woman.”
But as she heaved herself up on her cane and made her way out of Falk’s office, he smiled to himself. There’s nothing simple about you, old woman, he thought.
And then the smile faded. Many have underestimated Mother Northwind, he thought… and wondered, just a little, if there were a risk he had just done the same.
CHAPTER 19
High Raven had promised to tell Brenna and Anton their fates before the day was out, and he was true to his word… but only in part.
Their immediate fate, at least, was not to become “food for scavengers,” which Brenna supposed was the most important thing. But beyond that, High Raven was not forthcoming. “You will live,” he said. “What more do you need to know? Tonight, and perhaps for one or two more, you will be our guests. Then you will move on.”
“Move on where?” Brenna asked, but High Raven would not say.
The next two days were the strangest Brenna had ever spent. She had resigned herself to spending the evening sitting around the fire, chewing in silence on whatever gristly game the Minik had managed to scavenge from the Wilderness. Instead, she ate sumptuously: caribou and lake trout, pickled mushrooms, sweet cattail pollen cakes and more, washed down with a powerful drink that smelled and tasted of honey. And when the food had finally quit coming-only because she couldn’t eat anymore, not because there was any shortage of it-the music and storytelling and dancing began, and went on far into the night.
The music was strange, and wild, the whistling of high flutes and the singing of a strange single-stringed… fiddle, she guessed you call it… twining around each other above a constant but complex drumbeat. It made her feel… different. Wild.
Free.
Free of Lord Falk. Free of the MageLords. Free of Mother Northwind. Free of all the restrictions she had lived under so long, restrictions that seemed all the more smothering now she had escaped them, having literally flown away like a bird fleeing a cage through a suddenly opened door.
Free…
She began to eye Anton speculatively as she drank more of the mead, listened to the throbbing drums, watched the Minik dance, men and women stripped down to nothing more than loincloths, bodies glistening with sweat… Anton wasn’t watching her, though, he was watching some bare-breasted girl even younger than she was, eyes wide, lips slightly parted, and she felt a pang of jealousy, and suddenly she was up and dancing, too, and then Anton joined in, and for a few moments they were dancing together, though not the kind of dancing she’d thought so exciting at the Moon Ball. This was wild, primeval, sensual…
Free.
But then, suddenly, it ended. The drums stopped, the flutes sighed their last high notes, the fiddle vibrated into silence. Brenna and Anton suddenly found themselves alone in the space around the fire, as the Minik began gathering their clothes, retrieving plates and vessels they had brought in for the communal meal, and streaming out into the cold air to return to their own huts.
Brenna and Anton were still breathing heavily. Brenna was excruciatingly aware of how close he was. She wanted to get closer. She wanted him to touch her. She wanted…
She started toward him, but was suddenly jerked back by a strong hand on her arm. The old woman who tended the fire was staring at her. Her look was not unsympathetic, but she shook her head and pointed behind her, where, Brenna saw, a bed of pine boughs had been made on the floor, two red woven blankets spread on top. And then she stepped between Brenna and Anton and pointed at a second bed on the far side of the fire. Anton licked his lips, but nodded and, with a last glance at Brenna, made his way to his own bed…
… as Brenna did to hers, frustrated and a little angry. Free, she though. Free of everything except chaperones!
In the morning, though, without the mead adding fuel to the fire in her blood, without the beat of the music and the half-naked bodies weaving in and out on the dance floor, she was more grateful than not. She found it hard to even look at Anton that morning, and the reluctance seemed mutual. The old woman smiled to herself and put more wood on the fire.
Maybe not a chaperone, she thought. Maybe just wise with age.
High Raven came to fetch them an hour later, taking them to the large sled which had brought the airship ashore. Anton almost leaped at it, insisting the envelope be stretched out fully, running his hands over every rope, inspecting the burner. “Undamaged, as far as I can see,” he said. “Except for some of the wicker.” He pointed to a hole that had worn in one corner of the gondola during the slide across the ice. High Raven, who had been watching silently, came closer to examine it. He grunted.
“We can fix that,” he said.
While Anton had been examining the airship, he had collected a crowd of Minik, mostly children who laughed and whispered and pointed, but also a few men and one or two women, though in general, Brenna had noticed, the women seemed to be the ones doing all the work around the camp. The men had been very good at drinking and dancing the night before, but she wondered what they did during the day. Hunt, she supposed, though she saw little evidence of it.
Her impression that women did all the work was strengthened when High Raven sent a little boy running off somewhere. He returned with a woman, tall and sturdy, her hair, in a braid reaching almost to her waist, just beginning to gray. “My wife, Sweetwater,” he said. Then, in rapid-fire, lilting Minik, he pointed out the hole in the gondola.
His wife replied briefly and, even Brenna could tell, in the affirmative, and went away again.
“She will fix it,” High Raven said. He turned to go.
“What should we do?” Brenna called after him.
“Whatever you like,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. “You are our guests. But do not leave the camp.”
“Why not?” Brenna said, out of some perverse impulse.
“Guests do not leave unexpectedly,” High Raven said. “If they do, they are no longer guests.” He walked away. The other men followed. The children remained close but not too close, pointing and giggling.
“A very polite way of saying that if we leave, we will be brought back-and no longer treated as guests,” Anton noted.
“In other words, we’re still prisoners,” Brenna said. Her thoughts of freedom the night before came back to mock her.
“But alive. And not in Falk’s hands. That’s something, right?” Anton made a face at a little girl in a long buckskin coat decorated with colorful but rather clumsy beadwork; it had the look of something she had made herself. She screeched, then ran behind a bigger boy-her brother?-and hid, giggling, peeking out again as if to show she wasn’t really frightened.
Brenna again remembered calling the Minik savages, and felt renewed shame. She hid her eyes with her hands then drew her hands back again. “Peek-a-boo!” she said.
The little girl laughed and copied her. “Peek-a-boo! Peek-a-boo!” she shouted, and soon all the children were shouting it, running around and around Brenna and Anton, alternately hiding and showing their eyes and shrieking at the top of their lungs.
A group of passing women gave the children an indulgent glance and Brenna and Anton warm smiles, and she suddenly felt better again about their circumstances. So they weren’t allowed to leave the camp; well, so what? It wasn’t like they could go anywhere. She wouldn’t last a day in the northern wilderness, even with Anton’s help- and he, though she was certain he must have far better survival skills than she, wouldn’t fare much better with no supplies.
Could you still be called a prisoner when your prison walls were saving you from certain death?
Her improved feeling lasted throughout the day, as they played with the children, sharing their noon meal of fish and bannock, and watched High Raven’s wife expertly weave new wicker into the hole in the gondola. That
