An Apprentice to Elves

by Sarah Monette

  It is a wolf! she had scolded herself, rubbing angrily at her eyes. Not a man! But she had lived among the wolves and wolfcarls for almost five years at that point, and she had known, even as she told herself she was being foolish, childish, soft, that she would miss Hroi—and she proved it for weeks after his death, as every time she came into the kitchen, she looked, as reflexively as breathing, to find him in that warm, perfectly wolf-shaped spot between the bread oven and the hearth. It hurt, almost as much as it hurt watching Sokkolfr working and bartering and building walls, and yet all the time a man without his shadow, as in an old, old story her mother’s mother had told her when she was a child.

  She said nothing, for there was nothing to say. But she took it upon herself to see that Sokkolfr had food to eat that was easy and appetizing and required no thought—even though that took creativity, it being winter. And she listened, when he found it in himself to talk.

  When Sokkolfr took a new brother, a gangly wheaten-coated pup of Viradechtis’ whelping—clearly Kjaran’s get by his odd eyes, palest blue and gleaming gold—Otter was surprised by her own delight, by the warmth it gave her to see them together, Sokkolfr and Tryggvi, a man and his shadow, and she found herself smiling more readily at Sokkolfr, even as she laughed at the way Tryggvi leaned into her legs to ask to have his ears rumpled.

  The wolfjarl Vethulf was a shouter and a stormer. Vethulf-in-the-Fire some of his shieldmates called him, and it suited him, with his blazing red hair and his blazing temper. No one could be more unlike Skjaldwulf or more unlike Isolfr. At first, Otter had been afraid that he would hurt one of them—or that he would take his temper out on the nearest convenient woman, as she was long accustomed to men doing. But no matter how loudly he shouted, or how inventively he cursed, he never raised his hand to his lover or his wolfsprechend … or to Otter herself. Slowly she came to believe that he never would, although she still did not like to have him between her and the door.

  Even more slowly, she came to understand that Isolfr did not resent her for her share of Skjaldwulf’s affection. He was hard to read, his face marked—she had been told—by the claws of a trellqueen. And he didn’t talk to her, not as Skjaldwulf did or Sokkolfr did—or even as Vethulf did when he wasn’t yelling.

  She had assumed at first that he scorned her—a Brythoni slave woman, why should he not? But some months after Thorlot had made friends in her forthright fashion, she had remarked, “I would not have approached you—many women do not care for the company of a woman smith and I haven’t the time to waste on them—but Isolfr said I should.”

  “Isolfr?” Otter had asked, blinking over the bucket in which she scrubbed shirts. She could blame the lye soap, surely, for the sting of her eyes.

  Thorlot was a big woman, her eyes very blue in her forge-roughened face, her ginger hair streaked at the temples with enough gray to show that she was older than Isolfr. Isolfr was not much older than Otter, though the scars on both Otter’s face and the wolfsprechend’s hid their youth. Thorlot gave Otter a bright, thoughtful look and said, “Isolfr worries.”

  “About me?”

  “You are Skjaldwulf’s daughter, and you are far from your home. Of course he worries. And Isolfr knows what it is to be the white raven.”

  She met Otter’s eyes steadily, trusting her with this truth—a truth that turned Otter’s understanding of Isolfr upside down. Not resentment, but shyness; not contempt, but concern. And Thorlot the shieldmaiden guarding his back.

  Isolfr had worried, and Thorlot had extended kindness. She would have died for them that afternoon. As she thought of what the Rheans would do to them, she knew that her fear was not for herself: the Rheans couldn’t take this away from her, because she knew it was only a respite. But they could take Isolfr and Thorlot away from each other.

  That was a bad day. That was the day Otter realized she had begun again to care.

  TWO

  Whatever her other frustrations in the house of the svartalfar, Alfgyfa loved the work. The smithing work, anyway: there were other tasks that delighted her less, such as caring for her foster brother Girasol, Tin’s son, once he arrived.

