Choosing the knife
Ragnarolf’s name does not so much occur to the patron as surface, like wreckage from an old storm. It has been there in the back of his mind for seasons, circling the drain of memory every time a ledger line refused to sit straight.
He leans back from the toll–table, joints aching, and lets the facts arrange themselves.
An exiled sea–wolf, once trusted enough to command a longship on the jarl’s business; now penned to an inn just outside the inner walls, close to the roads, the harbor, the shrine. Branded with disgrace yet spared the noose. Watched, weighed, left to brew ale and swallow his bitterness. A man the jarl’s court can point to when it wishes to prove its mercy.
Eirikr’s careful letters, never naming Ragnarolf outright, but sketching him in the margins of other reports, have added color to that bare outline. The way he quiets a room without drawing steel. His habit of paying attention when drunks speak of raids gone wrong, of missing blades and ore that never reached the armory. His wary civility with garrison officers, Lidra Hakonadottir among them. His hatred of Bjorulf, worn like a hidden bruise, never quite shown yet always there when certain names are spoken.
The patron taps a cracked fingernail against the column where that fateful raid is inked in dry, impersonal runes: hulls lost, warriors drowned, the jarl’s son buried abroad. On another, later page, Bjorulf’s commissions swell: replacement blades, emergency repairs, private arms ordered by officers who suddenly grew more cautious about their own skins. Profit blooming from blood.
Ragnarolf took the blame. Bjorulf took the coin.
To set one against the other is to toss a spark into old tinder. Dangerous, yes. But useful danger. An open inquiry would warn the smith and compromise honest officers along with the guilty. A hired assassin would only trade one secret corpse for another. A true outsider would lack standing, allies, roots.
Ragnarolf is none of these and all of them at once. Marked as unclean yet still bound, however grudgingly, to Frostmark’s peace. Knotted into its gossip, its trade, its quiet discontents. Too low to be heeded at the lawstone, too well–placed to be ignored in the taproom.
And most important: he has reason. The kind that keeps a man awake through winter nights, fingers flexing for a weapon he swears he will not take up again.
If the gambit works, the patron thinks, the first cracks in Bjorulf’s iron will show themselves far from the lawstone, in places where ledger–keepers do not officially look: in river–boats and road–dust, in cave–mouth whispers and ale–thick boasts. Ragnarolf will either drag proof into the light or at least throw enough confusion into the smith’s dealings that other eyes, Hrod’s, Eirikr’s, perhaps even Knutr’s, can follow the trail.
And if it fails? If blades are bared and blood spat on Frostmark’s snow with no tidy confession pinned to the mess?
Then an exiled raider stirred trouble, as such men do. The patron’s hands remain clean. The jarl’s court keeps its distance. The ledgers close on another winter with their lies intact: and the quiet watcher in the counting–room waits, as he has always waited, for the next, sharper knife.
Weighing the wreckage
Ragnarolf’s name does not arise so much as bob up again, waterlogged but stubborn, in the patron’s thoughts as he traces the columns. There it is in the ledger: inked exile, forfeited shares, a longship struck from the jarl’s rolls. An exiled raider turned innkeeper: kept close enough to watch the roads and harbor, yet too stained to be welcomed within the inner hall; hardy, angry, with old sea–ties that run far beyond Frostmark’s clean, official maps. A useful piece of flotsam, if pushed into the right current.
Eirikr’s veiled reports have painted the man as no simple taproom host. He listens more than he boasts, remembers more than he admits, and asks careful questions when ale loosens tongues about missing ore, blades that never reached the armory, and a certain blacksmith whose fortunes rose on the bones of a failed raid. That same raid carved the wound in Ragnarolf’s life and first fattened Bjorulf’s coffers.
To set such a man against the smith is dangerous (old wolves bite deep) but his very dishonor makes him a convenient knife. If the move fails, the court can merely shrug, say an already–tainted exile stirred trouble where none was wanted, and let the snow cover the blood.
Bending the trade–wind
Rather than send a formal summons or written order that could be traced, the patron reaches for subtler levers: river gossip and merchant hunger. In the lamplight of the counting–room he lets the toll–papers pile at his elbow until the right one surfaces. A southbound manifest noting a “scrap iron and surplus blades” convoy drifting far off its proper routes. He studies the seals, the hand that wrote the figures, the improbable destination. Then, with a law–speaker’s patience and a smuggler’s nerve, he takes up his quill.
A shifted routing mark here, a corrected timing rune there, a destination sigil nudged from armory to “private forge” in the margin: each alteration small enough to pass any casual check, together enough to bend a trade–wind. By his hand the wagons’ path kinks, drawing them up from the main winter road to a lesser track that skirts Frostmark’s outer market, close to the harbor caves and the cliff–carved ancestor shrine. Close to the Road’s End Inn.
Paper alone cannot carry rumor, though. For that he needs a tongue. He sends a quiet word down to the harbor offices, calling in an old favor from a small–time river trader three seasons behind on his tolls. The man is summoned, scolded just enough to sting, then offered a simple bargain: your debt cleared, if you turn your prow north instead of south and, when you come to Frostmark, you drink where the ale is strong and the questions are gentle. Talk of ice–choked bends, thin profits, and, as if it were an afterthought, a heavily guarded line of wagons marked as worthless scrap taking a strange road by night.
Let the trader think he is merely selling news to pay his way. Let the iron and blades roll toward Bjorulf’s door under proper seals. Somewhere between quill and wagon–ruts, between toll–mark and taproom, the patron’s invisible hand will have done its work.
Priming the messenger
The chosen trader, cheeks chapped and beard rimed with frost, receives his instructions over a jug of thin, steamed ale in the counting–room’s back corner. Carry your usual winter goods upriver. At Frostmark’s harbor, ask for “the inn by the road’s last milestone,” not by name. Drink there. Warm yourself. Complain, as men do, about hard roads and thin profits. And then, as if idly, speak of a heavily guarded convoy of “scrap iron and surplus blades” taking a strange night road toward a private forge. He is fed seal–marks, wagon–count, and the tempting hint that good iron might be had for cheap, but nothing of suspicions or schemes. In his own mind he is merely bartering gossip for coin and custom, never guessing his tongue has been shaped into a knife and set upon its path.
