So they tromped along, and eventually they had tromped far enough without speaking that Alfgyfa found herself enjoying the filtered evening light and the song of birds.
She was still anxious. She still felt a great, racking loss for Tin, for Nidavellir, for Idocrase. For the family—yes, family—that she had lived with for more than half her life. And that she was now giving up, because—
—because she couldn’t give up her other family to the Rheans without standing and putting up a fight.
“You’re your father’s daughter,” Osmium said wryly, and Alfgyfa realized she’d snorted out loud in frustration over her own chain of thought.
“I’m something, all right,” she said. “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that actually happened! We weren’t even close to that cavern!”
“Trellwarrens,” Osmium said. She bent her head down, kicking the toe of her boot through leaf litter. She seemed completely fascinated—but then, alfar didn’t usually get to spend a lot of time kicking leaves around. “They don’t use space the same way alfhames do.”
“I feel as if I’ve been saying this all day, but I don’t understand.”
“They take”—she made an expressive gesture with her hands—“shortcuts. They go shorter ways than the real world allows.”
“The same sideways where they push the stone.”
“Maybe,” Osmium agreed. “It seems to happen a lot where they were in a hurry.”
“Huh,” Alfgyfa said. She stomped the ground experimentally. “I wonder how fast you could get to Othinnsaesc from Franangford using those tunnels.”
“Don’t even think about it,” Osmium said. Alfgyfa shot her friend a glance, but Osmium’s perfectly deadpan expression convinced her that the alf was, in fact, kidding.
“Argh,” Alfgyfa said. “If the damned svartalfar weren’t so damned bullheaded—”
“Oh, certainly,” Osmium allowed. “And my people can’t hold a grudge, either. My people, for example, aren’t still naming ourselves for poisons half a millennium later.”
It made Alfgyfa laugh. Which was, she supposed, its purpose. “All right,” she said. “All right, then. And I’m not the least bit stubborn either, I suppose.”
“Oh, no more stubborn than the enamel baked on a good cast-iron pot,” Osmium said.
Alfgyfa threw an acorn at her and missed. Somewhere in the undergrowth, a squirrel dove after it. “What am I going to do?”
“You? Us, you mean. It’s as much my fault as yours that we fell through the ceiling.” Osmium rubbed her elbow. “How are your bruises, by the way?”
Now that the anger and fear were wearing off, Alfgyfa could feel every one of them.
“Coming up nicely, I thank you for the inquiry.” She stretched against a convenient, low-hanging branch, bit back a moan at the answering aches, then trotted two steps to catch up with Osmium, who had just kept trundling along.
“What are we going to do, then?”
“Fight,” Osmium said. “Die.” She glanced up sideways and winked. “Sneak and plot like Loki would, and come up with something better.”
“You get Thor into a dress,” Alfgyfa said. “I’ll come up with some means of distracting the giants.”
“We shall make it a bargain,” Osmium said.
Despite herself, Alfgyfa’s heart was beginning to lighten. She ducked down and picked a leaf or two of wintergreen. One she handed to Osmium. The other she crushed and tucked into her cheek. The sweet, cool minty flavor brought a flood of saliva to her mouth. Somewhere off in the distance, Greensmoke’s pack had started an evening howl, even though it would be light for hours yet. In summertime, even the wolves had to improvise.
The sound made Alfgyfa homesick again, but this time in a completely orthogonal direction. Was it possible, she wondered, to die of missing two places at once? Even if you happened to be staying in one of them, you’d grown too big for it to be exactly what you remembered.
If only she had some good way to stay in touch with Tin. With—this time she admitted it, though only barely—with Idocrase.
“I’d love to meet them someday,” Osmium said wistfully. “The wolves, I mean.”
“You’ve met Viradechtis,” Alfgyfa reminded her. “And Amma.”
“And Kothran and Hrafn,” Osmium agreed. “But they’re not wild wolves.”
“Oh,” said Alfgyfa. “They can be pretty wild. Whether it seems like it or not.”
But she was already casting her mind out to Greensmoke, seeking the wolf’s opinion of alfar. It was, Alfgyfa was not surprised to note, much more positive than her opinion of men. “Well,” Alfgyfa said, “maybe.”
