managed, somehow—sledges drawn by unhappy, exhausted horses, men on skis with tump lines dragging sleds across the worsening snow, the women of heall and village and keep sending whatever they could to the men who had left them behind to fight for their lives. Even Viradechtis’ pups grew thin, though Isolfr saw to it that she got half his rations as well as her own, and Leitholfr and Hroi took to hunting when they could, while Sokkolfr stumped about the great hall on crutches, cursing his still-unsteady leg.
The svartalfar and the men liberated Franangford—if liberated was the right term for a village that had been burned to the root-cellars—and Vethulf sent Kari and Hrafn back and forth with bulletins at every opportunity. Kari didn’t seem to mind; he was comfortable traveling in the cold and, as he reported with an elaborate shudder that hid a very real discomfort, “They’re fighting in the tunnels now.”
Isolfr agreed. If he never saw a trellwarren from the inside again, it would be far, far too soon.
Their solstice celebration was a slender group—Kari and Hrafn, Sokkolfr and Hroi (who had moved back into the wolfheall as soon as Sokkolfr’s leg healed enough for him to get around on it), Isolfr, Viradechtis and five squeaking, staggering pups arranged in a basket by the hearth in the great hall, Leitholfr, and the three yearlings who were not on patrol, as well as the noncombatants remaining in Bravoll, village and keep, from the blacksmith’s five-year-old son all the way up to Inge, the venerable and terrifying mother of the jarl, who held the keep in his absence.
The keep’s crippled fiddler, old Thorsbjorn, played over the meager feast, and on the swept floor of the wolfheall women danced with little boys and half-grown girls. Isolfr danced once or twice as well, but mostly sat with Sokkolfr and their wolves by the fire.
“I don’t know what we’ll do for tithe-boys, either,” Isolfr said, gesturing at the pups. The boys should have been there already, sneaking glances at the basket, sniping and teasing each other over the possibilities of who would bond one of the bitches. Instead, all the boys of an age were already
in Franangford or marching on Othinnsaesc. Old enough for the wolves was more than old enough for war.
Sokkolfr followed his motion and said, quietly enough that Leitholfr—who was tending the winter-skinny boar turning on the spit over the fire—would not hear it, “We’ll have whatever’s left when they get home. There will be wolfcarls who have lost their wolves, as well.”
Isolfr shook his head and looked down under the weight of Sokkolfr’s earnest stare. “They seem so much younger than we—”
Sokkolfr grinned, and reached down to stroke Hroi’s ears. “We managed,” he said. Which Isolfr could not argue.
Isolfr patted his friend on the shoulder and pushed himself to his feet. “Rest your leg,” he said. “I’m going to check the solstice fires.”
Sokkolfr nodded, but Isolfr felt him watching as he left. It was all right; he’d be back shortly. He just felt the need to make sure the fires would last through a night when the sun did not rise.
He made the rounds of the fires, shivering: north, east, south, west, exchanging formal blessings with the fire-watchers as he went. A broken-armed wolfcarl to the north with a pair of eager town-boys; two widow-women to the east; two more wolfcarls to the south, one of whom had lost his sight and the other his right leg below the knee; Thorlot, the Bravoll wolfjarl’s lover, to the west, with her eldest son. She was the daughter and sister and widow of blacksmiths and knew a good deal of practical smithing herself; Isolfr had had cause to be grateful to her more than once already, and the winter only half over. She was a big woman, her forearms and shoulders muscled like a man’s, her face unexpectedly beautiful. It occurred to him, seeing her lit by the solstice-fire, that this was what the waelcyrge must be like, and he shivered a little at the thought.
They exchanged the blessings, the boy blushing mortified scarlet when his voice cracked halfway through, and Thorlot said, “How goes the night, wolfsprechend?”
“Well, I thank you. And you?”
“Cold.” She grinned. “Will you share a cup?”
“Gladly,” he said, ridiculously pleased at the invitation.
She had mulled wine and a stack of wooden cups. “’Tis for the patrol when they come in,” she said, “but I always take care to make more than enough.” She and Isolfr saluted each other and drank, while her son checked the solstice-fire with earnest concentration.
“How do your sister’s cubs?” Thorlot asked.
“Very well,” he said, and could not stop the smile that spread across his face. “They’ll be opening their eyes soon, and then matters will become truly exciting. I remember what Viradechtis was like—”
He broke off. He had been, purely out of reflex, watching the forest over Thorlot’s shoulder as they talked, and he saw a small figure on skis break from amid the trees and make for the palisade, going at a tremendous clip. “That child’s going to break her neck.”
Thorlot turned, her son coming up beside her, and thus they were all watching when the girl pulled up, waved her arms frantically, and shouted, “Trolls! Two miles west! They’re coming up out of the ground!”
“Sound the alarm,” Isolfr said to Thorlot and her son; he himself scrambled down the ladder so fast he nearly broke his own neck and took off running full-out for the wolfheall.
Hunting trolls through the woods at night in snow is … unpleasant. Isolfr and Viradechtis, with every other wolfcarl, wolf and wolfless man who could fight, labored through the shadows and the branches, wading through the drifts of snow like cattle at a mud wallow. Isolfr had tried to get his wolf to stay in the wolfheall, but the pups were old enough that she could leave them for a few hours, and she had not listened to any of his arguments. He had done what he could: appointed Sokkolfr to watch the pups and followed his sister into the night.
He had expected warriors, but these were trellsmiths, trellwitches, half-grown kittens. The warren was emptying, and Isolfr killed them with a lump in his throat so big that it hurt to breathe around. Two miles. They’d tunneled to within less than two miles of Bravoll.
