A Companion to Wolves

by Elizabeth Bear

  A bright look under the eyebrows; trying to pretend the throbbing wound on his shoulder troubled him not at all, Isolfr said, “No smith of my people would dream of competing with svartalfar. That much, our stories have remembered for us.”

  That pleased them, and the svartalf holding his axe said, “I am called Silver.” It seemed to be a cue, or a decision, or something that Isolfr could not read, for the others named themselves as well: Mica, Flint, Granite, Gypsum—even the cantankerous old svartalf grudgingly admitted his name to be Shale.

  Isolfr bowed and asked the question now urgently uppermost in his mind: “Tell me, Masters, what will you do with me?”

  That occasioned some muttering back and forth. Silver seemed to be in charge, judging by the way his long pointed ears flicked under his hair as the other svartalfar spoke in turn, and Isolfr felt more confident in thinking of him as the jarl. Earrings clattered one on the other, and Isolfr wondered how the svartalfar ever managed to sneak up on anything. He waited with concealed impatience while they discussed him, worried about his werthreatbrothers and what they would think when he did not reappear. And worried more about what Tin had let slip earlier—that the svartalfar were driving the trolls out of their warrens, and thus down upon the men.

  At last, Silver straightened from his huddle with the other svartalfar. “We aren’t certain it’s safe to let you go,” he admitted, shrugging. His long, broad hands made wings in the darkness. “But we can’t take you deeper, and we can’t very well keep you here until the last cold comes down on us all.” It blinked at him shrewdly, long upswept strawberry-blond eyebrows gliding together over the top of a whittled-looking nose. “What do you think we should do with you, Isolfr Viradechtisbrother? Since our sister assures us of your good conduct—”

  “Sister?” Surprised, he looked at Viradechtis. She had dropped her elbows to the floor and stretched out, clearly content to nap while the two-legs carried out their incomprehensible pack-games.

  Silver laughed, a grating multitoned sound. “Not your sister. Ours. Tin.” Foolish man, his tone implied.

  Isolfr stared hard at Tin. Nothing about the svartalf said woman to him. “Forgive me,” he said, very carefully. “I had thought him—her—a male. Your sexes seem very alike to me.”

  This seemed to amuse the svartalfar extensively, if their chiming noises were anything to go by. “You haven’t answered the question,” Silver said when they had finished laughing at him. Isolfr wondered now if Silver was male or female, but determined not to ask. Maybe the names were a clue—rocks for males and metals for females? In any case, it was hard to imagine a male svartalf wielding his troll-spear with any more deadliness than Tin.

  “I must return to my people,” Isolfr said. He kept his eyes on Silver’s face, not on the axe he—she?—held. “As fast as I can. They need to know the trolls have marched south, because south is where our families are.”

  Silver rolled the haft of Isolfr’s axe dismissively between his hands. “What are man-families to us?”

  “There are wolf families too,” Isolfr said, trying to keep the rising panic from his voice. He must have failed; Viradechtis was at his side, her ears up and the fur of her hackles slightly raised.

  “Hmmm.” Glances traded between the svartalfar, and more of that musical muttering. “But it’s seen svartalfar,” Shale said. “It’s seen our tunnel—”

  Silver was nodding, sagely, sadly. Isolfr’s hands went cold with fear and he felt Viradechtis rumble—not out loud yet, but thinking about it. They would fight if they had to—

  “Let him give his parole,” Tin interjected, tapping the butt of her troll-spear on stone.

  “Parole?” Isolfr and Silver both glanced at her at once, startled.

  “He’s a queen-wolf’s pack-brother,” Tin said, reasonably. “His word is no doubt good.”

  Raised eyebrows, thoughtful mutterings. He gathered that they did not particularly wish to kill him; they were not, he thought, a warlike people, for all their fearsome weaponry. And he understood then that they were frightened, and even why.

  “I will bring no harm upon you,” he said, interrupting their debate. “I swear it by Othinn’s spear, by my sister’s strength, and by my own honor.”

  “You will not speak of us to others of your kind?”

  “I will not. I promise.” And part of his mind asked him how he thought he was going to convince Grimolfr and the other wolfjarls without explaining how he knew that the trolls were fled south, but he pushed it away. He would think of something.