  He was Tin’s second child. Her first, a daughter named Rhodium who was a little younger than Alfgyfa, had been sent fostering to a household of the Iron Lineage in another alfhame, for complicated alfish reasons that Alfgyfa tried not to listen to. Girasol, being a less valuable male, would stay with his mother. His father and his facilitating parent, though certainly known, never seemed very important. Alfgyfa, whose experience had all been the other way around—she knew who her mother was, of course, but it was her father who was the center of her world—found it disconcerting, but she never doubted that Tin loved her son.

  It must be said that svartalf babes, for a mercy, were not so helpless as human ones. They clung under their mothers’ robes with strong spidery fingers almost from the moment they were born. Perhaps that was the secret to the svartalfar’s unearthly strength: there was simply no part of a svartalf’s existence when it was not engaged in some physical task that was desperately essential for life. When Tin wished a reprieve from Girasol—when she would be working close in to fire and steel, for example—she reached into her robes and pried his tiny fingers free of her flesh, then handed him off to one of the apprentices.

  He was, in that way, much less trouble than a babe in a sling.

  But it must also be said that svartalf babes, for a tribulation, were not so helpless as human ones. His fingers might be delicate—almost unimaginably fine, like the teeth of a reindeer-horn comb. But they were also unimaginably strong, and they pulled Alfgyfa’s hair and left bruises on her arms and shoulders where he perched. And he was much more mobile than a human infant, and from a younger age. He could quite outscamper her, and the other apprentices never let her forget the times she had to come to them to retrieve him from some unlikely perch.

  She also tended the shaggy little ponies of Nidavellir, as the alfhame was called. They were beasts no larger than a dog-trellwolf, often spotted of coat, round-bellied and hard-hooved. But they could do the work of any cart horse or reindeer Alfgyfa had known, hauling ore and victuals in carts to and fro. They were perfectly at home in the tunnels, and you could see them trotting cheerfully along the wider thoroughfares of the alfhame as if they trotted along some grand boulevard under a bright spring sun. Their hooves clopped bright echoes, and in their harness stonestars glimmered, and bells rang down the long passages of worked stone.

  But child-minding and animal husbandry were not all of her duties—or even the most of them. And before long, Girasol grew to the age where he was ’prenticed himself, and then Alfgyfa was no longer the youngest and least of Tin’s household. As the seven years of her apprenticeship passed, so she learned. Smiths did all sorts of work, but Alfgyfa loved best the blades—axes, swords, even knives for cutting vegetables. She loved the work of making crucible steel: taking iron ore and mixing it with burned bone—from trellwolves, ancestors, bears, sometimes even trolls, depending on the purpose of the blade—for strength and resilience. When a svartalf died, her remains were wrapped and scented with great ceremony, then burned in a refining fire with ore. The charcoal that remained of the bones became part of an alloy with which blades or baubles were made for those who wished to remember her.

  Alfgyfa thought this was an excellent form of funeral, and even better than burning in a boat, as Ingrun’s brother Randulfr had once told her was the tradition of his home country.

  Along with the ore and bone, the crucible—a cylindrical pottery vessel—was filled with chips of glass and sand. (This sand and glass would bond to the slag, and help leave the remaining steel pure, once it was hammered clean. Sometimes, for particular weapons, the glass and sand were chosen from significant sources as well. There was a blade in the entrance hall of Tin’s home that had been wrought by one of her foremothers, and the fragments of glass for its refining had been salvaged from a cobalt-tinted window broken in the attack that started
a clan feud. When the feud was ended, the weapon was hung up forever.)

  The filled crucible was then covered and sealed up with clay slip, just like the clay slip Alfgyfa had already learned to use to fix a handle to a drinking cup before it was fired.

  Many mastersmiths shared one furnace cavern. When it was time for the ore to be refined, each crucible was marked with the seal of the particular smith who had filled it—or, more likely, who had caused it to be filled by her apprentices. The crucibles were buried in charcoal in a cave that touched the surface: one designed so it caught the wind and channeled it into the heart of the fire—and the heat and fumes of the furnace rose up chimneys so the fire, in its own turn, created a draft and drew ever more breath.

