Notai

The Notai are a peaceful, nomadic people of the Freljord, renowned for their mastery of song and their memory of ancient legend. Traveling in caravans whose carts are drawn by elkyr, they journey from village to village bringing music and dance, one last celebration for everyone they meet as each winter's chill sets in. Some settlements welcome them, others distrust them as traders or fear the ice that heralds their coming and the deadly winter it can bring, yet to all of them the Notai carry song and togetherness, a thread of spirit that links the scattered north. The tribe's wandering is bound to the winter demigod Anivia. The Notai ride the wave of frost spilling from her wings, and they hold that she is not merely a guardian of their realm, as the Avarosans believe, but freedom itself, the passion that warms a heart even as the first snows fall. They must leave as the snows settle because their migration is a charge winter's mother entrusted to them, to carry that spirit across the Freljord and lend Anivia wind for her journey. Their songs preserve the oldest legends, including how Anivia's birth first brought snow into the world when she burst from her egg of ice. The tribe's best known members are the boy Nunu and his mother, Layka. A singer who taught her son that behind every thing there is a story, Layka gathered tales into songs and kept a knotted string as her heart-song, a record of everywhere the two had traveled. On his fifth nameday she gave Nunu a flute, which he named Svellsongur after a blade from legend. When raiders attacked their caravan, Nunu was separated from Layka and dragged to safety by the surviving Notai, and his search for her alongside the last magical yeti, Willump, became one of the Freljord's most beloved stories.