  Another colloquy, muttered, crashing. Silver stopped it with a brusque sideways sweep of his long hand. “Enough. This creature has done us no harm, and I do not want its blood-guilt. It was brave enough to go rooting deep in a trellqueen’s warren, and it companions a queen-wolf, and she, I believe, we can all agree to trust?” Said with deep irony, and the other svartalfar winced. And nodded.

  “If I am wrong in my estimation of you, Isolfr Viradechtisbrother, do not mistake. Your death will be spoken of in hushed and trembling whispers for centuries to come.”

  Isolfr believed it. “You are not wrong,” he said, meeting Silver’s strange, bright eyes.

  Silver nodded. “Good, then. Your axe.” And the long arm extended, spinning the axe to present Isolfr with its haft. “Tin, you brought the creature in, you had best take it out. And do something about its bleeding while you’re at it.”

  “Come along, Isolfr,” Tin said, not unkindly. “Are you hungry?”

  Viradechtis came to her feet, yawned mightily, and shook herself. Isolfr bowed awkwardly to the svartalfar around the fire and turned to follow Tin. “No, I thank you, lady.”

  She laughed, and the noise made him shiver. “I am no ‘lady,’ wolfbrother, if I understand the word correctly. I told you. I am a member of the smith’s guild—not yet a master, though even old Fluorite has allowed I may stand my testing at the Midwinter Convocation. I rate no honor in your speech.”

  “I beg pardon,” Isolfr said, feeling heat in his face. “I am not … among my people, women don’t …”

  “Women,” Tin said thoughtfully, as if tasting the word and finding it not entirely to her liking. “Females, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “We do not have the word,” she said, gesturing him through a narrow doorway and into a small room which had been painstakingly hollowed out around a fountain, clear water rising from a cleft in the rock, a bench-like shelf around the walls. “Women. It is an odd word. Sit down, wolfbrother.”

  He sat, propping his axe beside him, and she hopped up nimbly to crouch beside him. “But you are female.”

  “Yes?” she said, looking at him sidelong, her eyebrows rising.

  “What do you … what do you call yourself?”

  “Svartalf,” she said. “Tin of the smith’s guild and the Iron Kinship. What else ought I to call myself?”

  “I beg pardon,” Isolfr said again. “I do not know.”

  She bared her teeth at him; he hoped it was meant as a smile. “Take off your shirt, and let me repair the damage I have done.”

  He obeyed her, and she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth the same way Ulfgeirr did when faced with spectacular bruises among the tithe-boys. “Well, it does not need stitching, and that is good, for it would be hard to explain to your people, would it not?”

  She cocked her head, and he realized she was teasing him. “It would,” he said. Viradechtis thumped her head down across his lap with a resigned sigh.

  “Does she often have to sit with you while you are repaired?” Tin asked.

  “It happens … with some frequency. Ours is not a peaceful life.”

  “Neither trellwolves nor men are creatures of peace,” Tin said. She took a folded square of linen out of a pouch at her belt, reached a long arm to dip it in the fountain, and then attacked Isolfr’s shoulder briskly. He set his teeth and did not yelp at the coldness of the water.

  “I am sorry that I injured you,” T
in said. “But I did not want to kill you before I knew what you were, and it seemed safer …” She shrugged, a remarkable gesture on a creature as bony and gnarled as a svartalf.

  “I understand,” Isolfr said, and did.

  “It does not seem to be a serious wound, at least.” Isolfr tipped his head awkwardly and saw that she was right; it was more than a scratch, but not by a great deal. It was no longer bleeding, and wouldn’t even leave a scar when it healed.

  Whatever she dressed it with stung. She gave him a little pot of some herb-smelling unguent, and he recognized the texture of beeswax when he dipped a finger into it. “You keep bees underground?”

  She laughed like the tinkle of cracked crystal. “No, don’t be silly. Within the mountains there’s a valley, warmed by the breath of Mimir, where water grows so hot under the earth that it boils and steams in pools and fountains. We of Nidavellir alone know the way. We cannot farm animals in the dark, and neither can we grow fodder.”

  “So you do not turn to stone at the first touch of sunlight?” he asked, and then flushed at how like an ignorant savage he must sound.

