The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (67 page)

It surprised him that he thought of Egil with approval. The old monster! The killer! How angry he must have been at his son and his dying body! That was no excuse for killing Svart. He would do better, Kormak thought. He could not excel Egil in fighting, but he could excel him in growing old.

"I will risk age as well." He swung down off the dog. As he touched the ground, he felt his body thicken. He was heavier than before, though still strong. A gray beard bristled over his chest. He brushed his hand across it. Hairs prickled against his palm. Age, or his stay in the country of the elves, had made it thicker and more manly.

"Well, then," Alfgeir said. "I ought to tell you my true name. I am Volund, Alda's father. I could not enter the country of the fey to rescue her. The doors leading into the land of the fey have wards against anything that is foreign and might be dangerous: humans, iron, unfamiliar magic, and magicians who are not fey. My leg braces are iron and magic, and they cannot be made otherwise. In addition, I am a great magician. The fey doors would have roared like dragons if I had tried to enter. The fey let you in, because you seemed harmless.

"I gave you three magical gifts to give Alda. The first two would wake her and break the magical bonds that held her, because they contain what the fey hate most: death and history. As much as possible, they try to live beyond time and change. Memory fails in their country. Although they love to hunt, they do not like to touch blood or death. Their human servants strike the killing blow and butcher the animals.

"But, as Odin said:

'Cattle die. Kinsmen die.

You yourself will die.

I know one thing that does not die.

The fame of the dead.'

"That is what's real for humans: blood and death and history; and that is what I gave to Alda with my first two gifts.

"Bodvild asked me to make the bracelet when she came to my forge. Foolish child! Later, when she lay drunk on the smithy floor, I raped her, breaking her maidenhead, and took back the bracelet. She was your mother, Alda."

"A cruel gift," Alda said.

"The brooch was made for your grandmother, the wife of King Nidhad. He took me prisoner and made me lame. In return, I killed his sons, your two uncles, and made their skulls into drinking cups. Their teeth became the ivory in the brooch. I recovered it before I flew from Nidhad's court, but left the cups for Nidhad to enjoy."

Alda's hands went up to her breast, touching the brooch under her dress. "Another cruel gift."

"Yes," Volund said. "But remember the third gift. The dog could not enter the land of the fey any more than I could. But hidden in its golden shell and carried by you, Kormak, it could slip in. When the shell broke, it could carry you away."

"Why did it take you so long?" asked Kormak, always curious. "Alda was a prisoner for centuries. Did you not care for her at all?"

"How could he?" Alda asked. "I come from blood and death."

Volund smiled, showing strong, square, white teeth. "I am comfortable with blood and death, as my history ought to tell you; and kin matter to me. I knew your brother, Alda, and made him a sword that he used until he died. A famous warrior! But not as lucky as he might have been.

"It took me a long time to learn that Alda was still alive and then discover where she had gone. Then – hardest of all – I had to find someone who could enter the land of the fey unsuspected. You could, Kormak. A human and a slave. No one would fear you or suspect you, since you came with Svanhild."

"What will happen to her?" Kormak asked.

"She is as hard-hearted as her mother – you must have noticed that. She will be fine among the fey. Her father may try to recover her, but I doubt that she will go back.

"I promised you silver," Volund added. He bent down and lifted up two bags. "This is the silver that Egil hid in the waterfall. Svanhild stole it from her father, so she would have a gift to give her mother. I took it from her while she was sleeping on the train. The treasure you carried into the land of the fey is gravel, enchanted to look like silver. When you entered, did the doorway groan?"

"Yes," said Kormak.

"That was because you are human, and also because you carried magic – the gravel and the three gifts. Since you were not turned away, the guard must have thought the door was groaning for only one reason."

"Yes."

Volund grinned again, showing his strong, white teeth. "The spell on the gravel will wear off, but this is real. You are a rich man now." He held the bags out.

Kormak took them. They were as heavy as ever. "This is what I carried all the way from the country of the light elves?"

