An Apprentice to Elves

by Sarah Monette

  Alfgyfa followed the pillars, the stonestars’ unsteady light dancing around her, down tunnels she had to sidle through sideways and past a steaming waterfall. There was flowstone everywhere, draperies and fantasias of rose, peach, cream, and stranger colors. The air reeked, first of the ammonia of the bats, then of sulfur.

  Since she had been here last, some enterprising aettrynalf (or company thereof) had moved along the edge of the path she followed, setting more stonestars in pleasing patterns of blue and teal and green to mark the border. This was comforting, because the path was no wider than a doorway, and beyond that edge was a plunge so great that when she accidentally kicked a pebble over, she counted thirteen in the silence as it fell. The click and rattle when it finally struck stone at the bottom echoed loudly.

  She remembered the gate and the bell when she reached them, though they looked different from two feet higher up. The bell was amethyst carved in the shape of a trumpet blossom. The gate had been worked by a Master whom Alfgyfa did not know, but whom she longed to meet, if indeed that Master still lived. It might have been natural, a thing of flowstone, so organic did it seem—but the teeth of stone did not reach the roof or floor of the cavern, just met at top and bottom and intertwined. And they were worked with subtle, suggested—almost imagined—figures: the ghostly stone faces of alfar peered out from amid soft, stylized stone leaves and blossoms.

  The gate and the bell were lit by pendant lanterns arching on flowstone brackets from the wall to either side. They glowed with a warm and shadowless light.

  Alfgyfa took up the slender crystal rod that hung beside the bell. Carefully, precisely, she struck the edge of a stone petal once.

  The tone that filled the gate-cavern raised each hair on her arms and on the back of her neck. It rose high and sweet and pure, shivering and echoing in the silence, and seemed to fill the caverns around her with sound as palpable as water. She thought she could lean out over the chasm on it and it might bear her weight. She was almost tempted to try.

  Common sense (“an uncommon commodity,” Tin muttered in her memory) kept her weight over her feet and those feet on good sound stone.

  The gate was unguarded, thus the need for a bell. The gate was immobile to any external means, thus the lack of need for a guard. Someone would be along shortly, Alfgyfa hoped. That trust in providence was a quality that the aettrynalfar would expect their visitors to cultivate.

  If this were a svartalf holding, on the other hand, there would be an apprentice porter on duty to work the gate on its massive stone gears and its alf-wrought cables. (It was alfar who had wrought the impossible cable that kept the Fenris Wolf chained. One or two little belts to move a geared stone gate were not beyond them.)

  Carefully, Alfgyfa hung the crystal wand up again. It was still shivering against her fingers sympathetically when she let go.

  The dark was restful. She was glad of the chance to sit and be silent, both of which were in ever decreasing supply in the heall.

  She did not wait too long.

  Two alfar came briskly up the path behind the gate. One, clad in red robes, walked so close to the cliff edge that his hems trailed over the stonestars set there. They shone through the weave, and Alfgyfa shuddered, but the alf seemed unconcerned. The other, younger and taller—though tallness was a subject of some complexity among alfar, with their stooped posture and elongated limbs (Alfgyfa had often wanted to put a wicket over one of them to judge height, as you might with a hunting dog)—wore rich indigo chased with silver, and a wealth of rings in his ears and gold inlays in his teeth.

  They paused on their side of the gate, and the younger glanced at the elder and said in Alvish, “Who is this human with mud on her knees and stonestars in her hair?”

  The older shrugged under his robes.

  The younger shook himself. He waited a courteous moment to see if his elder would respond, then turned back to the gate. He tilted his head back to meet Alfgyfa’s gaze through the bars and asked, “Who are you?” in Iskryner.

  Alfgyfa answered in Alvish. “I am Alfgyfa, a friend to Osmium, the daughter of Antimony, though I have been gone these seven years. I would like to speak with her, please.”

  Both alfar blinked. Their faces took on the stillness that Alfgyfa knew represented startlement in alfar. She privately called it the don’t-rush-me-I’m-thinking face, because that was what Tin always said if an apprentice tried to interrupt. Alfgyfa waited while they sorted through their emotions and the logic of their decisions—a faster process with aettrynalfar than svartalfar, blessedly.