Osmium skipped a step and grinned.
TWELVE
The eve of the army’s departure was upon them so quickly that Otter barely felt the time before it had passed—or rather, it seemed to have evaporated. With that night would come the feast, and all the food set aside for it must be prepared before it could be consumed. Otter found herself in the warm kitchen, surrounded by rising loaves, slashing the top of each with a razor while Mar snored against the hearth. And while she cut and cut and cut again, she could do nothing to stop the tears that rolled down her cheeks and dropped on her apron and—occasionally—on the loaves.
Well, perhaps there would be some magic there. Something in the salt of her body to protect the ones she had so foolishly let herself come to love.
She almost slashed Sokkolfr with that same razor when he cleared his throat behind her. She whirled, the blade in one hand, and he jumped back laughing. Then she was humiliated by her red face and swollen eyes, but he didn’t seem to mind. He did stop laughing, though, as soon as he noticed.
He reached out gently, as if approaching something wild and startled, and laid his fingertips on her shoulder. “It’s just me.”
Otter flicked the razor closed, heedless of the oil on the blade, and laid it on the table between the loaves. She wiped her snuffly nose on the top of her sleeve. “You’ll kill a body with fright,” she complained. She wanted to see him, and she didn’t want to see him. She wanted to hug him against her. She wanted to twist away and run. And she wanted to bite hard so he would run away and never give her this feeling again, like somebody twisting a dull knife in her gut.
“Can I help with the loaves?”
“The oven’s hot enough.” She went and fetched the peel, a broad, flat, long-handed paddle of beech. She handed it to him and carefully said nothing further as he chose the most-risen loaves and loaded them into the oven, while she continued lifting damp, clean cloths to slash the tops of the next batch. She slashed them with letters Thorlot had shown her: runes of victory in battle and strength at arms, which for now, for this purpose, took the place of the runes of health and prosperity they habitually used.
Sokkolfr finished loading loaves and sealed the bread oven with the heavy door. Beneath it, the fire in the hearth crackled gustily. It was drawing well: the bread would cook hot and fast.
He leaned on the peel—blade up, so as not to damage its smooth edge—and said, “Skjaldwulf wanted me to tell you that Tryggvi will be going south with him and the army. And Mar and I will be staying here to protect the heall and the pups. And you.”
“But—” she said. And then, “You—”
“I’m housecarl,” he said. “This is the house. Somebody needs to stay behind, and I am the logical choice. Ulfhundr and Athisla and her pups will be staying, of course. And Brokkolfr and Amma will be here too; she’s expected to go into season close to midsummer. It will…”
Her breath snagged on the hooks in her throat. Don’t say it.
He looked to one side. “It will give us one more litter from Mar.”
Otter almost staggered with the complexity of emotions that left her light-headed. She had not expected this fierce relief—when Skjaldwulf and the others were still going, and the Rheans would no doubt treat them as little more than a bump in the northward road. And there was guilt over the relief, to be sure. B
ut at the same moment, she still felt the fear for those who were going. And, too, a sharp spike of pity for Thorlot, whose man would not be staying behind, wolfsprechend or no, and with that a second measure of guilt at her own relief.
Then she realized that she had just thought of Sokkolfr as her man, and her cheeks hurt with the heat in them. Heat she could not blame on the ovens, when Sokkolfr was standing closer to the fire than she.
He said, “Otter? I thought you would be pleased.”
“I—” Her heart choked her. She wanted to turn and bolt, more now than she wanted anything else, but where would she go? She stared at him, and he stared back, the forehead between his brows so wrinkled in concern he looked, himself, like a worried wolf.
Otter stepped forward. It was the hardest step she’d ever taken. She paused there, like a half-wild cat on the threshold of a warm room. She put her foot down, picked it up again. Put it back down, if possibly, even more hesitantly than before.
She pushed the peel out of the way, put her hand on Sokkolfr’s cheek, and lightly pressed her lips to his. “I am glad,” she said, when their eyes met, after. “And I’m not glad. All at once.”