The hook lands
Three days later, the Road’s End Inn glows like an ember against the snow, its shutters leaking firelight onto rutted ice, when the half‑frozen trader shoulders through the door with river‑mud still crusted on his boots. Ragnarolf’s practiced eye notes the flinch at the cold, the guarded scan of faces, the way the man’s hunger fixes first on the hearth before the ale. Desperation, debt, and a story to sell. Ragnarolf steers him to a bench near the tap, sets a foaming horn before him, and offers that easy, careless question about the road that always draws more than men mean to give. The trader hesitates, then fishes out a crumpled, damp‑spotted copy of the manifest as if producing a talisman to prove his words are worth paying for. By the time Eirikr’s attention lifts from his own quiet cup and his scholar’s ear catches “scrap iron” and “private forge,” the hook has already set. He rises from his shadowed corner, drawn by the strangeness of the route and the half‑heard mention of seals, and leans in just far enough to see the unfamiliar crest pressed in wax. The patron’s design, far off in some lamplit counting‑room, has unfolded exactly as intended: word of the convoy has washed up at Ragnarolf’s hearth, into the hands of the one man in Frostmark least likely to treat it as idle winter chatter.
Weighing the tale
Ragnarolf lets the murmur of the room swell up around them, a soft roar of dice‑rattles, spoon‑clatter, and low song that makes their table just another eddy in the taproom’s current. He flicks two fingers at the serving girl hovering with a fresh jug; she reads the gesture well enough and drifts away, leaving only the trader’s steaming horn and the innkeeper’s steady, unreadable gaze.
“Hard roads,” Ragnarolf says, as if the words are a toast, not a question. “Ice on the bends?”
The trader seizes the prompt with the eagerness of a half‑drowned man catching driftwood. He talks of cracked runners and treacherous ruts, of a mule that nearly went to its knees in a frozen ford. He curses toll‑keepers as thieves, claims the river is shrinking year by year, swears his profits are a hair from vanishing altogether.
Ragnarolf nods in the right places, tops up the man’s horn at the right lulls, but he is listening elsewhere. No ship‑captain’s name at the southern docks, only “a man with a good cloak.” No tally of which garrison yard the “surplus blades” were stripped from, only that they were “old pattern, not worth keeping.” The trader circles back again and again to the same thin reassurance: the seals were all in order, all in order, as if saying it often enough makes it true.
A rustle of wool at his shoulder signals Eirikr’s approach before the man speaks. The law‑speaker’s aide moves like a man stepping between words on a page, careful not to smudge anything. He inclines his head to Ragnarolf in brief acknowledgment, then pitches his voice mild.
“Forgive the intrusion. You mentioned seals.” His eyes go to the damp‑spotted scrap the trader has half tucked back into his belt. “Might I look?”
The river man hesitates, torn between habit and the gleam of authority in Eirikr’s bearing. Ragnarolf slides a fresh heel of bread across the table, simple, wordless encouragement. Coin, in another shape. The manifest comes out again.
Eirikr takes it with ink‑stained fingers, careful not to tear the softened parchment. In the uneasy dance of firelight and lamplight, he holds it close, squinting past water‑warp and river grime. His thumb finds the lump of wax, the impressed rune‑wheel and coiled beast that serve as crest. He traces its ridged edge, lips moving soundlessly as he maps the pattern against memory.
Ragnarolf, watching, sees the change hit him like a small, inward blow. The slight tightening at the corners of the scholar’s eyes. The way his jaw sets, then deliberately loosens, as if he has bitten down on something hard and decided not to spit.
“Not a quartermaster’s mark,” Eirikr says at last, softly enough that it barely carries beyond the table. His thumb rests on the crest like a man pinning an insect. “This belongs to a private holding in the south. Household stores. My… cousin’s estate.”
The trader blinks, uncomprehending. “The man at the dock said, ”
“I do not doubt what he said,” Eirikr cuts in, still mild, which somehow makes the words colder. His eyes, storm‑grey in the shifting light, stay on the wax. “Only what he meant.”
Ragnarolf feels the faint stirring in his gut that comes when a current undercuts the surface swell. A sense he learned on longships, now turned to the tides of men and paper. Private southern metal, crawling its way north under guard, straight to Bjorulf’s fire, past his own door.
“All in order, then,” he says, letting the phrase lie between them like a blade sheathed in cloth.
Eirikr lifts his gaze to meet Ragnarolf’s, and in that shared look there is the first shape of agreement: this is no idle winter tale.
Eirikr begins to probe with a law‑speaker’s patience, not pouncing but circling, tightening. What toll‑posts were passed, in what order? Which clerks took note of the convoy’s passage? Who read the manifests aloud at each ferry and scratched the count into wax?
The trader frowns as if peering back down a long, snow‑blurred road. His answers come halting, second‑hand. A toll‑keeper “in a blue cloak, or green,” a clerk “with a birthmark, somewhere about the face.” He remembers the smell of fish at one crossing, but not the name of the river. Each detail sounds like something told to him in a warm counting‑room, not lived on an icy track with tired beasts and shouting guards.
“There should be ledgers at the south ford,” Eirikr murmurs, half to himself. “A lawstone declaration at the border yard, for so large a movement of arms‑grade metal. Witness‑marks from the garrison.”
Instead: “hasty winter clearances,” “verbal assurances,” minor officials whose names have never been spoken in Frostmark’s shadow. Ragnarolf listens as those slippery phrases pile up, and with each soft evasion the old taste creeps back. Salt and iron and the quiet, deliberate bending of rules that drowned a raid and left his name in the dirt.
Naming the true cargo
Eirikr lets the trader’s last vague reassurance trail off before he spoke again, voice mild as cooled steel. “Then tell me this,” he says, “why would a private southern hearth send rusted scraps so far north, on three wagons and double guard, when any back‑alley smith could melt them within a day’s ride of the jarl’s hall?”
Cornered between scholar’s logic and innkeeper’s silence, the river man swallows. “Because… because Master Ironbrand said there’d be silver in it. Extra. If there were no delays, no… inquisitive eyes. Said he had special orders. Reforged heirlooms. Strange metals. Work for a craftsman of repute.”
That little boast turns the whole tale. Heirloom steel and rare alloys are precisely the kind of “scrap” that never touches a public roll. Ragnarolf can see it: captured trophy‑blades beaten thin and reborn under false marks; shield‑bosses pricked with unregistered sky‑iron that should lie under shrine‑stone; dull ingots hiding a darker shine, kin to the tainted ore that drowned warriors and snapped oaths on a foreign strand. Metal that, by custom and law, belongs in a priest’s fire or a barrow’s belly. Never in the sole keeping of a greedy smith with friends in shadowed places.
