Magebane (40 page)

“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 built it, and I am very close now to success. The Minik here and beyond the Wall of Sorrows will be one people again, and the MageLords will be humbled. But I need that girl. I need Brenna, and I need her alive.”

High Raven studied her. Mother Northwind was surprised he had actually made use of the spellstone she had left with him. It would be sitting there now on the ground before him, probably, frosted and smoking, her face hanging in midair above it, a terrifying mystery if the Minik were the primitive savages the MageLords believed . . . but of course she had lived among them for far too long to believe they were either primitive or savage. They had no magic, that was all, but for the MageLords that alone was enough to render them something less than fully human, just like the Commoners.

“Send someone for her,” he said abruptly. “We are at the Camp of the Bear. You remember?”

She remembered it well; she'd wintered there four or five times when she'd lived with the clan. “I remember,” she said.

“Have them come north along the east shore of the lake,” High Raven went on. “They must bring a large sledge to carry away the flying thing, the airship. So that we may know them, have them carry a banner of blue . . . the blue of your eyes, North Wind.” Mother Northwind blinked at that. “If they do not do so, we will kill them as we would any other interlopers.”

“They will do so.”

High Raven studied her in silence for a long moment. “It is good to speak to you again, North Wind,” he said at last. “If you do as you say, and the Wall of Sorrows falls, perhaps we may yet meet once more in person.”

“Perhaps, High Raven,” said Mother Northwind.

The magelink vanished.

Mother Northwind gazed, eyes unfocused, into the empty space where it had been. Sometimes she wondered why no one in the south seemed to register the fact that Northwind was hardly a proper Mageborn name. It was, in fact, merely a translation into the common tongue of a Minik name, given to her by the people of High Raven's clan when she had lived with them and served as their healer and midwife.

If I believed in omens
, she thought,
this would be a good one: that the very clan I once belonged to has found the Heir for me.

When did he notice my blue eyes?
she thought a little wistfully, feeling for a moment like a girl a quarter her age.

And then, suddenly, she stiffened.
But this changes everything!
She had thought to let Lord Falk bring Brenna back to the Palace and somehow spirit her away from there before he could take her north to the Cauldron. But now she had, or soon would have, both Brenna and Karl. She had only to have Brenna taken to Goodwife Beth's safe house. Verdsmitt was inside the Palace . . .

After twenty years, the pieces of her grand scheme were at last falling into place.

But they'd quickly fall out of place again if Falk found Brenna. She knew exactly how he meant to do that: knew that he would be calling on Tagaza to go to the Spellchamber and use the powerful spell created to locate the Heir.

Mother Northwind had always had a healthy respect for what the strongest MageLords could do with their hard magic, and so had laid emergency plans to disrupt the use of the Spellchamber.

It is time
, she thought,
to put those plans into effect
. She smiled. And by destroying New Cabora City Hall . . . the guards on her carriage had told her of that, their news having come via the magelink that had also provided their orders . . . Lord Falk had even provided the perfect excuse for it, one that would have no one thinking that the timing was anything but coincidental when it stopped Tagaza from locating the true Heir.

And so she summoned one more magelink, and passed a brief message to the Commoner who answered . . . and thus, when she arrived at the Palace in the early morning light, she was not at all surprised to find all in confusion, the MageLords having just been forcibly reminded that they were not totally sufficient unto themselves; that they did, in fact, depend on the Commoners for many things, including stoking the great MageFurnace with the coal that other Commoners dug from under the rolling hills of the southeast.

Three Commoners and one Mageborn had died in the mayhem in the great chamber of the MageFurnace as water had poured onto the hot coals and flashed into scalding steam. A regrettable but acceptable price, Mother Northwind thought.

She felt certain High Raven would agree.

She allowed herself to be helped from the carriage and led to her sumptuous quarters not far from Falk's own, hobbling along with her cane, a harmless and humble old woman.

WHEN LORD FALK RETURNED from the Square, grim-faced, the heart of New Cabora lay in ruins, the Courthouse and the Grand Theater (where many of Verdsmitt's plays had shown in triumph) having both suffered the same fate as City Hall. Falk had made it clear that the fault lay with the Common Cause, “common vandals,” he called them, who had murdered other Commoners with their foolish and futile sabotage of the MageFurnace, and who had now brought down just retribution on their city. “Why are you protecting them?” Falk shouted to the white-faced, staring crowds, silent except for sobbing children too young to understand why they had been forced out into the frozen streets at sword point. “Give me their leaders! Give me their Patron! Give me Prince Karl! There is someone within the sound of my voice who has the power to do all these things. There is someone else who knows who that person is. If they will not act, force them to! For the sake of your livelihoods, your homes, your families. Tell me who they are!”

His voice might have been falling on deaf ears, for all the reaction it got, but he knew he was speaking the truth. There were people in that crowd who knew the leaders of the Cause, or knew how to get to them, and Falk was confident they would not let their city be reduced to rubble over some petty concern about so-called freedom.
Freedom to live in squalor and chaos
, Falk thought, looking around at the Commoners in disgust. Poor. Benighted. Powerless. Did they not realize how much the MageLords had done for them? Did they think they would have survived, prospered to build New Cabora at all, if the MageLords had not made it possible to survive in this frozen northland in the first place?