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Authors: Elizabeth Bear

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BOOK: A Companion to Wolves
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Isolfr tasted blood when he grinned, and surged forward in Kari's wake as he, his wolf, and Vigdis charged up the steps of the dais. Isolfr shouted, and Vigdis yowled, and as they came upon her, the trellqueen deigned to rise from her chair. She lurched forward, the wolves upon her, and the mountain itself seemed to shift under her tread. She was surefooted in the pile of hides and ingots around her throne; Isolfr and Kari tripped and skidded. She swung one massive arm, Hrafn dangling from it with all his teeth buried in her forearm, and Isolfr saw her bulging belly, the grotesque and leaking swollenness of her teats.
The Iskrynequeen was pregnant, and he remembered what Tin had said, that only the queens could breed, but if the trolls had young kittens, they could make queens. For a moment, sickened, he thought of Viradechtis and the pups growing in her belly, back in Bravoll, but the pack-sense threw Franangford at him, Hrolleif dying, Aslaug dying. Pregnant bitches had died at Franangford, and at Othinnsaesc, and the trolls had not hesitated, not—as the svartalfar had said in contemplating the destruction of men—grieved.
He heard his own rising shriek, a noise as terrible as Vigdis', and as the trellqueen turned her head, bellowing, Hrafn still dangling from one arm, Vigdis snarling and snapping and aiming for the hamstrings, Isolfr darted in, braced his feet, and swung with all his strength at the crest of the Iskrynequeen's belly.
He saw the axe hit, saw the gout of black blood, and then he saw the trellqueen's arm begin a swing, a fist like a morningstar aimed at his head. He started back out of the
way, but his feet fouled among the furs, and as he scrabbled for balance, his still-entangled foot tipped him backwards over the edge of the dais. He had just sense enough to cast his axe aside before the stone collided with his skull.
 
 
I
solfr?”
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.
 
 
W
hen 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 her 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.”
 
 
C
hrysoprase 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?”
BOOK: A Companion to Wolves
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