An Apprentice to Elves

by Sarah Monette

  Greensmoke’s answer was understanding, sympathy. And then alarm—sudden and sharp and quickly followed by aggression, angry and unsubtle, a mother’s fury when her home was invaded.

  Athisla leaped up. Amma too, one very stubborn cub still clinging to her teat, but swiftly shaken loose as she stepped forward. Mar was beside them, all trace of a limp lost as his hackles rose and his lip curled into a snarl.

  Brokkolfr, Ulfhundr, and Sokkolfr were up as well, remains of their luncheons scattered around their feet where they had fallen. The new wolfcarls huddled behind them, hands hovering uncertainly, waiting to be told. All the men were lightly armed, Alfgyfa realized as a sinking sensation seized her gut—a few bows, spears, daggers. No swords or axes, and no shields.

  They were armed for a hunt. Not a battle.

  The bitches fell back as Mar shouldered forward. Alfgyfa found herself on her feet, spear raised in guard. She stepped forward beside the old wolf, felt his gratitude.

  Idocrase was right behind her. “What is it?”

  “Rheans,” Brokkolfr said.

  “Run?” Sokkolfr asked.

  Ulfhundr shook his head. “Coming right for us. They know we’re here.”

  Sokkolfr glanced quickly over his shoulder. “Boys, get your pups in the middle.” The new wolfcarls scrambled to obey, while Athisla circled, helping. She stood over the small pile of cubs, snarling so low in her throat that Alfgyfa felt the vibration in her belly.

  Thank the gods that Otter isn’t here, Alfgyfa thought, and tested her grip on her spear.

  * * *

  The Rheans came through the trees in a broken line, encumbered by their great rectangular shields. Alfgyfa had heard they marched in lockstep like so many cart horses, but apparently the lack of roads impeded them. They scrambled over tree trunks and chopped branches out of their way with short, heavy-bladed swords.

  The mist swirled around them, showing glimpses of bronze helms, red shields, skirts made of armored leather straps protecting the tops of bare legs. One, toward the back, had some kind of horsehair crest sticking up from his helm, and Alfgyfa wished even more that she had a bow, or knew how to use it effectively if she did.

  A couple of the new wolfcarls had bows, however. She couldn’t remember the new name of either to save her life.

  “You with the bows,” she said, keeping her voice low in case somebody among the Rheans spoke proper Iskryner.

  Both boys looked up.

  She jerked her chin. The Rheans had slowed a little, catching sight of the armed men and wolves awaiting them. “The one in the back,” Alfgyfa said. “With the crest. That might be the commander.” One boy—the ginger—seemed to get it. He nocked an arrow. The other looked at her quizzically. “Shoot him.”

  “Oh.” He looked quite green, or maybe that was only the weird light through the mist.

  “I’ve never killed anybody before either,” she remarked.

  On her left, Sokkolfr replied mildly, “We all have to start somewhere.”

  One of the Rheans shouted something, brandishing his sword. Alfgyfa was pretty sure it was a demand to surrender. She looked over at Sokkolfr. He shook his head, shortly. No.

  “Idocrase, are you armed?”

  He laughed, but not as if anything were funny. When she glanced at him, he showed her his little woodsman’s axe. “Better than a sharp stick.”

  “What were you going to hunt with?”

  “I was going to watch!”

  The Rhean in the back shouted this time, and the others began to run forward. There were perhaps twenty of them—actually, from what Otter had said, Alfgyfa would have been prepared to bet that there were exactly twenty of them—and Northmen and wolves were outnumbered as well as outarmed.

  “Loose!” she shouted to the bowmen, and heard the hiss of arrows leaving the string. If either struck home, she didn’t see, because as the Rheans broke into the clearing, they tried to converge and lock their shields together into an impenetrable wall. But one tripped on a tree root, and Alfgyfa lunged forward, darting with her spear. It slipped between shields and pinked one soldier in the chest.

  She was so surprised she neglected to put the force of her hammer arm behind it.

  “Shit!” she said, as the Rhean jumped back. She lunged forward, shoving hard, and this time the spear bit hard and skipped up the man’s breastplate to wedge against the flange that protected his throat. He went backward over a fallen tree, legs pinwheeling. Another arrow whisked past her—she heard it—and then somebody had her by the collar and was yanking her back, too.