He considered her. Then leaned forward and kissed her back, in turn.
Then she broke and fled, leaving him alone with the ovens and with tables full of rising bread. It was a quarter hour or so before she gained control of herself enough to force herself back to the kitchen.
When she returned, he had pulled out the first round of loaves and racked them to cool, then replaced them with the second round. The smell of perfectly baked bread filled the kitchen. He turned when he heard her step, a question unspoken on his lips.
Without looking up at him, she uncovered the next row of loaves, flicking flour into the air with a careless gesture of the toweling. Wordlessly, she picked up her razor, looked at him, and smiled.
* * *
The feast was a wild success, and it had absolutely nothing to do with Alfgyfa. She’d spent the day more or less in hiding, avoiding Galfenol. The Masterscribe and the rest of the svartalfar were still in residence largely because Galfenol’s plans to depart immediately had been derailed by Tin’s obstructionism. However, Alfgyfa knew, that was coming to an end. They would be leaving at nightfall, which was still late enough in the evening that there would be plenty of feasting beforehand.
And Alfgyfa knew perfectly well that she could not avoid the svartalfar tonight. She was the daughter of a wolfheofodman. To her, as to Thorlot and Otter, fell the duty of hosting the revel. Even if this heall was no longer her home—and if this heall was no longer her home, then she had no idea where her home might be—she owed these warriors who had come to defend it the ale-cup and her smile.
And she had to talk to Tin. She owed it to Tin, along with an abject apology. She knew that her master—her former master?—had been respecting her own desire to be left alone to think. She had been spending her time in the woods, in the cellars, with the cubs and Athisla, despite the irritation of the tithe-boys. (Athisla liked Alfgyfa. She also liked playing hard to get.) Tin had allowed her this avoidance, but Alfgyfa also knew it had to end before Tin left to return to the Iskryne with the others.
She also knew that there had been several—not tiffs, tiff was the wrong word—discussions between Tin and Galfenol regarding her, her fate, and what she was pretty sure everybody everywhere who clammed up when she wandered into a room was referring to as the Problem of Alfgyfa.
She was coming to realize she didn’t want to be a problem. Being a problem was uncomfortable and made it impossible to rest. She wanted to be a smith. A blacksmith and a stonesmith, if anyone could be both. And she wanted to learn the witchcraft Thorlot knew and find another witch to teach her more. And if Tin’s house wasn’t her home and Franangfordheall wasn’t her home, maybe she was wrong in trying to have a home at all. Maybe she wanted to wander up and down the Northlands, learning things.
She certainly didn’t want to be a woman the way Kathlin was or the way the heall women were, no matter how much she liked Otter and Mjoll. Thorlot was a blacksmith, but Alfgyfa knew she’d only gotten there because she was a blacksmith’s widow, and that was not an acceptable path.
She wanted to be a woman, she realized, the way Tin was a woman (and that was a sentence you couldn’t even say in Alvish; it just degenerated into nonsense), and she might be self-centered and naive, as Galfenol had said, but she knew enough to see the problem—or Problem—with that.
She still gravitated to Thorlot, but there were alfar in the forge all the time now, and in any case, Alfgyfa probably should have been helping in the kitchen. And she knew it. But instead she sent Olrun with a brief note to Tin.
Tin found her a quarter hour later in the herb patch in the kitchen vegetable plot, weeding around the dill. A significant fraction of Alfgyfa’s “weeding” was going to wind up in a skillet for the supper: the asparagus was going to need to be chased back with hoes come autumn, assuming there was anyone around to do it by then.
The mastersmith didn’t talk. She just hunkered down about an alf-arm’s length from Alfgyfa and commenced her own weeding, peering over at Alfgyfa’s hands from time to time to see what the human apprentice was pulling out or breaking off, and into which pile she was placing it.
Enough time passed that the long, trencher-shaped basket into which the asparagus was being piled looked like it might be getting too top-heavy to lift before either one of them said anything. It was Tin who broke the silence first, and what she said surprised Alfgyfa.
“I respect your decision to stay.”
