A Companion to Wolves

by Elizabeth Bear

  Trellqueen, Isolfr said, and thought of the destruction of Franangford, Hrolleif and Tindr and Signy and everyone he knew who had been killed by trolls, Tin’s siblings, Kari’s grief.

  The trellwitch flinched a little, and he caught a scrap of confusion in her thoughts. Trolls knew that men did not have queens as they did, did not share the daughtermind. It baffled her, that men could care so about creatures who could not share their self.

  He had never thought that trolls could grieve; the trolls had never thought that men could grieve.

  “I owe my people—” he said, and there had to be something wrong with him, he was apologizing to a troll. “I cannot let a trellwarren grow again here.”

  away the trellwitch said. And then again away. She drew herself in, trying to shield the kitten with her body.

  Viradechtis moaned.

  “You have nowhere to go,” he said. “And I know that you would lie to save that kitten’s life.”

  away the trellwitch insisted, and he caught clouds of meaning, shreds of clarity. The Iskryne trolls knew of other troll warrens, other lines. sisterkin the trellwitch said, and although he could not make sense of the concept, he understood what she was telling him. She would take the kitten to one of these other warrens where the Iskryne line and lore could be preserved.

  “You would not return to the Iskryne later?”

  dead said the trellwitch, meaning that the Iskrynequeen was dead, meaning that the Iskryne was a place of death, meaning that the Iskryne was dead to trolls. Although he knew she would lie to him if she could, he also knew that she was not lying. She did not want to return to the Iskryne or to the caves beneath Othinnsaesc. She wanted to find her own kind again, wanted sisterkin, daughtermind, and she wanted the kitten to live.

  And, though Othinn might curse him for it—god of wolves, god of war—and though Viradechtis whined beside him, leaning against his will, already tasting the trellwitch’s blood in her teeth, he could not bring himself to blame the trellwitch.

  It was not the god of wolves who had saved him, him and the wolf beside him, his daughter and Viradechtis’ cubs. Not the god of war.

  It was the patroness of smiths, the goddess of witches, and of whores.

  “Teach her that we can also love,” Isolfr said, and dropped his axe to hold Viradechtis hard, with both cold hands, while the trellwitch fled into the snow.

  FOURTEEN

  Franangford and Othinnsaesc had to be rebuilt from the tumbled stones, and it would take more than the summer—especially as heallan and keeps alike desperately needed the spring for planting to recover from two bad years. Food was more needful than shelter, and the Franangford wolfheall would be little more than a stockade and a circle of tents when Isolfr and his wolfjarls took up residence, along with the new Franangfordthreat. Sokkolfr would be housecarl, as he and Isolfr had planned; he and Frithulf and Kari remained Isolfr’s shieldmates, his friends, his pack, as they had been.

  While they stayed at Bravoll still, some nights Viradechtis wished to sleep with her consorts, but some nights she wished to sleep with her brother and her mentor and the black wildling, and where she chose to go, Isolfr chose to follow.

  And Skjaldwulf and Vethulf did not complain. They seemed delighted when he came to their bed—and they continued to share, for Kjaran and Mar insisted on it—but accepting when he did not. They had reached some sort of peace with each other at Othinnsaesc; Isolfr did not ask for details, knowing it would be unkind. Though they still butted heads, and brawled—like fishwives, Isolfr told them—through the wolfheall, no one could doubt that affection underlay the insults, especially when Kjaran could not be troubled to turn from washing Mar’s face to see what the matter was.

  Isolfr had spoken to them, when they returned from Othinnsaesc full of Skjaldwulf’s tales of the trellqueen, terrible-taloned, maw-handed mother of monsters—“it took two men to bring her down, though Frithulf tells me the one you slew in the Iskryne was larger.”

  “Um,” Isolfr said.

