Many Words

They moved on to other topics as they ate. Einar Goransson was the son of a caravaner from the central plains, and had grown up on the roads, tenuous tracks carved from the wilderness, which linked the far-flung cities of the Norrmanrike. As the kråka flew, was more than five hundred leagues from den Holm to Syderskogholm, where Sif had grown up. Over the roads, it was nearer nine hundred. Einar had traveled much of that distance as a boy, and had stories to spare.

Lilja, though she hadn’t traveled, had stories of her own. The far north, north even of den Holm, was her home. It was the land of the jotun, of draugr and drakunr circling the dim torchlight of every outpost of human civilization.

Eventually, the two of them looked to Sif. She demurred. She had plenty of stories, but they dredged up memories of her old life in the south, a life hacked to pieces and left to burn by the ontlig invasion. “Another time,” she said. “We need to go soon anyway.”

Lilja looked over her shoulder at the water clock standing by the stairs down. “I guess so.”

Sif stood. “Are you doing anything tonight? I need to go to the Rikesarkiv after we finish. It would be nice to have company for the walk.”

“I’m free,” said Lilja and Einar, in unison.

Sif smiled as both blushed. “We can all go together, then. Einar Goransson, will you be here later?”

“I’ll find a game of tafl,” he said.

“Good. We’ll see you soon.”


Sif stopped by her room, a tiny slice of the tower with room for a bed, a trunk, a desk and chair, and absolutely nothing else, to fetch a cloak, then joined her comrades outside. The wind blew over the courtyard wall, as it did from all points of the compass. It flowed up the tower and to the rotating torus of cloud surrounding its peak. The prevailing wind and the unusual cloud came from the a relic of the guild, an ælfish artifact which bled off the tension on the weave created by the presence of luftsenmagiker and the magic they wrought. Each of the guilds had one, gifts from the Twelve. After three centuries of study, human magiker were no closer to making anything like them.

Sif wrapped her cloak tighter against the biting wind and stepped into place next to Lilja, who wore exactly what she had worn to dinner. Lilja looked her up and down with some amusement.

“I’m not from here,” Sif said softly.

Leifsson heard her anyway. “Are you cold, aspirant?”

All eyes turned to Sif. She saw no point in anything but the truth. “Yes.”

“Why?”

Wary of traps, Sif waited a moment before answering. “It’s cold outside,” she said cautiously.

Leifsson rolled his eyes. “Yes, obviously. Why are you cold?”

“That isn’t as interesting,” Sif said, waving dismissively. “Tell me about Einar.”

Lilja shook her head. “There’s nothing to tell. We’re friends.”

“I don’t—” Sif craned her neck to look past Lilja. “There he is now. Einar! Einar Goransson!”

Lilja frantically shushed her, but too late. Einar cast his gaze around the room and saw Sif waving. He made a face which said, ‘ah’, and headed over. Lilja blushed.

“Sif Hrothgarsdottir. Lilja,” Einar said, conspicuously dropping the patronym off of the latter’s name. “Is this spot taken?”

He was tall for his age—less than a year Sif’s senior, just about a year older than Lilja—and lanky. Like most of the men of the Akademi, his fine blond hair was perpetually mid-tousle. His eyes were bright and green, in the middle of a broad face with sharp features.

Lilja glared daggers at Sif, but Einar seemed not to notice. Sif nodded. “Of course. We wouldn’t call you over if it wasn’t.”

Einar laughed. “I guess not.” He sat next to Lilja. “How are you?”

Lilja made no answer. Sif filled in. “Good. We’ve been learning lots of cumulations, so I think we must be getting to a good part of the book of forms.”

Einar bobbed his head. “If you’re close to six hundred, you’ll be starting on gales and tempests soon.”

“Exciting,” Sif said.

Lilja huffed. “For you, maybe.”

Einar blinked.

Sif lied, “Herre Leifsson’s lecture was harder than usual today. And at least you can read.”

“You can too,” Lilja pointed out.

“It takes me ten times as long.”

Einar held up a finger. “You can read, though.”

