The Tempering of Men (6 page)

As for Brokkolfr, he decided the best thing he could do with himself was sit in the sauna and boil some of this prickly restlessness out of his brain. Amma followed him—which surprised him less when he found Hrafn lying mournfully beside the sauna door.

Gray-masked black Hrafn had been born a wild wolf; he had found his bond-brother Kari mostly by accident in the aftermath of the sack of Jorhus. They had joined the Franangfordthreat before the old konigenwolf had been killed, but they remained here because of Isolfr. Kari had been with Isolfr when Isolfr slew the trellqueen in the Iskryne—the story Freyvithr Godsman had come to collect.

Grateful that he would not have to build the fire and heat the stones himself, Brokkolfr nevertheless wondered if Kari was in hiding. Hrafn lifted his head, ears pricked, his tail thumping the boards twice in greeting as Amma flopped down beside him. Brokkolfr shed his clothes and untied his straggling braids, then pushed aside the first of two hanging blankets to enter the sauna.

“Has the godsman given up, then?” Kari asked as Brokkolfr stepped into bone-deep warmth. Kari was a slight man, wiry and scarred, his yellow-brown beard still ragged as a youth's.

“For tonight. That one, I think, does not give up easily.” Brokkolfr hesitated, but Kari waved him over amiably. They were close to the same age—and Amma liked Hrafn. Brokkolfr settled on a sharp-smelling cedar log, his shoulders against warm stone, and cupped a hand across his mouth and nose so he could breathe the cooler air it caught. Water beaded on his face as Kari reached forward and switched soaked spruce branches across the coals. Steam billowed up, and Brokkolfr reached for a scraper. He checked the edge for nicks that could draw blood.

Kari leaned back, body slack in the heat, licking at beads of sweat and condensation. Brokkolfr stood into dizzying heat and dragged the horn edge of the scraper down his chest, watching as a week's soot and grit peeled away with the sweat. He flicked the scraper clean and started under his chin once more.

He almost opened his mouth to say,
You and Frithulf went to the Iskryne with him. Do you understand him?
And was stupidly grateful that Kari spoke first, before he could make a fool of himself by prying into another man's business. “We haven't any shortage of candidates for this litter,” the wildling said. “And the next will be spoiled for choice. But that won't last more than a couple of summers.”

Brokkolfr hung the scraper carefully. “What do you mean?”

Kari's torso swelled and shrank with deep, slow breaths. He spoke between them. “This year, we're heroes. We saved all the northlands. We'll eat well and have all the women we want. Boys will compete to come be wolfcarls—at least they will once there's food in from the fields, and the memories of the deaths is a little further off, and until then we have wolf-widows to spare. But in two summers' time, or come a lean winter—gratitude is soon forgotten. And the werthreats will die away and the wolves will go wilding. And why should they not? With the trolls gone, what need is there of the Wolfmaegth?”

Brokkolfr sat again heavily. The steam lessened, and he took his turn with the branches. It had the sound of something Kari had been thinking about for a long time. “Of course, you've spoken of this to the wolfsprechend.”

Kari shrugged heavily. “To the wolfjarl.”

Which one?
Brokkolfr wondered. “I'm more worried that there
will
be a need for us.”

Kari slitted one eye, a pale glimmer behind his lashes. Brokkolfr knew it for encouragement.

“Isolfr Viradechtisbrother
is
the treaty with the svartalfar,” Brokkolfr said. “When the ice pushes
them
out of the Iskryne, like it pushed the trolls before them, and when Isolfr is gone—what then?”

There was a long pause. Kari sighed and let his eye fall shut again. “Skjaldwulf has thought of that, I'm sure.”

Yes,
Brokkolfr did not say.
But has he thought of an answer?

FOUR

“You were hardly hospitable to him, were you?” Vethulf said as mildly as he knew how. Isolfr's head was bent over one of the pups—who was at last tired enough to lie still and be checked for ticks—and his long blond braids shielded his face very well, but Vethulf was becoming something of an expert on Isolfr's shoulders. Those shoulders said he didn't want to talk about the godsman, or anything else, and in fact wished Vethulf would go away.

Sorry to disappoint,
Vethulf thought, and settled his own shoulders more comfortably against the door frame. Viradechtis leaning against one leg and Kjaran flopped across his feet told him he was right. Vethulf counted beats of his heart and was at nine when Isolfr's well-studied shoulders slumped and he muttered, “Hospitality surely doesn't mean I have to take my heart out of my chest to show him.”

