An Apprentice to Elves

by Elizabeth Bear

  “Ow,” Fargrimr said. “What was that for?”

  “Good plan,” Skjaldwulf explained.

  Then, abruptly, he craned his neck, stretching up. “What’s that?”

  “What? Where?” The moonlight was full of tricks and shadows. Fargrimr squinted through them, but did not find his answers there.

  “There’s a black line on the ice … ah, Othinn’s bad eye!”

  Fargrimr stood on tiptoe, but whatever made Skjaldwulf curse, he could not see it. “What? What is it?”

  “The Rheans are camped on the ice,” Skjaldwulf said, settling back. “The siege is under way.”

  EIGHTEEN

  In the songs, they would have waited for the dawn. In the songs, there would have been a dawn to wait for.

  But the sun would not rise for weeks. A wall of cloud was piling higher over the ocean to the west, blotting out the aurora and the stars. And it was only a matter of time before the Rheans spotted the Army of the Iskryne—even marching from this unconventional direction—and mounted a defense. Thus Gunnarr whipped the army from march to attack formation without a pause. Fargrimr found himself and his mixed band of Freyasheall wolves, wolfcarls, and wolfless men arrayed on the army’s right, center rather than flank.

  A sense of unreality attended the army massing in the dark. Ice creaked underfoot, and the harness of fighting men creaked as well, on every side. Fargrimr shivered in his armor, the round shield unslung from across his back and heavy on his arm. He glanced from left to right, saw Blarwulf with his beard stiff with ice, saw the priest Freyvithr in borrowed mail, as ready to fight for his home as any man.

  Fargrimr lifted his shield and locked it with those of his comrades. A shudder ran down the line as the shield wall formed. Cries rang across the ice from the Rhean siege: they were noticed. A voice raised on Fargrimr’s left, from the center. Gunnarr’s voice.

  The konungur called the charge.

  A howl rose from a thousand throats as the Army of the Iskryne plunged forward. They moved like an avalanche across the ice, and Fargrimr felt a moment of fierce exultation. A moment when he believed, almost, that they could win.

  The Rheans were still forming when the army reached them. By rights, the Northmen’s shield wall should have plunged through, cracked the line, sent Rheans scurrying this way and that—and then it would have been a slaughter. But Rhean discipline held, and the soldiers scrambled into their formations even as the Northmen burst upon them.

  Fargrimr was battered, his shield pounded bruisingly against his arm. Something dripped down his cheek. A moment later, he felt the sting of a cut, and realized that some blow had glanced his helm against his face hard enough to cut him. He thrust and slashed at the bigger Rhean shields, trying to batter them apart.

  The wolves snarled between the legs of the men, dodging out under the shield wall to snatch at Rhean hamstrings and calves. The Rheans had donned quilted leggings under their armor skirts, for warmth and protection, but those were ridiculous against the teeth of trellwolves.

  They were winning, he thought with some surprise, as he realized that most of his steps were forward. They were driving the Rheans back. He turned to Blarwulf at his shoulder, to shout some encouragement—

  A massive hand seemed to come out of the sky, snatch up the Freyasheall wolfjarl, and toss him into the dark. It descended again—a Jotun’s paw. Shouting in horror, Fargrimr threw himself to one side.

  It broke the shield wall, but the wall was broken already. Sprawled on his back, Fargrimr saw a shaggy shape as big as a barn outlined against the overcasting sky. Ice and clouds gathered light between them, concentrated it, and even without a torch, he could see fairly well, if dimly. The Jotun had a domed, shaggy back, hunched up with a head hanging below it—

  Fargrimr shook his head. Not a Jotun. One of the shaggy creatures that had swum ashore. A mammoth, that was what they were called.

  The thing swept curved tusks as long as a ship’s keel. They whipped over Fargrimr, sending men and wolves tumbling like scythed wheat. Fargrimr rolled frantically to the right as the thing lurched forward. A foot, thick and stubby as a tree trunk, caught the edge of his cloak, choked him until the clasp tore free. He rolled again, pushed off with his hands, lost his sword, kept rolling.

  Came to his knees and heard a rallying cry.

  “To me! To me, you sons of bitches!” Skjaldwulf bellowed. “It’s no worse than fighting a wyvern, boys!”

