by Rich Horton
It surprised him that he thought of Egil with approval. The old monster! The killer! How angry he must have been at his son and his dying body! That was no excuse for killing Svart. He would do better, Kormak thought. He could not excel Egil in fighting, but he could excel him in growing old.
“I will risk age as well.” He swung down off the dog. As he touched the ground, he felt his body thicken. He was heavier than before, though still strong. A gray beard bristled over his chest. He brushed his hand across it. Hairs prickled against his palm. Age, or his stay in the country of the elves, had made it thicker and more manly.
“Well, then,” Alfgeir said. “I ought to tell you my true name. I am Volund, Alda’s father. I could not enter the country of the fey to rescue her. The doors leading into the land of the fey have wards against anything that is foreign and might be dangerous: humans, iron, unfamiliar magic, and magicians who are not fey. My leg braces are iron and magic, and they cannot be made otherwise. In addition, I am a great magician. The fey doors would have roared like dragons if I had tried to enter. The fey let you in, because you seemed harmless.
“I gave you three magical gifts to give Alda. The first two would wake her and break the magical bonds that held her, because they contain what the fey hate most: death and history. As much as possible, they try to live beyond time and change. Memory fails in their country. Although they love to hunt, they do not like to touch blood or death. Their human servants strike the killing blow and butcher the animals.
“But, as Odin said:
“ ‘Cattle die. Kinsmen die.
You yourself will die.
I know one thing that does not die.
The fame of the dead.’
“That is what’s real for humans: blood and death and history; and that is what I gave to Alda with my first two gifts.
“Bodvild asked me to make the bracelet when she came to my forge. Foolish child! Later, when she lay drunk on the smithy floor, I raped her, breaking her maidenhead, and took back the bracelet. She was your mother, Alda.”
“A cruel gift,” Alda said.
“The brooch was made for your grandmother, the wife of King Nidhad. He took me prisoner and made me lame. In return, I killed his sons, your two uncles, and made their skulls into drinking cups. Their teeth became the ivory in the brooch. I recovered it before I flew from Nidhad’s court, but left the cups for Nidhad to enjoy.”
Alda’s hands went up to her breast, touching the brooch under her dress. “Another cruel gift.”
“Yes,” Volund said. “But remember the third gift. The dog could not enter the land of the fey any more than I could. But hidden in its golden shell and carried by you, Kormak, it could slip in. When the shell broke, it could carry you away.”
“Why did it take you so long?” asked Kormak, always curious. “Alda was a prisoner for centuries. Did you not care for her at all?”
“How could he?” Alda asked. “I come from blood and death.”
Volund smiled, showing strong, square, white teeth. “I am comfortable with blood and death, as my history ought to tell you; and kin matter to me. I knew your brother, Alda, and made him a sword that he used until he died. A famous warrior! But not as lucky as he might have been.
“It took me a long time to learn that Alda was still alive and then discover where she had gone. Then—hardest of all—I had to find someone who could enter the land of the fey unsuspected. You could, Kormak. A human and a slave. No one would fear you or suspect you, since you came with Svanhild.”
“What will happen to her?” Kormak asked.
“She is as hard-hearted as her mother—you must have noticed that. She will be fine among the fey. Her father may try to recover her, but I doubt that she will go back.
“I promised you silver,” Volund added. He bent down and lifted up two bags. “This is the silver that Egil hid in the waterfall. Svanhild stole it from her father, so she would have a gift to give her mother. I took it from her while she was sleeping on the train. The treasure you carried into the land of the fey is gravel, enchanted to look like silver. When you entered, did the doorway groan?”
“Yes,” said Kormak.
“That was because you are human, and also because you carried magic—the gravel and the three gifts. Since you were not turned away, the guard must have thought the door was groaning for only one reason.”
“Yes.”
Volund grinned again, showing his strong, white teeth. “The spell on the gravel will wear off, but this is real. You are a rich man now.” He held the bags out.
Kormak took them. They were as heavy as ever. “This is what I carried all the way from the country of the light elves?”
“Yes.”
“Won’t the fey be angry with me?” Kormak asked.
“Yes. I suggest you go into the part of Ireland that the Norwegians and Danes have settled. You know their language. The fey have little power there.”
Volund gestured down the grassy slope behind him. At the bottom, three horses grazed. “I will accompany you for a while. I would like to know my daughter. And the iron dog will make sure that no one bothers us.”
