A Companion to Wolves

by Sarah Monette

  There was no blame apportioned. It was not Glaedir’s fault Kolli had died, any more than it was Kolgrimna’s fault she had gone into heat. It was the way of the wolfthreat, and when Eyjolfr, ashen-faced but determined, came to keep vigil, Hrolfmarr seemed more glad than otherwise.

  Cremation was a matter of the werthreat; the wolves accepted this madness of their brothers philosophically. All the werthreat who could stagger followed the boys as they carried Kolli’s body to the pyre beyond the practice field. This was where Ulfmaer had been immolated, and Asny’s pup who’d been born dead, and others, wolves and men, whom Isolfr had never met but found he mourned. Eyjolfr stood by Hrolfmarr, Glaedir pressed anxiously against his brother, and Viradechtis and Kothran, Eitri and Authun and Harekr, like frightened children, made a small anxious wolfthreat of their own as their brothers lit the stacked wood and resin and stood shoulder to shoulder, their faces scorched by the heat.

  No one said anything, but Hrolfmarr’s shoulders were straighter when the fire died to blowing ashes, and Isolfr could feel something shift in the pack-sense, like a stressed muscle releasing its tension.

  Isolfr threw himself into the business of holding household with grim determination because doing was better than thinking. He and Sokkolfr between them organized Frithulf and three or four others into dragging out meat for the wolfthreat, although none of them had the first idea how to cook for the werthreat and could provide no better than cheese and pease porridge and winter apples. And ale. Lots of ale. The werthreat did not complain.

  He could not bring himself to go near Hringolfr Left-Hand, cravenly asking Sokkolfr to find out how Kolgrimna and her brother did. Sokkolfr gave him a thoughtful look, but did as he asked, reporting back that man and wolf were fine, and that Yngvulf the Black and Arngrimr stood guard over them.

  “Arngrimr will be happier,” Sokkolfr said. “He can’t have Vigdis, but Kolgrimna favors him over Glaedir, and at least some of her pups will be his. He stands higher in the wolfthreat after this mating.”

  “Yes,” said Isolfr, and realized too late how bleak he sounded.

  “Isolfr?” Sokkolfr sounded worried and Isolfr had Hroi’s warmth bumping against his back, pushing Viradechtis aside. She snarled, but it was a puppy snarl, and Hroi ignored her while she dragged at his ruff.

  “I’m fine,” he said to Sokkolfr, and “I’m fine, old man,” to Hroi. “Truly.”

  Hroi whined in the back of his throat, manifestly unconvinced, and Sokkolfr said, “Hringolfr is unhurt.” He studied Isolfr a moment and added, “Hringolfr says there is no shame in fearing Viradechtis’ season. He says the only shame is if you let your fear hurt your sister.”

  Isolfr felt his face burning. “Thank you, Sokkolfr,” he said and turned away.

  The magic of the mating worked its trick; when the first of the long patrols returned, Hlothvinr had bonded Griss, becoming Aurulfr the Brown, and Svanrikr—surprising Isolfr—had bonded Skefill and chosen to be called Ulfrikr. (“Ulfrikr Un-Wise,” Frithulf crowed, delighted.) Johvatr did not return, and at first Isolfr’s heart beat hollow in his chest, but Aurulfr assured him that Johvatr had decided to leave the wolfheall rather than remain as an unbonded man.

  The Great Leif, though, returned, more massive and silent than ever, and Isolfr noticed that the smallest of Asny’s pups, who had shown no interest in the new tithe-boys, would stagger purposefully after Leif whenever he saw him.

  And that was hopeful.

  Briefly, Isolfr thought of his father and mother, of Jonak and Kathlin, and then pushed the thought away. He was not welcome in the jarl’s hall; his father had made that clear. And if he had lost blood-sister and blood-brother, he had gained werthreatbrothers in their stead.

  More restless than he would admit with the events of the past few days, he skied out in search of game with Viradechtis running broad-pawed on crusted snow beside him. In the cold shade of the fir wood, a brace of snow hares at his belt, they came upon the second long patrol, and even from a distance Isolfr could see that something was wrong. Someone—Hrolleif, to judge by his size and his twin red braids—trudged on snowshoes before a travois. Isolfr could not see who was missing at first, but the wolf who floundered beside the makeshift litter was Ingrun. Too heavy to run atop the snow like Viradechtis, she plowed through it on a trail broken by Vigdis, and she whined and nosed the hand of the man in the travois. Tithe-boys skied behind, their faces grim, and two dog-wolves and their brothers brought up the tail.