The whole warren could have been on them at any moment, the earth opening under his feet, trolls in the keep, in among the cubs and women—
It had been a very near thing.
It was still a near thing, too near for comfort. The trolls fought wildly, and Isolfr knew they were animals at their last point of retreat. But more than that, they fled before him; anywhere he and Viradechtis appeared, they broke, and were cut down as they fled.
They were fleeing, panicking, and Isolfr’s heart lifted a little with what that must mean about affairs at Othinnsaesc. He was praying, as he killed troll after troll, Leitholfr on one side and a wolfcarl from Kerlaugstrond on the other, praying for his wolfjarls and his shieldmates, for the konigenwolves who fought at their wolfsprechends’ sides, for Grimolfr—even, to his surprise, for his father. Whatever he had felt for Gunnarr as a child—love, awe, hero-worship—was gone, but he found that he preferred the thought of his father alive and storming in Nithogsfjoll to the thought of his father dead and bloody on his funeral pyre.
It will do, he said to himself, and killed a trellsow, one of the ones he’d learned to recognize as a smith. And thought of Thorlot, who might be a better blacksmith than her father or brother or dead husband, or than her son would be, but who would never be anything more than wife, sister, daughter, mother. At least she was honored, he thought, wrenching his axe free of the trellsmith’s ribs. He didn’t mean Thorlot, and he did not know whether he was angry at his own kind for their blindness or angry at the trolls for making him see how blind they were.
The trolls and the svartalfar—Tin who barely recognized the word woman—and he killed the next three trolls in a black and causeless fury.
And then the line of men stopped moving forward, and Isolfr looked around; their vicinity, for the moment, was clear of trolls. His sister stood near; she tilted her head to look at him and said wistfully, Cubs?
“I told you so,” Isolfr said, but they were both exhausted, and the trolls were not fighting well. The absence of one konigenwolf and one wolfsprechend would not tip the balance.
He said to Leitholfr, “Viradechtis wants her children.”
Leitholfr smiled and said, “You did tell her so. Go on with you, then.”
Isolfr nodded, said, “Come, sister.” They started back toward Bravoll, through the snow and the bitter cold. They were tired, Viradechtis’ jowls rimed with blood and Isolfr’s mittens stiff with it, but in this cold it was death to sit or even to stop and rest for a moment, leaning against a tree.
They had gone maybe three-quarters of a mile when they heard the noise. It was a tiny sound, piteous, and they both thought, Cub?, Isolfr wondering for a crazed, panicked moment if somehow Signy had gotten out here, all by herself in the cold and dark.
The next moment he knew that was nonsense, but by then he could see the source of the noise.
A trellwitch, crouched in the snow, a muddle of rank furs and dull bronze, clutching to her breast a troll kitten. The kitten was crying, and when the trellwitch looked up, Isolfr was astonished to see tears in her mad red eyes.
Viradechtis growled and gathered herself, and Isolfr reached to unsling his axe.
The trellwitch said please.
Isolfr flinched back; his hand closed on Viradechtis’ ruff before he thought. The trellwitch did not speak as men spoke, nor in the images of the pack-sense. She did not have a voice, as he understood such things, the word seeming to be formed out of darkness and stone and smelting fires and things that did not ordinarily make words. And it was not exactly a word; it was merely the closest she could come.
please said the trellwitch again.
He should have killed her. Taken her head off, disemboweled her—or simply let go of Viradechtis. Should have killed her and smashed the kitten’s skull with the heel of his boot. But he was tired of death, tired of blood and slaughter and pain, and the trellwitch was rocking the kitten gently, soothing it with her crooked, knotted claws e
ven as she stared at him. She was afraid, and if trolls could grieve, she was grieving, and yet she stayed where she was and tried to communicate with him.
“I cannot let you live,” he said to the trellwitch. “Your people will slaughter mine.”
slaughter the trellwitch said, amid flashes of fire and screaming, of Othinnsaesc. He saw for a moment what men looked like through troll-eyes. And shuddered away from the seeing.
Othinn, god of wolves, god of men, expected he would show no mercy. Othinn was a god for the strong, who granted no more than a man or a pack could take, and defend.
“I cannot,” Isolfr said. “I am sorry.”
And he was sorry, although he could never have explained it to anyone. Sorry because she found him as loathsome and terrifying as he found her—Viradechtis a great thing with flaming eyes, himself a spidery wrong-angled creature pale as a rotten corpse—sorry because the trolls were caught between the men and the svartalfar, and although it was no doing of his, it was no doing of hers either. Sorry because she loved that kitten as Viradechtis loved her cubs. Sorry because he could feel her fear and her desperation and the howling loneliness that gnawed her. Her queen was dead, her sisters were dead, the world was empty to her—and he knew that this was the first time in her life she had ever had to think of herself as a single creature.
kitten she said, as Viradechtis pushed toward her, and Isolfr held onto the wolf’s ruff when it would have slipped through the clenched fingers of his mittened hand.
Trellqueen, Isolfr answered, the Iskrynequeen vividly in his memory. Beside him, Viradechtis, growling, leaned forward against his grip. She was not trying to make him let go of her, not yet, but he could feel her patience wearing thin.
kitten the trellwitch said desperately, and he understood. This was the only kitten, the only daughter of the Othinnsaesc queen, the only remaining daughter of the blood of the Iskryne. And he understood, in all the things that clustered around the trellwitch’s approximation of language, that this meant even more to trolls than it did to men or svartalfar, that if this kitten died, a whole wealth of craft and lore died with her, the race-memory and daughtermind and history and shapings of trolls who had delved so far under mountains as to touch the giant Mimir’s hair, and wrought black cities underground.