  “Two men,” Skjaldwulf said, grinning, “and when the monster fell and they turned to clasp hands over her corpse, there in the strange-chambered warrens and caverns of what once was Othinnsaesc, I vow to you, Isolfr, they were the two most surprised men in the North of the world. For there was Gunnarr Sturluson on one side, black to the brow with the blood of trolls, and there on the other—”

  “No,” Isolfr said, guessing.

  “Yes! And there on the other, Othwulf Vikingrsbrother with the trellqueen’s ichor still wet on his axe.”

  “What did they do?”

  “What could they do? They clasped hands over her corpse. And then Gunnarr spent three hours in the bath house, washing like a cat that’s fallen in the honey pot.”

  Isolfr managed to retain his dignity until Skjaldwulf’s own lips began to twitch with repressed laughter. And then they were holding each other up as they choked on mirth, Skjaldwulf’s arm tight across Isolfr’s shoulders, Isolfr’s eyes streaming, while Vethulf looked on in feigned disapproval.

  But it hadn’t been the trellqueen, or even his father, that Isolfr had wished to speak of. He thought he’d had enough of trolls for one life, and he thought he’d hear the story a thousand times anyway, if the gods granted him the years in which to hear it.

  It is the manner of wolves to say what they mean and say it plainly, and he said to them plainly that he wished them to treat him as a werthreatbrother, no more and no less. “I am not fragile, and I am not a child.” He glared at Vethulf. “Call me ‘lad’ again, and I’ll have your stones.”

  Vethulf tilted his head and tucked his chin like a wolf protecting his throat. Skjaldwulf intervened before the red-haired wolfjarl could step forward, though, and said in his quiet voice, “We do not think you fragile, Isolfr. We would have to be blind as well as fools to think so. I did not want …” He spread his hands helplessly, and his love was all through the pack-sense, honey stirred into tisane.

  Isolfr understood; it softened his heart but not his resolve. “Then think of me as a wolf. You would never seek to … to coddle Mar as you have sought to coddle me.”

  Skjaldwulf’s turn to look taken aback, but Vethulf burst out laughing and tossed his braids over his shoulders. “Can I still call you a daft creature?” he asked, and Isolfr was almost offended, and then realized that he was being teased, that that was Vethulf’s way of signifying agreement.

  He grinned at his wolfjarls and said, “That will suit me very well.”

  And things were better. To his surprise, neither Vethulf nor Skjaldwulf pressured him to lie down for them, though they made no secret of desiring him. They could not have kept their desire out of the pack-sense if they had wanted to, but they did not court him. He was afraid, at first, that Vethulf would corner him as Eyjolfr had, but he did not, and Isolfr came to understand as winter turned to spring, that he would not, that Vethulf, for all his sharp tongue and arrogant self-confidence, did not see other men as less than himself, and there was a generosity in him that finally showed Isolfr why Viradechtis had made him wolfjarl.

  Eyjolfr himself chose to join the Franangfordthreat. Isolfr had been startled enough when Randulfr said that he and Ingrun wished to stay—but he was pleased, also, and it made sense, for Ingrun was easily second bitch at Franangford, and Amma had none of Kolgrimna’s stubbornness. But when Glaedir came up beside Ingrun, he could not help looking to Skjaldwulf—who gave him a nonplussed shrug and said, “Eyjolfr? Do you follow your wolf?”

  “I do,” said Eyjolfr, and added a bit stiffly, “I bring no quarrel to Franangford, with wolfjarls nor with wolfsprechend.”

  The pack-sense said he meant it. “Then you are welcome,” said Isolfr.

  That was indeed a day of wonders, the day before the Nithogsfjollthreat began their long trip home, for Vigdis, to no one’s surprise more than Grimolfr’s, chose Ulfbjorn as her new brother. It was a good choice, despite his youth; the big man was steady of heart and even-tempered, and even Ulfrikr Bro
ken-Nose had the sense not to call him womanish.

  And it was wonderful as well for the look on Grimolfr’s face, when he had to tilt his head back—far back—to glower up at his wolfsprechend.