  Randulfr. Forgetting his dignity, Isolfr skied to them, calling through the trees. Viradechtis barreled to meet her mother, and Hrolleif looked up at his name. The creases of his squint deepened when he saw Isolfr’s face.

  “Kolgrimna and her brother?” he asked, when Isolfr was close enough that they would not have to shout. The tithe-boys drew together in a worried knot, and Kolgrimna’s kin and their brothers came forward, still giving Hrolleif and Isolfr a certain respectful distance as Viradechtis climbed onto her mother’s shoulders, sniffing and licking.

  “Well,” Isolfr said. “Five wolves covered her: Skald, Glaedir, Arngrimr, Hallathr and Guthleifr. Man and bitch are fine. Randulfr—”

  “I’m fine, Isolfr,” Randulfr said from the travois, his voice only slightly strained. “The second troll had a club, but my leg will heal. A little crooked, maybe, but Hrolleif set it well.”

  Isolfr exhaled in relief, and only knew then that he had been holding his breath. Hrolleif shifted his grip on the travois; his heavy hand fell on Isolfr’s shoulder. “Someone was hurt,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Kolli,” he said. “Glaedir—” He couldn’t move any more air. Hrolleif squeezed his shoulder hard, and then jumped at a sudden, meaningful snarl as Viradechtis piled into Isolfr’s legs hard enough to knock him off his skis. He went down, and found himself sprawled on the snow between two angry wolves.

  Vigdis’ teeth had snapped shut on air, but her ears were flat and her hackles up, her amber eyes fixed on her daughter. Isolfr did not know how Viradechtis had overstepped but he knew without a doubt that she had. He could see it in the way her ears and tail drooped and she skulked forward, whining submissively, to lick and paw at her mother’s mouth. Vigdis arched her neck up, her ears forward; the puppy rolled on her back on the snow, showing her cream-colored belly, and all was well.

  Except Isolfr looked up to see Hrolleif regarding Viradechtis steadily, worried contemplation plain on his face. Isolfr closed his hands on the snow hard enough to press icy pellets through the slits in his mitten palms. He braced against the drift and stood, then knelt to fix the bindings on his skis, without daring to glance at Hrolleif again.

  Viradechtis came into season in the green warmth of spring. She was by then already larger than either Kolgrimna or Asny, and Hrolleif said, lifting one massive paw after another to check the bones of her legs, “She will have Skald’s size.”

  “Like Skefill and Griss.”

  “Skald sired true with that litter,” Hrolleif said, a little ruefully, while Viradechtis slobbered genially into his hair. It was Vigdis more than her daughter who had signaled Viradechtis’ approaching heat, becoming ever more snappish and rough with the younger wolf, growling when she came too near Skald.

  “Except Kothran,” Isolfr said, smiling at the thought of Frithulf’s frequent, insincere complaints about Kothran’s size. Kothran was small, but he was fast and a canny tracker, and like Viradechtis, he had his mother’s sharp intelligence. He suited Frithulf perfectly, and man and wolf both knew it.

  “Clearly he gave it to his litter-sister. Go on with you, little girl. You’re strong as an ox.” He shoved her with his shoulder and she went, skirting cautiously around her mother, who watched with baleful amber eyes. Hrolleif stood up, said, “Patience, sister,” to Vigdis, and to Isolfr: “Watch for limping, though. She’s of the age to hurt herself just because she doesn’t want to stop running.”

  Isolfr nodded.

  Hrolleif hesitated, said, “We will have to be c
areful, when you return. She is not ready to be konigenwolf yet—”

  “But she’s already too close, isn’t she?”

  Hrolleif nodded, unhappily, then clapped Isolfr on the shoulder. “We will talk,” he said. “Go now, and safe journey.”

  This time there was no farewell kiss, and Isolfr was aware, not only of Vigdis’ implacable stare, but of Grimolfr watching from the doorway of the roundhall, his face unreadable.