Framing the legal snare
Between them, they turn from thoughts of overturned carts and slit throats to quieter blades. Eirikr sketches, in low, precise tones, how a shipment declared as household surplus may be strangled by its own ink: misapplied seals, missing double‑marks, tallies of weight that do not fit declared scrap, a single edge bearing a temple rune or crown‑armory notch that should never travel unescorted. Such flaws make parchment into a noose; every clerk, captain, and carter who swore those marks true stands beneath accusation of oath‑breaking and fraud. Ragnarolf, thinking like a raider who has learned the price of spilled blood on another man’s floor, sees instead the uses of drift and delay. Bogged wheels on a “treacherous” drift, a prudent diversion to his stables for fresh teams, a pious stop at the cliff‑shrine to “appease” the ancestors. From there, witnesses can be plucked like stray coins: a toll‑keeper warming himself by Ragnarolf’s hearth, a shrine‑warden sharp‑eyed for forbidden metal, a bored wagon‑guard loosened by ale: enough eyes and tongues to bind the convoy in testimony before Bjorulf’s men ever smell the smoke of their own forge.
They do not speak of plunder; the metal itself is secondary. The true prize, they agree, is proof that Bjorulf’s prosperity rests on forbidden trade: off‑the‑book blades and shrine‑worthy fragments laundered as trash, seals loaned from soft‑handed kin in the southern court, Frostmark’s walls armed from a shadow ledger. Crack one crate under lawful eyes (show a temple rune, a foreign king’s stamp, a weight that shames its parchment) and Eirikr can thread missing ledgers and false oaths into a noose. Then the trail will run from a frost‑stained inn table straight to the jarl’s high seat, with Bjorulf’s name nailed along every link.
Winter’s clamp on the roads and river gives the convoy its cover. Once the first real ice locked the fjord’s edges and turned the forest paths into ankle–snapping ruts, the garrison’s gaze curled inward. Patrol captains, half‑numb in their own mail, prefer to keep their men where they can see them: drilling shield‑walls in the yard, pacing the walls against phantom raiders, shouting at recruits to stamp their feet lest toes blacken. No sane band of outlaws, so the thinking goes, will drag plunder through knee‑deep drifts with the wolves lean and the nights twenty‑hours long.
Under such reasoning, the outer gate checks have thinned to ceremony. The harbor watch looks more to storm‑sign and ice–pressure on the chain‑boom than to odd marks on passing cargo. At the road gate, guards huddle round braziers, more interested in thawing their fingers than in prying up wagon–covers. A carter who curses the cold convincingly and shoves the right wax–stamped tablet under a sleepy sergeant’s nose is waved through with barely a thump to his tailboards.
“Scrap and surplus” is the winter’s favorite lie. Old helm–rings, twisted spearshafts, cracked mail, bent knives from campaign chests. Such dross is forever being carted to some forge or midden. The category is broad enough to swallow anything that looks dull and heavy; no one wastes breath tallying each rust‑flecked bar when their own breath hangs white and painful in the air. So long as seals gleam unbroken and the manifest bears a familiar southern sigil, the scale stays idle, the crowbar stays on its peg.
For men like Bjorulf, this is the season when iron moves best. Grain is watched, firewood counted to the last stick. But who hoards broken blades in deep winter? In that blind spot between real needs and assumed safety, a three‑wagon train can rattle from riverbank to smiths’ row with only the snow and the dark bearing honest witness to what it carries.
Bjorulf’s recent rise makes this shipment more than routine. His mark is cut into ever more hilts at the belt of officers and minor nobles, his forge‑fires never dim, and gossip in the taproom says even the jarl’s own kin slide coin his way for work done “after hours.” Men boast of blades “Ironbrand‑forged” as if the name itself were a charm against splitting or dulling, and those who cannot pay in silver pay instead in favors, in silence, in small bendings of the rule. Each unchallenged delivery fattens that web. Every wagon that rattles straight from gate to smithy without a crowbar laid to its boards tightens his quiet monopoly on Frostmark’s iron, giving him leverage not only over whose mail holds in the next campaign, but over which law‑speaker dares question a man who shoes half the garrison’s spears.
Letting this particular convoy slide by on a winter’s nod would be more than laziness. It would be a sign that his shadow‑trade no longer hides beneath the jarl’s law, but moves alongside it: close enough to share its cloak.
The trader’s easy talk of “scrap iron” catches on Ragnarolf’s thoughts like a fishhook buried deep. He has heard that tone before: the shrugging dismissal, the way a man’s eyes slide off the numbers as if weight and worth were fog. In his mind, salt‑stung and sharp as ever, rise the old raid’s chalked tallies. Barrels marked as ballast that never sloshed, crates of “surplus” spearheads that somehow left his men short at the surf line. He remembers Eirikr’s careful finger tracing discrepancies no one wished to see. Now, the same soft lie coils round this convoy: thin ink, fat wagons, too many blades at their side for rusted junk. It is the same trick with new gloves. To let it roll past his door unchallenged would be to bow his head beneath the exile brand forever, admitting that the paper which damned him may never bleed.
For Eirikr, the trader’s clumsy sketch of that distant cousin’s seal is the last, cold prod. That sigil belongs on household gear and summer grain, not on winter wagons skulking north under too many spears and too few lines of ink. If it rides here, it rides with sanction. Corruption is no longer rumor in Frostmark’s alleys; it has reached upriver halls that share his blood and name. Let this pass, and any future charge he brings will be strangled at birth with one simple question: why did the law‑speaker who knew the mark keep silent when it first showed its face in the wrong snow?
That stretch of road (where the trees fall back, shrine‑flame licks the cliff face, and the harbor caves breathe their slow salt mist) is the only place all their threads lie briefly naked. There the wagons still belong to no captain’s paperwork, only to the weather and the wheel‑ruts; there the guards curse distance and frozen fingers, not regulations and musters. There, southern wax seals have not yet been broken and re‑pressed with Frostmark’s neat wolf‑head stamp, and no quartermaster has yet sworn an oath that these crates are clean. And there, the track slews close enough to the Road’s End that two men with wits, a lantern, and a few loyal blades might tug at Bjorulf’s web without dragging the whole garrison down on their heads. If they mean to test his scheme without turning Frostmark into a battlefield, it must be on that ragged strip of snow in these three nights. Between shrine and sea, before ink and iron freeze into law.
