“So, they gave you his address and sent you on your way?” Dagny asked, but I couldn’t tell if her incredulity was directed at me or at the Mästare and the Korva.
“Basically.” I leaned against the lab countertops beside her, idly toying with the folded note written on the Mästare’s letterhead.
As soon as I left Amalie’s chambers and the bizarrely intense meeting, I headed straight to the labs. Elof was finishing up a class, but as soon as it ended, I slid in the past the departing students.
Dagny cleaned up lab equipment in the sink, while Elof sat at his desk, dealing with his lesson planner. Since it was only the two of them, I felt comfortable telling them both all about the Mästare and the Korva’s strange proposal.
“Right before I left, Amalie told me that Calder wasn’t expecting me back until after lunch, and then she gave me his address,” I said and held up the paper.
“Jem-Kruk’s address?” She took the paper from me without asking and hurriedly read it. “This is in the staff housing at the Mimirin. He lives here?”
“Is he my neighbor?” Elof got up from his desk and came over to us.
“Are you going to go see him?” Dagny asked, and she held the note out so that Elof could read it.
He scoffed. “That’s one floor above me. He’s practically been on top of me.” Then he looked up at me. “How long has he been here? Why haven’t I heard about this?”
“I don’t think he’s been here that much,” I said. “A couple weeks near the beginning of June, and then he came back recently, according to Amalie. She also said he’s been keeping a low profile.”
“That makes sense, I suppose,” Elof said, but he still sounded slightly offended about being kept out of the loop.
“Did you know about the álfar?” I asked.
“Not especially. They treat their biology like trade secrets, so they don’t like talking to me.”
“When I was growing up, there were all these stacks of old National Geographic magazines around the house,” I said.
Mr. Tulin would’ve been a hoarder if his wife had let him, but magazines were something he refused to give up. It was mostly the ones with the best pictures—art, architecture, science, and nature. They were tucked away in nooks, stacked on end tables, left sitting in boxes under the window until they were sun-faded and warped.
“There was this one issue that had a big feature on ‘lost tribes’ and ‘uncontacted peoples,’” I remembered. “All over the world, there are these little pockets of humans totally detached from the greater civilization. Some of the tribes have essentially never had contact outside of their villages, so they’re even more cut off than we are.
“In Iskyla, that seemed impossible to imagine, so I was obsessed with these stories,” I went on. “There are literally hundreds of these small communities. Tiny, intense clusters with specific traditions, beliefs, and languages.
“Much of their way of life seemed unusual or primitive, or at least very different than what I’d grown up around,” I said. “And the more I think about the álfar, the more I notice the similarities to these lost tribes. Eliana was very odd, but she spoke our language, understood how to use electricity, and got along fine around the city, relatively speaking. Like she’d spent time with a lost world and in our human world.”
I looked over to see Elof eyeing me up with an arched eyebrow. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to launch into a monologue. I was just thinking aloud.”
“All right, fine, I cave,” Elof announced abruptly. “I’ll tell you what I know.”
Both Dagny and I looked at him, and she asked, “What are you talking about?”
“Dagny, I thought you knew me well enough by now.” He tsked at her but he was smiling. “There’s a super-secret hidden tribe of magical beings that defy cultural and biological norms, and you think I didn’t immediately want to know everything about them?”
She smiled. “How silly of me.”
“What do you know?” I walked over to his desk.
“Not much more than you, unfortunately,” he admitted wearily. “I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting your new álfar friends—other than Eliana—but I did meet a young man who claimed to be from Adlrivellir, and the Styrelse believed him.
“The main thing that got me really curious was his perfect English,” Elof explained. “Trolls have adopted English as their primary language for centuries, but before that it was mostly old Norse and Germanic. Even now, many communities speak and incorporate the ancestral Scandinavian mixed with nearby human languages, like Inuit, French, Spanish, and German.
“It turns out that the álfar speak five languages.” He held up his hand to demonstrate. “Two that we—both trolls and humans—have no record of at all; an old variation of Norse; English; and a psychic one that we apparently can’t handle.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I haven’t the faintest, honestly. He became deliberately obtuse every time I pressed him on it. But no matter, because this particular story is about how come their English became so similar to ours.”
“How did that come to be?” Dagny asked.
“When they met us, initially they were very excited,” Elof explained. “This was a thousand years ago, and while the troll kingdom always lagged a bit behind humans, the álfar were trapped way back in the Dark Ages.”
“I always thought our delays in technology and industry had to do with our reliance on our abilities,” Dagny said. “Humans had to create advancements for themselves. Necessity is the mother of invention.”
“Funny you should mention that, because that seems to track for the álfar as well,” Elof said. “They have been reliant on their abilities, and it seems to be with good reason, though I have yet to see the full display of their particular talents.
“Regardless, the álfar were originally excited to join our worlds, or at least that’s what was written in the scant records of the time,” Elof said. “There were a few things—a couple letters, some drawings, a limerick—that establish that the trolls and álfar were mutually happy about the union, if slightly but justifiably trepidatious.
“And things fell apart very quickly,” he went on. “The álfar living in the troll kingdom were almost entirely wiped out by the Grændöden.”
“The Green Death?” I translated. “Didn’t that wipe out a lot of trolls too?”
“It did, but that was hundreds of years later, in the thirteenth century,” Elof clarified. “Are you familiar with it?”
“Some,” I admitted. I’d heard of it because it had decimated the troll populations in Scandinavia, so there were hardly any of our kind still living in our homeland.
“Candida viridi,” Elof said. “It’s a fungal infection that gets in the blood, causes candidiasis, and after a few painful days, their skin gets a greenish hue, and they pass away. We eventually figured out how to handle it, but the first time we encountered it, when we were breaking bread with the álfar, it was a massacre. There are few accounts from that time, but the first recorded mention of the Grændöden describes leaving man, woman, and child dead in their beds.”
I snapped my fingers. “That’s what happens with a lot of these lost tribes! They’re not used to our germs or our environment, so they don’t have the basic immunities that we take for granted.”
“Not even we have an immunity for that, but it appears to have hit them worse,” he said grimly. “Nearly going extinct had a sobering effect on the álfar, and they retreated into themselves. But they have never given up hope that we will reunite someday, or at least that’s the conclusion Mästare Amalie has drawn, since they continue to speak our language.”
“You disagree with that?” I asked.
Elof gave a disingenuous shrug. “Perhaps. It’s possible. Maybe even likely.”
“But?” I pressed.
He leaned forward and tented his fingers together. “When the álfar first met the trolls, they weren’t just exploring their neighborhood. One of the reasons the disease was so devastating to the álfar was because there were so many of them living around Áibmoráigi.” He paused, as if letting it sink in. “They were making an exodus.”
“From what?” Dagny asked.
“I have no idea.” He shook his head. “Maybe they were running from something or searching for something that they didn’t have at home, like food or water.”
“But after the Grændöden, they went back to where they came from, and they haven’t really come back since,” I said. “That means they must have made peace with whatever they were running from or found a new source of food or whatever.”
“The Grændöden was near-certain death,” Elof reasoned. “Whatever they went back to only needed to be a little bit better than that.”