  He and Viradechtis set out briskly, for they had a good deal of distance to cover to reach the shelter Hrolleif had told him of, that was known to all the wolfheallan of the North as a place not to disturb. Isolfr was glad to have purpose, glad of a reason to drive himself hard, because he began, as the sun climbed in the sky, to feel heat sparking in his groin and belly, something that was not quite an ache in the long bones of his thighs. Viradechtis seemed not to feel anything of that sort, but he noticed she was as distractible as she had been as a small puppy; it was the first time he’d ever had to call her to keep her by his side. Her thoughts were scattered, racing, full of heat. They slept piled together that night, as they always did, but he was awoken long before dawn by a faint muttering snarl that sounded like nothing so much as a man cursing under his breath; he came up blearily on one elbow to see her pacing back and forth across their campsite. Her head swung round at his movement, and for a moment he was pinned by molten gold fury.

  He saw her for the first time not as Viradechtis whom he loved but as a trellwolf: fifteen stone of power and blood-lust that could rip his throat out here, now, in this small clearing, before he could so much as sit up. And then he smelled pine boughs warm with the sun, and she was herself again, the low snarl shifting to a whine of distress, and he thought, She knows even less than you do of what is happening to her.

  He sat up, raked his fingers through his hair, said, “Come here, little sister.” And she came gladly, gratefully, and tried to bury her head in his armpit. The thought came, sharp as a stabbing knife, She trusts you.

  He got them moving as quickly as he could, and it was mid-afternoon when they sighted the shelter—a lean-to against the face of a cliff, but better than nothing and with a good supply of firewood laid in. Most of Isolfr’s work while they were here would be replacing the wood he burned.

  He took a moment, both of them shivering a little, to test Viradechtis’ legs as Hrolleif had. But there was no soreness, no sharp pain of injury, and he ruffled her ears and said, “Go hunt, sister.”

  She did not wait for him to tell her twice.

  It took four days for Viradechtis’ heat to run its course. She and Isolfr were both fretful, uncomfortable, and Isolfr was deeply grateful that Hrolleif and Randulfr had both, separately, warned him about the blood, for he knew otherwise he would have panicked, and here in the wilderness panic was the same as death.

  Viradechtis hunted, taking out her mating anger on rabbits, deer, even a winter-skinny bear. She and Isolfr ate very well, but he noticed that both of them were always hungry. He chopped wood, repaired the lean-to’s roof and walls, began the process of curing the skins of Viradechtis’ kills, all the while painfully aware of the fire burning in her, a fire that kept him half-hard for hours at a time. And at night, while Viradechtis ran, he lay beside the banked fire and brought himself to release with his hands, twice, three times, using himself more and more brutally until he was able to sleep.

  He was glad there was no one with him.

  On the fifth day, he woke sometime in the afternoon to find Viradechtis sound asleep, curled around him as if she were a child and he were her doll. He was exhausted, aching in every limb, but that sensation of prickling, scathing heat was gone. Thank you, he thought vaguely, although he did not know whom he thanked, and fell back asleep.

  It was a full week after they had left the wolfheall before they began the return journey. Isolfr found himself reluctant to hurry; he needed time, still, to feel his way through the changes in his sister. She was still Viradechtis, still sunlight-in-pine-boughs, and she was still a very young wolf.

  But she was not a puppy. Her eagerness was tempered now, her gold eyes deeper, something darker behind them that had not been there before. She had always been dictatorial, but now there was a weight behind it, a sense of strength. He realized, with a shiver of anxiety, that she would not reflexively roll over for Vigdis now. We will have to be careful, Hrolleif had said, and Isolfr knew it for an understatement.

  So he did not feel that there was any rush to return to the wolfheall, where life would only become more difficult. He walked slowly and let Viradechtis roam as she pleased. And about noon of the first day, when she called to him, sharp and urgent, he turned aside without hesitation.

  She had found a trellherig, a place of sacrifice. There wasn’t much left of the victim, and Isolfr was just as glad, but Viradechtis’ emphatic images in his head told him that she had caught the trolls’ scent, and it was recent.

  Isolfr thought pointedly of the wolfheall, and the strength of wolves and men within it.

  But Viradechtis shook him off, already running along the trolls’ route.

  The only thing stupider than tracking an unknown number of trolls would be to leave his sister to track them alone. Isolfr cursed and went after her.

