An Apprentice to Elves Read online

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The authors would like to acknowledge their debts to Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), the author of the Prose Edda; the Viking Answer Lady and her fascinating and tremendously helpful website, www.vikinganswerlady.com; Dr. Robert J. Hasenfratz (for teaching Bear Anglo-Saxon all these years ago); Mitchell and Robinson’s A Guide to Old English; Jennifer Jackson, agent beyond compare; and Beth Meacham, for being the extraordinary editor that she is.

  THE ISKYRNE

  1. HERGILSBERG

  2. MONASTERY AT HERGILSBERG

  3. SIGLUFJORDHUR

  4. FREYASHEALL

  5. OTHINNSAESC

  6. NITHOGSFJOLL

  7. FRANANGFORD & AETTRYNHEIM

  8. BRAVOLL

  9. THORSBAER

  10. VESTFJORTHR

  11. ARAKENSBERG

  12. BEORNESBEORG

  13. BEONVITHR

  14. KERLAUGSTROND

  15. KETILLHILL

  16. NEW NIDAVELLIR

  17. NORTH POLE

  PROLOGUE

  Tin laced her fingers together across her gravid belly and frowned along her nose at the feeble human child.

  The feeble human child frowned back. Eventually, because she was human and did not have the patience of a svartalf (and because she was seven years old, which even among her short-lived kind was considered very young), Alfgyfa blurted, “I’m not sorry.”

  Tin said nothing. Although she was by far the most experienced of all the smiths and mothers in dealing with humans, she still found it difficult to sieve all the meanings in the words of creatures who could not sing their nuances, and the issues here were unfortunately and unpleasantly complex.

  Alfgyfa, her scowl not abated one whit, said, “What Manganese said was mean. And it wasn’t true. The aettrynalfar aren’t trolls.”

  The aettrynalfar, like Alfgyfa herself, were yet another headache handed to Tin by Isolfr Viradechtisbrother, and not something she wanted to discuss at the moment. “Be that as it may,” she said and held up a warning finger at Alfgyfa’s indignant expression. “Be that as it may, it is not correct to hit someone with whom you disagree.”

  “But they have holmgangs all the time in stories!”

  What had possessed her, Tin wondered, and not for the first time, to agree to Isolfr’s mad fostering scheme? “What you did was not a holmgang.”

  “I don’t see why not,” Alfgyfa muttered mutinously.

  “A holmgang has rules,” Tin said. “It isn’t just jumping on someone and swelling her eye. And you know that perfectly well.”

  Here, for the first time, Alfgyfa’s direct, pale stare—so unnervingly like and so unnervingly unlike her father’s—shifted away. Tin felt a spark of unworthy and disproportionate triumph.

  The point was not that Alfgyfa had hurt Manganese badly—or even could have with her spindly child-human arms. The point wasn’t even that Manganese hadn’t deserved a bruised eye, because on that matter Tin was by no means decided. The point was that Alfgyfa was as wild as a wolf pup, and there were only so many of her ructions and disturbances that the Smiths and Mothers would put up with before they declared this experiment a failure and shipped Alfgyfa back to her father at Franangford. Even at times when Tin found that idea personally tempting, she did not want it to happen. She did not want the svartalfar to march to war against the humans, and she knew as well as Isolfr did that if they did not find some way to build bridges—not one bridge, but many bridges—between their peoples, war was exactly what was going to happen. It might not come for another century or more, given the problems the humans of the Northlands were having with the humans from beyond the sea, but Tin did not want to see war as an old alf any more than she wanted to see it now.

  And this mulish scrap of a creature, slouched and sulking, might be a part of the solution to the problem of linking their peoples together. If Tin could stop her brawling like a bear in rut.

  She allowed herself a sigh and said, “Tell me what you should have done.”

  “Swelled both her eyes,” Alfgyfa muttered sullenly.

  Tin found herself afflicted with a sudden, transient deafness, which lasted long enough for Alfgyfa to heave a sigh of her own, sit up straight, and begin to recite the Nine Recourses of the Apprentice.

  Tin was not sure whether it made the child more or less aggravating that she already knew them perfectly.

  * * *

  Alfgyfa had always been able to speak to wolves. Always, through all of her memory, the wolves had been her nursemaids and companions. Gentle Amma, and trickster Kjaran with his odd-colored eyes. Old Hroi, gray-muzzled to his forehead and devious at games. Snow-shouldered Kothran, ears and nose of the pack. Black Hrafn and blacker Mar, the wit-sharp wildling and the leggy, raw-boned, silent old wolf upon whom so much of the pack-courage of Franangford Wolfheall rested.

  And Viradechtis. Of course, Viradechtis, the konigenwolf of the Franangfordthreat, a warrior already legendary in her tenth year—and, as the bond-sister of Alfgyfa’s father, Alfgyfa’s frequent babysitter and playmate.

  Like her father, Alfgyfa heard all of these wolves plainly and understood them. Not that wolves—most wolves—spoke in anything like words, though Viradechtis came close sometimes. But they had always accepted her as one of their own, a strange slow-growing pup with no teeth. They had been her playmates, her packmates, her champions, and her allies.