  There was the Franangford wolfjarl, his borrowed wolf at his left hand, a shout on his lips that rose and fell until it was almost a song. Fargrimr grabbed a blade from the ice—not his own; it was short and broad and untapered, in the Rhean way. He lunged up on bruised knees and wrenched back to stand beside Skjaldwulf. And there was the svartalf Tin, suddenly, whipping a halberd that seemed as long as one of the mammoth’s tusks above her head. She danced back, leading the war-beast after her, pricking its curling snout with her blade to enrage it. There was a Rhean on its neck, Fargrimr saw, legs tucked in right behind its ears, guiding it with a goad-tipped stick.

  “There!” he shouted.

  Skjaldwulf saw. “Bowmen!”

  There were three or four close enough to hear. They followed the line of his pointing arm, and arrows flew. The beast-rider slumped, but did not fall. Two wolves snarled and snapped by the animal’s hind leg, evading its ponderous efforts to stomp on them. Tin stabbed hard with her polearm, and the creature shrieked as red blood welled where its eye had been a moment previously. It wheeled and stampeded, scattering Northmen and Rheans alike.

  In this small corner of the battle, there rose a ragged cheer.

  Despite it, the Iskryner line was breaking. The Rheans had brought more of their war-beasts up, and the Northmen’s assault was crumbling all around Fargrimr.

  “Can we rally?” Skjaldwulf asked, as a ragged group of soldiers clumped around him. The line had sealed between them and the Rheans. The mammoth’s trail of confused destruction stretched toward the embattled city rather than back to shore. They stood in a momentary eddy of calm.

  It was too dark to see the Rhean standards, too dark to tell if Verenius Corvus’ men were part of the Rhean fist preparing to come down on the luckless men of the North. Certainly too dark to tell whether they would be faithless or true.

  “We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t turn into a rout,” Fargrimr answered. “What if we retreat to shore?”

  Skjaldwulf reached out for Tryggvi, rested a mailed hand behind the wolf’s blood-soaked ears. Fargrimr didn’t think any of that blood was the wolf’s. A moment of silent communication passed between them, uncanny as everything to do with wolfcarls. Then Skjaldwulf said, “Vethulf is with Gunnarr. Gunnarr agrees that we must retreat, but the disengagement is a problem.”

  “Tell him to let us handle that,” someone said.

  Fargrimr looked up to see Erik Godheofodman an arm’s length away, leaning on the haft of a bloody axe. He was soaked in red from beard to britches, the fur on his bearskin cloak spiked with it. Behind him were ten or twelve other men, bear-cloaked as well.

  “With your help, we’ll cover his retreat. If he gets up to that headland,” Erik said with a broad gesture, “he stands a chance.”

  Skjaldwulf hesitated. No one was dense enough not to understand what Erik was offering. What they risked to stand beside him.

  Fargrimr caught the wolfjarl’s eye and nodded. Skjaldwulf nodded back.

  “All right,” Fargrimr said. “Let us get the konungur to shore.”

  * * *

  The Iskryner line fell back in the wake of the mammoth’s blind, harried flight, and Tin was swept back with it. She made it a fighting retreat, and though some of the men around her wept and prayed, they stayed with her.

  And she knew who it was whose courage bought her the chance to retreat. Human eyes could not have discerned it, but as she fought with the rearguard to the edge of the ice—and then cracked through thin ice at the verge of the land and splashed through freezing salt wa
ter to the beach and up it, Tin saw who defended her. She saw Erik Godheofodman and his bear-sark-threat charge forward into the Rhean ranks, a sweeping crescent. Behind them, she recognized Fargrimr Fastarrson and Skjaldwulf Marsbrother, and a rank of men and wolves from Freyasheall and from Franangford. She saw Stothi, the enormous mate to the Freyasheall konigenwolf, move among the Rheans like a scythe.

  She did not see his human brother beside him.

  Alfar did not weep. No water ran from their eyes, as from the eyes of men. And Tin knew that some men thought that this portended a lack of sentiment among her people.

  Dry-eyed, she knew also that this intimation was flawed. Whatever else you might say of men, their gallantry was not in question. And if alfar engaged in such a crude, human conceit as weeping, then Tin would have wept for the men—and the wolves—who were covering her retreat right now.

