A Companion to Wolves

by Elizabeth Bear

  Isolfr?”

  Frithulf’s voice.

  “Come on, Isolfr, we need to get out of here. And I’m not carrying you.” A slap, hard enough to sting.

  Isolfr moaned protest, dragging one hand up to catch Frithulf’s wrist. “Don’t hit me.”

  “So you are in there! Come on, brother, open those pretty gray eyes. Vigdis, you want to give me some help here?”

  A wolf tongue, hot and wet and accompanied by breath reeking of troll blood, began to wash his face. Moments later, it was joined by a second, and the pack-sense said Kothran, who liked washing Frithulf’s face best, but would lick a werthreatbrother and gladly. Wolf-spit stung in his cuts. His face felt flayed.

  “Ah, gods! Frithulf!” He floundered into a sitting position, ending with one arm hung around Vigdis’ neck. She snuffled his ear and then began washing that, too.

  “I knew that would get you,” Frithulf said with evil satisfaction. “Now, come on. Tin says we can’t let you sleep here.”

  “Did we … is everyone … ?”

  “That monster is dead,” Frithulf said, “and you’re our worst casualty, though Kothran will be limping for a few days. And I think Kari’s broken some fingers and I want you to look at them, so get up, Isolfr, and let’s get moving.”

  Isolfr lurched to his feet, although his head was pounding and he could only open one eye. “Is there bone showing? I don’t know what we’ll do for splints down here—”

  “Shhh. Lean on me. Kari’ll do fine until we’re back to Tin’s people. She seems to think they’ll help us now.”

  “But only if there is enough of us left to be helped,” Tin said. “Can he walk?”

  “Vigdis and I will keep him up,” Frithulf said grimly. Isolfr wanted to protest that he was perfectly capable of keeping himself up, and was Kari really all right? But the cavern was swimming in front of his one good eye, and the floor kept bucking and lurching beneath his feet. He buried his fingers in Vigdis’ ruff and followed where she and Frithulf led.

  There were long stretches of their climb back to the svartalfar’s domain that Isolfr could not later remember. He remembered being left against a wall like a rag doll while the other six butchered three trellwitches who would not even turn from their working to defend themselves, remembered Tin saying dryly as she dragged him to his feet one-handed, “And now perhaps the mountain will not fall down on our heads before we have a chance at a bath.”

  He remembered them coming to a room—for Tin was taking them a different way and he wondered why but could not find his tongue to ask—in which six stunted trolls lay dead, each with its fingers tightly clasped around the hilt of the knife protruding from its stomach. Kari’s voice said softly, “What happened here?” and Tin answered, “These were her males. They lived only to breed with her, and as she died, so died they also.”

  “These are male trolls?” Frithulf said.

  Tin tched impatiently. “And what else should they be?”

  But if Frithulf answered her, Isolfr did not hear him, his wits wandering again, and the next thing he knew clearly was Frithulf saying, “Duck. Duck, dammit, Isolfr. Bend your head,” and he realized his friend was trying to urge him through another mouse-hole in the stone.

  “’M not a stone mouse,” he said muzzily.

  “Of course you’re not,” Frithulf said, “but you’re really starting to worry me.”

  “His brain has been rattled,” Tin said from the other side of the hole. “He will be well, with rest.”

  “Yes, but he can’t rest here. Vigdis!” And Vigdis’ head appeared through the hole; she leaned forward and took Isolfr’s forearm very gently between her jaws, and began tugging.

  “Vigdis not a stone mouse,” Isolfr said.

  “No, she’s a trellwolf, and on feast days she flies to the moon.” Frithulf’s hand on the back of his head, pushing, and Vigdis pulling, and it was too much work to argue about it. Isolfr climbed through the hole. Good puppy, said Vigdis, warming him down to his toes, and Frithulf and Kari followed him through.

  “He can’t go much farther,” Frithulf said to Tin.

  “He won’t need to,” she said, and her voice opened up again into its full range. “The sceadhugenga will know the trellqueen has fallen, and I imagine by now the elders will have noticed I am gone.”

  “So we’ll either be greeted as heroes or kidnappers,” Frithulf said. “Splendid.”