  But Alfgyfa was a girl, and she would never belong to a wolf of her own, the way Father belonged to Viradechtis, the way Brokkolfr belonged to Amma. When she was old enough to understand this—when her father had explained that wolves were warriors, and wolfcarls died young, and that women bore children, and children were the future of the pack—she had grown very quiet for a long time. This had worried her father and his shieldmates, and the other wolfheofodmenn, because even as a small girl, Alfgyfa was not known to take being thwarted lightly.

  But she had thought about it, and thought about it. And three days later (which was a very long time to think about anything), she had marched up to her father at dinner and told him, “If I can’t belong to one of your wolves, I’ll find my own!”

  She’d never heard such laughter in the heall. But if Kari could find his own wolf—Hrafn had been a wild wolf before Kari had become his brother—why couldn’t Alfgyfa?

  “You’ll go to the svartalfar,” Father had said, quite kindly, “and learn to be a smith. The apprenticeship is arranged.”

  Being a smith was interesting work—Father’s woman Thorlot was a smith—but it wasn’t like running through the woods with wolves, a
nd Alfgyfa had said so. But now, here she was, two years later—a big girl of seven summers—and Father had sent her away, just as he promised. Not even to the aettrynalfar, the poison elves who lived within a day’s walk of Franangford. But all the way to the Iskryne, at the lonely top of the world, to study with a svartalf, a dark elf, Mastersmith and Mother: Tin, who had made Alfgyfa’s father’s axe.

  It was a splendid axe, that much was true.

  But while there were wild wolves aplenty in the cold, heavy forests on the lower slopes of the mountains of the Iskryne, there were no wolves at all in the endless alf-warrens beneath them.

  She missed her father, of course—how could she not?—and his wolfjarls and the people of his heall, wolfcarls and wolfless, who had been kind to her. She missed the heallbred children, the noisy, tumbling almost-pack she’d grown up with. But when she lay awake at night in the odd rounded room that she shared with Tin’s other apprentices, it wasn’t any of them she longed for. It wasn’t even any individual wolf, although she would have given a great deal to have Viradechtis’ great shadow appear in the doorless entryway. It was the sense of all the wolves, what her father called the pack-sense, which she hadn’t even fully realized she felt until it was taken away from her. And then she knew, bereft, that she had no memory that did not have the pack-sense as part of it—until she came to the Iskryne.

  She lay awake, listening to the breathing of Yttrium, Manganese, and Pearl, blinking the burning out of her eyes and listening, even though she knew there was nothing to listen for, that no wolves came gladly beneath the surface of the earth except in shallow dens and scrapes they dug for their cubs, or while hunting trolls. Alfgyfa knew the way the wolf-brothers and wolf-sisters gathered whining about the wolfcarls’ entrance to Aettrynheim (the aettrynalfar themselves did not name their home so, but it was useless to suppose Skjaldwulf would not); the trellwolves would come no farther than the Room of Bridges, and even there, they flattened their ears uneasily and paced in restless loops, too aware of the weight of stone above their heads to be comfortable. No wild wolf, without a brother to coax or command her, would come as far as Nidavellir.

  And yet Alfgyfa listened and listened and fell asleep listening, night after night, hearing nothing.

  Until, quite unexpectedly, one night—she heard something after all.

  She jerked upright in surprise, and then held her breath, restricting her listening to no farther than the confines of the room, for svartalfar had sharp hearing and Yttrium slept lightly. But she had not made enough noise to disturb Tin’s senior apprentice, and she was able to put herself in the pack-sense again, straining upward and outward until she found what had startled her: a wolf, a half-grown dog-wolf, thirsty and frightened. And trapped.

  There were no words in the pack-sense and no names as humans understood them, but the wolves of Franangford had named Alfgyfa in their own way, as the sharp bite of snow smelled on the night wind. She knew they gave her that name mostly because she was her father’s daughter, but she liked it, and she tried, as the heall-women said about hand-me-downs, to grow into it. She offered it to the dog-wolf now and felt his fright increase to alarm.

  Not-Wolf! he said—not to her, but to his absent pack. But wherever he was, they couldn’t comfort him, and he whined in miserable defeat.

  It was different than speaking to the wolves she knew; this one was not accustomed to human words or human patterns of thought, and she had to struggle to find a way to say friend. Like-pack was the closest she could come, and it was clumsy and not quite what she meant.

  But she felt his skepticism clearly enough: the idea that any not-wolf could be like-pack was not something he was prepared to believe.

  Well, then. She’d just have to show him.

  * * *

  Kindling light in stone was one of the Masteries of the smiths; journeymen and apprentices were not permitted to learn.

  Thus, once she’d slipped out of the dormitory—Yttrium hadn’t woken, which felt like the first victory Alfgyfa had had in a very long time—instead of immediately setting out to find the trapped wolf, she turned to her right and followed the corridor, one palm riding along the smooth stone of the wall until she came to the first of the dim sparks that Tin’s household kept glowing during the hours of sleep.

