She bit back all of her questions. Like how do wolves manage to travel by boat for so many full moons? Was that why they had trained themselves to be gentle in wolf form? And was it possible to put in a request for spices they didn’t have on hand the next time his traders left for market? And what did they trade for anyway?
“After the next full moon, I will dispatch Randulfr and a hunting party to the Northern Ice to hunt the great white bear, so we may have provisions with which to barter and sell when the traders sail again this summer next.”
Again, so many questions popped off in her head, but she refused to ask them.
“Ah, here we are at the smith’s house.”
They walked into a dark room, which Chloe figured out was actually a free-standing, one-room structure, behind which sat the smith’s longhouse. The two wolves inside the workshop, one father and one son, judging by the similar look of them, both stood up when they entered. And it seemed they were expecting Chloe and Fenris to stop by because the older one immediately waved a hand toward a square stone, with a glowing red rectangle on top of it.
She didn’t understand.
“My queen, the smith has agreed to show you how he makes the woman’s dagger and at the end of your lesson, you will have a simple dagger of your own to use at meal time and for cutting materials and also for defending yourself against wild animals if you should meet them in the forest.”
Her eyes widened, and she once again had to squelch her follow-up questions, including whether a dagger could be used to do stuff like shave, and um, what wild animals in the forest? Though, she kind of didn’t want to know the answer to that second question.
“I will translate any questions you might have for the smith and his son, but you will have need to talk to me do so.”
Before she could even think to say, “No, thank you,” her butt was on the stool in front of the anvil and she was asking, “Is there more than one cast for making these? If so, may I choose mine? And I see he’s already heated the iron. Is there any way to ask him to back up and start from the beginning without being rude?”
Fenris said a few words and the two men scrambled to start gathering what appeared to be a large set of blackened tongs and a number of oddly shaped hammers.
“What did you say?” she asked him.
“Your queen wishes for you to start from the beginning.”
“I said without being rude!”
“He is your subject. In this relationship there is no such thing as rude.”
“Yeah, actually there is. You kings and queens just haven’t figured that out yet,” she answered. “Just be happy you’re not French. That lesson is going to get learned like a mofo in France several hundred years from now.”
“I did forget how baffling you could be.” He smiled and came to stand behind her stool.
She wanted to tell him if he really wanted to understand baffling, he should try learning Old Norse from scratch.
But then the two smiths started pouring molten ore into the cauldron and she became too interested in what they were doing to give him a good comeback.
THE NEXT DAY FENRIS SHOWED up after her lessons again and this time, he took her to the iron fields to see where “much of our metal” came from. That one was a little less hands on, since unlike women of this age, she knew better than to handle anything with questionable chemical content while pregnant. But it was still thrilling to see how people who had no formal classes, internet, or books to guide them, made things day in and day out.
The day after that, he woke her early in the morning to take her to the farm hamlet just a little ways down the coast to show her where all of their grain came from. The hamlet was relatively nearby, but it was still about an hour away in the small fishing boat he’d procured for the trip, and when Fenris started to tell her stories about the mostly unpopulated lands they passed along the way, she forgot herself and started asking him questions about where the humans lived and how much interaction they had with them. And somehow they ended up talking about the differences between wolf and human interactions in both their times all the way there.
Then on the way back from the hamlet when Fenris asked her if they had the resting sun for a time in her land, that led to a conversation about how she knew a little about a lot of things due to at first to these things called “books” and then later on to a more recent invention called “the internet,” which was how so many people all around the world were able to know about what they called “the midnight sun” even if they had never seen it in real life with their own eyes.
He kept asking her questions about “these matters that could be read in books” and “the internet,” until eventually she told him the story of how Professor Henley had figured out he was a Viking back in Colorado, and found a picture of his sword at a museum in a city called Oslo, which might have not yet been founded in his time but was the capital or the main city of Norway in her own. And that led to a discussion about what year they were in, and that never fully got figured out, since the Norse wolves used a calendar that was a mix of moons, summers, and winters, and eras of rule, as in “The time of the second Fenris” and the time of the “third Fenris.” Fenris was the sixth in his own line of kings, but there was another Fenris line before that, which would take “many boat trips for which to account” according to Fenris.
The day after that, he took her to the beekeeper’s longhouse to see how the honey that sweetened their food and provided the base for their mead was made. And so on and so forth until before she knew it, another full moon was just a day away.
To Chloe, it felt much like what she’d seen and read about in human mating rituals. Wolves didn’t date and in many cases, they didn’t even bother with getting to know each other. A she-wolf went into heat and then proceeded to have crazy wolf sex day and night with whatever guy she either wanted or had agreed to mate with until she got pregnant. Then if they were lucky she went into heat maybe one or two more times within her lifetime, giving her two more pups before they grew old and died together.
Everything romantic that happened between wolves tended to come before their actual heat night. And even then, it wasn’t so much dating, as hanging out and deciding if they wanted to be together on their heat night. Not exactly the stuff of romance novels.
Cases like hers and Rafe’s, where two wolves got to know each other as adults before the she-wolf went into heat, were rare and Wolf Springs was full of mates for life, who grumbled in their later years that they didn’t have anything in common and wished they had chosen more wisely.