“Thank you!” Lilja said. “And she doesn’t even have to work at working magic.”

A servant deposited plates before Lilja and Sif. “Sorry, one more,” Einar said.

“Not at all, sir.” The servant bowed and retreated.

“It isn’t like it comes naturally to me,” Sif said, defending herself. She looked over Lilja’s shoulder thoughtfully. “Working magic, maybe. Not working magic like we’re supposed to.” She put a little boom into her voice, mirroring Ansgar Leifsson. “‘Sif Hrothgarsdottir, are you trying to knock down our tower?'”

Lilja laughed. After a moment, Einar joined her.

“Lilja was telling me you think we might start on the poles soon,” Sif continued.

Einar nodded enthusiastically. “Soon,” he echoed. “Herre Leifsson loves to make things hard. He’ll have to teach you some of the gale forms first, though.”

“Not tonight, then,” Sif said, relieved.

Einar shook his head. “He usually waits until the weather’s worse anyway.”

“Worse?” Lilja said around a mouthful of bread, looking up at Einar suddenly.

“The harder the wind is blowing, the harder it is to make the jumps,” said Einar earnestly.


For the next three hours, Sif managed to keep her mind from wandering. Leifsson reviewed another dozen cumulation forms, then taught two dozen more, along with a half-dozen new zephyrs. He dismissed them in the early evening, instructing them to have dinner and meet him in the courtyard for the last of the day’s lessons.

Chairs scraped on the stone floor. Sif sat a moment longer, working through one of the new forms.

Lilja watched. As Sif finished, she offered, “Eat with me?”

Sif stood. “Of course,” she said gratefully. “It’s nice to have the company.”

During the walk down the spiral to the main hall, they talked about nothing in particular. Sif found that to be one of Lilja Orrisdottir’s great strengths. In general, Sif liked people, but found it hard to talk to them. She had no such trouble with Lilja. On more than one occasion, they had chattered away deep into the night, until only embers remained on the hearth in the hall, and most of the guild had long since gone to sleep.

They were nearly the same age, and had come to the Akademi der Luftsmagiker by a similar path. Lilja, too, had shown no magical talent until only a few months ago. When she finally did, a magiker was there to see it. It was nice to have a kindred spirit, Sif thought.

They found two chairs at the end of a table near the fire. This close to it, Sif could feel the gentle breeze drawing smoke and soot up and and into the flue over the hearth, both its physical presence on her skin and the flow of magic which powered it.

Lilja flagged down a servant. Her family had money, and extensive lands near den Holm. Had their family’s territory been further south, they might have been more than minor nobility. Sif, for her part, was still uncomfortable with the idea of servants. Lilja had grown up with them, and Sif was happy to leave dealing with them to her.

“Will you be eating?” the servant asked.

“Yes, both of us,” Lilja replied. The servant dipped his head and retired. Sif relaxed. Lilja grinned. “You get used to it.”

Sif tilted her head. “How would you know?”

Lilja opened her mouth, then frowned. “Good point.” She leaned across the table. “I think Ansgar Leifsson is going to let us try the poles.”

“In this weather?” Sif said. To punctuate the point, a gust of wind howled around the tower. “At night?”

Lilja shrugged. “Maybe not tonight,” she said, “but soon. That’s what I hear.”

“From who?”

Lilja shrugged. “Einar.”

“Einar Goransson?” Sif raised her eyebrows. “You’ve been spending lots of time with him.”

“Have I?” Lilja replied innocently. “He said that last year, this is when Herre Leifsson started.”


Like all the guilds, the Akademi der Luftsmagiker took most of its students at a young age—Sif was twice as old as most new aspirants. Yet it was not unheard of for older children, nearer Sif’s age, to show a talent for the working of magic. Most guilds had some provision for bringing such students up to speed. At the Akademi, it was Leifsson’s job.

It was not an easy one. Sif and her fellows trained at three times the pace of more traditional students. For four hours each day they studied ælfish. On most days, they spent an hour in the courtyard learning to fight. Four more they spent on the theory and practice of magic.

