The Tempering of Men (3 page)

“He's with Fargrimr Fastarrson, the heir of Siglufjordhur,” the sentry said. Siglufjordhur was a big southern keep, far down the peninsula in what Vethulf had heard were impossibly temperate climes—four months of winter, no more, and only a week dark at the heart of it. “Head northwest. About a quarter hour's walking.”

Vethulf was three steps away when he remembered himself. “Thank you,” he said over his shoulder. “Othinn guide your hand.”

The sentry nodded in return. “Othinn guide your hand, wolfjarl.”

As the sentry had promised, the walk was short—even less than a quarter hour. Vethulf passed several campsites, and at each the wolfless men were unwontedly polite. A close and common enemy made for quiet camps. At the last fire Vethulf walked by, the jarl of Siglufjordhur's graybearded housecarl told him the jarl's fire was the next. “But the jarl's asleep.”

“I'm to speak with the son,” Vethulf said.

The housecarl snorted. “Well, all right. But I'll wager he's not your type.”

Vethulf's arms crossed as his spine drew itself erect. Bilious words scorched his throat, but he bit down on the inside of his cheek and rebuked himself,
What would Isolfr say if he saw you screaming like a fishwife at some wolfless man?

“I'll wager you're right,” Vethulf snarled, and turned as crisply as he could in snowshoes to stalk across trammeled drifts to the next fire.

He could make out Randulfr and Ingrun at their ease on skins beside a shielded fire, and a lean, sword-wearing man dressed in well-sewn seal fur seated beside them. As Vethulf entered the ring of light, both men and the wolf looked up. Vethulf suddenly understood the housecarl's amusement.

The face over the seal fur collar was beardless, framed by hard blond plaits that sharpened its features but could not coarsen their delicacy. Fargrimr Fastarrson was either a very pretty, very young boy—or he wasn't a man born at all.

Vethulf's hesitation and confusion must have been obvious, because Randulfr popped to his feet while Ingrun's tail waved negligently once or twice. “Vethulf,” he said, with every indication of delight. “Are you looking for me? This is my brother, Fargrimr. He became my father's heir when I went to the tithe. Grimi, this is Vethulf Kjaransbrother, Franangford's wolfjarl.”

“So it was your yard we cleaned the trolls from,” Fargrimr said. “I'd wondered whose mean huswifery that was.”

Perhaps the words should have offended, but rather than being mocking, Fargrimr's teasing invited camaraderie. The voice was high and sweet, but the intonation was a man's. Vethulf fought the urge to shake his head like a wolf to clear his ears.

“It wasn't mine when the trolls moved in,” Vethulf said. “I just inherited the problem.”

Randulfr extended a hand to clasp. Vethulf put his own hand in it and let Randulfr transfer the clasp to Fargrimr's, once Fargrimr had dusted the snow from his trews and bindings. He had a good grip, solid and meaningful through his mittens, hard from the sword.

In the southern lands where there were no trolls, it was not entirely unheard of for a man without sons to make one. An unlucky sire could choose one of his daughters as heir and raise her as a sworn-man, a functional son. Such a girl never grew to be a woman; instead, she grew to be a man. She would take a man's name and would not marry, though some took girls as lovers, and thus she could head her father's household when he died. Upon her passing, one of her—his—sister-sons could then inherit. Sworn-men supposedly submitted to a course of herbs and surgeries that would unwoman them, but on the evidence of his eyes Vethulf thought that might be slander. The furs were thick, but Vethulf could see no sign that Fargrimr, at least, had had his breasts burned from his body.

Vethulf had also heard that there were four or five sworn-men with the company of wolfless men—one an archer who had died in Franangford, as it happened—but he hadn't realized any ranked.

“I didn't know you were a southerner,” Vethulf said to Randulfr, so he wouldn't stare at Fargrimr's chest. “You don't have an accent.”

Randulfr extended his right arm through the gap in his cloak and shoved up the nested sleeves of his coat, sweater, surcoat, and tunic to expose a naked white arm. “No tattoos, either. I went to the heall too young.”

Beside his brother, Fargrimr also stripped his sleeve, showing—by contrast—muddy wriggling swirls of blue-green wode and hairless forearms banded with muscle like barrelstaves.

“His fault,” Fargrimr said, fondly, and punched his brother. “I would have had washerwoman calluses, instead of learning the axe.”