  The shelter was remote from any wolfheall, but it was south of them, not north, and inside the long patrols. There should be no trolls here, and no trolls anywhere with summer coming on and the days lengthening toward white nights and the midnight sun. It was too far for them to travel in a night, and trolls were not fond of the sun, even the weak sun of winter.

  So the broad, careless trail of many hooves, the crushed underbrush, the ease with which Isolfr could track them even without the pack-sense, were not simply unsettling. They were impossible. But nevertheless, even he caught the musty reek of trell-bodies, dozens of them.

  He put his head down and ran.

  Trellwolves were sprinters. Their gait over distances was a lope, and a fit man could run faster for longer. Isolfr had finally hit that hoped-for growth spurt, and though he would never be a tall man, he was of a height with Sokkolfr. And life in the wolfheall had made him strong, stronger even than the jarl’s son he had been; a jarl’s son might practice at arms and ride long hours, but it was nothing compared to running with wolves and the hard physical labor of the life of a wolfcarl.

  It wasn’t long before he saw Viradechtis’ brush and haunches flickering through the ancient trees ahead of him. Soon, he was running beside her, and he thought she slacked her place a little to let him catch up—or perhaps she was tiring. Her tongue slipped between her teeth, at least, and her long-legged canter slowed. As he drew up beside her she stopped at the base of a slope leading up the back side of a bluff. She whined low in her throat and lifted her muzzle to the wind.

  He could have picked the rank scent out of the air even without Viradechtis’ assistance. He dropped a hand to her ruff, smoothed her thick-coated ears. She leaned into him, her ribs rising and falling on heavy breaths, and took a hesitant step up the long hill before them.

  Footsteps silent as his wolf’s, Isolfr crept forward. There was a village at the base of the bluff, Ravndalr, a little hamlet of some five families that subsisted on charcoal-making and clay mined from the bluff. It was beholden to Gunnarr Sturluson, and Isolfr, when he had been Njall Gunnarson, had known it well.

  It was hard to believe that that had been only four and a half seasons gone by.

  He knew before they came to the top of the hill what they would see. Viradechtis scented no blood, no death, no fire—no fire at all, not even the fire of hearths—and over it all hung the appalling reek of troll, and, what was worse, the serpent-musk of a wyvern.

  And wyverns could see in the daylight.

  This time, Viradechtis listened when Isolfr asked her to stay. She dropped her elbows, not quite lying down, hovering a finger’s width over the pine needles. Isolfr was not so dainty; he pressed his belly to the damp ground and crawled, movin
g away from the trellpath. When he reached the bluff, he rolled behind the tangled roots of an undercut tree, steeled himself, and looked out over Ravndalr.

  Ravndalr was not there.

  Isolfr saw the small clearing where it had been, the friendly, bowering pines. The cottages that had clustered around a central well were so much wreckage. Heaps and layers of strewn earth lay over the pine needles and the cattle paths, red clay annealed in lumps on the timbers of destroyed cottages.

  Clean-picked bones lay piled in the center of the clearing, but Isolfr could see no sign of trolls. Just the smell of them, thick as if he lay in the center of the whole warren. And then, horribly, he understood where they were.

  They had chosen Ravndalr because of its prized clay bluff, and when they were done dining on the inhabitants, they had simply burrowed trell-caves into the sticky earth itself, and gone to ground there. A whole warren indeed—and only a long day’s ride from the keep that held Isolfr’s own mother, his father, his brother Jonak, rising twelve, and his ten-year-old sister Kathlin, who might by now have retired the rag doll she had still slept with when he left.

  He thought it was Viradechtis who whined, but when he glanced over his shoulder to quiet her, he realized it was himself, his own breath hissing through his painfully tightened throat. Grimolfr has been hiding from us how bad things are, he thought, and let his forehead fall down on his hands. He drew a breath between fingers sticky and black with pine tar, the scent of clean loam and pine needles clearing his head of the fear-miasma of troll.

  I need the pack.

  I cannot do this alone.

  But the pack was a day away—a day there, and a day back. And there were wolfless men within striking distance. He couldn’t leave; if the trolls began to move, there might be something he could do. Die like a babe, he mocked himself, and bit his fingers, hard, for the focus of the pain.