  The ice was a mercy. It was thinner closer to shore, where the action of the waves wore at it. The mammoths—for there were more of them, only in stories would there be only the one—refused to tread on it past a certain point, however goaded, and without them … Tin thought that under other circumstances, the Northmen might even have rallied.

  As it was, it was enough that they didn’t dissolve like water-washed salt. That they held the line, and the fighting retreat, was a credit to Gunnarr Konungur. He was in the front of the fray, broad and savage, wielding a sword in each hand as if shields had meantime grown unfashionable. Each sword dripped, and when he bellowed, men answered.

  Up the beach they retreated, wet sand a benediction under sea-numbed feet. They found their way to the cliff road, and the pass was a relief. Tin held the front lines with human and wolven companions, and as the Rheans drove her back, she realized she was fighting beside Skjaldwulf and the gigantic Stothi. So some of that vanguard who had broken the Rhean assault had survived, at least this long.

  A long hill sloped down steeply at the back of the sea cliff, and across this the Iskryner army fanned, making for the forest at the base. There might some brief safety lie.

  The enemy was not pressing quite as hard. There was a pause between Tin falling back and the Rheans pressing forward, and the pause was getting longer. “They don’t like the forest,” Skjaldwulf shouted above the relentless clash of metal on metal, war cries, screams, and the savage noises of fighting trellwolves.

  Tin swept her halberd in a wide feint, giving herself and Skjaldwulf room for three more retreating paces, and then the first reaching black twig-fingers were over their heads, and it was clear the Rheans would follow them no farther.

  “Will these woods be inviolate, do you think?” Tin asked Skjaldwulf curiously. She found Rhean behavior even harder to predict than that of the Northmen.

  “Eh,” Skjaldwulf said, squinting up the slope toward the top of the sea cliff. “Only until they get one of their commanders out here.” His eyebrows pulled together, then shot up. After a moment, he said, “Mastersmith, do you know if Fargrimr has made it this far?”

  “I have not seen him since we left the ice,” Tin said.

  “Will you help me look?” She was surprised by the sudden sharp urgency in his voice. “Please. It’s important.”

  “Of course I will help, wolfjarl,” Tin said.

  “Good,” said Skjaldwulf. “Because we may not have much time.”

  * * *

  Fargrimr was crawling when he reached the shelter of the trees. If it hadn’t been for the cover of the winter darkness, he knew he would have been dead, and he found himself grimly, bitterly unwilling to give either Iunarius Aureus or Verenius Corvus the satisfaction. You’ll not beat me, you bastards, not this easily, he thought as his fingers clawed around a tree root; he dragged himself forward and half fell, half rolled behind the tree and out of the enemy’s direct line of sight—if any of them could still see him. It was too dark and too cold to take precise or accurate stock of himself, but he stayed still and decided after a few moments that nothing was presently bleeding. His shield arm was still numb halfway up to the shoulder, but he didn’t think it was broken.

  He was contemplating the next step—get up, venture farther, find at least one of your men, Fargrimr Fastarrson, that you may not shame your father where he sits in Valhalla—when an odd, creaky wind chime of a voice said, “Lord Fargrimr?” then called softly, “I have found him, wolfjarl!”

  It was the svartalf, he realized, blinking in bewilderment at the darkness layered on darkness where her voice was. But he could not think which wolfjarl she would mean until Skjaldwulf’s voice said, “Fargrimr? Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Just bashed about and starting to stiffen—though of course I may have injuries I have not yet been able to feel.”

  Skjaldwulf’s pained bark of laughter told him the other man understood. “Listen,” the wolfjarl said, crouching down, “they don’t seem to have a commander out here now—at least, nobody seems to be ordering the soldiers forward into the woods.”

  “All right,” Fargrimr said.

  “But they’ll change that as quickly as they can, won’t they? They know we came into the woods, they’ll send their soldiers in after us?”

  “To finish what their mammoth started,” Fargrimr said, wondering why Skjaldwulf felt the need to spell out their approaching doom.

  “No, wait, listen,” Skjaldwulf said, touching Fargrimr’s shoulder lightly where he might ordinarily have gripped it. Fargrimr appreciated his restraint. “The Rheans haven’t been camped outside of Hergilsberg for twelve years. They haven’t had time to build their cursed roads.”