  Then the elder alf said in Iskryner, “Alfgyfa?” and held his hand about four feet off the floor. And suddenly, Alfgyfa recognized him.

  “Orpiment!” This was Brokkolfr and Kari’s friend, one of Osmium’s wisdom-fathers, and Alfgyfa was a little horrified that she hadn’t recognized him immediately.

  He turned to the younger alf and said, “Agate, crack the gate for a konigenwolf’s brother-daughter.” For all Agate’s visible wealth, he leapt to do Orpiment’s bidding; either wisdom was valued more highly than indigo dye, or Orpiment chose not to waste his wealth on ostentatious displays.

  As Agate scuttled off, Orpiment looked at Alfgyfa and smiled. “You have learned Alvish well, for a human, though your accent—”

  He gave her a mock-severe frown, which involved his entire face and his ears.

  Alfgyfa ducked her head, which would have hidden her smile from a human, but had no such effect on an alf. She said, “I have been apprenticed to Mastersmith Tin of the Iron Lineage in the Iskryne, Elder, as you must be aware.”

  “And now you are a journeyman and returned?”

  She craned a little sideways and was able to see as Agate turned a vast iron wheel and the gate began to glide open. The younger alf turned it only enough for Alfgyfa to slip inside, then closed it again, as if something else might sneak through on her heels. She took all the time the transit afforded her to consider her answer. “I am afraid,” she said, when she was standing next to Orpiment, “that things are a little more complicated than that. I have come to ask a favor of Osmium. If you are willing, I will explain my situation to you both and perhaps you can advise me.”

  Agate fell back into step with them as Orpiment began walking again and Alfgyfa followed. Orpiment took on an air of consideration, waggling his long jeweled fingers in the air as if tapping on the edge of a table. “What advice do you need, Alfgyfa Isolfrsdaughter?”

  “I must ask a question of Osmium’s dama—a complicated matter of politics. I wish to know how best to present it. I don’t want to offend anyone.”

  Osmium’s mother-by-honor was Antimony, the oldest Mastersmith of the aettrynalfar. He was probably their most respected leader; he was certainly the only one Alfgyfa had even a shred of a scrap of a toehold with.

  Orpiment watched her sidelong under his tufted, curling eyebrows for several paces. Finally, he uttered a huff that was the alvish equivalent of Vethulf’s sardonic “well, this ought to be good” and rattled his earrings at her. “Osmium is a journeyman stonesmith.”

  “Already!” Alfgyfa said, proud of her friend. Then her stomach settled worryingly. “Does that mean she’s traveling?”

  “She is here.” Orpiment smiled. “She is an aettrynalf. Where would she go? There is only this steading. But she will take this time to practice for the public good and also to study with other masters. She is very busy.”

  “Journeymen are,” Alfgyfa said. “But this is terribly important. The lives of the heall may depend on it.” Plus the lives of the town and the keep and the whole of the North, but the aettryalfar were themselves such a small community that they—unlike the svartalfar—did not habitually think of groups larger than Franangfordheall, and she did not want to cloud the issue.

  “Ah,” said Orpiment, his eyebrows rising in token of something, although Alfgyfa wasn’t quite sure what. “Then we shall pull her from her duties, shall we?”

  * * *

  Alfgyfa’s
time in Nidavellir had done nothing to make Aettrynheim less spectacular to her, especially now that she was old enough and educated enough to have some idea of how recent this settlement was by alfar standards—and how much work it had taken to make it as it was. Orpiment led her through a city at once as familiar and as alien as childhood. Familiar, for she had spent many hours here before leaving for the Iskryne. Alien, because now she saw with adult eyes what had then been merely a playground of wonders just as taken for granted as were her pack of wolvish playmates.

  Too, she had gained competing experience in Nidavellir, where the motivating aesthetic was very different. Svartalfar tunneled and shaped and made cozy burrows. Alfgyfa looked around with the assessing eyes of Tin’s almost-journeyman and thought that the aettrynalfar built like they were still trying to win an argument.