  When the snow still lingered—gray at the edges of meadows and deep under the trees—the svartalfar marched home. Tin took her leave of Isolfr privately, and left him with a gift he hadn’t expected—a war-axe shaped by her own hands. Not her Master-piece, of course, but an axe made by a Mastersmith nonetheless.

  “If you hang it on the wall over your mantel,” she said, troll fingerbones rattling from the rings lining her long pointed ears, “I will know, and I will come and take it back.”

  “Are you wishing me war, Mastersmith?” He smiled to soften it, and laughed when she showed him her teeth.

  “With no trolls in the North,” she said, “it would have to be war with the svartalfar.”

  He sighed, and sank down in a crouch, the axe laid across his knees. It was a beautiful thing, art and destruction wrought in one bright killing curve, the broad steel blade inlaid with bronze and silver coils. “My people will fear it. Fear your people, I mean.”

  “Use that to keep the wolfheallan strong,” she said, and reached with bony fingers to pat his hand. “Even the smiths and mothers will speak to queen-wolves. Get your lover to put it in a song, so people remember. If they fear us, there will be no war.”

  “He’s not my lover,” Isolfr said.

  She raised an eyebrow, a long feathery, shaggy sweep. “You’re his beloved. Both of them. I saw enough on the war-trail to know.” Then she laughed, and took her hand off his and pushed his chest like a wolf-cub nudging playfully. “We don’t get to pick who loves us, you know. And better to get him to write the song than be remembered forever as ‘fair Isolfr, the cold.’”

  He scrubbed a hand across his face, roughness of beard and scars and the smooth skin of the unmarked cheek. “Is that really what they call me?”

  She smiled. “You frighten them, Viradechtisbrother. You went down under the mountain and came out again, twice, and the alfar call you friend. They’ll have you among the heroes before you know it. And you can seem quite untouchable—‘ice-eyes, and ice-heart, and ice-hard, his will.’”

  “Othinn help me. It is a song already.”

  “Isolfr Ice-Mad,” she said, and when he winced, she shrugged.

  He snorted and looked down, pretending he was testing the edge of the axe on his thumb. “There are worse names.”

  “Don’t tempt your gods,” she admonished.

  “It’s a goddess I ought to thank.” Viradechtis looked up from her place by the fire, and gave him a dark, opaque stare. He knew what she was thinking—the trellwitch, and the kitten. He hadn’t told anyone about them, and he wasn’t about to tell Tin.

  Viradechtis would forgive him eventually. She would have to; he was hers, and she was his—unto death and the hall of heroes, if Othinn would still have them—and they’d each forgiven worse.

  “Goddess?”

  “My dream of trolls and you and fire,” he said. “A gift from Freya.”

  Tin laughed. “Ah, yes. You know svartalfar made her necklace for her? So our songs say.”

  “So do ours,” he said. And they said she sold her body to earn it, too, but then, what choice did women have? Even goddesses. Even queens.

  “Tin—”

  “Yes?”

  “What you said about war, and the wolves, and teaching men to fear the svartalfar.”

  “Yes.” She settled back, and folded her hands.

  “I am the father of a daughter,” he said formally, recalling Hjordis’ words: if you wish me to send her to be heallbred —

  “I have heard.” Her eyes caught the light, quartz-bright. He thought she knew already what he was about to ask.

  “When she is of age, may I send her to you, to be apprenticed as a smith? It seems to me …” He hesitated, coughed to clear his throat, began again. “It seems to me that we will need people, men and svartalfar, who can speak between the races. And if my child is a smith, and later a mother—”

  “Ah.” Tin rocked on the balls of her feet, medallions and talismans clanking on her gorgeously embroidered clothes. “Ah, yes, and the daughter of Isolfr Ice-Mad, Isolfr Viradechtisbrother, yes—”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes,” she promised. He almost thought the brightness in her eyes was about to spill down her creased cheeks, but instead she clasped his hand again. “Yes. Send her to me. I will make it right with the smiths.”

  “And the mothers?”

