An Apprentice to Elves

  He continued, “I know that men do not have these traditions as we do, but it does not seem, from what those who fought in the Trellwar will say, that your communities”—another complicated word that translated only roughly and then as something like kinship-grouping-and-surrounding-allies—“are just as close-knit as our own. And I have wished to imagine it and cannot. If you do not have tradition as we do, what is it that holds your people together? How do you trust each other?”

  It was an important question among the svartalfar, who would cheerfully cheat each other if they could—and one purpose of the endless rituals and lists was to channel the possibilities for false-dealing into the very narrow avenues where it would not cause feuds and vendettas such as svartalf history was littered with. A svartalf trusted her neighbors because they did their laundry the same way, because they dried their herbs the same way, and because when they sat down to dicker, they both understood exactly what was and wasn’t at stake.

  His question was a good one, and Alfgyfa was well aware that she probably wasn’t the best person to answer it, given that her view of human society was odd and getting odder by the day. But she remembered how travelers guesting at Franangford—mostly wolfcarls from other wolfheallan, but the occasional wolfless man who for whatever reason didn’t care to chance his luck in town—would sit around the hearth in the evening and share news and gossip and later the younger members of the Franangfordthreat would start pestering Skjaldwulf to offer something from his seemingly endless memory chests.

  “Stories,” she said. “We tell stories.”

  * * *

  No decisions were made in that session—no consensus could be reached, which left Tin equal parts frustrated and grateful. And restless. She returned home well into the Hours of Quiet and knew she had no hope of sleep.

  Tin was considered something of a radical by her people, but she nevertheless found Alfgyfa a revelation. Tin’s sole human apprentice learned fast and did not want for application to her studies, but she lacked discipline. She was not meticulous. Instead of mastering a skill through repetition, she would practice until she’d achieved some approximation of ability, and then she would attempt variations. Even innovations, which Tin had been raised to believe were the sole province of those who had achieved formal Mastery of a trade.

  It wasn’t a belief system she’d ever been over-respectful of, or interested in enforcing. Tin had been responsible for a few innovations as a journeyman in her own right, and that had been scandal enough. But now one of those innovations had last been seen staring sullenly at the hem of Tin’s robes, apparently insensible to the fact that she’d placed her own ascension to journeyman in jeopardy.

  And Tin was forced to realize that what passed for youthful rebellion and radicalism in a svartalf was in fact simply the normal process of learning, where humans were concerned. Sometimes she despaired.

  But she was committed.

  And—as she paced and fretted and jangled her robes—she was committed to getting Alfgyfa out of this mess, and getting her pointed, once again, toward the goal of this whole costly and no doubt foolish endeavor: becoming the first—and if this were any indication, the only—human Mastersmith.

  Supper had long ago been cleared. Tin walked the halls after her apprentices should have been in bed and she herself as well, twisting her ringed fingers together and sucking on her teeth and in general making a nuisance of herself to the housekeeping staff. She needed to find a solution—not an exception to tradition, nor a hole in it, but a way to make the rules work for her. For Alfgyfa.

  For the peace they needed to cement, and the alliance that had to be strong and whole when the Rheans finally made up their minds to come back to the Iskryne in force. The alliance between Tin and Isolfr had been forged in one war against an alien threat—a war, she knew, for which the svartalfar bore some responsibility, and in which the men had borne the brunt of the damage—and she would not see it broken by another.

  One difficulty at a time, she told herself. Like setting gems. First, she couldn’t let the Smiths and Mothers decide to dissolve Alfgyfa’s apprenticeship. Second, if they dodged that blow, she couldn’t let the Smiths’ Guild decide to postpone Alfgyfa’s ascension to journeyman as a punitive (they would call it “teaching”) measure. She especially couldn’t allow them to decree what was called “doubling back,” laying a second seven-year apprenticeship on the miscreant’s shoulders. It was a significant matter to double a svartalf’s term of apprenticeship. For a human, who might live no more than fifty winters—a mere seventy, if he or she were extremely lucky—another seven-year term would be insurmountable. She would have to send Alfgyfa home to her father in disgrace, and again the alliance would be strained, if not broken—the same result as if the Smiths and Mothers simply dismissed her on the spot.