  At its height, the air feeding the blaze whistled through the mountainside so that it was like lying under the belly of a dragon. The whole of the warrens grew warm when the smelter was fired. And even after the furnaces were cool enough to approach, Alfgyfa loved that one must go into them only in thick shoes padded with wool and leather, which burned and crackled and scorched around one’s feet. The crucibles glowed yellow-white when the apprentices pulled them from the ashes, and Alfgyfa loved that, too.

  Alfgyfa loved also the forge. She loved the singing of the hammers—Mastersmith Tin’s, and those of her journeymen Jade and Nickel. She loved when she was allowed to pick up her own hammer and stand in a circle with the other apprentices around an anvil. The Master or one of the journeymen would tap a spot on cherry-colored iron, and the apprentices’ blows must fall in the same place, in quick sequence, one after the other like the patter of the raindrops that these caverns would never know. Alfgyfa loved swinging her hammer with all her might, feeling the pull across her shoulders, and the quick elastic slam into hot metal, and then the tug and skitter as she whipped her hammer away before the next one fell.

  When they worked on the raw steel from the crucibles, with each blow impurities showered from the metal in cascades of brilliant sparks. They hammered and hammered until the steel was clean.

  She even loved the ceaseless labor at the bellows, where each of the apprentices took turns pumping the leather-wrapped wooden handles for the hours and hours required to refine steel. When Alfgyfa began, she could barely move the bellows. She was not as strong as an alf, and her small human hands barely spanned the broad handles. She would stand on her tiptoes and strain, pushing down with her whole body, until one of the other apprentices came and added his or her weight to Alfgyfa’s. But eventually, as months passed—not that the svartalfar measured time in months, the moon being as alien a light to them as the sun—Alfgyfa gained in weight and strength and muscle until she could take her turn with the alfar, unassisted.

  She loved too the shaping of the blade, the folding and refolding, the care that must be taken with temperature and the force of the hammer blows.

  But she loved most of all the quench—the moment when the forged steel was lifted in tongs, glowing dully, and slid into the cask of oil that awaited it. There was a delicious sort of dread in the moment when she strained her ear for the plink or ting of cracking metal—of a failed quench, and effort wasted, and metal that could now only be recast and reforged. But what she loved best was that moment when a blank blade was lifted, flaming, from the cask, and the burning oil spattered from it like dragon’s tears.

  And in all of this, she loved also the incongruities in what Tin told her—told all the apprentices—about smithing. “Blacksmithing is gentle. It is not a thing of brute force, but patience and coaxing. You lead the form out of the metal. You lead the metal to become what it should. If you force it or rush it, the gate will warp, the nail will be brittle.”

  Pearl asked, “What about blades?” thereby saving Alfgyfa the trouble.

  “Most of what we smith is not blades, child. But yes, a blade that is rushed will be brittle, and it will shatter. If not in the quench, then when a life is at stake.

  “You will find,” she added, looking at Alfgyfa, “that this principle applies much more widely than just the forge.”

  * * *

  Tithe-boys were not the bane of Otter’s existence, for Otter’s existence in the heall was largely too contented (she did not use the word happy, not even to herself) to admit of banes. But they were, more frequently than not, a source of ongoing irritation and a damnable nuisance.

  Otter was no one’s mother. Was not, in her estimation, cut from cloth well-suited to the task of raising children. And yet here she was, along with Thorlot, acting foster mother for this pack of beasts and the wolves that kept them.

  In her calmer moments, she’d entertain that thought, then remind herself that it was somewhat uncharitable. At least wolfcarls, by and large, did their own laundry. And they made sure the tithe-boys learned that the heall women had duties beyond playing their personal servants also.

  The current batch, gathered in anticipation of the unborn puppies maturing in the belly of the young bitch recently traded from Ketillhill, were a fine example. Two of them were but fourteen—young to come to the heall—and four were the more usual fifteen or sixteen winters. But it was an odd side effect of the end of the trellwar that more young men survived, and so there were more young men seeking their profession in the wolfheallan even as the wolfheallan became less critical to the defense of the North. After years of scraping and scrimping, the Franangfordheall was swimming in tithe-boys.