"Yes."

"Won't the fey be angry with me?" Kormak asked.

"Yes. I suggest you go into the part of Ireland that the Norwegians and Danes have settled. You know their language. The fey have little power there."

Volund gestured down the grassy slope behind him. At the bottom, three horses grazed. "I will accompany you for a while. I would like to know my daughter. And the iron dog will make sure that no one bothers us."

T
hey rode together into the part of Ireland the Norwegians held. The iron dog made sure they had no more adventures. Kormak bought a farm, and Alda stayed with him, as did Volund for a while. Kormak had more questions to ask him. How had Volund known to be in the tunnel, when Kormak and Svanhild came riding? Was it an accident that Svanhild and Kormak were traveling together, or was that part of Volund's plan? How far back did the elf prince's planning go? To the elf who opened the door in the cliff and beckoned Kormak in?

But Volund had grown silent and refused to answer these questions, except to say two things. "I plan deeply and slowly, as the story of Nidhad tells you. The king thought I was reconciled to life in the smithy, and he thought I was safe. I was not."

In addition, he said, "Not everything is planned."

He spent most of his time with Alda, sitting by her loom and watching her weave, his withered legs stretched out in front of him, encased in iron. His hands, folded in front of him, were thick and strong. His face was worn. Though elves aged slowly, he was obviously not young.

Of all the people Kormak had met – Egil, the lord of the light elves, the chiefs of the dark elves, the queen of the fey – Volund was the most formidable.

Sometimes he talked about the swords he had made. All were famous. More often, he listened to Alda speak about her childhood. She never spoke about her long stay in the land of the fey.

In the end, Volund returned to the lands of magic. Before he left, he said to Alda, "If you ever want to visit Elfland, send the iron dog to find me. He will always know where I am."

The dog growled. Volund touched it, and it suddenly looked like an ordinary wolfhound. "Stay here, Elding."

The dog said:

"Decent behavior

outshines silver.

Kindness is better

than gold or fame."

"Glad am I

to be a farm dog,

guarding the farmer,

guarding the sheep."

"I don't intend to raise sheep," Kormak said, scratching the dog behind its ears.

"Nonetheless, I will guard you and Alda," the dog growled.

Volund rode away.

"A hard man to understand," Alda said. "I'm glad he's gone."

"I wish he had answered more of my questions," Kormak replied.

Kormak raised horses and sold them at a good price. Alda wove. Her cloth became well known among the Norwegian and Danish settlers. Noble women, whose husbands had grown rich through raiding, bought it. They had no children, but the wars in Ireland produced many orphans, and they found several to foster. Kormak lived thirty years more, aging slowly and remaining strong. Alda did not age at all.

At last, Kormak grew sick and took to his bed. "What will you do?" he asked Alda.

"Go to Elfland," she replied. "The dog will know the way. Our foster children can have the farm and the silver that remains. I still have the gold bracelet and the gold and ivory brooch, though I have never worn either. I want to return them to Volund."

"Have you ever regretted staying here?" Kormak asked.

"I have liked it better than the country of the fey," Alda replied. "As for Elfland, I will find out how I like it."

A
lda sat beside Kormak until he died. After he was buried, she picked out a horse. "The farm is yours," she told her foster children. "I am taking this horse and the dog."

The children – grown men and women – begged her to stay.

"I want to see my father and the lands of my kin," she replied. "The dog will guard me."

And she rode away.

SING

Karin Tidbeck

Karin Tidbeck (
www.karintidbeck.com
) is the award-winning author of
Jagannath
and
Amatka
. She lives in Malmö, Sweden, where she works as a creative writing teacher, translator and consultant of all things fictional and interactive. She has published short stories and poetry in Swedish since 2002 and English since 2010. Her short fiction has appeared in publications like
Weird Tales
,
Tor.com
,
Lightspeed
and numerous anthologies including
The Time-Travelers Almanac
,
Steampunk Revolution
and
Alien Encounters.