  “You are men, and young ones at that. You could not make a Mastersmith of the svartalfar go anywhere she did not wish to. Now come. These halls stink of troll.”

  More walking, and Isolfr was stumbling, even though the floors were remarkably smooth. He felt as if the trellqueen’s furs were still tangling his feet. The pounding in his head was echoing all down his spine, and he could feel his knees wanting to buckle.

  “Isolfr,” Frithulf said, “you weigh a hundred stone.”

  “Do I? Sorry,” and he tried to straighten, but nothing was working.

  Frithulf swore and said, “Kari, I think I’m going to need you to get his feet.”

  Are they running away? Isolfr wanted to ask. He would have believed it, as odd and distant as they felt.

  But then the tunnel was full of light, and he tried to get a hand up to protect his eyes while svartalfar voices boomed and hummed and chimed around him. Without Vigdis to steady him, though, he could no longer tell where the floor was, and although he knew for a moment that he was falling, there was nothing he could do about it. Sorry, Frithulf, was the last coherent thought he had for some time.

  When he woke clear-headed, after an interval of fevered dreams and terrible worry, he was lying in his own bedroll, but the surface beneath him was smooth pale gray stone. The fire was burning in a sunken circle of the same stone, and even he could recognize the beauty of the masonry under the soot.

  “Are you come back to us, Isolfr?” Tin asked. He turned his head to find her crouching beside him, leaning on her spear.

  “Have I been gone?”

  “You frightened us something awful,” Frithulf said from beyond Isolfr’s feet. “The sceadhugenga said the wyvern’s poison was inflaming your wounds, and we had to grind up the most vile smelling paste I’ve ever met in my life to draw it out.”

  “You said my brain was rattled,” Isolfr said to Tin, frowning, trying to piece his memories together in a way that would make sense.

  “It was,” she said. “But the fever was the danger.”

  “The sceadhugenga said you might be left wit-addled,” Frithulf said, coming to crouch on Isolfr’s other side. “I asked how we’d tell the difference, but just got bones shaken at me.”

  “Bones?”

  “The sceadhugenga’s honor,” Tin said. “When each sceadhugenga dies, the next adds one vertebra to the strand.”

  “Whose vertebra?” Isolfr asked, although he had the feeling he might not want to know.

  “The dead sceadhugenga’s, of course. It is how the lore is passed.”

  He’d been right about the knowing.

  “You are lucky,” Tin said. “Chrysoprase is of the oldest lore-line, and knows more of healing than anyone I have met. He says you will not lose the eye, either.”

  “Oh good,” Isolfr said weakly.

  “And he’s stitched you up beautifully,” Frithulf said. “It should scar very cleanly.” There was no bitterness in his voice, although Isolfr would not have blamed him if there had been.

  He stretched his hand out and Frithulf clasped it briefly, warmly.

  “What about Kari?” he asked, remembering. “Didn’t you say his fingers were broken?”

  “One broken, two sprained. He’s got a paw like a seal’s flipper right now, but the sceadhugenga did nice work on him, too. And the wolves are very well. If the svartalfar keep feeding them as they have been, we may have to roll Kothran out of here like a beer barrel.”

  “The elders are most embarrassed at having been discourteous to a konigenmother,” Tin said, and the gravity of he
r voice was belied by the wicked twinkle in her eyes. “Moreover, Silver spoke for you—which is more than I would have expected of her—pointing out that you did not swear not to return here, but only swore not to speak of us to others, which you did not, and not to bring harm to us, which you manifestly did not. And you have—” Another of those svartalfar words Isolfr did not know.

  “What?”

  “That’s what I said,” Frithulf put in.

  “It goes very badly into plain speech,” Tin said. “You exceeded your oath.”

  “I did?”

  “If I’ve understood them correctly,” Frithulf said, “you swore not to bring harm to them, but by killing the trellqueen, we actually brought them good. Tin says it would have taken them months, if not years, to find the opportunity to do it themselves, and by then the trellwitches would have made another queen. So you did more than you swore to do, and it—”

  “It embarrasses the elders,” Tin said. She cocked her head, regarding him with her small, bright eyes. “You must understand, we are a cautious people, of oaths and bargains. And thus we are very careful to deliver what we promise, but delivering more than one has promised is considered the mark of a mother and it is not treated lightly.”