  The main portion of Aettrynheim—the market square, as it were—was a cavern vast beyond the possibility of glimpsing all its boundaries from one place. Within it there lofted stone spires, smithed from the living rock, that served both as domiciles and shops—their windows glowed cheerily in the subterranean dark—and as pillars to support the distant roof. Above, by craning her head, Alfgyfa could see the arched groins and fan vaults not constructed so much as grown out of the rock, coaxed into being by the aettrynalfar and then limned in phosphorescence to mark out the beauty of their construction.

  This was the same art as that used by the trellwitches to stone-sing their tunnels and warrens, but any doubts she had had about the likeness of the aettrynalfar’s art to that of the trolls were instantly settled and buried.

  Alfgyfa had become adept, in her illicit explorations, in judging distance and shape in trellwarrens—and in understanding that their passageways curled around odd corners of the world such that tunnels or chambers that should overlay each other often occupied slightly offset spaces. Trellwarrens took sometimes more and sometimes less space than they ought, but none of the geometry that Yttrium had beaten into her reluctant head ever did her the slightest good, except to prove that whatever this was, it wasn’t that. It was unsettling. It was unsettling to notice, it was unsettling to figure out, and even once she understood it—as well as she could—it was unsettling to experience.

  And none of it happened here. Here, there was only the glory of stone seemingly freed from its own weight, splashing like water and soaring like flights of birds. The rock blazed in all the colors of flowers, but mostly the lights that ran in veins were a clear, warm color like candlelight, only stronger and steadier.

  It was this art for which the aettrynalfar had been exiled, because the svartalfar considered their stone-shaping to be trellmagic—perverse and an abomination.

  Alfgyfa thought it beautiful, though she would never say so to Tin. She felt the peace working on her even as they crossed the open space at the center of Aettrynheim and headed deeper into the mazes on the far side.

  Some private domiciles were in those pillar-keeps with their balustraded spiral stairs winding up the outside, but more were worked into the warrens at the edges of the cavern. Individual tunnels led back in ranks that stretched as high as Alfgyfa could see. They were accessed by tiered balconies, each atop the other, and many of them had broad windows of quartz at the front so their occupants could enjoy the view of the city.

  Many also connected to other tunnels at the back, and Alfgyfa honestly had no idea how deep under the earth those caverns ran, or how many alfar lived here. As many as in Nidavellir, she thought—but the difference was that these were all the aettrynalfar, everywhere, whereas svartalfhames sprinkled themselves all through the Iskryne and perhaps beyond, in directions where the terrain was too alien and terrible for men to venture aboveground.

  There were lands beyond the Iskryne, Alfgyfa knew, where the world bent south again. The ships of far-traders sailed around their cold, dismaying coastlines. The warm currents that thawed the long peninsula that the men of the North inhabited did not touch those bleak places. In those lands, beneath eternal ice and the calving glaciers that littered the northern seas with ice-castles, who knew what dwelled? Svartalfar, certainly. Duergar, she had heard. Wyverns and Jotunn and gods knew what. Trolls.

  There were so many more svartalfar that aettrynalfar. And the aettrynalfar, too, were at risk from the Rheans, she thought suddenly, though neither aettrynalfar nor Rheans were aware of it. The aettrynalfar lived here, not in the Iskryne. The Rheans could reach them. And the aettrynalfar, who had forsworn war and murder, had not even the reluctant, troll-inspired martial experience that svartalfar did.

  This realization left her feeling unsettled and strange and frightened all over again.

  The other thing that gave Alfgyfa’s skin a strange, sticky, misfit feel was that while she was definitely noticed—and occasionally nodded to or smiled at—by individual alfar in the crowds she and Orpiment moved through, she was not remarkable. Men came here, to this alfhame, regularly enough to be unusual but not shocking. She hadn’t realized how weird it would seem to not be an object of fascination.

  And are you sorry?

  No, she wasn’t, not at all; it was just that it was unsettling.

  Orpiment sent Agate on ahead to whatever the alfar’s original destination had been with orders to make Orpiment’s excuses. Then, stopping twice to ask for directions, he eventually led Alfgyfa to the edge of what must have been a sort of public park or stone-garden. Water ran splashing in little fountains among stepped pools of pastel stone, and delicate ivory-colored walkways arched over them. There, they found Osmium, up to her wrists in mending a park bench that looked to have grown organically out of the floor.