“I was born Fasti Fastarrson,” Randulfr said. “Someday I'll tell you how I wound up in the borderlands. It's a long story, involving a trade negotiation and a young wolf-bitch who tagged along with her mother after being told to stay home.” He grinned at Ingrun, who had sprawled on her side as if the snow were a featherbed, her feet extended toward the coals. “But you have the look of a man with a message, wolfjarl.”

“I've come to speak to your brother, actually,” Vethulf said. “Fargrimr, I am sent by Grimolfr to pass the word: the heofodmenn of the wolfless men are summoned immediately to a council of war.”

TWO

As Grimolfr and the season predicted, there was no dawning, but nevertheless the torches of the Wolfmaegth almost sufficed to stain the deep-blue sky in crimson. Vethulf stood with his brothers of the wolfthreat and werthreat, awkward at the back of the human and svartalfar army. The svartalfar had insisted on the honor of the vanguard. When Grimolfr and Gunnarr Sturluson protested, the foremost smiths and mothers of the svartalfar had been polite but adamant. The svartalfar were guests of the men, and they would fight at the front. Furthermore—as Tin, the mastersmith who had befriended Vethulf's wolfsprechend, Isolfr, pointed out—her people did not rely upon torches to see in the dark and so should have the lights at their back, where they would blind the trolls but not the svartalfar.

The light of the men's torches still revealed the svartalfar, though—their hunched backs draped in cloaks worked with elaborate quilting; richly, raggedly decorated in subtle rusts and umbers; mail and weapons showing the dull glint of oiled steel. Some of the svartalfar stood no higher than a man's waist and the tallest were only eye to eye with a trellwolf, but their legs bent strangely under the skirts of their hauberks, and when their arms extended, their reach was half again Vethulf's span.

Behind the svartalfar were ranked the wolfless men, Gunnarr the jarl of Nithogsfjoll and his warriors and all the rest of the jarls and their men. Here again the trolls had done them a favor, because the hewn trees, trammeled snow, and scraped-clear hillsides made it easy for the wolfless men to line up shoulder to shoulder, lock shield-edges and advance in a double-rank. Boys and old men not strong enough for service under arms stood behind them, bearing spears and torches.

Down the slope from the crest of the hill to the seacliffs, Vethulf could see the tumbled walls and ruins of what had been Othinnsaesc. Trellfires blazed at the boundaries, glittering on drifts slumped over broken stones.

It griped Vethulf for wolfcarls to fight behind wolfless men when trolls were the enemy, but the wolfcarls were sortie fighters, and a shield wall was only as effective as its cohesion. Somewhere among those wolfless men were Fargrimr and the other two surviving sworn-sons. Vethulf allowed himself a moment of pity for the father of the one who had fallen, who must have burned all his born-male heirs and also now had lost the sworn-male one. Perhaps there were sister-sons to stand the family's obligations.

Perhaps.

Vethulf shook his head. Many fathers had lost sons and sons had lost fathers. Tonight—unless it was today, and who could tell, in the bleakness of midwinter?—there would be more. Beside him, Kjaran whined, reading Vethulf's distress as plainly as the wind, and shifted his paws uneasily. Vethulf leaned his hip on the wolf's shoulder in apology. No warmth penetrated either his woolens and furs or Kjaran's coat, but the contact was comforting. He wanted to strip off a gauntlet and bury his fingers in the wolf's thick ruff, but the cold was too dangerous and the fight was at hand.

He hoped. The worst part of organized action was the waiting.

All around him, men and wolves groaned and fidgeted. The Franangfordthreat surrounded Vethulf and Kjaran, stretching off to the left where Skjaldwulf and Mar made a lynchpin for the southernmost flank of the Wolfmaegth. Only half the Wolfmaegth moved with the svartalfar and the wolfless men. The rest were with Grimolfr, circling wide to the south.

Vethulf felt them and all the rest of his brethren through the pack-sense. Waves of disquiet and eagerness flowed through them, a tumult of conflicting desires. But a driving purpose underlay that, and Vethulf knew that once battle was joined, the Wolfmaegth's passion would be unified.

