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.
“But you are most unusual Minik-na,” High Raven said. “Were you grown men come to hunt our lands, you would already be food for the scavengers. But you are young, you have come in a most unusual device
… and this one,” he nodded at Anton, “speaks our language and claims to be from Outside the Wall of Sorrows.
“And so we will hear your stories. You will tell us the truth. I will talk with my councillors. And then I will decide what will be done with you.”
“We cannot ask for anything fairer than that,” Anton said quietly.
“Then let us begin.”
For the next hour, they talked. The Minik seemed interested enough in what Brenna had to say, but it was Anton’s claim that he had come from beyond the Barrier-the Wall of Sorrows-that really captured their interest. Brenna began to think that maybe everything would work out after all when Anton mentioned the name of a particular clan of the Minik and one of the old women cried out and leaned forward eagerly, wanting to hear more; for she came from the splinter of that clan that had been sundered from the rest when the Barrier had sprung into being. But Anton was unable to answer her furious queries in her own tongue about the families whose names her clan had kept fiercely alive for all these centuries, and she had sat back, scowling and frustrated
… taking a little bit of Brenna’s hopes with her.
“There is a thing I do not understand about your tale,” High Raven said to Brenna. “You say your guardian, this Lord Falk, stole Anton’s memories, and would twist his mind to make him falsely loyal. But when I lived among the Minik-na as a young man, I learned that among your Mageborn there are two kinds of magic, hard and soft. This Lord Falk is a wielder of the hard magic, but the delving and twisting of minds is a matter for those who wield the soft. How then could he do this?”
“He has help,” Brenna said bitterly. “Someone I thought was a Healer. Mother Northwind.”
The name had a peculiar effect on High Raven. He froze, very much like the bird that was his namesake, head cocked, hard black eyes studying her. “A Healer named North Wind?” he said at last.
“Mother Northwind, yes.” Brenna shuddered. “But she is no Healer. She’s as much of a monster as Falk.”
High Raven ignored that. “She will be looking for you, then?”
“I don’t know,” Brenna said. “Falk will be. As far as I know, she was just a… tool he was using.”
“Hmmm.” High Raven exchanged looks with the elders who had accompanied him. “We have heard enough,” he said. “We will discuss it. You will continue to wait here. There will be food, soon, for all. And I will tell you your fates before the day is done.”
With that, he got up and left the longhouse.
Brenna glanced at Anton for reassurance, but Anton, staring after the departing clan leader, seemed to have none to give.
Bucketing along in the horse-drawn carriage-apparently she didn’t rate a magecarriage-bearing her from Lord Falk’s demesne to the Palace, Mother Northwind felt a kind of… poke… in her mind. It was a sensation she had crafted to alert her when someone wished to speak to her via magelink.
The two men-at-arms accompanying her to the Palace were literally just inches away, their butts planted on the seat on the other side of the carriage wall, but they would never hear a thing through the noise of creaking wheels, pounding hooves, and rushing wind. She called up the magelink, expecting to see Vinthor or Goodwife Beth-who was neither good, a wife, nor named Beth, she thought with amusement-but instead seeing a face she had not seen in years and had not really ever expected to see again. Startled, she let the magic develop fully, so that her face would be visible, and her voice undisguised. Then, staring at the craggy brown visage, framed by long black hair drawn back in a ponytail, bluestones shining in its ears, she said, wonder in her voice, “High Raven?”
“Healer North Wind,” the Minik clan leader said. “Long has it been since we last spoke.”
“Long indeed. You left me with the impression that it would be the last time, too, as you withdrew into the wilderness. Yet I see you never discarded the magelink spellstone I left you with, should you change your mind.” She felt a spark of curiosity. “So why have you changed your mind?”
“I have two Minik-na in my camp,” High Raven said.
Mother Northwind frowned. “So?”
“They mentioned your name,” High Raven said. “They called you a monster.”
Mother Northwind’s mouth quirked. “Sounds like they know me, sure enough.” And then she sat up. “Two of them. Young? A boy and girl?”
“Yes,” High Raven said. “Brenna is the girl’s name, Anton’s the boy. They arrived in a… flying thing. I thought them MageLords and would have killed them on sight-except that the boy spoke to us in the True Tongue.”
“He’s from outside the Great… outside the Wall of Sorrows,” Mother Northwind said.
“So he says,” High Raven said. “And I find his claim credible.” She found his lined, impassive face as hard to read as it had been when she had last seen him, the day she had returned to the shore of the Great Lake to tell the clan that had preserved her life that the MageLord who had massacred their kin had died a fittingly horrible death. High Raven had been the new clan leader them, following the death of his father, who had set her free, but she had known him well for years. “Why did he call you a monster?”
“High Raven, I am a monster,” Mother Northwind said softly. “I can kill with a touch, twist the minds of men, steal their very souls.”
“You can also Heal.”
“I can also Heal,” Mother Northwind agreed. “And when I do the other, it is only in the hope that by so doing I can heal the damage done to the world by the MageLords and the Wall of Sorrows.” She leaned forward. “I am close, High Raven. Since I left you, I have been working toward the destruction of the Wall and the MageLords who