  Orpiment moved so Osmium would see them when she raised her head, and the two waited quietly. It would not do to startle her, break her concentration, and perhaps leave her hands—bone and flesh—imbedded forever in stone.

  Alfgyfa wasn’t sure if Osmium noticed them at once or not, because she didn’t raise her head. She was glad of the time to study her childhood friend, now a grown alf, robed in a deep blue-green, the draping sleeves rolled up and pushed back to reveal her long, dark, bony arms to above the elbow. She had her first tattoos already, marking her transition to journeyman and adulthood. And she worked with intense focus; from watching Tin, Alfgyfa suspected than an older master would probably work more casually, more easily, but she thought about the possibility of Osmium’s hands being left behind in the stone when she pulled away and didn’t feel inclined to judge.

  And she watched as the stone stretched and sought, rising up to heal a gap knocked in the scrolling decorations on the nearest leg of the bench.

  Five minutes or so later, Osmium slid her hands from the stone and raised her head to smile at Alfgyfa and Orpiment. She patted the healed base of the bench as Alfgyfa might pat the dirt near a fresh-planted pea shoot, and stood.

  “Alfgyfa,” she said.

  Osmium held her arms wide, and Alfgyfa went and crouched to hug her, awkward as this maneuver always was between human and alf. “Osmium,” she replied, feeling uncomfortable and curiously formal. Osmium set her at arm’s length—and an alf’s arms were very long—and regarded her with a smile.

  “You’ve grown muscles,” she said.

  Whatever alienation had possessed Alfgyfa for a moment, she breathed it out then, as she replied, “And you’ve grown arms.”

  Osmium laughed and let her go with a pat not unlike the one she’d given to the bench. “Are you a journeyman, then?”

  “It’s a long story. I need your help, and Orpiment’s. Or, I should say, I need to find out if you are willing to help. Or at least to listen.”

  “You need never doubt that I will listen. May I offer you a tisane?”

  Alfgyfa knew from Osmium’s hopeful look—and her knowledge from Nidavellir how new journeymen behaved—that she wanted to show off her lodgings, so she said, “Yes, please.”

  Osmium bustled around enough packing up her tools that Alfgyfa thought it might almost be a cover for nervousne
ss. Perversely, that too made her feel better.

  Orpiment watched and said nothing.

  As they walked, Osmium pointed out bits of the city she had worked on—her repairs and amendments, her elaborations and adaptations. They were all small, as befitted a journeyman’s work, but Alfgyfa liked them, and she recognized that some of them were quite clever.

  It wasn’t far from the park to Osmium’s home. Osmium led them to a spiral stair, and they climbed it as it wound the perimeter of one of the pillar-towers. The railings felt smooth under Alfgyfa’s hands. They were carved—or shaped, maybe—to resemble ancient, espaliered grapevines naked in winter, the terminal branches twisted together to form the shape of the ascending banister.

  Osmium lived high above the city. Her door was a wonderful ochre orange that reminded Alfgyfa of autumn and butterfly wings. Osmium opened it not with a key but with a stroke of her fingers; Alfgyfa imagined her shaping the stone within to release a latch. The door swung wide as silently and smoothly as if it were a living limb, not a construct on hinges.

  Osmium stepped within, and her guests followed.

  The tower flat was small and cozy, taking up—by its shape—perhaps a fifth to a quarter of the diameter of the massive pillar. Alfgyfa could see at once how the apartments would be staggered within the tower, rising on a spiral with the staircases. Off to her left, in fact, was an elevated area of this flat, serving as a bedchamber and library, which was separated from the entry, living area, and cooking area by shallow steps. The raised floor, Alfgyfa guessed, represented the ceiling of a staggered flat below. This flat’s ceiling was low enough, as was usual with alvish domestic architecture, that Alfgyfa had to go crouchbacked; she was long accustomed to doing so in Nidavellir, but having been free of it, even for a short time, reminded her now of just how uncomfortable it was.