Brenna shot Anton a look. He blushed. “Not quite what I was trying to say, Chief High Raven.”
“I am not a Chief,” High Raven said. “I am a clan leader.” He regarded Brenna steadily. “Then you are not a great princess?”
“No,” Brenna said. “I’m a Commoner. But a MageLord has been my guardian.”
“Has been?”
“He is a monster,” Brenna said. “I escaped him.”
“In this.” High Raven indicated the airship, the blue silk stretched out across the ice like a giant snake, here and there rippling a little in the wind.
“Yes.”
“It is a thing of the Outside World,” Anton said. “It’s called an airship.”
High Raven turned and looked back at the shoreline, then at the setting sun. “We will have to hurry if I am to send men enough to bring this thing to the camp before darkness. Let us ride the sled together, and when we are warm around the fire in the longhouse tonight, you will tell me what I wish to know.”
A few minutes later Brenna found herself seated, more or less comfortably, on the flat wooden base of the sled. Anton sat on the other side, his back to her. High Raven sat on the end, his back to them both. One of the men had taken his place as driver; the other had remained with the airship as a guard.
The roar of the sled’s runners on the ice made it impossible to talk, which suited Brenna fine. She stared at High Raven’s broad-shouldered back. A savage. A savage chief… clan leader, whatever. How many Commoners had he killed, how many farms had he pillaged?
She pulled herself up short. She didn’t know he had done anything of the sort. But it was hard to think of him in any other light when all she had to go on were the many tales she had heard as a child of the Minik, the Savages of the North.
In most of those stories they were faceless villains, bloodthirsty denizens of the forests who emerged in the middle of the night to terrorize innocent villagers. Occasionally they were presented more like ghosts, elemental spirits that resented the creation of the Great Barrier and in the guise of men took their revenge. She did remember one story in which a young Commoner girl and a Minik boy made friends, but it had ended badly with the boy reverting to his bloodthirsty nature and a noble MageLord being forced to kill him to save the girl’s life-and more importantly, it was implied, her maidenhood.
None of those stories had prepared her to come face-to-face with one of the savages herself. Especially one that didn’t sound like a savage at all and spoke her language as well as she did.
And how did Anton know their language?
Well, she supposed she’d find out soon enough. And it wouldn’t do to assume that High Raven was a murderous, almost supernatural villain like the savages of the children’s stories.
No, that wouldn’t do at all.
The dogsled fairly flew over the ice, and in short order they reached solid ground… as opposed to solid water, she supposed. Frozen reeds sticking out of the ice crunched as they slid over them, then they bounced upon onto the bank and rushed into the forest, flying between tall pines on a barely-there track that the dogs seemed to know well.
Perhaps five minutes later they emerged from the trees into an open area dotted with huts, smoke rising from holes atop their dome-shaped roofs. A tall bluff, its exposed face a pebbly conglomerate, sheltered the camp from the north. A stream, frozen solid, wound along the south edge and bent around the bluff out of sight a short distance to the east.
Most of the huts were made of hides, shaped on a frame, but in the center of the camp rose something much larger and longer constructed of logs, caulked with clay and roofed with pine branches.
“You will wait in the longhouse as our guests,” High Raven said. “I must see to the retrieval of your…” he nodded at Anton, “airship.”
Brenna was glad, as the man who had been driving drew his crossbow and escorted them toward the longhouse, that High Raven had specified that they were guests. Otherwise she would have felt a great deal like a prisoner.
Inside, the longhouse felt deliciously warm. A fire burned in a pit at its center, fed a new log periodically by a toothless old woman who gave them a hard look as they were brought into the dim interior.
“Wait,” their guard said, and went out again. Brenna looked around. Large logs encircled the fireplace, obviously meant as benches, and she sat down on one. Anton sat beside her. The old woman moved to the far side of the fire.
“Why did you-” they both said at once, turning toward each other at the same instant, and Brenna, despite everything, laughed, Anton echoing her a moment later. The old woman leaned over to one side to get a better look at them around the fire, shook her head, then leaned back again… which for some reason only made them laugh louder.
The laughter died quickly. Anton, though, still smiled as he said, “You first.”
“Why did you call them Minik?” Brenna said. “How did you know that’s what they’re called?”
“Because I know many of them,” Anton said. “Back home, we call this the Wild Land, but it belongs to the Minik. The Union Republic has negotiated treaties allowing us to settle here and there. We conduct a lot of trade with them.”
“That’s why you know their language?”
Anton nodded. “When the Professor told me we were coming here, he made me learn their language. It’s only polite,” he said. Sadness briefly clouded his face, then he smiled a little. “I turned out to be a much better speaker than he was. He almost got us beaten up in an inn one night when he garbled a request for cheese toast.”
“What did he really ask for?” Brenna said.
Anton shook his head. “You don’t want to know. Now, my turn.” He met her gaze squarely. “Why did you call them savages?”
“It’s… what we call them,” Brenna said, and suddenly felt ashamed. They obviously weren’t savages. That was MageLord talk, treating everyone else as somehow lesser than themselves. Commoners, savages… all just subjects to be used and abused at will. “I’ve never actually seen one before. They were all driven out of the South when Evrenfels was established.”
“They have stories about those days, you know,” Anton said. “In the Outside, I mean. Stories of the day when ‘the sky exploded and the ground burned and the People died.’ And then stories about the sudden appearance, between sunset and dawn, of the Wall of Sorrows that separated friend from friend, clan from clan, family from family, children from parents.” Anton gazed into the fire. “The Professor made a study of those stories. He thought the Anomaly had some cosmic origin. ‘Who knows what strange forms of matter may exist out among the stars?’ he used to say to me. ‘Who can say what effect such strange matter would have should it contact the Earth?’” Anton shook his head. “But the truth turned out to be far stranger.”
Brenna had never thought about what the arrival of the MageLords must have meant to the savages-the Minik. One more black mark to set down against them. The more she learned about Falk and his ilk, the happier she was to be a Commoner.
They talked a little more, mostly in low voices, as they waited for High Raven to return. About an hour later, he did, with half a dozen other Minik in tow, three men and three women, gray-haired and wizened but hale. “These are those whose council I keep,” High Raven said. “They will listen with me and help me to make the wisest decision.”
“About what?” Brenna asked, tentatively.
“About your fate,” High Raven said without smiling. “Minik-na are not welcome here.”
“Minik-na?” Brenna said.
“Minik means People,” Anton said. “Minik-na means ‘not people.’” He shot her a look. “Or, you might say, savages.”
“Oh,” Brenna said in a small voice.