  “Sunlight. Oh, the brighter goddess. Ah, no,” she said, as if she did not find his question peculiar. “We do not. Although we don’t like it much better than the trolls do, to tell you true.” She sighed. “Fortunately, we are more cunning than they, because Mimir’s breath is not so hot as it was, and our crops are failing as the ice drips down from Iskryne and into our valley.”

  “The glaciers,” Isolfr said, realizing why the svartalfar would be pushing south, making the trolls push south in turn.

  “Yes,” she said, and tied the dressing with a jerk at the knot. “Come along, Isolfr Viradechtisbrother, and I will show you a tunnel that does not run so steep.”

  SEVEN

  It was, at least, not harder than Isolfr had feared to convince Grimolfr that the war-strength of the trellmaegth had left the warrens and headed south—because he had feared it would be impossible. But Grimolfr had been wondering—as they all had—and he came around quickly when he understood that Viradechtis’ conviction agreed with Isolfr’s: the trellboars were not in the warrens because they had gone south, leaving the sows and priests behind. Grimolfr and Skald turned the Wolfmaegth easily enough, and the wolfless men were not about to stay in the mountains alone, not with high solstice over and winter on the horizon. Sooner they would have stayed in the mountains of the moon.

  It took a day to get the army moving, and half as long to get out of the pass as it had to get in. Rested men and horses awaited them; they had seen no trolls. A hasty council of war determined that the army would retrace the route of Othinnsaesc, as they had seen and fought more trolls and wyverns than all the other wolfheallan combined.

  They had the sun all through the night and the endless drone of mosquitoes. They had mud and tired men and wounded men and horses staggering from lack of rest, and every man grudged an hour spent sleeping, for all the need.

  The charge south was the sort of feat that births epics.

  It was Frithulf, his face still raw and pink with healing flesh, and Kothran, ranging wide, who stumbled across the path of the troll army. The Wolfmaegth followed, and Isolfr soon lost track of the days. Sokkolfr watched him, or sometimes he watched Sokkolfr, but it was Ulfbjorn who made sure that the two of them and Frithulf and their wolves had hot food and clean water when they stumbled to the fireside at night. The Great Ulfbjorn seemed tireless. He walked—he was not much of a rider, and argued that he might as well spare a horse his weight—and somehow he and Tindr were always where they were needed, with a foul joke and a swig from a flask, keeping the line moving, keeping a man or a wolf on his feet for one more league.

  At least the trell-path was clear, churned mud down to permafrost, and the flat landscape meant there was little chance of an ambush. Isolfr was glad of the rib-sprung carthorse they gave him to ride. It was easier to catch snatches of sleep in the saddle, and at times he could force Frithulf to ride for a space if he led. He worried about his tithe-brother; Frithulf’s wounds still pained and exhausted him, and he had neither rest nor good food to buy him healing.

  Othwulf rode up beside Isolfr at one point, long legs tight around the barrel of a sorrel gelding whose shaggy neck shed clots of hair into the dry, never-ending wind. Viradechtis was even too tired to flirt with Vikingr; she just leaned her shoulder against the black wolf’s and sighed, and they slogged side by side through the mud. Isolfr leaned likewise on the horse’s bridle, toiling forward through mud as Othwulf leaned down and lowered his voice so as not to wake Frithulf, who had fallen into a fitful doze. “How do the trolls travel by daylight, Isolfr?”

  Isolfr didn’t know any better than anyone else, but he knew why Othwulf asked. Othwulf asked because even inane speech was better than silence, when they could not know if they had any chance of catching the trellthreat before it fell upon heall and keep and steading at Othinnsaesc. Or if Othinnsaesc was even where it was headed.

  “The same way we travel by winter, I expect,” Isolfr said. “With little pleasure. They’re moving slowly, for trolls; it must be difficult for them.”

  “I wonder what drives them to such desperation.”

  “Ice in the north,” Isolfr answered, and then bit his lip before he could say too much, but he did glance up into the silence that followed to see Othwulf staring at him with considered respect. It wasn’t the covetous look that Eyjolfr or some of the others gave him. Rather, it was the slow, thoughtful nod of a man who’s just been shown the trick to a puzzle he himself could not fathom.