That was the topic at hand now. Before coming to the guild, Sif had worked magic on the fly, expressively. There was no structure to it, only what controlled chaos Sif herself wrung from the order of the weave. The guilds had a better way, re-imposing order onto the disorder of magic by teaching thousands of forms. Each tiny movement or single syllable corresponded to an exertion of will, a tiny tweak of the weave. Put together in the right way, the forms’ effects built on one another. A magiker who knew them well enough, and had the creativity to put them together in the right way, could do nearly anything with them, and leave the weave more intact than she would simply working magic off the cuff.

The girl seated next to Sif elbowed her. She could nearly have been Sif’s sister: they shared wide-set blue eyes and heart-shaped faces, though the girl’s blonde hair was curly where Sif’s was straight, and her skin was pale where Sif’s was darker.

The reason for the intrusion into Sif’s thoughts became clear a moment later. Ansgar Leifsson said, “Would you care to demonstrate, Sif Hrothgarsdottir?”

Sif frantically rewound Leifsson’s lecture in her head. No good.

The girl next to her stared straight ahead. Out of the corner of her mouth, she whispered, “Five seventy-one.”

Sif stood. “Five seventy-one,” she said. Leifsson nodded, gesturing in a circle with two fingers: go on. “One of… Felmansson’s cumulations?”

Leifsson nodded again. “Very good. Show us.”

Sif made a pyramid with her thumbs, forefingers, and middle fingers, then rotated her right hand so that her right thumb touched her left forefinger. The weave hummed as she did. She reversed the motion, and the power faded away.

“Well done. Be seated.”

Sif did so. “Thanks, Lilja,” she mouthed. Her seatmate dipped her head just a fraction.


Sif sat at a table at the periphery of the Akademi der Luftsmagiker’s main hall, a round room filling the whole width of the tower. The wind howled outside, and through the panes of the nearest window, Sif saw snowflakes swirling in the gray of the late afternoon. A fire blazed on the enormous round hearth at its center, and a scattering of other luftsmagiker were seated at the long tables around the room. Some played games of tafl, while others chatted and ate. Sif’s table was small, filled with an array of candles to ward off the winter’s gloom and a stack of books.

She had long suspected reading would agree with her. The runic glyphs of Norrmanssprak had taken her but a few days of practice to come to terms with, and now whole worlds were open to her. The ælfish script was beginning to yield, too, despite its greater complexity. Some authors used ælfish to write Norrmanssprak; those books, she could do. Others used ælfish terms to fill in gaps in Norrmanssprak’s magical vocabulary, switching to ælfish script for a few words in the middle of a line of runes. Those were harder, but a man called Helmutssen, dead for a century now, had written a dictionary with whose help she could struggle through. Ælfish itself remained beyond her, but she could hardly expect to learn a whole new language in a month.

“Sif Hrothgarsdottir!”

Sif Hrothgarsdottir. She reveled in her new patronymic, an everyday reminder that she had a family to call her own. She would never tire of it.

“Sif Hrothgarsdottir, you are late!” Ansgar Leifsson called. He was no longer a young man, but not old, exactly, either—fifteen years Sif’s senior, she guessed. He had sharp features and a face with harsh lines. He rarely spoke of his past, but Sif gathered he had been to war with the dweorgr before accepting his current assignment.

Sif scrambled to stack her books. As she did, she reached out, feeling the weave of the world. Conscious of Leifsson’s watchful presence, she placed her fingers together in a complicated arrangement, then drew them apart. Power surged between them, more than she expected. She brought her hands closer together, then spoke a few nonsense syllables which she was informed were ælfish. A puff of air swirled around her table and put her candles out. “Coming,” she said.

Leifsson nodded once, a short, spare motion. “Efficient.”

“Thank you, Ansgar Leifsson.” Sif gathered her books, dipped her head respectfully, and followed Leifsson to the staircase which spiraled further up the tower.

They ascended one and a half turns—except for a few rooms, like the library and the hall, the tower fit together like a puzzle, with no two rooms at exactly the same level. They turned into a lecture room. Sif took a seat, and Leifsson stood facing Sif and her classmates.