  Brokkolfr. “Stay in line!” he bellowed. He gave her collar a shake and let her go, exactly like a mother wolf with a pup. He had a spear as well and put his shoulder to hers. The Rheans hesitated, clustering. One of them reached to help the fallen man to his feet. The man limped. Alfgyfa strained through the mist but could not spot the crested helm.

  At her side, Mar snarled. Sokkolfr was just beyond him, Ulfhundr one more on. Idocrase stood on Brokkolfr’s other side. Behind them, cubs and boys.

  The Rheans had sorted themselves. Someone shouted again. Alfgyfa leveled her spear. Remembered, this is to kill. Aim for the flesh.

  The Rheans came on. Someone pushed at Alfgyfa’s back. One of the new wolfcarls, bracing her to withstand the charge. She set the butt of her spear, found a point of aim. Screamed with an open mouth as the Rhean shields reached her.

  She would have gone down, but her aim was true. Her spear chipped the top of the broad Rhean shield and slid into the eye of the man behind it. He fell forward, pulling the shield-wall open. Mar was there, slashing at hamstrings. The old wolf fought as if his teeth were sabers, cutting and whirling and cutting again. Alfgyfa’s spear shaft snapped against the upper edge of the fallen Rhean’s shield. Chaos on all sides, men screaming, wolves snarling. But the pop of that stick of wood echoed through her whole body.

  She ducked, parried up with the bit of haft she still held. Remembered Brokkolfr’s admonition and did not lunge forward. Just dropped to her knees and snatched up the Rhean’s little sword. It was broad, though, and heavy. Both her hands fit on the hilt. She got it up just in time. Got a foot under her and lunged up, trusting Sokkolfr to parry for her. He stopped a cut she never saw, but only heard, and she plunged the blade up under the next Rhean’s shield and into his groin.

  She missed the pelvic bone. She felt the softness as the blade went in, and wrenched it back out again. She lost Mar in the combat. Heard him snarling. Heard Sokkolfr shout and one of the tithe-boys scream. Parried a blow meant for Idocrase, who used his reach and his little axe to blindside one of the Rheans and lop the man’s hand off at the wrist. It swung there, bones severed, connected by a strip of flesh.

  The man gripped his new stump and sat down.

  That was the enemy before her. Behind her, a crescendo of snarling. The gravelly roar of wolves who mean uncompromisingly to rend. She smacked her sword blade into the downed man’s face to keep him from changing his mind and whirled. Three Rheans in among the new wolfcarls. Two down already. Amma and Athisla flanking a third, ripping him between them like a rag doll.

  There was the tall one—Varghoss. He stood over his fat little Feigr, and they both snarled. A Rhean all but sauntered up to them, and suddenly there were two more with him. Alfgyfa didn’t know where they had come from. Metal on metal, screams and grunting all around.

  Idocrase lunged forward, swinging his axe, and Mar was there as well. Athisla, bleeding from a gash on her shoulder, shook her teeth free of the Rhean she had been mauling and noticed her cub’s jeopardy. The Rhean sword came down, and Varghoss parried with his spear haft, shunting the blow aside. The wood held, but chips flew. It wouldn’t hold another time.

  Alfgyfa caught a flicker of motion from the corner of her eye. She whirled—just in time—and parried a Rhean sword. She struck back, viciously, all her forge-strength behind it. Whether it was that or the shock on the man’s face when he realized he was fighting a woman, she did n
ot know. But she batted his blade aside and plunged her sword into his throat. He sagged, heavy on a blade stuck in bone. She kicked him off it and swung back to Mar and Idocrase and the cubs—

  Too late. Mar snarled over Varghoss’ prone body, crouched, defenseless as the blow came down, and she could not reach him. Idocrase got his axe in the way, shunted the blow aside, but there was another Rhean right beside this one and no way to block both blows.

  Feigr came out of nowhere, all third of a wolf of him, and buried his milk teeth in the Rhean’s leather bracer. The Rhean’s blow went wide, knocked aside by the weight of the cub. Mar hamstrung him, but he didn’t fall, just knocked the old wolf aside with his heavy shield.

  Mar went sprawling. The third Rhean slashed at downed Varghoss, who groped a log up off the forest floor in time to parry. Feigr clung to the Rhean’s vambrace, feet swinging. The Rhean was dragged wide open, shield akimbo from striking Mar.