Ragnarolf weighed the rumor in the quiet after last call.
The taproom had sunk into that hollow stillness that came after the last roar of laughter, after the last slammed cup. Ash grayed the hearth, the fire burned low and mean, and only a few coals glared like watching eyes. His staff had gone to their pallets; the barrel‑boy’s snores drifted faint through the back wall. Outside, the wind worried at the shutters with thin, spiteful fingers.
He stood alone behind the long board, cloth idle in one hand, the other drumming a slow, uneven beat along the worn hilt of the seax at his belt. The habit came from river currents and wave‑counting days; now it marked out thoughts instead of tides.
“Scrap iron.” “Surplus blades.”
The trader had said the words with the easy carelessness of a man tossing slops to pigs. Too easy. Ragnarolf had watched the way the fellow’s eyes had slid aside when he spoke of weights and numbers, of wagons creaking heavy under what the manifest called worthless junk. He knew that slide. He had worn it himself in younger years, shrugging off rich loot as “old rope and fishhooks” when it suited a captain’s purse.
His mind ran the route again, tracing it on the wood with a wet ring from the rag: upriver to the bend where the ice thinned, down through the forest cut to the headland road, then that narrow throat of track between the cliff‑carved ancestor shrine and the drop toward the harbor caves. A bad stretch in winter. A fine stretch for men who wanted a thing to vanish or change hands unseen.
He could almost smell it from here: wet leather, sweating horses, the iron‑dust taste of too many blades hidden under old mail and rusted links. The jarl’s wolf‑head stamped on wax that did not belong so far north. Bjorulf’s name not written anywhere, but humming in the gaps.
His fingers tightened on the seax hilt.
This convoy felt different from the usual whispers that blew through his doors with the smoke and the gossip. Not just another smuggler’s wagon cheating a toll, nor some quartermaster shaving coin off a spear order. There was a weight to it, like the press of a stormfront you could feel in your bones before the clouds showed their teeth. The same weight he’d felt long ago when they’d loaded barrels marked as ballast that sloshed too little, crates of “surplus spearheads” that somehow left his men light at the surf line.
His jaw worked. Old images rose unbidden. The heave of the longship under his boots, the chalked tallies by torchlight, Eirikr’s younger hand following columns of numbers no one wanted to look at too closely. Then the broken bodies on a foreign strand, and the jarl’s son among them, blue with sea and steel while the accusation of betrayal was still warm on everyone’s tongues.
Bjorulf’s forge had glowed bright in the days after, fat with emergency orders and “replacement arms.” And Ragnarolf’s name had cooled to ash.
He could trace a line, now, in the quiet: from those first falsified tallies, through the failed raid and the exile brand, to these winter wagons lumbering toward Frostmark under a cousin’s seal Eirikr swore had no place on war metal. A line of iron and lies running straight to Ironbrand’s anvil.
For the first time since the lawstone, it did not feel like grasping at smoke. This rumor had heft. Carts and wheels and hoofbeats. Men with spears. A thing that could be touched, counted, cracked open.
He let himself, just for the span of a breath, picture another day at the lawstone. Not standing below it with his wrists bound and his eyes on the dirt, but beside it, shoulders squared, seax at his belt by right. He saw himself laying out ledgers and seals, crates pried open to show southern steel where there should be rust. Saw Eirikr’s clear voice naming witnesses, Knutr’s cursed hand twitching at the taste of wrong metal, Hrod’s steady testimony about altered records. Saw Bjorulf’s heavy jaw tighten as the trail curved, in full view of the gathered crowd, from the harbor caves and smiths’ row back to that first sabotaged raid.
He could almost hear the murmur of it: not coward, not traitor, but scapegoat. Could almost feel, in some deep place that still spoke in salt and oar‑pull, his voiceless ancestors turning back toward him instead of away.
The picture held him there in the dim, while the coals clicked and settled. Long enough for the drum of his fingers on the seax to slow, to match the hard, measured beat in his chest. Long enough for want and fury and a cold, practical hunger to braid together into something sharp.
A trail at last, he thought. Iron under the snow, not mist.
If there was ever a chance to follow it, it ran with those wagons through the dark, past his door, between shrine and sea.
But the same vision curdles as he follows it past hope and into consequence.
To so much as lay a hand on those wagons, to halt them in the snow, to ask a single sharp question with his body in the road, would look, from any captain’s saddle, like an exiled raider slipping his leash. The jarl’s wolf‑head stamped on wax makes the load holy in the dry language of law; to interfere with it is to spit on Skeldeir’s hand in full view of Frostmark. There is no tidy way to “test” such a thing. If the play fails, there will be no patient sifting of motives.
In the most likely telling, there is a night skirmish on the headland road, two or three men left bleeding, and witnesses enough to swear they saw Ragnarolf Skaldson leading blades against his lord’s own iron. After that, the Road’s End is not a hearth but a crime scene. The shutters boarded, the barrels seized “pending judgment,” his people scattered to whatever employers will touch them. Lidra ordered to stand gate while her jarl’s hangman knots the rope. Her eyes turned away as the stool kicks free.
His hard‑won, narrow life here, all of it, balances on that strip of frozen track.
At the far end of the hearth‑glow, Eirikr feels the noose of it tightening, fiber by fiber, around his own thin claim to standing. Every line of statute he ever copied marches through his head: the clauses that let a law‑speaker halt a wagon, crack wax, demand to see what lies beneath neat handwriting; the unspoken addendum that says a man who does so to the wrong seal will find his ink turned suddenly poisonous. His cousin’s crest burns in his memory like a hot brand. It is leverage enough to pry at the shipment, and rope enough to hang three branches of his kin. If he chooses wrongly (if the crates crack clean and legal) then all anyone will remember is that Eirikr Halfdanar raised his voice against his betters. A minor house that forgets how to bow does not keep its place at the lawstone; it becomes a cautionary verse muttered over ale, its sons serving in other men’s halls, its daughters married off without bride‑price. He risks not only dismissal, but the slow, grinding erasure of his name from the circle where judgments are made.