  And third, whatever happened, she couldn’t allow it to affect judgment of Alfgyfa’s journeyman-work.

  It was halfway to breakfast; the kitchen apprentices were serving a light meal for the household staff and the smithing apprentice whose job it was, today, to see that the forges were stoked and brought up to temperature before the work began. Tin had stopped in to warm herself with bread and mushroom broth while she considered the problem at hand.

  She was half dozing in a chair by the fire, watching one of the kitchen cats lie lazily atop a bale of kindling, the tip of its calico tail twitching, when the answer came to her with such force she nearly spilled the remainder of her broth. Why did it seem that you could think and think and think on something, only to find the answer as soon as you set it down? It worked for troubles of the forge as well as troubles of the mind—and in Tin’s experience, the greatest frustration was that it didn’t work at all unless you performed the fruitless tail-chasing portion of the process first.

  The second stage in an alf’s education was called journeyman for a reason. Often, a journeyman would move between the workshops of two, three, even four masters, learning different skills and ways of managing workflow in each shop, hopefully absorbing the strengths and remarking the weaknesses of each master. But there was also another, older tradition, by which an apprentice on the brink of making the transition could be sent (or taken) to travel for remedial or additional education before being elevated in rank.

  That tradition also held that only the apprentice’s guardian master had the power to make the decision whether or not this additional training was warranted. It was usually invoked when there was a particular master whose specialty would address a weakness the guardian master knew for certain would prevent the apprentice from making a successful journeyman-piece, but there was nothing that said that was the only reason it could be invoked.

  Maybe if Tin could get Alfgyfa out from under everyone’s nose for a half year or so, and if she behaved herself for a like time when they came back, Tin’s petition to elevate her would go through the councils as a matter of course. Her journeyman-work would stand a chance of being judged on its own merits and not against an especially exacting standard tailored to ensure it could not pass. She’d just be another among the half dozen or so such petitions they handled at every meeting.

  Tin might even suggest that Alfgyfa take a svartalf name, in honor of her adopted people. A petition for, say, Niobium of the Smiths’ Guild and the Iron Lineage, ’prentice to Mastersmith Tin, was much less likely to incite comment than, say, one for Alfgyfa Isolfrsdaughter. Unremarked was best, for such things.

  Not that Tin would intend that as any form of deceit, of course. Alfgyfa would be showing respect, taking an alf name, and Tin would be overjoyed to give her one. Niobium wouldn’t be bad, actually; after all, it was one of the refractory metals.

  She laughed to herself, the crystals braided in her hair chiming as her head shook slowly. It was a good feeling, this sense of one’s own genius narrowly avoiding a trap. She needed to remember not to start thinking it was something she could do on demand, for nothing was more certain to ensure that she couldn’t.
r />   She reached out idly across the intervening space and scritched the cat under her throat, hooked black nails working through white fur. The cat pressed into her touch and purred.

  Immediate problem solved, Tin was shamefully tempted to doze off where she sat. But she knew Alfgyfa, and she knew the young woman—an adult, by the lights of her people, though by Tin’s she was at best a mature child—would be pacing sleepless in her chamber.

  Technically, she wasn’t entitled to her own room until she was a journeyman, but they’d promoted her a bit early within the household for everyone’s sanity and sleep.

  Tin extracted herself from the purring cat and rose from the chair. She earned a reproachful look; cats had no respect for other hierarchies and presumed themselves liege of all they surveyed. “As well bestir yourself, Mistress Beetletrapper, and be about your work. The rats know where the pantry lies.”

  The cat yawned elaborately, after the manner of cats. She rose with studied nonchalance and wandered off in the rough direction of the pantry, as if she had just remembered that she would like a snack. Tin turned to go the other way.