  “And it’s a bit of a blow to them that we did this thing—I won’t try to pronounce it, I thought Silver was going to laugh herself sick when I tried—when half the time they can’t even remember not to call us beasts.”

  “Your position,” Tin said, and cocked her head the other way, “is now more favorable for gaining the svartalfar’s help.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Isolfr asked her.

  This time she did not turn him aside. She shrugged and said, “You have killed the Iskrynequeen, and I believe you will kill the young queen as well. My people as well as yours will be free from a fear that we have known, mother and daughter, all our lives. My mother and my mother’s mother, and the full hand of my siblings, all were killed by trolls.”

  “But you couldn’t have known we would succeed,” Isolfr persisted.

  Tin smiled at him, brilliantly, and said, “I gambled.”

  Chrysoprase was a gnarled little being who could have ridden on Vigdis’ back the way Isolfr had ridden his little gray pony Stout when he was still too small for a man’s horse. He came shortly thereafter, and poked and prodded the flesh around Isolfr’s stitched wounds. When he was satisfied, he crouched back on his heels and grunted, his brindled sideburns feathering in the faint ceaseless breeze through the caverns.

  “You’ll do,” he said, and rattled the silver rings on the tip of the staff he carried in place of a trellspear. “You’ll heal as well as the rest of them.” He shuffled back; Isolfr, crouching, fought the bizarre urge to drop to his hands and knees and follow at a crawl. Chrysoprase’s lips were thinner and crookeder than Tin’s, and there were no inlays in his teeth. He took a breath, and spat his next words out as if he was spitting on a woman’s fresh-swept floor: uneasy defiance. “And what would you have of my people, Konigenwolfsbrother?”

  Isolfr had not been ready for it. He blinked, and hunkered down on his heels. “Help,” he said, finally. “Only what I came here to ask. Help against the trolls. And soon, as soon as possible. We’ve already been in the mountains too long.” He didn’t say what he felt, the clear glass-edged fear.

  “Humph,” Chrysoprase said. He thumped his staff on the stone. “We’ll see.” But Isolfr rather thought he meant, yes.

  TWELVE

  They came back to Bravoll before the solstice, three wolfcarls and three wolves at the head of a svartalfar army. The svartalfar traveled fast, even over snow and with the winter at their back, blowing hard. They had horses—ponies—no bigger than the trellwolves, shaggy and seeming accustomed to cold and ice and the dark underground. The ponies ate palmfuls of grain and stamped their feet, shaking ice from their fetlocks, and did not complain.

  Isolfr, for himself, rode a sledge more often than he liked—Tin and, surprising him, Silver required it of him, and of Kothran as well whenever the white wolf limped. From his privileged seat, Isolfr watched the svartalfar, and healed. Chrysoprase pulled his stitches out after a week, although Isolfr’s face still hurt when he frowned or—less often—smiled.

  The svartalfar traveled swaddled in cloaks, hunched on the beds of the sledges when they could. It took them only twenty days to come to the pinewoods outside Bravoll, and they were expected when they came. Isolfr could not have kept it from Viradechtis, not with her worry eating at him with every clop of the ponies’ hooves.

  The whole wolfheall turned out to greet them. The fighting men—wolfcarls and wolfless—of Bravoll came to meet the svartalfar army, and the trellwolves came with them. Isolfr made sure he was standing for it; his injuries were healed as much as they would until spring, and he wasn’t about to meet his wolf—and his wolfjarls, he thought, concealing a flinch—wrapped in furs and flat on his back like an infirm old woman.

  You came home with an army, he reminded himself, turning over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of four thousand svartalfar, banners and trellspears glittering in the winter halflight.

  It didn’t help.

  The red-and-black-barred wolf bounding at the head of the pack, her belly bulging with pups, came close enough to Isolfr to catch his scent and then turned her back on him, ears flat, making a display of her wrath. Mar and Kjaran at least sniffed his hand before snubbing him. And his wolfjarls—

  He forced himself to meet their gaze evenly, aware of Skjaldwulf and Vethulf drawing up short before him, side by side, matched in their gait and matched in their hesitation. Isolfr felt as if his face burned, as if each etched clawmark was on fire once more.