“Is that what he's asking you to do?” Vethulf said. “I only heard him asking about a dream.”

That got him a glare. “Would you feel the same if it were your dreams he wanted to hear?”

“I never remember my dreams,” Vethulf said cheerfully.

For a moment, he thought Isolfr might smile, but he sighed instead. “I don't want to talk to him. That's all.”

In a pig's eye,
Vethulf thought but bit his tongue before saying. He had grown up the ninth of his father's ten children, with nieces and nephews older than he was, not to mention more cousins than a man could count in a night, all of them brawling in and out of the longhouse his father's elder brother ruled; he had learned early to fight fierce and fight dirty if he wanted to get anything for himself—if he wanted to be heard. The edge that upbringing had given his tongue and his wits had served him well in Arakensberg Wolfheall, which was much enmeshed in the politics both of the Wolfmaegth and of Arakensberg Keep.

But then he had become wolfjarl to Isolfr Viradechtisbrother, and sharp words no longer served him. Vethulf didn't have to scramble to be noticed; it was the men of Franangford who scrambled to be noticed by him. Skjaldwulf, whom he had thought his rival, had turned out to be his best ally—and unimpressed with his flyting. And Isolfr, whose notice he most craved, retreated from the kind of fighting Vethulf knew best like a wolf retreating burn-footed from a hot coal.

He knew—had learned the hard way—that it was not cowardice. Isolfr was one of the bravest men he knew. But fighting with words was not Isolfr's way. And Vethulf, for once in his life wishing
not
to hurt another with his words, found them clumsy and twisting in his mouth.

*   *   *

After the meal, Skjaldwulf took Freyvithr outside into the bailey, where they could watch construction of the stables. Freyvithr leaned forward on the hewn log they shared, thick arms, roped with images of cats elongated until they almost seemed like serpents, propped on his knees. He let a horn of mead rest in one hand. There was no need for fire on a sweet spring evening, and Freyvithr seemed unconcerned by black Mar sprawled at his feet. The breeze ruffled the wolf's fur so the lighter undercoat showed in waves like the silver turning of leaves.

Despite himself—despite his loyalty to Isolfr—Skjaldwulf found he liked the godsman.

Freyvithr said, “You haven't much use for scholars here in the north, have you?”

Skjaldwulf snorted dismissively, at first hearing only implied condescension. A moment's reflection on Freyvithr's tone told him he might have reacted prematurely. “We have skalds,” he said, flipping a braid behind his shoulder. He scratched at his beard. “But you mean more than that, don't you?”

Freyvithr nodded. “Written records. Men whose duty it is to maintain and expand them. We have books—” He shook his head. “We have books from the days of the High Konungur, Njall Waroak. The actual words and thoughts of men who lived nine hundred years ago. Not what skalds remembered, or the songs people asked for.”

Skjaldwulf rolled his own drinking horn between his hands, feeling the copper piecework of its badges and bangles press into both palms. Songs and sagas were not supposed to change—one was meant to repeat them as one received them. But even the most trained memory failed, and even the most scrupulous skald could tune a story to an audience's liking.

And what audiences liked changed over the years.

The wolfheall kept records, written records, but they were records of wolf lineages and troll behavior, not the deeds of men. Still, Skjaldwulf could imagine writing down what men did and thought, as well—

He nodded his apology. “And you wish to add my wolfsprechend's thoughts to this…”

“Archive,” Freyvithr supplied. “Simply put, yes. So that nine hundred years on, others may read the plain words of Isolfr … Isolfr Viradechtisbrother as if in his own voice, rather than what others have written or remembered of him.”

“That doesn't seem to leave much place for skalds,” Skjaldwulf said. It had been his first apprenticeship, before Mar chose him. He still sometimes wondered what his life would have been had he never come to the wolfheall. He might have starved or died by some wayside, or of drink or some lord's or rival's passions. Or he might be wealthy and respected, with (he supposed dubiously) wife and sons and house in a warm southern town.

Such as the one Freyvithr came from.

“You could come and see,” Freyvithr said blandly.

Skjaldwulf sent him a searching look, afraid for a moment that Freyvithr had used some witchcraft to read his thoughts.