Alfgyfa accidentally pulled a whole stalk of dill up. She looked at it, frowned, and tossed it in with the asparagus. A few herbs never hurt to flavor the vegetables. Well, maybe not horehound.
“I didn’t expect that,” she admitted, because everything else she was feeling was far too complicated to put into words, and because she felt that at this point she owed Tin—and herself—the truth.
Tin dug her fingers into the earth, humming harmonics without their base note. It was an idle thinking sound, one which had never quite stopped running up Alfgyfa’s nerves like a brush made of wire. “Apprentice,” she said. She looked up. “If I had never gone against the Smiths and Mothers—when I was a journeyman myself!—we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. If I hadn’t continued to go against them, we could not have this conversation, for you would never have come to Nidavellir as my apprentice. I have not ossified completely simply because I have more gold in my teeth these days.”
Abashed, Alfgyfa looked down. “I don’t want to leave my apprenticeship.”
“It would be a big investment to abandon now.”
Alfgyfa nodded.
“And you don’t know, exactly, what it is you do want.”
Alfgyfa nodded, more slowly, again.
“But you also can’t leave your father’s people to face a war alone.”
“No,” she said, with a feeling that was half resolution and half panic. “I can’t.”
“There is,” Tin said, “provision in your contract for a leave of absence due to family crisis.”
Alfgyfa jerked upright—still kneeling, but rocked back on the balls of her feet now. She put a hand to her throat, heedless of the sap and dirt she smeared there. She felt she could not get a breath in or out past the thing in her throat. Hope? Pain? Were they any different?
Gently, Tin continued, “Under most systems of crisis determination, invasion by an alien army would suffice.”
“You mean that.”
Tin nodded—a human nod, serious and focused.
“You keep—why do you keep bending the rules for me?”
Tin laughed. “Because I keep bending the rules, you frustrating little beast. How many times must I say it before it penetrates your skull?”
Another silence. “Is it wrong or right if I say thank you?”
“Either way,” Tin said. “I do not think this basket will hold any more of this vegeta
ble.”
“It may not hold as much as it already has,” Alfgyfa said.
They lugged the asparagus inside—the basket overflowing with asparagus that wouldn’t be enough for more than two tables. It didn’t matter, really. Nobody ever all got served the same food at a feast like this. If you spotted something really appealing on a neighboring table, you could always wander over and make pathetic eyes at the diners there, if any of the food lasted that long.
Inside the kitchen, Mjoll took custody of the asparagus and Kathlin put Alfgyfa to scrubbing pots. Ordinarily it might have seemed like a punishment—especially as Tin, under cover of diplomatic immunity, slid out the back door—but every other station in the echoing, tumultuous kitchen was filled already. Alfgyfa had known when she walked inside that she was throwing herself into the fray.
She’d shirked enough.
* * *
Around the time the roasts were coming off the spits to rest and be carved into joints, Otter appeared to drag Alfgyfa out of the dirty water by her elbow and send her upstairs to dress. Alfgyfa could think of several occasions when she would have been even more grateful for a reprieve from some horrible task—washing svartalf linens in bubbling volcanic pools, for example—but this was probably the most welcome one she’d ever actually received. Her hands stung and her back throbbed, and the sweat had dried on her face in itchy saltscapes.
She didn’t quite have time for the bathhouse, so she undid her shoulder brooches and stripped to the waist in the women’s anteroom beside it. She dipped water out of the barrel that stayed tolerably warm against the steam-room wall and scrubbed her face, arms, and upper body with the slimy brown lye soap, then rinsed. Her hair wouldn’t dry in time if she washed it, so she decided it would just have to do as it was. She’d get Mjoll or somebody to fuss over a braid. She dragged her shift and straps back up, and sprinted for her room.
By the time the sun had moved the breadth of her hand to the west, she was seated on a stool while Thorlot’s eldest stood behind her, fussing as predicted. She’d changed to clean linens and an overdress in plaid of green and blue and bright mustard, borrowed from Kathlin since any dresses Alfgyfa might still have at Franangfordheall were going to be much too small. Her shoes were soft leather, not hard boots, and red. Her girdle was hung with a dagger and her sewing case, as well as other things.
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