  He actually thought he might have bolted, if Frithulf hadn’t been beside him, driving his nails into Isolfr’s elbow through sweater and shirt alike.

  There was no way he could bemoan his scars in front of Frithulf. It shamed him even to remember them.

  He leaned into his friend’s touch for a moment and then shook loose, pulled forward, Tin appearing at his side. You’ve made her respected, he thought, but that wasn’t quite right. She had made herself respected. She’d gambled and she’d won.

  And Isolfr was happy to name her an ally and a friend. “Skjaldwulf,” he said, forcing his lungs to breathe, to support the words that wanted to fall soundless from his mouth. “Ve … Vethulf. This is Mastersmith Tin, of the smith’s guild and the Iron Kinship, daughter of Molybdenum of the lineage of Copper. She comes in your defense.” Isolfr swallowed, and waved over his shoulder with a broad, sweeping gesture he hoped might be worthy of a ballad. “She’s brought her family.”

  They stared at him. And Skjaldwulf said, “Your face—”

  “A trellqueen,” he answered, and bit his lip to keep from apologizing for not being as beautiful as he should have been. Idiot, he thought. The scars should have been a secret relief.

  “Isolfr—” Vethulf began, and Isolfr braced himself for the dressing down. But Skjaldwulf knocked Vethulf’s arm with an elbow, and then pulled Isolfr into an almost brutal embrace that Vethulf lunged into a moment later, both of them pounding his back and shouting until Frithulf stepped in and grabbed the wolfjarls’ arms and said “His ribs were cracked, you fools—”

  It didn’t matter. Even the pain didn’t matter, because Viradechtis finally deigned to come and lean against his hip. And as she did so, her mother sat in the snow beside her and began painstakingly washing her face.

  They were home.

  They had come home in time.

  Even Ulfgeirr couldn’t find much to complain about with regard to the sceadhugenga’s doctoring, although once they were back at the wolfheall he did make Isolfr sit on a wooden bench and peel off coat and jerkin and sweater and tunic and shirt so he could see how the wounds had healed all down. He grumbled and muttered, especially when he found the still-sore swelling over Isolfr’s ribs that Frithulf had wrapped tight for him, but in the end he sat back and patted Isolfr’s
shoulder and said, “He made a better job of it than I could have.”

  Isolfr smiled—it hurt less every day—and bent down to show that he could, and, incidentally, to rub his hands in Viradechtis’ coat. She lay on her side, belly like a snow-smoothed hill; he ran his hands down her to feel the puppies squirming under her skin. Five or six, he thought; a big litter, for spring. Maybe there would be a konigenwolf.

  He tipped his head toward the jarls, wolfjarls, housecarls, svartalf Masters and wolfsprechends milling around the far side of the fire, and said, “How bad has it been?”

  Ulfgeirr sighed and handed him a clean shirt. Isolfr pulled it on over gooseflesh. His hands were chapped and mottled with chilblains; the journey had been fast, but it hadn’t been easy. Nevertheless, he managed the laces, and pulled his jerkin on over it, wincing as he raised his arm. After two months outdoors, even the drafty chill of the heall felt like luxurious warmth.

  “That bad?”

  The housecarl shrugged, and absently reached down to tug Nagli’s ears. The red wolf sighed and pushed against his knee, and Isolfr felt sudden panic. “Ulfgeirr, where’s Sokkolfr and Hroi? And Ulfbjorn?”

  “Relax,” Ulfgeirr said. “Sokkolfr broke a leg in the last raid. He’ll be fine, but he’s … convalescing in the home of a Bravoll widow-woman who finds him charming for some reason. I don’t think he’d complain about a visit when our council’s done. And Ulfbjorn’s around here somewhere. He’s probably shy of all the fuss and waiting to say hello in his own fashion. That’s the good news. Signy, though”—he shook his head—“won’t last the winter. She’s taken a bone fever. And we lost the last patrol we sent toward Franangford, but otherwise the trolls have been quiet. Ulfsvith thinks they may be sapping, but that seems a great distance to dig.”