They rode together into the part of Ireland the Norwegians held. The iron dog made sure they had no more adventures. Kormak bought a farm, and Alda stayed with him, as did Volund for a while. Kormak had more questions to ask him. How had Volund known to be in the tunnel, when Kormak and Svanhild came riding? Was it an accident that Svanhild and Kormak were traveling together, or was that part of Volund’s plan? How far back did the elf prince’s planning go? To the elf who opened the door in the cliff and beckoned Kormak in?
But Volund had grown silent and refused to answer these questions, except to say two things. “I plan deeply and slowly, as the story of Nidhad tells you. The king thought I was reconciled to life in the smithy, and he thought I was safe. I was not.”
In addition, he said, “Not everything is planned.”
He spent most of his time with Alda, sitting by her loom and watching her weave, his withered legs stretched out in front of him, encased in iron. His hands, folded in front of him, were thick and strong. His face was worn. Though elves aged slowly, he was obviously not young.
Of all the people Kormak had met—Egil, the lord of the light elves, the chiefs of the dark elves, the queen of the fey—Volund was the most formidable.
Sometimes he talked about the swords he had made. All were famous. More often, he listened to Alda speak about her childhood. She never spoke about her long stay in the land of the fey.
In the end, Volund returned to the lands of magic. Before he left, he said to Alda, “If you ever want to visit Elfland, send the iron dog to find me. He will always know where I am.”
The dog growled. Volund touched it, and it suddenly looked like an ordinary wolfhound. “Stay here, Elding.”
The dog said:
“Decent behavior
outshines silver.
Kindness is better
than gold or fame.
“Glad am I
to be a farm dog,
guarding the farmer,
guarding the sheep.”
“I don’t intend to raise sheep,” Kormak said, scratching the dog behind its ears.
“Nonetheless, I will guard you and Alda,” the dog growled.
Volund rode away.
“A hard man to understand,” Alda said. “I’m glad he’s gone.”
“I wish he had answered more of my questions,” Kormak replied.
Kormak raised horses and sold them at a good price. Alda wove. Her cloth became well known among the Norwegian and Danish settlers. Noble women, whose husbands had grown rich through raiding, bought it. They had no children, but the wars in Ireland produced many orphans, and they found several to foster. Kormak lived thirty years more, aging slowly and remaining strong. Alda did not age at all.
At last, Kormak grew sick and took to his bed. “What will you do?” he asked Alda.
“Go to Elfland,”
she replied. “The dog will know the way. Our foster children can have the farm and the silver that remains. I still have the gold bracelet and the gold and ivory brooch, though I have never worn either. I want to return them to Volund.”
“Have you ever regretted staying here?” Kormak asked.
“I have liked it better than the country of the fey,” Alda replied. “As for Elfland, I will find out how I like it.”
Alda sat beside Kormak until he died. After he was buried, she picked out a horse. “The farm is yours,” she told her foster children. “I am taking this horse and the dog.”
The children—grown men and women—begged her to stay.
“I want to see my father and the lands of my kin,” she replied. “The dog will guard me.”
And she rode away.
Biographies
James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards; his fiction has been translated into twenty-two languages. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine.
Angélica Gorodischer was born in Buenos Aires and has lived most of her life in Rosario, Argentina. She is the author of thirty-three books in several genres. Oral narrative techniques are a strong influence in her work, most notably in Kalpa Imperial, which—in the English-speaking world—is considered a major work of modern fantasy narrative. She has received many awards including, most recently, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Amalia Gladhart is the translator of two novels by Ecuadorian novelist Alicia Yánez Cossío. Her chapbook Detours won the Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Iowa Review, Bellingham Review, Stone Canoe, and elsewhere. She is Professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon.
Tom Purdom lives in downtown Philadelphia where he spends his days writing science fiction, reviewing classical music for an online publication called The Broad Street Review, and pursuing the pleasures of urban life. He started reading science fiction in 1950, when it was just emerging from the pulp ghetto, and sold his first story in 1957, just before he turned twenty-one. In the last twenty-five years, he has produced a string of novelettes and short stories that have mostly appeared in Asimov’s. Fantastic Press recently published a collection of his Asimov’s stories, Lovers and Fighters, Starships and Dragons.
Theodora Goss’ publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format. Her work has been translated into nine languages, including French, Japanese, and Turkish. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, Locus, and Mythopoeic Awards, and on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her short story “Singing of Mount Abora” (2007) won the World Fantasy Award.
Yoon Ha Lee lives in Louisiana with her family and has not yet been eaten by gators. Her works have appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other venues. She used to make her own paper dolls.
Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the novel Queen of Kings, and the memoir The Year of Yes. Her Nebula-nominated short fiction has recently appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Apex, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean & Glitter & Mayhem, and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven and The Book of the Dead. With Neil Gaiman, she is the New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures. She lives in Brooklyn in an apartment shared with a seven-foot-long stuffed crocodile.
Robert Reed is the author of numerous SF works and a few hard-to-categorize ventures. His latest novel is a trilogy in one volume: The Memory of Sky, published by Prime Books, is set in Reed’s best known creation, the universe of Marrow and the Great Ship. In 2007, Reed won a Hugo for his novella, “A Billion Eves.” He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter.
Benjanun Sriduangkaew enjoys writing love letters to cities real and speculative. Her work can be found in Clarkesworld Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, and Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year.
After a brief and inglorious career in the legal profession, K.J. Parker took to writing full time and has to date produced three trilogies, five standalone novels, five novellas (two of which won the World Fantasy Award) and a gaggle of short stories. When not writing, Parker works on a tiny smallholding in the West of England and makes things out of wood and metal. K.J. Parker isn’t K.J. Parker’s real name; but even if you knew K.J. Parker’s real name, it wouldn’t mean anything to you.
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama. He has also won a British Fantasy Award and a BSFA Award. His latest novel is The Violent Century and, forthcoming, The Drummer.
E. Lily Yu was the 2012 recipient of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a 2012 Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award nominee. Her stories have recently appeared in McSweeney’s, Clarkesworld, Boston Review, and Apex.
C.S.E. Cooney lives and writes in a well-appointed Rhode Island garret, right across the street from a Victorian Strolling Park. She is the author of How To Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes and Jack o’ the Hills. With her fellow artists in the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours, she appears at conventions and other venues, dramatizing excerpts from her fiction, singing songs, and performing such story-poems as “The Sea King’s Second Bride,” for which she won the Rhysling Award in 2011. Her website can be found at csecooney.com.
Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of five novels for adults and young adults. Her most recent, The Summer Prince, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Asimov’s, Interzone, Subterranean, Zombies vs. Unicorns and Welcome to Bordertown.
Jedediah Berry is the author of a novel, The Manual of Detection, winner of the Crawford Award and the Dashiell Hammett Prize. The book was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio and has been widely translated. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, Unstuck, Massachusetts Review, and Ninth Letter, online at Tor.com and Interfictions, and in anthologies including Best American Fantasy, Gigantic Worlds, and Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. He serves as roaming editor for Small Beer Press.
Carrie Vaughn is the author of the New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty. She’s also written a handful of stand-alone fantasy novels and upwards of seventy short stories. She’s a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, and in 2011 she was nominated for a Hugo Award for best short story. She’s had the usual round of day jobs, but has been writing full-time since 2007. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado, where she lives with a fluffy attack dog and too many hobbies. Visit her at carrievaughn.com.
Erik Amundsen is always Chaotic Evil.
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty series from Angry Robot Books, and her short fiction has appeared in Escape Pod, Flurb, Nature, and elsewhere. As a futurist, she had worked with Intsitute for the Future, Intel Labs, SciFutures, and InteraXon to develop narrative prototypes about technologies in development. You can find her at madelineashby.com, or on Twitter @madelineashby.
Alex Dally MacFarlane is a writer, editor and historian. When not researching narrative maps in the legendary traditions of Alexander III of Macedon, she writes stories, found in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction and other anthologies. Poetry can be found in Stone Telling, The Moment of Change and Here, We Cross. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF St
ories by Women (forthcoming in late 2014).
Ken Liu (kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Chrysanthemum and the Dandelion, the first in a fantasy series, will be published by Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint in 2015.
Harry Turtledove writes science fiction (including a lot of alternate history), fantasy, and, when he can get away with it, historical fiction. His novels include The Guns of the South, Ruled Britannia, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, and Every Inch a King. He is an escaped Byzantine historian, and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, fellow writer Laura Frankos. They have three daughters, one granddaughter, and the required writers’ cat.
Krista Hoeppner Leahy is a writer and actor. Her work has appeared in ASIM, Raritan, Shimmer, Tin House, The Way of the Wizard, Writers of the Future, and elsewhere. She attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2007 and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.
Peter Watts—author of Blindsight, the so-called Rifters Trilogy, and an obscure video-game tie-in—is an ex-marine-biologist and convicted felon who seems especially popular among people who don’t know him. At least, his awards generally hail from overseas except for a Hugo (won thanks to fan outrage over an altercation with Homeland Security) and a Jackson (won thanks to fan sympathy over nearly dying from flesh-eating disease). Blindsight is a core text for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology, despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires. The sequel, Echopraxia, is probably out by now.