  Idocrase opened him up from sternum to belly button with a hard overhand blow. But there was another right behind him—two more. And Mar was back, savaging the Rhean who had swung at Varghoss. Varghoss took advantage of the moment’s respite to clamber to his feet. He grabbed a downed Rhean’s sword in passing, and now he was armed again.

  There were too many of them, and they came from everywhere. Alfgyfa’s respite ended—there was another, a big man, swinging his sword with dreadful force. She ducked aside; Brokkolfr skewered him from behind. She gasped for breath.

  She heard a thud, and a piteous whine.

  She turned to see Mar—gallant Mar, bravest of the wolves of Franangford, companion of her childhood—hurl himself between a descending sword and Idocrase’s unprotected back. Her screamed NO! was still within her lips as the blade pierced his back, emerged from his breast, and was torn from the Rhean’s hand by the power of Mar’s lunge.

  The wolf’s leap followed the man’s arm inside the protection of his shield. His teeth slashed through the Rhean’s throat. Blood flowered. They fell together, the wolf as if embraced by the man’s arm under the protection of his shield.

  Alfgyfa stood stunned. It would have been her death, too, had not the woods around them resounded, suddenly, with a chorus of what seemed like thousands of howls. Greensmoke! There, in the mist among the trees, flitting shapes. There and gone, surrounded by echoes that rang from the strange shapes of stones and trees to fill the forest. It seemed like ten dozen wolves had surrounded them, not a twentieth that number.

  It was too much for the fragile-spirited Rheans and their superstitious leanings. Too much by far. Perhaps, if their leader had been with them, they might have rallied. But from wherever he had hung back, among the trees, his scream ripped the gray day open. He whimpered. A wolf snarled.

  The remaining Rheans were in flight already, stumbling through the woods, dragging one another. It was Alfgyfa’s life that they fled, because her sword sagged with her arm and her knees buckled.

  Brokkolfr caught her. Idocrase was on the other side. Sokkolfr had run to Mar and was dragging the dead Rhean’s heavy shield arm aside. And from somewhere nearby, arose a savage, quavering howl … intermixed with human sobbing.

  Alfgyfa blinked her eyes into focus. She draped her arm around Brokkolfr’s shoulders and pushed up, turned, seeking the source of the sound. Too late, she remembered the whimper before Mar was injured.

  … Killed. Before Mar was killed.

  She closed her eyes again. But not before she saw Athisla and Varghoss, who had been Canute so recently, huddled together over the broken body of the fierce, fat little pup.

  The wild wolves stood forward, just within the curling mist. They showed themselves around the clearing, and everyone—wolf and human—within its bower stood to face them except the grieving mother and the grieving brother of the slain cub. Greensmoke’s jowls frothed with blood. Alfgyfa did not have to ask where it had come from.

  They faded away then, and were gone in the blowing, milky swirls.

  * * *

  What limped back to Franangford in the evening was very different indeed from what had trotted cheerfully forth only that morning. Otter had been waiting for them—had been waiting for them without wishing to seem that she was waiting for them—and heard the cry go up from the wall. It was Jorhildr, playing on the battlements, and her voice sent a spike of stark bitter-cold fear into Otter’s heart—because what she voiced was not a glad shout, but a shriek of horror.

  Otter hit the steps by the gate a stride behind Thorlot. She stumbled, and if the stone had not still been rough and new, she might have slipped, but it gritted under her boot leather and held. Rheans, she thought, calculating whether she and Thorlot could get to the gatehouse in time to drop the portcullis and winch down the heavy iron-banded door. Thorlot clutched Jorhildr against her hip as she crouched. She glanced through a crenellation and gasped.

  Otter knew it would be bad before she looked. But when she nerved herself and glanced between merlons, what she saw struck her to the heart very differently from what she had anticipated. There were Sokkolfr, and Brokkolfr, and Alfgyfa, and the humped shamble of cloaks that was the svartalf Idocrase. And there were the new wolfcarls, mostly carrying their cubs in their arms. And there were Varghoss and Ulfhundr, leaning on each other at the back of the group.

  Sokkolfr and Brokkolfr carried a litter between them, and on that litter was a collapsed-seeming heap of bloody fur.

  “Oh, no,” someone said, and it was Otter.