The godsman obviously misread the stare. “Isolfr. Or if a wolfsprechend cannot travel alone—I am sorry, wolfheofodman, I do not know your customs—you and Isolfr, or Vethulf Kjaransbrother and Isolfr. As suited you. People do come, you know. To Hergilsberg. There is a tree there said to have been planted by the goddess herself. The archive grew up around it.”

Skjaldwulf turned his head one way and then another. He could have swept half-built Franangford up with a gesture of his arm, but that might have been a touch too sarcastic.

Of course, in Skjaldwulf's place, Vethulf probably would have bitten the man's head off.

“We have a half-built wolfheall here, and a half-mended pack. I should send you my wolfsprechend and his konigenwolf, the very core of our success? Would you take the queen from a shattered hive, godsman? There will be no hive in that place come springtime.”

If any of them went—and it was madness to think it, even as the thought enticed him—it would have to be Skjaldwulf. Who could read the runes.

He was old for such travel. But then, he was old for a wolfcarl, too.

“What need have you of stout walls if the trolls are truly gone?” Freyvithr seemed to take no offense. He sipped his mead, rolling the spiced-honey wine across his tongue until Skjaldwulf could almost taste it for him. “If the Lady has given you an answer to the very problem that forced your existence, what then?”

“Wolves are Othinn's answer to the trolls,” Skjaldwulf said. “He will have an answer to the wolves, if there are truly trolls no longer.”
Something will come up.

“Will you become farmers, then? Wolves like ponies, tamely pulling plows? Will you become brigands, or turn to viking? What will you do when the winters grow colder, and you are driven south like the trolls and the svartalfar?”

Skjaldwulf shrugged. “I have heard that you in Hergilsberg have your own problems. Raiders from the southlands burned the town ten years since, did they not?”

“The town,” Freyvithr admitted. “A portion of it. But not the archive.”

“And have they vanished like the trolls?” Skjaldwulf knew very well that the seacoast was still harried by raiders. Not so far north as Othinnsaesc. But then, there was little so far north to raid for except pine trees and trellwolves, and neither of those things were particularly transportable.

“Perhaps the Wolfmaegth's future lies with the temple guardians.”

Skjaldwulf rocked back on the log bench, his long legs straightening as if to kick the suggestion away. Even if Skjaldwulf could stomach selling himself into the service of someone like Gunnarr Sturluson—or even someone like Freyvithr—how could he bring Mar with him? You could not take the wolf from the pack, nor the wolfcarl from the wolf. And warriors might be hired to hunt men, but that was not the purpose of trellwolves. A wolfheall could not be a weapon of conquest.

How would a konigenwolf and her wolfthreat deal with the demands of a human lord? What human lord who was not a wolfcarl himself would understand the delicacies of working with a wolf pack? And what of the inevitable spoiled sons who wanted a trellwolf of their very own?

Better to let the pups run wild.

Skjaldwulf looked at the men working, at the heaps of felled timber and the mounds of quarried clay that filled the air with their smooth, distinctive scent. Would those half-built fortifications ever be needed? Was it possible—an all but incredible thought—that Skjaldwulf himself would live to see another ten summers? Wolfcarls, beloved of Othinn, did not die in bed.

Perhaps we will have to learn how.

“We would make poor mercenaries,” Skjaldwulf said mildly, and left it at that.

*   *   *

In the morning the wolfsprechend's daughter—long awaited and much delayed—arrived for fostering. Vethulf wondered if it was the wolfheall's current state of chaos—half-constructed, wolfcarls and stonemasons underfoot, sledges laden with bluestone rumbling along rutted tracks far into the lingering evenings—that served as a beacon to attract still more pandemonium.

Alfgyfa was not the only child in the wolfheall—wolfcarls bred sons and daughters, after all, and something must be done with them. But she was the only one who was Isolfr's daughter, and his wolf was nearly beside herself with the preparations, the clamor of her arrival, and the upheaval and excitement of her presence. Vethulf could feel
cub
all through the pack-sense the whole day long. Things calmed finally, and that night found all three wolfheofodmenn in the room the wolfjarls had claimed for their own use—and sometimes that of the wolfsprechend. Isolfr propped himself on a four-legged stool in a corner with his toddling daughter sleeping on his knee, awaiting a nurse hired from the town who would take charge of her.