Even those on the edges of the scheme feel the danger sharpening to a fine, bright point. The river trader, thawing out by Ragnarolf’s hearth, knows what it means when a smith like Bjorulf takes interest in quiet caravans and thinner‑than‑honest ledgers. Men who carry such tales rarely live long if they are traced; slag heaps and quenching pits have swallowed more than broken blades and stray apprentices. By passing on the rumor, he has already wagered his skin on Ragnarolf’s discretion and Eirikr’s prudence, staking his life on the hope that law and exile will cut Bjorulf before Bjorulf cuts them. If Ironbrand scents a leak and this night’s work goes awry, the trader knows his face will be one of the first remembered, his name hammered into an unmarked stone.
Between them, the choice shrinks to a single, narrow thing: not whether to risk themselves, but how. Do they cut at the convoy in the open snow, or slip a hook into it with seals and counter‑orders? Do they trust a shrine’s shadow, a harbor cave, a forged writ? However they set their feet, the path leads toward blood, ink, or both.
The first cold accounting comes in silence.
Ragnarolf lets the roar of the room roll past him like surf, all laughter and slammed mugs and dice on wood, while the real work happens in the quiet eddy by his hearth. He stares into the coals, not for omens, but to keep his voice flat.
“Hired blades first,” he says. “You said eight at least?”
“Eight that I saw,” the trader answers, fingers worrying at the rim of his cup. “Four riding close to the wagons, four more riding out, like hounds. Proper mail, not piecemeal. One with a southern helm.”
“Veterans, then,” Ragnarolf says. “Men who’ve stood in a shield‑wall. Not green lads who might think twice if a law‑speaker waves papers at them.”
He counts them off in his head with the same calm he once used to number oars on a ship: eight guards, three wagons, one blacksmith whose shadow reaches too far.
Eirikr folds his hands over his cup to still their tremor. “And veterans have learned that a man’s conscience doesn’t fill his belly,” he murmurs. “Their loyalty is coin and fear, not law. If the manifests bear the jarl’s mark, they need not ask why the crates go to Bjorulf’s yard instead of the armory. In fact, they are better paid if they do not ask.”
He glances up, eyes hooded. “Understand this: if we step into the road with no writ, no captain’s seal, then in the eyes of any witness we are robbing the jarl’s wagons. Shout ‘treason’ loud enough, and no one will care what crest Eirikr Halfdanar claims to recognize.”
Ragnarolf feels that word like a hand closing on his throat. Treason. Exile had been named something softer (negligence, failure of duty) but they had sounded just as final when the law‑speaker spoke them.
The trader shifts on his bench, suddenly a smaller man than the one who swaggered in smelling of river ice and cheap tar. “Those guards,” he says, voice rough, “talked of Ironbrand like he was jarl of his own little hall. Said the wagons were ‘his work’ and no fool would interfere. One of ’em laughed that if trouble came, Bjorulf would ‘settle the reckoning at the forge.’”
Ragnarolf’s scar tightens along his cheek. He has seen what a forge can hide.
“So.” He drums blunt fingers once on the table, each tap a tally‑mark. “We have steel‑bought men around the load, a law that calls it the jarl’s, and Bjorulf’s name on their tongues.”
“And no authority,” Eirikr finishes, the words tasting of ash. “Only questions. Only a cousin’s seal where it should not be, and a trader’s memory of overheard boasts.”
Around them, a cheer goes up as someone wins a cast of knucklebones. Ragnarolf doesn’t look away from the small circle of men by his fire.
“Obvious enough,” he says quietly, “that if we go straight at it, we die as thieves. Or live as them, long enough to hang.”
No one argues. The wax board in their minds is already crowded with black marks.
From there, the wall of obstacles grows, stone on stone.
Eirikr drags a damp scrap of parchment closer, smoothing it against the ale‑stained board with ink‑smudged fingers. “Look,” he says, and the word has the weight of a verdict. With quick, economical strokes he draws circles and lines: a quartermaster’s mark, the armory rune, Bjorulf’s stylized hammer.
“This man,” he taps the quartermaster’s circle, “owes Ironbrand more than coin. His son’s mail, his own gaming debts, a mistress’s bracelet. All hammered into ‘favors.’ He signs whatever Bjorulf sets before him.”
A line to another circle. “Here: two lieutenants whose finest blades bear the Ironbrand curl on the fuller. Men proud enough of their steel to forget who they owe for it.”
Another line, this one toward the keep. “And the steward of stores. So long as the racks look full on counting‑day, he will not ask why old spears are painted as new, or why the best of the metal passes through a private yard.”
He glances up at Ragnarolf. “If such men speak together, an accusation becomes a record. A record becomes law.”
Ragnarolf remembers the lawstone’s cold under his boots, the ring of faces turned away. Alone then; alone again, if they misstep. “Repeat offender,” he says, the words rough as rust. “They would not even need proof. Only the right tongues, wagging in chorus.”
Eirikr nods, bleak. “And once branded so, no ancestor rite, no later truth, will scrape it clean.”
Eirikr says it plain, because there is no way to gild it. “I cannot make myself a captain with ink,” he murmurs. “I may advise, interpret, draft. But I cannot write a writ that bids armed men halt a noble’s cargo and expect them to obey. Not without a captain’s hand beside mine.”
“And no captain will give it,” Ragnarolf finishes, “not on a rumor and a seal glimpsed by firelight.”
“Not without inquiries, petitions, three winters of hearings,” Eirikr agrees. “By then, whatever rides those wagons will be melted, beaten flat, and hung at some officer’s hip.”
They are left instead with three thin strands: a ferryman’s half‑frozen tale, a crest stitched where no scrap‑iron deserves it, and Eirikr’s gut‑deep sense that the convoy’s timing and path have been bent with care to slip past proper eyes. Set against quartermasters, guild oaths, and the jarl’s own house‑mark, their doubts feel miserably small. A single seax raised toward a locked‑rank shield‑wall, knowing full well whose skull will crack first if they swing.
The land itself seems to conspire against them. Under Ragnarolf’s slow questions and the softening weight of refilled cups, the trader sketches the road: a tight‑walled forest track where branches rake canvas and cloaks, where any watcher must stand bare to the path like a post. Then the sudden spill from trees to open ground. Hard‑packed snow between treeline and keep, torches on the walls washing it all to silver and shadow. Ragnarolf can see it as if he walked it now: the ruts past his own yard, the way every hoofbeat carries to his lintel. No ravine to tumble into, no rock‑spine to crawl behind. A man stepping from that darkness to thumb at tarp‑ties would sit in the eye of three powers at once: Bjorulf’s hired steel, the jarl’s sentries, and the hard, unblinking gaze of the lawstone that waits behind them all.