  The alfar’s dark-sight was much better than Alfgyfa’s, but Tin had told her that even alfar couldn’t see in a perfectly lightless place. And even alfar suffered from diseases and the failing of the flesh as it aged, and their elders tended to be as dark-blind as humans. Thus, each of the lights left glowing during a household’s Hours of Quiet marked a cupboard in which was kept a lamp—the perfectly ordinary sort of lamp that could be lit with a tinderbox. Alfgyfa didn’t even have to stand on tiptoes to open the cupboard; at seven, she was already as tall as most of the adult alfar around her, although her arms were much shorter than theirs.

  She struggled slightly with the tinderbox—even to a skilled hand they were simpler in theory than in practice—but eventually an ember smoked in the dried cave moss and she managed to light a curl of cedarwood from it by blowing softly and evenly. A touch to the lamp wick, and a small, flickering glow warmed the corridor. It steadied when she closed the lantern’s pane on its hinges.

  The dog-wolf did not feel close by. She wasn’t supposed to go exploring alone, and there would be svartalfar awake and working throughout the tunnels once she got farther from Tin’s household. Here in the alfhame there was no sun to dictate one’s rising and retiring, and each household chose their own Hours of Quiet. It was considered polite for visitors and passersby to mark the existence or lack of lights in a household, and—if they were absent—to avoid noisiness and traffic in nearby corridors.

  But. Everybody knew that the human child was Mastersmith and Mother Tin’s apprentice. If Alfgyfa just gripped the lantern and strode boldly, any alf she encountered would probably assume she was on an errand for her master.

  She reached out to the dog-wolf, orienting herself again, and realized that whatever tunnel—if it was a tunnel—that he was trapped in lay outside the usual orbit of alfar life. That was good. She’d be moving away from the populated corridors.

  And so she did. Trying to stride with purpose, holding the lantern well out from the skirts of her ill-fitting apprentice robes so its hot sides would not make them stink and smolder, Alfgyfa followed the trace of the dog-wolf’s presence. She cajoled him as she walked, in sense-images and emotions, trying both to calm him and to lure him into revealing his name.

  Wherever he was, it was dark. He’d been there a while; she could smell the urine and feces from where he’d soiled his pen. But not too many days—he was painfully thirsty, but not yet terribly weak with it. He’d tried climbing the walls, scratching and scrambling, but all his efforts had only left him with nails chipped down to sore quicks.

  Alfgyfa winced in sympathy. She tried to let him feel it in the pack-sense, but he only answered her again, Not-wolf.

  But maybe, she thought, somebody else was looking for him.

  As she followed his trace, she cast about. Surely his pack and his konigenwolf were seeking him. Could she hear them calling?

  She’d never heard of a wolf so far separated from its pack that the pack-sense could not find it. Now, questing outward, thinking her own wolf name as fiercely as she might shout her human one over and over in a game of Echoes, she found a hint of that concerned contact. Help me find him, she thought. Help me bring him back to you.

  The konigenwolf’s name was green-wood-burning. She smelt of rough smoke and pine needles curling in the heat. She seemed more accepting, both of not-wolf and of like-pack, and Alfgyfa wondered if she knew something, somehow, of the wolfheallan. The sense of her mind was mature and konigenwolf-whimsical: a strong adult, where the dog-wolf was in that gray twilight between being a cub and becoming an adult. Alfgyfa guessed that the konigenwolf was probably his mother.

  The dog-wolf’s name was the scratch of mice under snow cover
. As Alfgyfa walked toward him, the tunnels became dustier and colder and … emptier. No alfar lived here; no alfar had lived here for a long time. She climbed through a hole that was both ragged and smooth, as if the rock had been torn like rotten cloth, then melted. On the other side, the air smelled different, sour like old sweat, but sweet, too, and over it all a sharpness that made her nose sting. It was the same air the dog-wolf was smelling, and she decided to be encouraged by that.

  Which was just as well, because the next moment, she misjudged the pitch of the floor and fell, banging both knees and scraping one forearm in her effort to keep the lantern safe. Tears started to her eyes, and she had to stay crouched for a moment, the way the svartalfar mostly did instead of sitting, to keep from crying. Apprentices didn’t cry, and wolves did not cry either.

  And then, as her eyes adapted to the new patterns of rock and shadow, she forgot about her throbbing knees. The hole had dropped her into a hallway which stretched farther than she could see in either direction, neither perfectly straight nor quite bent enough to be called curved. The floor was lower than the edge of the hole and slanted, which was what had caused her to fall, and she frowned uneasily at the angle; it wasn’t steep enough to be a ramp from one level of tunnels to another, but it certainly wasn’t level. Or, at least, she thought it certainly wasn’t level, but the longer she looked, twisting her head back and forth to try to get a sense of the whole visible length, the more uneasy about it she became. If she looked at it one way, it really did seem flat, but if she tilted her head just a little differently, the slant was unmistakable. Finally, she pulled out the pouch of pebbles stone-shaped to be perfectly spherical—a parting gift, shyly offered and just as shyly accepted, from her closest aettrynalf friend, Osmium—and picked through them for the one she liked the least, a dull brown-gray and not even glassy smooth. She set it down in front of her and released it, being careful not to push, and watched in considerable relief as it rolled to her right, gathering speed, and disappeared into the dark.