  The trellwolves seemed to handle the change in fortune more economically: recent litters of the older Franangford bitches had been on the small side. The end result was that, in addition to the six newly arrived boys in want of a future, there were three tithe-boys left over from Amma’s and Viradechtis’ last litters. And these youths were well into the category that Otter would consider men.

  None of them was an awful person, precisely. But Canute, Tunni, and Varin had too much idle time on their hands, being too old for lessons beyond swordplay—and, being unwolfed, were in a strange position with regard to the threat and the heall. They didn’t belong to the wolfsprechend yet. But nor did they belong to anyone else.

  Brokkolfr did his best to manage them. But Brokkolfr was not their mother either, and he too had a limited number of hours in his day. As Isolfr’s second—and the better human politician of the two, though no one could match Isolfr when it came to settling conflict between wolves—Brokkolfr had enough to do managing stresses between wolfcarls.

  In any case, right now, standing in the spring mud with a collapsed hide-stretching rack in ruins before her, Otter was feeling anything but charitable toward tithe-boys. And great grown nearly men tithe-boys least of all.

  Among their other failings, they did have a tendency to show off for Thorlot’s daughter Mjoll and the other young women of similar age. And Mjoll, for all her general good sense, was still young enough to be flattered, even though she liked the tithe-boys no better than Otter did.

  Which was why, after she came to tell Otter about the incident in the yard, Otter had asked her to stay inside and see to the porridge for the next little while. Mjoll had blushed blotchy red, and Otter knew she didn’t need to say anything more.

  Otter drew herself up and looked across the mud of the kitchen yard to Tunni, Varin, and—always the ringleader—Canute. The other two boys—great, grown boys! She would indeed start thinking of them as men, if only they would act like it!—clustered slightly behind Canute, the tallest. They were all trying to look nonchalant. Or as nonchalant as one could look with mud-stained breeches and a bloodied nose.

  Cause in a wolfheall, Otter had learned, was a tricky thing. The pregnant bitch from Ketillhill was a nondescript agouti tawny named Athisla, and this was her second litter, her first at Franangford. She was sly, and a bit of a trickster—Frithulf’s brother Kothran had taken to her immediately, and there was some excitement in the heall anticipating just how clever the cubs in this litter might be. Her brother Ulfhundr was young and timid—for a wolfcarl—and very much under his wolf’s paw, as the
wolfcarls said.

  If Mjoll was flattered by the tithe-boys’ attention, Athisla actively sought it. She knew they were going to be competing for her puppies, and just as she’d encouraged scuffles between her potential mates before her heat, Otter was sure her sly dun snout was in back of this mess somewhere, even if Otter herself would never understand exactly how.

  You could learn a lot about wolves if you paid attention in a wolfheall, even if you’d never be able to speak to them yourself. And you learned even more about boys, whether you wanted to or not.

  She sighed and looked at the three boys. They quieted, watching her warily back. She said, “Would anyone care to explain what happened here?”

  They all exchanged glances. Canute straightened up slightly and said, “We were … roughhousing.”

  “Canute,” she said. “Come over here.”

  He started toward her with a glance to his two friends. Tunni and Varin hesitated, then trailed along as raggedly as the sheep at the edge of the herd who were just begging to be picked off by predators. Otter raised her eyebrows at them—are you sure you want to be part of this discussion?—and they dropped back somewhat, but kept coming. She would commend their loyalty, if not their brains.

  She studied Canute while he crossed the yard, red mud sucking at the soles of his boots. He might have eighteen winters on him, but he wore them like a scarecrow’s coat. He tugged the hem of his outgrown jerkin down as he walked. It wasn’t too tight, merely too short, as if, like a shaded sapling, all his winter’s resources had gone to growing height rather than breadth. If he gained the breadth to match his height, he would be a bull of a man. And probably still an idiot.

  Canute stopped before her, close enough that she had to crane her head back for a view of the underside of his chin and the sharpness of his cheeks and jawline. His hair was a streaky brown-blond under the mud matted into it. What she could glimpse of his expression was equal parts rebellious and crestfallen.