  She laughed and showed him the inlays on her teeth. “The mothers will understand.”

  Authors’ Note

  There are many worlds in the branches of the tree, and legends do not stay untouched as they move from place to place. The world of the Iskryne is not Earth, but certain of its human cultures are not unlike certain historical Terran cultures. We have chosen to recognize this kinship by rendering the language of the people in this story in a melange of Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and other Germanic languages—making our choices in each case by ear rather than striving for a spurious consistency—in the hopes that this alien familiarity and familiar alienness will help readers as they enter into this cold and perilous world.

  The Wolfheallan, The Wolfcarls, And The Wolves

  ARAKENSBERG WOLFHEALL

  Ulfsvith, wolfjarl

  Vethulf, brother to Kjaran

  BRAVOLL WOLFHEALL

  Asvolfr, wolfcarl

  FRANANGFORD WOLFHEALL

  Kari, brother to Hrafn

  KERLAUGSTROND WOLFHEALL

  Osk, wolf

  KETILLHILL WOLFHEALL

  Aslaug, konigenwolf

  OTHINNSAESC WOLFHEALL

  Brokkolfr, brother to Amma

  Othwulf, brother to Vikingr

  NITHOGSFJOLL WOLFHEALL

  Aurulfr, brother to Griss

  Clorulf, brother to Vith

  Eyjolfr, brother to Glaedir

  Fostolfr, brother to Guthleifr

  Frithulf, brother to Kothran

  Grimolfr, wolfjarl, brother to Skald

  Hringolfr, brother to Kolgrimna

  Hrolfmarr, brother to Kolli

  Hrolleif, brother to Vigdis, konigenwolf

  Dramatis Personae

  Isolfr, brother to Viradechtis

  Randulfr, brother to Ingrun

  Skirnulf, brother to Authun

  Skjaldwulf, brother to Mar

  Sokkolfr, wolfcarl

  Thurulfr, brother to Egill

  Ulfbjorn, brother to Tindr

  Ulffred, wolfcarl

  Ulfgeirr, brother to Nagli

  Ulfmaer, brother to Hroi

  Ulfrikr, brother to Skefill

  Yngvulf, brother to Arngrimr

  Asny, wolf

  Eitri, wolf

  Frar, wolf

  Frothi, wolf

  Hallathr, wolf

  Hannar, wolf

  Harekr, wolf

  Havarr, wolf

  Ingjaldr, wolf

  Isleifr, wolf

  Nyr, wolf

  Olmoth, wolf

  Surtr, wolf

  Thraslaug, wolf

  Valbrandr, wolf

  THORSBAER WOLFHEALL

  Leitholfr, brother to Signy, konigenwolf

  Stafnulf, brother to Ormarr

  Groa, wolf

  VESTFJORTHR WOLFHEALL

  Bekkhild, konigenwolf

  Praise for A Companion to Wolves

  Winner of the Romantic Times Award for Best Fantasy

  “It’s not surprising either that [A Companion to Wolves] is extremely well written and more suspenseful than most contemporary fantasy I’ve read.”

  —Don D’Ammassa

  “Njall Gunnarson, son of Lord Gunnarr, is chosen to join the wolfcarls, warriors who bond with wolves and dedicate themselves to protecting the nearby villages from the ravages of man-eating trolls. Bonded with the female wolf pup Viradechtis, Njall receives a new na
me—Isolfr—and learns the requirements of living closely with a soul-bonded wolf, including sexual bonds between wolfcarls whose wolves choose to mate. When one winter brings a flood of trolls, the wolfcarls and their wolves take to battle, though it may be their last, using everything they have built through living as a pack. Coauthors Monette (Mélusine) and Bear (Blood and Iron) combine their literary talents in a saga of warriors whose love for their wolves and for one another serves to bind them together into a band of fierce protectors.”

  —Library Journal

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A COMPANION TO WOLVES

  Copyright © 2007 by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear

  All rights reserved.

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  eISBN 9781429965491

  First eBook Edition : July 2011