By the time they have finished stacking obstacles in their minds, the shape of any plan they might choose looks almost laughable. To uncover what rides beneath those tarps they must neither spill blood on the jarl’s road nor reach beyond the thin sliver of authority they truly hold; they must slip a hook into Bjorulf’s shadow‑trade without giving him clean grounds to cry treason. Eirikr names it: inside the written law there is no safe handhold on that cargo. Ragnarolf, jaw tight, answers that letting it pass untouched means swallowing the same old lie until it sets like iron around his name. The odds, both men know, verge on folly: but knowing it does not free them. It only hardens the truth that whatever they dare must walk a knife‑edge where justice and outlawry are one misstep apart.
The decision takes shape without proclamation, the way ice takes the river. Ragnarolf moves through the rest of the evening on habit alone, his body knowing the work while his mind hounds a single word. He refills cups, wipes foam from table‑boards, trades jests sharp enough to keep the mood bright but dull enough not to draw notice. He settles dice‑debts with a practised eye for sleight of hand, claps shoulders, soothes a brewing quarrel with an extra heel of bread and a muttered reminder about the lawstone.
All the while surplus circles his thoughts like a gull over carrion, coming back and back to the same raw patch. Surplus blades. Surplus iron. As if steel were so plentiful in Frostmark that it could be shunted aside from the armory and trundled to one man’s forge under a private seal. As if that one man were not the same cold‑eyed bastard whose name lies like rust along the edges of Ragnarolf’s exile.
“New edge held sweet as a lover’s tongue,” a half‑drunk carter crows near the hearth, smacking the hilt of a short sword. “Bjorulf’s boys know their work.”
“Swapped my old spearhead for one of his,” another answers. “Straight as a priest’s tale. Never mind what the quartermaster doles out. This is the steel that keeps a man breathing.”
Each boast lands like a pebble in Ragnarolf’s gut. His fingers stray again and again to the faded axe‑scar on his cheek, the familiar ridge of it against his thumb rough as old rope. Raids had been honest, in their way. You set your keel toward a foreign shore, named your fear and your greed, and if the sea or steel took you, no one pretended surprise. This… this is iron turned sideways, its point hidden in ledgers and seals.
He pours, he smiles, he listens. Behind his teeth, his jaw works like a man chewing gristle.
Across the room, Eirikr watches him over the rim of his cup, the fire painting hollows under his eyes. There is nothing of a drunken scholar in him now, only the distant focus he gives to tangled law‑knots. He notes who praises Bjorulf’s wares by name, who mentions late deliveries, whose glance slips toward the door when talk turns to convoys and cold roads. He weighs Ragnarolf’s uncharacteristic quiet against the trader’s tale and the memory of that stitched crest flaring in the lamplight.
Ink stains on his fingers catch the glow as he turns the cup, thumb worrying at the grain like a man turning over clauses in his head. He measures, in the set of Ragnarolf’s shoulders and the thinness of his smile, how far the innkeeper is willing to be bent before he breaks. He counts, without looking, how many regulars in the room would think twice before siding with the lawstone over the man who keeps them warm and watered on winter nights.
Neither speaks of the wagons again while there are ears to hear. Yet between the clatter of cups and the low roar of talk, a thing settles: not a plan, not yet, but a shared refusal. The Road’s End Inn hums and steams and laughs around them as it always has; beneath that familiar din, something leaner and colder lays its blade across both their throats and waits to see which of them will move first.
When the rush ebbs and the benches begin to empty, Eirikr finally leans in, voice pitched low enough that only the hiss of the fire competes with it. The clatter at the far tables has thinned to the lazy rattle of dice and the murmur of a half‑sung sea‑ballad.
“If that seal is truly on the convoy,” he says, eyes on the flames rather than Ragnarolf’s face, “then someone has written my cousin’s name over something that does not pass through the lawstone.” His hand rests on the rim of his cup, ink‑stained thumb tracing an invisible rune again and again, as if he might write the right clause into being on bare wood. “I can ask questions in the hall, but written petitions vanish. Men like Bjorulf have longer memories than ledgers. Longer knives, too.”
Ragnarolf answers with a snort that is almost a laugh, roughened by old smoke and older bitterness. “Questions behind doors are why I sleep in my own loft instead of my own hall. They weighed my words, found them lighter than a lordling’s lie.” He lifts his own cup, tilts it, watching the dregs slide. “If this is tied to him, I’m done waiting for the law to grow a spine. The road is under my eaves. I’ll use what ground I’ve got.”
They do not argue so much as circle the same cliff from different paths, testing each foothold with words. Eirikr lays out, with a scribe’s precision, every boundary they dare not cross: no blades drawn except in clear self‑defense and in full sight of witnesses; no loose talk that they act in the jarl’s name; no seizure of cargo that cannot be framed as safeguarding “suspect” goods until a higher judgment. No threats, either, that could be twisted into extortion. Ragnarolf counters with the sea‑raider’s catalogue of what must be done regardless: someone must see the wagons before they reach the inner gate; someone must know the drivers’ faces and the escort’s colors; someone must be close enough to smell whether the “scrap iron” stinks of river‑mud, grave rust, or burned salt‑metal. Between these lists (of prohibitions and necessities) the shape of their knife‑edge path emerges, narrow as a ship’s plank in heavy seas.
Once named, the practicalities come quickly, like men mustered at a horn‑blast. They fix the timing: three nights from now, when the convoy must pass the inn if it keeps the most sensible winter road. Ragnarolf will contrive a reason for delay. A sudden crowd of teamsters needing stabling, a lame horse in need of a farrier, a keg rolled “accidentally” across the track, perhaps even a thaw‑slick patch of yard that requires sand and care before wheels dare it. Eirikr will be present in his capacity as law‑speaker’s clerk, cloak neat, satchel full, carrying enough wax‑sealed tablets to make a “routine” inquiry look official to any half‑literate guard captain. If the wagons’ papers are thin as the trader claimed, that alone gives him cause to ask that one be set aside under pretext of irregular manifests, mis‑tallied tolls, or fears of bandit tampering along the forest road.