  “I’ll speak with you later,” Othwulf said, and put his heels to his tired steed.

  Later, while Isolfr slogged beside the mare that Frithulf slept astride, he smelled blood and flinched sharply. And then looked up, realizing he had been more or less dozing on his feet, and felt a warm hand on his shoulder. Vethulf, the quarrelsome, the fleet-footed, Vethulf-in-the-Fire walked beside him, his gray wolf slogging more like a carthorse than a predator.

  Vethulf said nothing at first, just thrust a stake into Isolfr’s hand. One quarter of a skinned raw rabbit was threaded on the pointed end; the blood smirched Isolfr’s mitten.

  “No time to cook,” Vethulf said. “But I didn’t see any signs of worms when I butchered it.”

  The meat was still warm, steaming slightly. Frithulf woke at the voices and looked around blearily. “Are we attacked?”

  “You’re fed,” Vethulf said. He gave Isolfr another bony fragment of meat on a stick—“for your shieldbrother”—and a whole unskinned coney for Kothran and Viradechtis to share.

  He fell away into the column before Isolfr could blink the thought of thanking him into his bleary mind, and Isolfr looked up at Frithulf in supplication. “What was that about?”

  “Stay pretty,” Frithulf advised, through a mouthful of meat.

  Isolfr would have kicked him if he hadn’t been out of reach on the horse.

  They pushed hard, frantically, and Grimolfr sent Skirnulf and Authun, who were young and light on their feet and had had no serious injuries between them, to try to give warning to Othinnsaesc village. “Tell the fishermen not to fight, if there’s any fishermen left to tell,” he said, and Skirnulf nodded.

  But when they were half a week from Othinnsaesc, they felt the tear in the pack-sense, and then two days later they saw the smudge of smoke against the sky, and Grimolfr swore exhaustedly, while the konigenwolf of Othinnsaesc made a terrible groaning noise deep in her throat, like a woman’s cry of pain, and then threw back her head and howled.

  And the Wolfmaegth of the North howled with her.

  A few miles further on, they found Skirnulf and Authun—or what was left of them—and from there the day slipped farther and farther into nightmare, between grief, and the stench of death and trolls, and the ambushes, first from one side, then from another. By the time they came upon the ruins of Othinnsaesc wolfheall and the ruins of Othinnsaesc village, both still smoldering fitfully, th
ere was no surprise left, no shock, only the weary horror of confirmation. Othinnsaesc had fallen into the hands of Othinn Battle-crow, and Isolfr prayed desperately, numbly, that the dead had been gathered up.

  Later, Isolfr was never sure how long it lasted, how long they fought among the ruins, and the only glimmer of light in that nightmare was the last remnant of the wolfheall finding them. Brokkolfr, brother of Othinnsaesc’s second bitch, had kept his head even as the wolfheall was burning around him. He and his sister had fought their way out, taking with them the wolfheall’s third bitch and her four three-week old puppies, and the few wolves and wolfcarls who could rally to them in the chaos. And he had kept them alive, he and Amma, for the better part of a week, hiding in the woods amid trolls and hunting wyverns.

  When Brokkolfr saw the wolfsprechend of Othinnsaesc he went down on his knees before him and wept with shame that that had been all he had been able to do.

  The Wolfmaegth and wolfless men fought their way into Othinnsaesc, but it was apparent from the beginning that they were outnumbered. When, two days after they reached the ruins of the wolfheall, a scout came back to report, white-faced and grim, that the trolls had already found their way into the seacaves along the coast, beneath where the village had been, Grimolfr rested his head against his hands and said, “We must fall back.”

  Ulfsvith, the wolfjarl of Arakensberg, protested, but Grimolfr cut him off. “We have neither the strength nor the numbers to finish them completely, and we must look ahead to the winter.”

  The silence in their rough camp grew even thicker. A man could choke on it, Isolfr thought.

  “We are too late for the people of Othinnsaesc. We must not allow ourselves to forget the people of Nithogsfjoll and Franangford and Arakensberg”—this last said pointedly—“who will now more than ever before need the wolfheallan to stand between them and the trolls. We must fall back.”