  She reached out, as if she could reach Sokkolfr from up here. Reach Mar from up here. Reach across all the space and time between herself and her foster father and cradle Skjaldwulf’s head in her arms, hug him close, soak up the savage grief he must be feeling. He knew. He’d known before she had. He would have felt it happen, and she tasted brutal shame that she had not somehow sensed his pain and need.

  “Oh, no,” Otter said again. “Oh, Mar.”

  “One of the cubs too,” Thorlot said. She was longsighted. She snaked the arm that was not holding Jorhildr close, and gave Otter a hard squeeze. “Run down, fetch Kathlin. There may still be something that can be done.”

  But there wasn’t, and Otter knew it by the bow of Sokkolfr’s head and the hitch in his stride before she ever descended the stair.

  She went carefully, mindful of the railless, rough-hewn stone. She would have liked to descend in an avalanche, but how would it help Sokkolfr or Skjaldwulf if she broke her neck in a fall?

  She fetched Kathlin and met the men at the gates. Mjoll was close at their heels, lugging buckets of boiling water and clean rags by the dozen. But that was the biggest irony of all: other than bruises and scrapes and strains and scratches, there were no injuries except those that had proved fatal for Mar and Feigr.

  Sword wounds, quite obviously. Rhean swords: the one that had murdered Mar was still run through his body.

  Sokkolfr hugged her hard when he saw her, and she bit her lip and managed not to sob against his shoulder. It would have been better if she could scream and punch something, but by now the children had gathered, and she was resolved that she would show them strength and calm.

  “How many?” she asked him, when he finally let her loose.

  “Twenty?” He shrugged and said with flat satisfaction, “Mar got his own back.”

  She saw the blood on the old wolf’s mouth and was not surprised. She turned to Varghoss. Ulfhundr had been supporting him as much as walking beside him, and as the hunting party came to a halt and lowered the stretcher across two sawhorses that thralls brought out, Ulfhundr’s grip changed to physically restraining him. Varghoss wanted to charge up and wrest his cub from Hel’s grasp, quite obviously. And he would just as obviously collapse if Ulfhundr didn’t hold him up.

  Sokkolfr reached out and stroked Mar’s bloody ear. “Bloody old hero. He saved the cubs. He saved Idocrase.”

  Varghoss’ sob broke clear. He jerked his face up and glared at Sokkolfr. “Not all the cubs.”

  “Not all the cubs,” Sokkol
fr agreed. He said formally, “I mourn our loss with you, threatbrother. Feigr is with Othinn All-Father now.”

  Varghoss wailed. He tore at Ulfhundr’s grip with a sudden strength that surprised the bitch’s brother, and leaped for Sokkolfr. Sokkolfr might have seen it coming. He might not. But Otter felt the impact of bodies as the younger man piled into him.

  The wolfcarls rolled on the ground, struggling. Sokkolfr was obviously trying to restrain Varghoss—to wrap him in a bear hug, clutch at his wrists, slow him down. Varghoss was swinging for teeth and broken bones, screaming incoherencies between sobs.

  He might have been a more effective fighter if he had been able to see through his tear-choked eyes, if he hadn’t been wasting his breath shouting that it was Sokkolfr’s fault Feigr had died. As it was, Brokkolfr and Ulfhundr were on him before Otter had even fully registered the attack, and he didn’t manage to do Sokkolfr much more than damage a bloody nose before they pulled him off.

  Physically, at least. Ulfhundr and Brokkolfr hauled him away, struggling and cursing. Alfgyfa seemed about to step forward—she looked from one to the other, obviously uncertain of what to do, and Idocrase laid one of his twiggy gloved hands on her outreached wrist.

  She glanced down at him. Whatever she might have been considering saying, though, was lost in Varghoss’ shout. “It’s your fault he’s dead! You’re a nithling and a coward, and you didn’t protect him!”

  Sokkolfr, who had been halfway through hoisting himself off the ground, stopped and covered his eyes with his hand. “I ask you to reconsider your words, Varghoss.”

  “Coward!” Varghoss cried again, straining against the men who held his arms. “And I claim my right of combat in recompense. I claim the holmgang!”

  * * *

  “But you don’t have to agree to go out there and fight him!”

  Otter had intended to be sensible and sweet. She had intended to use low tones, to speak in measured cadences, and to convince Sokkolfr of the irrefutable reason of her position.

  What came out—as soon as they were alone together—was more of a squawk.