Only when they have rehearsed, line by line, the tale they’ll offer if called to account, Ragnarolf the cautious innkeeper wary of blades too near his threshold, Eirikr the dutiful clerk insisting ink must match iron, do they dare weigh the cost. “If this goes awry,” Eirikr murmurs, “my kin will not claim me. They’ll say I grasped beyond my station.” Ragnarolf’s reply is flat as a frozen fjord. “I have fallen as far as a man can fall and keep breath in him. The rest is splash.” The last candle gutters between them, wick drowning in its own tallow, and in that smoky half‑dark they trade a single, grave nod, as if answering a challenge from unseen ancestors. They will stand in the road when the wagons come, and whatever skulks beneath those tarps will be hauled into the open: even if, when judgment falls, no jarl, no god, no carved stone of law will own the deed.
Lidra sits with her back to the wall and her shield propped within arm’s reach, cheeks still wind‑burned from watch. Melted snow beads along the rim of the boss and drips to the rushes at her feet. She has loosened her mail but not unbuckled it, as if the jarl might call her to arms in the time it takes to shrug free of steel.
Ragnarolf moves through the familiar rituals of closing (banking the hearth, stacking cups, turning benches up on trestles with the lazy scrape of wood on wood) yet leaves one candle bright on their table, its circle of light a quiet invitation. Outside, the wind worries at the shutters and sends a thin whistle through the chinks; inside, the last two carters stumble out on his polite insistence, laughter trailing thin into the night. He lifts the bar across the door with a solid thud that says: no more strangers, not tonight.
He does not go straight to her. He makes a slow circuit, checking shutters, smothering all but a few coals in the side‑hearth, giving her the space to decide whether she will stay or call for the bill and her bed in the barracks. When he does come, it is with the stew‑pot cradled in one arm and a fresh loaf in the other.
“Still warm,” he says by way of greeting, setting bowl and bread down between them. “Better in your belly than in the pot come morning.”
She snorts, the edge of a tired smile tugging at her scar. “You’ll spoil your reputation, Skaldson. Folk will say you’re soft on the watch.”
“Soft?” He arches a brow, tearing the loaf and handing her the larger piece. “Ask my lads at dawn, when I have them hauling barrels on the ice.”
He lets her talk first of routine things: the new lads who can’t keep their spears level, the captain’s latest barked orders, the way frost slicks the practice yard so falls hurt twice. She gestures with bread and spoon as she speaks, shoulders loosening by degrees, the lines at the corners of her mouth easing in the familiar rhythm of complaint.
“The boys from inland don’t know how to plant their feet,” she says, shaking her head. “They skate about like gulls on a frozen gut. One hard shove and they’re on their arses, shields in the wrong hand, spears gawping at the sky.”
Ragnarolf chuckles under his breath, the sound low and unmocking. “Sea‑ice teaches quick. Or it drowns you.”
“Aye. If the captain would let me march them out on the fjord instead of that cursed yard…” She trails off, rolling her eyes, then mimics in a gravelled bark, “‘Regulations. Liability. If one of your idiots cracks his skull, I answer for it, Lidra.’”
He smiles at the impression, but says nothing to fan it. Each complaint is a safe stone in shallow water. He nods along, neither prying nor agreeing too quickly, letting her step from stone to stone at her own pace.
As she speaks, he watches how much bitterness she lets into her voice when no officers are near, how often she glances toward the shuttered windows out of habit. The candle throws their faces into a small, wavering world of yellow and shadow; beyond its light the taproom is all dim rafters and the red eye of the hearth. Here, in this little circle, her shoulders sag more than a squad would ever see. She stretches cold‑stiff fingers around the bowl and stares into the steam as if it were a fog‑choked sea and she on the prow, deciding which way to turn.
When her rant begins to circle closer to kit and not just clumsy lads, he leans his weight on the bench and nudges it the rest of the way.
“You drill them hard, then,” he says, as if admiring her severity, tipping the pot to chase the last thick bits into her bowl. “Hard enough to crack good ash and ring true iron?” The words are easy, almost idle. His gaze is not.
For a heartbeat she only stares at him over the rising steam, jaw set. Then she lets out a breath through her nose, long and flat, like a war‑horn blown low.
“Hard enough to show what’s fit for battle,” she says. “And what isn’t.”
The list comes out clipped, a squad report turned confession: spear‑hafts sheared clean at the socket as if sawn, not split; shield‑boss rivets that sheer in a line; mail where whole runs of links part like cut thread; sword‑edges that curl and mushroom after two good blows. She names drills, dates, even the lads who bled when steel failed them. Each fault is spoken like the name of a fallen comrade.
As she talks, the fire settles, the rafters creak, and the inn’s emptiness cinches in around their low voices, turning her catalogue of splinters and breaks into sworn witness before an unseen court.
Ragnarolf lets a beat of silence fall after her last example, the scrape of his ladle in the pot the only sound. He watches the tension in her jaw, the way her fingers tighten on the bowl as if it were a shield‑rim.
Then, as if merely thinking aloud to himself, he says, “Wood can be knotted, iron can be flawed. But pieces from the same batch failing the same way… that’s strange.”
He doesn’t say sabotage. He doesn’t need to. The word hangs unsaid between them, drawn in the steam from their bowls and the long winter’s breath outside the shutters.
Lidra’s jaw works; he can see her testing the thought against her loyalty, against the wolf‑head badge on her shoulder. Habit makes her glance toward the barred door, as if an officer might have slipped in to hear.
When he adds, softer, “I’ve seen gear give out under a shield‑wall, but not like you’re describing. Not if the smith cared for his name,” something in her expression shifts. The loose, weary complaint is gone. What’s left is a soldier’s wary focus, as if she’s just heard the first hint of an enemy inside the line.
He does not speak of jarl’s banners or which coast ran red, only of a spray‑frozen shield‑line and the crack a dying spear makes, thin and wrong in a man’s hands. Of how cheap iron bends, how starved charcoal leaves a grey‑hearted blade, how a lazy hammer‑swing marks steel like a crooked rune. He lets the tale trail off before it brushes too close to lawstone business or exile talk, but the rough edge in his voice betrays where memory still bites. “Gear fails,” he concedes, thumb rubbing an old burn on his wrist. “But when it all fails alike, from the same hand, that’s not bad luck. That’s choice.”