  She loved her house in its hours of darkness. She had worked hard for her rank, studied, fought, risked everything more than once. Gambled on Isolfr and on his people—several times. Now, contemplating leaving it afresh, she walked slowly, trailing one hand along the pierced stone of the corridor, feeling the texture of the trellises and filigrees carved into the wall. Behind, there was space to permit airflow even through the walls, and delicate shelves, places to put lanterns or objects that some member of the household found beautiful. There were doors that opened into rooms or cabinets, carved from the living stone of the cavern walls.

  The stonesmiths were the only guild ranked higher than the blacksmiths. Tin did not wonder why.

  She paused at a cross-corridor. A freestanding wrought-iron chandelier in the shape of a delicate, weeping sapling stood there. The tree was entirely fantastical, based on one in an illuminated manuscript that Tin had once been privileged to study. It was crowned in curves of colored glass that seemed to support its twisted leaves and its hanging strands of violet flowers, though any craftsman worth the name would know they did no such thing. Each flower cupped a tiny glow inside from a minuscule jewel—a stonestar.

  The Lapidaries’ Guild was also well-regarded, though not quite so well as the smiths’. Each stonestar cast no more than a particle of light: less than a candle. But here were hundreds together, carefully faceted, so they spread their scintillating grass-green and lavender sparkles over the floor and walls.

  Tin’s passage stirred the corridor air. The fairy lights danced as the glass leaves and petals rustled and tinkled against one another. She paused for a moment to regard this thing, black metal and cold stone and melted sand, a thing which she had made with her own hands. Her Master-piece.

  Alfgyfa, she recalled, had been quite taken aback to realize that this, and not some elegant sword or fearsome axe, was Tin’s valedictory effort. But lately, Tin had noticed her studying it when she thought no one was looking.

  We grow and learn.

  She paused by the door to Alfgyfa’s room.

  This door was not worked from the same stone as the wall, with cunning hinges carved in place and concealing an iron pin. Instead, it was a panel of red agate, translucent and opaque in bands, shaved almost breathlessly thin. It was pierced, to reduce its weight, but also worked in two offset layers so that it provided privacy. The result was stone that looked as if it had been woven of red-dyed reeds.

  Tin laid her nails against it. It was warm to the touch.

  She was the mistress of this house and had no need to announce herself before entering. But she treated her apprentices as beings worthy of respect from the moment they signed their contracts, and in giving Alfgyfa a room to herself, Tin had also given her that modicum of autonomy that the child seemed so desperately to need. She would not take it away merely because she could.

  Delicately, she scratched at the stone.

  There was a scrape within, and a pause. Then a muffled-sounding voice called, “Please enter.”

  The voice wasn’t really muffled—not by stone, when there were so many gaps for air and sound to pass freely. Rather, it was Alfgyfa who always sounded flattened. Tin had gotten used to it. And honestly, it was amazing that the human had learned to sing any harmonics, given the limitations of her natural equipment.

  Tin entered the room. Alfgyfa rose from the cushioned stone basket of a chair on the floor, awkwardly levering herself up with a hand. The thought was habitual, as much as was Alfgyfa’s cramped posture, but it hit her with sudden sharpness: nothing in Nidavellir fitted the human, though she made do mostly without complaint. One of the reasons she had been given this room was because of its vaulted ceilings. And still she stooped, the back of her bright head brushing the worked stone ceiling. Tin had had to insist, both to Alfgyfa and to the other Smiths and Mothers, that the girl be given enough chance to straighten her spine, enough exercise for the muscles, that she would not go home to her straight-standing father as twisted and hunched as a svartalf.

  “We will leave in two dusks,” Tin told her. “You and I are going to Franangford.”

  “I’m being sent home?” Tin would not have expected Alfgyfa, who chafed so at svartalfar society, to look so horrified at the prospect. Tin contemplated that. She did not think Alfgyfa was merely horrified at the prospect of disgrace or failure—but then, she had never once doubted Alfgyfa’s love for their craft.

  “You are not,” said Tin. “We are.… Call it a diplomatic mission, if you like.” She sighed, letting the air whistle out through her ornamented teeth. “’Prentice, while the Smiths and Mothers may not agree, please do not think that I do not recognize that you acted in the first place to save my child. There will be no trouble between us. And we are leaving in order to increase your chances of successfully ascending to journeyman when we return.”

