Yet, Anna had come to Laren wanting to join of her own free will. Wasn’t that, she wondered yet again, a calling of a sort?

TRADING FOR MEAT

Grandmother concentrated on her footing as she made her way through the twilight woods. The weather had turned the snow into a glaze of ice and was treacherous. Two of the men walked beside her to assist her so she would not fall. Despite nearing winter’s end, the air had a bite to it and was harsh to breathe. As always, she yearned for summer warmth to melt the ice in her old bones. She sighed thinking of gentle sunsets, not the cold light that dimmed in the woods now.

As they approached the edge of the guarded perimeter, several of her people had their arrows trained on a small group of groundmites.

Captain Terrik turned at her approach. “Grandmother, I am glad you are here.”

“It looks like Skarrl and his group. Have they come to trade again?”

“It appears so.”

When the groundmites had first been spotted near their perimeter months ago, she had ordered her people not to kill them outright unless directly threatened. Her experiences in Blackveil had taught her that the creatures could be useful. They were not without intelligence, and this group had managed to evade all their traps in the forest.

In time, the groundmites made plain their desire to trade for meat, though all they had to offer were bone necklaces, rotting hides, and rusted tools and weapons they had scavenged from who-knew-where. Grandmother carefully encouraged these encounters, trading a chicken or pig for whatever rubbish the groundmites had to offer. The creatures were skinny and flea-bitten, but not as badly off, she suspected, as other groups. It had been a hard winter.

The one known as Skarrl shambled forward. He was the most decorated of the groundmites she had seen, with bone jewelry and the best furs to cover his body. She took him to be the chief of his group, or tribe, or clan, or however they organized themselves. His necklaces of bones and teeth clicked around his neck as he approached.

He halted before Grandmother, seemingly oblivious to the arrows trained on him. He launched into an avalanche of groundmitish gibberish interspersed with grunts and occasionally recognizable words of the common tongue: trade, meat, want.

“What trade, Skarrl?” she asked. “What have you got?”

Skarrl grunted, then turned toward his companions. He issued a stream of more unintelligible chatter and gestured at them. They rose from crouched positions, the arrows of Terrik’s archers following every move they made. They dragged a litter behind them as they approached. When they halted before Grandmother, Skarrl pointed a crooked claw at the litter. “Trade. Meat, want.”

A lantern hissed to life and the groundmites leaped back in dismay, then calmed when they saw the light would not harm them. Grandmother peered down at the litter. The light revealed a man bound into it beneath a rough fur. She could tell little about him, except that his face was mottled by bruises and crusted with blood. Beneath the bruises he was pale. He looked dead. She removed her mitten and placed her hand on his forehead. He was warm, not yet a corpse.

“Who is he?” Captain Terrik asked. “If the ’mites are hungry, why didn’t they just eat him?”

“As for your first question, I do not know, but some lost soul to be out this far in the wilderness. As for your second question, perhaps they thought bringing us this man would please us and they could get better meat from us. I do believe they’ve developed a taste for mutton and chicken. Skarrl, where did you find this man?”

But Skarrl only answered in his groundmitish babble that seemed to simply signify that he did not understand the question.

“I guess we’ll not know,” Grandmother said. “At least not from the groundmites.”

“You aren’t going to trade our good food for this half-dead man, are you?” Captain Terrik asked.

“Captain, where is your curiosity? I am going to trade, and if this man regains consciousness, we might discover he’s perhaps a trapper, or a wayward wanderer, or maybe even a spy. If he is a spy, it would be good to know, yes?”

“Yes, Grandmother.”

She turned to the soldiers who had escorted her and said, “Bring the oldest ewe we have. There is the black-faced one that is lame and has little life left in her. Also, the sack of grain we discovered today that is moldering. Hmm, perhaps a couple loaves of bread to seal the transaction.”

She turned to the groundmite chief and said, “Yes, Skarrl, we trade.”

He grunted in understanding.

Grandmother sensed the captain’s disapproving gaze on her, but she ignored him. He was just concerned, and justifiably so, about the welfare of their people. She believed they would make it to spring. They’d set aside a healthy amount of stores for the winter, and her people had either brought their own livestock or acquired other animals from villages and farms Second Empire had raided.

After the soldiers returned and the trade was made, Captain Terrik said of the groundmites, “We can still kill them and get our ewe back.”

“No, Captain,” Grandmother replied. “It would serve little purpose. We traded in good faith. You never know where a positive relationship with our neighbors might lead.”

“Trouble, most like,” he grumbled.

She tsked. “There is no telling how many creatures belong with this small group that comes to us. Better to not invite trouble by killing their chief. After all, we already have an enemy to the south. We do not need another here in the north. Now if some of your men would help me back and drag this litter home . . .”