As the dogsled approached, Brenna reached out and gripped Anton’s hand. He squeezed back, and so, hand in hand, they awaited the arrival of their discoverers.
The dogsled told her nothing. This time of year, it was the preferred method of travel, for Commoners, at least, between scattered villages, especially up here, where roads were nonexistent. The three figures on it, two riding, one driving, all heavily swathed in fur, revealed nothing more at first glance. She wished she had that much fur to wear; her own winter coat, which she had always thought so warm, had felt like a thin wrap in the airship and felt like nothing at all now they were standing on the windswept ice. Whoever they are, if they don’t help us, we’ll freeze to death, she thought.
Oddly enough, it was the dogs that gave her the first clue as to what sort of people were coming to meet them, and the realization made her squeeze Anton’s hand harder.
He turned to look at her. His eyebrows were rimed with ice and his cheeks as red as though they’d been scalded. “What is it?”
“The dogs,” Brenna said. “They’re wearing jewelry.”
It sounded absurd, put like that, but she didn’t know what else to call the collars set with bits of silver and glass and semiprecious stones that each dog wore. They made the animals’ necks sparkle as, tongues lolling, they raced toward them.
“So?” Anton said.
“Savages,” Brenna said, and then said nothing more, because then the dogsled was upon them, the driver shouting to the dogs to stop and pulling a lever that jammed spikes into the lake surface to slow the sled. It ground to a halt in a flurry of snow and ice chips, skidding sideways a little. Even before it quit moving, the two fur- swaddled men aboard it had hit the ice and raised the crossbows they carried.
“Minik,” Anton said under his breath, and then, raising his voice, said something in a language Brenna had never heard before, lilting and fluid, like the call of some wild forest songbird.
The crossbows lowered a little, the men’s faces, brown and shiny-smeared with some kind of grease as a protection against the cold, she realized-startled and puzzled.
The driver had jumped down from the back of the sled and came forward. The two other men stepped aside so he could stand between them. He gave Anton an appraising look, and said something in the same fluid tongue.
Anton frowned, then replied haltingly.
The man’s eyebrows lifted. He spoke to the other two men, who nodded and lowered their crossbows completely.
Then the man turned to Brenna. “I am High Raven, leader of the clan of the Three Rivers.” He spoke the common tongue flawlessly, his accent, though odd, easier to understand than Anton’s had been at first. “The boy says he is from Outside the Wall of Sorrows. This is a thing I find hard to believe, but we will test him to see if he tells truth. He says you are a great princess of the MageLords. Is this true?”
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?”