  Tin watched Alfgyfa. Humans gave so much away with their faces: expressive as the ears and tails of cats. Now the young woman’s face was smooth, her gaze calm and concentrated. But a muscle along her jaw flexed and softened rhythmically, and her nostrils flared with too-quick breaths, and the bright telltale flush was spreading along her cheekbones.

  “Stitch up that rent in your cloak,” Tin said, nodding to where Alfgyfa’s trellspear-torn cloak was draped across the bed. She laid something on the table and waited while Alfgyfa’s eye identified it. A needle, and a spool of spun gold embroidery floss, glittering in the candlelight. Alfgyfa’s eyes widened; she glanced back at Tin’s face.

  Tin smiled. “Use big stitches.”

  FOUR

  The Rheans kept coming. As if the past twelve years had been an ebb tide and now it had turned, they came in processions of ships that seemed like a rope on a windlass—endless, endlessly moving, and endlessly conveying fresh misery to Fargrimr’s threshold. Longboats out of Hergilsberg harried their convoys, but the Rhean ships were designed for war at sea in ways the longboats could not match. Fargrimr would have hated to try to row one up a river—the first sandbar would have been the end of that endeavor—but when it came to transporting hordes of men, these bulging deep-keeled monstrosities were unrivalled.

  Fargrimr waited, and watched them come. He had, perhaps, considered Otter’s declarations of the size of the Rhean army to be exaggeration—though not of purpose. He had never, even in his darkest thoughts, accused her of that. He had reassured himself that she was not trained to warfare. That she had been an impressionable girl when she witnessed the landing of the Ninth Legion in Brython, and that the conquest that had followed had rendered indelible her memories of that army as a vast, implacable, unfightable force.

  But now they came, and kept coming, filling up the basin around Siglufjordhur like grain filling up a silo for winter—and then spilling over, moving into the countryside surrounding, felling trees and closing roads, seizing and occupying crofts that had previously
been beyond the range of their power. There were thousands of them, perhaps tens of thousands. And Fargrimr was forced to admit that he had been unfair to Otter. So very unfair.

  If anything, she had understated the scale of the problem.

  After weeks of living rough, Fargrimr took this news back to Freyasheall, which was also his own keep of Siglufjordhur-in-exile. In a long night, over ale and rye loaves spread with the sweet new butter, Fargrimr and Hreithulfr and his wolfjarl, Blarwulf Stothisbrother, tried to lay some plans. Should they hold the keep and heall? Bring crofters and fishermen inside the wall and plan for a siege? Withdraw and evacuate, leaving Siglufjordhur entirely to the Rheans? Was the konungur coming with troops, and if he was, when?

  At least the wolves took it in stride. Stothi himself was a great snoring hulk under the table, the only trellwolf Fargrimr had ever seen who dwarfed Viradechtis. Fortunately, he was a peaceable giant—like some large men Fargrimr had known, he had nothing to prove. He held sway in the wolfheall as Signy’s mate through the simple expedient of being too immovable for anyone else to dictate to him, and too good-natured to take any violent notice when they tried.

  Stothi was a dark agouti, black-faced and black-booted, with black-tipped guard hairs shimmering when he breathed to reveal the rich amber of his undercoat. Signy, meanwhile, who lay against his back, relaxed and alert, seemed almost gracile by comparison, though each of her long pasterns was as thick as a woman’s ankle and she could have worn Fargrimr’s sword belt as a (quite snug) collar. Her coat was slate gray, almost blue in the torchlight, and it made her eyes stand out as brilliantly as topazes in a steel sword hilt.

  They were, Fargrimr had to admit, a handsome pair. And even Signy made two of Ingrun, who should have been sprawled snoring with her belly making a little bump across Randulfr’s feet, while Randulfr made everyone else fetch his ale because he couldn’t possibly disturb his wolf. Fargrimr felt a little pang as he wondered how long it took to train a wolf to do that. A pang, because Randulfr was not here. He was running north, to alert Franangfordheall of the activity at the Rhean garrison.