A cry went up from the back of the press, the howl of wolves and the bellow of men, the horrid ecstatic clatter of axes on bucklers and breastplates. The rearguard was in place. The clamor swept forward, and as the cry reached Vethulf he took it up, head thrown back, Kjaran howling beside him, the press of trellwolf and wolfcarl bodies on each side rocking forward and back in abrupt eagerness. The waiting wore men down, made their bones ache with anxiety, until the splashing terror of open war could come as a relief.

Vethulf shouted his throat scraped and hot, Kjaran rearing up beside him to paw the air like a striking stallion. Far to the front, the dark glitter of torchlight reflected on svartalfar halberds wavered as the forest of weapons dipped forward and the svartalfar tumbled downslope like an avalanche.

Behind them, the torches of the wolfless men dipped and fluttered, following. Then Vethulf was running, too, the axe swinging comfortably in his hand, Kjaran's feet silent and his tongue lolling between dagger teeth as he paced alongside. Trolls poured out of the warren below. Vethulf ran harder, each bounding downhill step jarring his legs to the hip. He had to check himself as he overran the wolfless men's line. As the armies of the humans and alfar poured down the slope, he kept an eye on the woods to the south. Trolls moved underground as easily as fish through water, and there was another logic to placing the wolfcarls in the rearguard.

The svartalfar met the trellish legion with a sound like a thousand falling trees. They plunged among the trolls with a great wailing and the terrible clash of wood and metal. Vethulf reached out to Kjaran with his mind, listening to the evidence of the gray wolf's senses, sharing what he himself observed from atop the moving tower of his height. Together they knew more than each alone. Vethulf could see across the press, down into the ruined town where battle was already joined, as the wolfless men formed their wall again and quickly advanced, shields locked and feet shuffling in unison while swords and spears poked through.

These trolls fought frantically, savagely, blocking the entrances to the warren with their bodies while miners tunneled behind them to close the gaps their warriors defended. The attacking archers loosed upon the miners, but when the trolls fell, their comrades only buried them in the bulwarks so black ichor stained the rough-shaped rock. Vethulf saw a man fall and his comrades close ranks around him, sealing the shield wall before the line could be broken. A second rank of men walked behind the first, some with spears, some merely leaning on their shieldbrothers' backs, reinforcing one man's strength with another against the superior weight and strength of the trolls. One of the second rank shoved the wounded warrior's shield over him to protect him; the fallen man curled in on himself like a beetle.

A moment later, Vethulf heard a roar that drowned even the noise of battle and looked left to see a band of trellwarriors break cover, running for the human army's flank—and the Franangfordthreat. Skjaldwulf's powerful baritone carried over the creak of leather and the breathless yelps of running men: “To me! To me, Franangford! For Viradechtis!”

Skjaldwulf could not have found a better rallying cry. The throats of the Franangfordthreat were opened, and the battle-howl that rang from them rivaled the ululations of the oncoming horde of trolls. Vethulf shifted his grip upon his axe haft and leaped forward, meeting the enemy midcharge.

What followed was a slaughter. These were not warriors, he realized as he hewed one and another, boots slipping in ichor-black, ichor-slick snow. These were house-trolls, decked in scavenged armor, swinging weapons they barely knew how to hold. A
distraction
, he thought, as Grimolfr's troop broke from the trees behind them and fell upon their flank.

It was not hard to disengage when all around him men and wolves were pulling trolls down like sheep. He drew back, scrambling upslope, finally locating a boulder with the hewn stump of a murdered forest giant still crouched beside it. He clawed up the vantage one-handed, awkward in buckler, leathers, and mail. Blood-clotted boots slipped before he jammed the toes in crevices and heaved himself up.
Where are the warriors?

Kjaran floated effortlessly up the rock to crouch beside Vethulf, ears pinned as he scented a bloody wind. Down by the ruins, the last of the trellish defenders had fallen. A great cheer went up among the wolfless men as svartalfar smiths and sappers approached the sealed tunnels. Then men and alfar drew back from the tunnels, the last few sappers moving at a scuttling svartalfar run, and Vethulf was only prepared for what came next because he'd witnessed the purging of Franangford.

A rising ice-sharp wind off the ocean brought him an acrid scent of burning, followed some moments later by a dull, heavy sound that struck his ears like a cup-hand blow and lifted and dropped the boulder under his feet. He swayed but kept his balance. Kjaran looked at him and whined.

“I know,” Vethulf said. “I hate it, too. Wolf-brother, where are the
trellwarriors
?”