T
he cold dawn light creeps onto the mountaintops; they emerge like islands in the valley's dark sea, tendrils of steam rising up from the thickets clinging to the rock. Right now there's no sound of birdsong or crickets, no hiss of wind in the trees. When Maderakka's great shadow has sunk back below the horizon, twitter and chirp will return in a shocking explosion of sound. For now, we sit in complete silence.

The birds have left. Petr lies with his head in my lap, his chest rising and falling so quickly it's almost a flutter, his pulse rushing under the skin. The bits of eggshell I couldn't get out of his mouth, those that have already made their way into him, spread whiteness into the surrounding flesh. If only I could hear that he's breathing properly. His eyes are rolled back into his head, his arms and legs curled up against his body like a baby's. If he's conscious, he must be in pain. I hope he's not conscious.

* * *

A
strangely shaped man came in the door and stepped up to the counter. He made a full turn to look at the mess in my workshop: the fabrics, the cutting table, the bits of pattern. Then he looked directly at me. He was definitely not from here – no one had told him not to do that. I almost wanted to correct him:
leave, you're not supposed to make contact like that, you're supposed to pretend you can't see me and tell the air what you want
. But I was curious about what he might do. I was too used to avoiding eye contact, so I concentrated carefully on the rest of him: the squat body with its weirdly broad shoulders, the swelling upper arms and legs. The cropped copper on his head. I'd never seen anything like it.

So this man stepped up to the counter and he spoke directly to me, and it was like being caught under the midday sun.

"You're Aino? The tailor? Can you repair this?"

He spoke slowly and deliberately, his accent crowded with hard sounds. He dropped a heap of something on the counter. I collected myself and made my way over. He flinched as I slid off my chair at the cutting table, catching myself before my knees collapsed backward. I knew what he saw: a stick insect of a woman clambering unsteadily along the furniture, joints flexing at impossible angles. Still he didn't look away. I could see his eyes at the outskirts of my vision, goldenyellow points following me as I heaved myself forward to the stool by the counter. The bundle, when I held it up, was an oddly cut jacket. It had no visible seams, the material almost like rough canvas but not quite. It was half-eaten by wear and grime.

"You should have had this mended long ago," I said. "And washed. I can't fix this."

He leaned closer, hand cupped behind an ear. "Again, please?"

"I can't repair it," I said, slower.

He sighed, a long waft of warm air on my forearm. "Can you make a new one?"

"Maybe. But I'll have to measure you." I waved him toward me.

He stepped around the counter. After that first flinch, he didn't react. His smell was dry, like burnt ochre and spices, not unpleasant, and while I measured him he kept talking in a stream of consonants and archaic words, easy enough to understand if I didn't listen too closely. His name was Petr, the name as angular as his accent, and he came from Amitié – a station somewhere out there – but was born on Gliese. (I knew a little about Gliese, and told him so.) He was a biologist and hadn't seen an open sky for eight years. He had landed on Kiruna and ridden with a truck and then walked for three days, and he was proud to have learned our language, although our dialect was very odd. He was here to research lichen.

"Lichen can survive anywhere," he said, "even in a vacuum, at least as spores. I want to compare these to the ones on Gliese, to see if they have the same origin."

"Just you? You're alone?"

"Do you know how many colonies are out there?" He laughed, but then cleared his throat. "Sorry. But it's really like that. There are more colonies than anyone can keep track of. And Kiruna is, well, it's considered an abandoned world, after the mining companies left, so –"

His next word was silent. Saarakka was up, the bright moonlet sudden as always. He mouthed more words. I switched into song, but Petr just stared at me. He inclined his head slightly toward me, eyes narrowing, then shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. He reached into the back pocket of his trousers and drew out something like a small and very thin book. He did something with a quick movement – shook it out, somehow – and it unfolded into a large square that he put down on the counter. It had the outlines of letters at the bottom, and his fingers flew over them. WHAT HAPPENED WITH SOUND?