  “Oh,” Fargrimr said and heard the svartalf echo, somewhere else in the dark.

  “We need bait,” said Skjaldwulf. “And then we need enough men to be the trap.”

  “Yes,” Fargrimr said fervently. “I just need a moment to get my legs under me.”

  “You need warmth and food,” Tin said, and threw her cloak around him.

  * * *

  It was dreamlike—nightmarelike—moving through the trees in the gloom that would neither lift nor deepen, finding one man, then another, occasionally two men together, all exhausted and stunned and sick with what Fargrimr thought of as grief: the awareness, deep in the body, of all those who had died. In this case also, though everyone was trying to deny a foothold to fear, they were terrified of the mammoths.

  Fargrimr did not blame them. He was terrified, too.

  Skjaldwulf said, seemingly at random, as they were talking to one of the jarls who followed Gunnarr, “They won’t be able to bring their monster war-beasts back among the trees,” and Fargrimr was standing close enough to feel the man’s body lighten.

  After that, they made sure to mention frequently that the mammoths could not be used in the forest.

  They also found wolves, wolves covered in blood, wolves limping, wolves whining softly. Even Fargrimr was worried and hurt by how few of them had been able to keep next to their brothers, and he did not object as Skjaldwulf developed a following of wolves, pressing close around first Skjaldwulf, but then Fargrimr as well, jostling and shifting against each other, but not fighting. And they were warm, each of them like an oven; though Fargrimr was careful not to touch them, their warmth seeped into him regardless.

  Every time they found a wolfcarl, there was a moment in which Fargrimr—admittedly punchy at this point—swore he could see a wave of not-mine rolling over the wolves, and if it broke against a defiant rock spur of mine! Fargrimr felt a tiny warm spark of elation in his own heart as that wolf bounded forward.

  Pairs, Skjaldwulf sent scouting into the forest. “We need to learn it quickly,” he said. “Look for places to set an ambush.”

  Men and wolves grinned back before vanishing.

  The wolfjarl of Ketillhill, when they found him, was sitting with his brother’s dead body in his arms, both of them rust brown with dried blood. He listened intently as Skjaldwulf explained his bare-bones plan. Then he laid the dead wolf down gently and stood to
glare into Skjaldwulf’s eyes. “I will bait them for you, as if they were bears. I claim the privilege of tempting these goat-humping nithlings back where their monsters won’t save them. Send any man who will volunteer to me.”

  Skjaldwulf had the sense to say nothing more than, “Thank you.”

  When they found wolfless men, Skjaldwulf sent them to muster under Gunnarr’s standard, which had been pitched defiantly just ahead of the tree line. It was safe enough, the Rheans having fallen back toward Hergilsberg—no doubt to amass their forces for the next attack—and there was no other way the Army of the Iskryne could have found enough of itself to be anything much more formidable than the Picnic Party of the Iskryne.

  Fargrimr tallied the men of Siglufjordhur as they located them, keep and town and Freyasheall, and was doubly grateful every time man could be matched to wolf. He found himself—not exactly tallying the Franangfordthreat, but he was certainly very aware of it when they encountered Vethulf and Kjaran, who’d mustered together a band of men and wolves already and were delighted to fall in with Skjaldwulf’s plan (and delighted, too, to lean up against Skjaldwulf, man on one side, wolf on the other, for a moment of peace in each knowing that the others were safe). When they found Isolfr, Fargrimr had to look away from the almost frantic hug Skjaldwulf caught his wolfsprechend in, the strength with which Isolfr hugged him back. Comfort both given and received. And with Isolfr joining the hunt, their ability to communicate with the wolves doubled or trebled—definitely trebled when a great black shape loomed out of the night and turned into Viradechtis, who knocked Isolfr flat on the ground and washed his face before she would proceed a single footstep farther.

  For all that Othinn was the god of wolves, Fargrimr thought, Viradechtis was Freya’s beast.

  They found most, though not all, of Siglufjordhur. They found most, though not all, of the men of the Franangfordthreat. They found most, though not all, of the Freyasthreat.

  They did not find Blarwulf. Fargrimr didn’t think they were going to.