Lidra studies him then, not as a harmless exile with a ladle, but as a man who has stood where mail parts and friends go down. The last dregs of her drink sit untouched as she weighs his words against faces she still sees in sleep. Snow hisses against the shutters; the candle gutters, steadies, throwing his axe‑scar into sharp relief. She doesn’t swear an oath or spit out a name. She only says, “If it’s not honest wear, someone’s playing games with warrior lives,” and asks, low, “What would you look at first?” When she lets him answer instead of calling for a sergeant, when she leans in to hear, Ragnarolf feels it take: the first hook of trust, quiet and sure beneath the surface.
Lidra answers not with outrage, but with detail.
She leans back, eyes narrowing as if she’s watching the drills play out again across the taproom floor. One calloused thumb hooks under the rim of her bowl; the other hand begins to move, sketching shapes in spilled ale and crumbs.
“First week of snow,” she says quietly. “Young Torfi in my file. Took a glancing cut on the left. Not even a full swing. Helm buckled in like tin. Left cheek‑guard folded against his teeth. I had to pry it out with my own knife.” She taps the side of her jaw, mirroring the remembered blow. “Stamp on the brow‑band was the jarl’s armory mark, clean and proper. But the steel rang dull when it hit the ground. Wrong temper.”
She doesn’t look at him to see if he understands. She just goes on.
“Two eight‑days later, practice shield‑wall on the inner yard. We run against the lads from South Gate, full weight. Hakon, been in three seasons, knows how to turn a blow, takes one solid hit to the mail. Should’ve bruised him, nothing more. Instead…” She grimaces. “Single row along the ribs splits like rotten thread. Not a tear spreading out from a point. A line. Every fourth ring drawn thin as wire. I watched them part.”
Her spoon scrapes once through the stew, then lies forgotten.
“And the shields.” Her mouth hardens. “Got a batch in late last thaw. Looked sound. Good planks, bosses bright. Week later I’m in the yard with a hammer, beating one of those bosses back into shape because the rivets have spread and bent like warm tallow. Not from a war‑stroke, mind you. From a recruit’s clumsy block.” She snorts softly. “I’ve carried shields through coastal storms and ship‑board crush. I know what honest strain looks like. This wasn’t it.”
She ticks off more: a spearhead that bent sideways the first time it bit a practice post; a sword that showed spider‑web cracks along the fuller after nothing more than forms in the yard; a pair of greaves whose leather gave way at the stitching, but only where the buckles joined fresh‑forged plates.
Each story lands on the table between them like a tossed coin, clipped and exact, the way she gives orders on the line. No embellishment, no flinching from where the failures turned to blood. Names, dates, weather, which sergeant was barking at whom. Who issued the gear. Which corner of the yard it came from.
By the time she falls silent, the stew has cooled in both their bowls. The only heat left between them is in the sharp, measured anger under her words.
As she speaks, she starts to arrange them. First by drill day, then by who issued the gear, her scarred finger tracing rough circles and lines on the tabletop between their bowls. She marks out little squads with wet thumbprints, taps once for the South Gate yard, twice for the inner. Names become flecks of spilled barley, drill‑calls become streaks in the foam.
A pattern emerges in the smudged beer‑rings and candle‑grease: not the even scatter of chance, but clusters. The worst failures come from certain wagons, certain batches. Always rolled in late from smiths’ row with some muttered excuse about flooded quench‑pits or a jammed cart‑wheel. She marks those wagons with a drag of her nail through the spill, a dark scoring that cuts across the mess.
“And always after they’ve been through,” she mutters. “Bjorulf’s boys. ‘Checking’ the racks.” Her mouth twists around the word. “Staying on past light‑call, saying they’re doing the quartermaster a kindness.” She snorts. “Kindness leaves helms whole.”
The table between them becomes a crude map of the yard and its sins, and her grim tallying leaves little room for accident.
Ragnarolf listens, quiet as if she were reciting a saga, but his questions are not a skald’s. They are a smith’s apprentice and a shield‑breaker’s in one.
“What color was the temper‑line on that snapped blade?” he asks. “Pale straw, or gone to blue?”
She blinks, searches her memory. “More grey. No shine to it.”
“And the spear‑haft, when it went?” He tilts his head. “Dry crack, or wet?”
“Wet,” she says slowly. “Smelled green. Fresh.”
He grunts under his breath, not surprised.
At his urging she sketches the curve of the cracked axe‑edge, the way it flared white at the break. His gaze tracks every motion, filing away each name, each morning’s frost, each barked order and which rack the faulty gear came from.
At last, when she draws breath, he speaks of the iron itself. How a bad quench leaves treacherous hardness that sings bright under a file yet shatters on the first true clash. How too much soft metal in a rivet lets a boss sheer sideways when a spear‑thrust lands square. He names slag‑lines running like black veins through cheap bar‑stock, alloys stretched thin to please a miser’s ledger, not a shield‑wall. No boast touches his voice, only the flat weight of a man who has stood in a prow counting on his gear while arrows hissed like sleet. The ease with which he shapes forge‑words and faults makes Lidra’s eyes flick up, measuring him anew.
Eirikr drifts nearer then, arms full of empty cups, pausing just long enough within their circle of candle‑light to hear Ragnarolf quietly name the same batches Lidra has marked. Without looking straight at them, he bends as if to wipe a spill and murmurs which of those failures could be pressed at the lawstone as negligence: poor craft, overwork, bad oversight. Then, softer still, he sketches how others, if they can walk the trail of seals and tallies back through the armory ledgers to a single hand on smiths’ row, might be honed into something harsher in the jarl’s ears. The word he does not yet speak glints unvoiced in the smoky air between them.
The unspoken charge thickens the air like forge smoke after oil is thrown on the coals. Somewhere in the rafters a beam creaks; the hearth spits; the last of the drinkers mutter over dice near the far wall. In their small island of lamplight, Lidra’s fingers drum once on the tabletop, a staccato of mail‑scraped nails against wood, then go still, flattening as if pinning her temper in place.
“You know whose mark sits on most of those blades,” she says at last. Her voice is quiet, but there is a shield‑wall’s edge in it. She does not spit the name Bjorulf, but it hangs there all the same, like the taste of blood after a bite to the tongue.
Ragnarolf does not supply it for her. Names have weight. Names draw ears.
“To whisper that his work fails on purpose,” she goes on, leaning in a fraction, “in a room like this, with your stain on you, ”
Her gaze drops, not by much, to where his exile‑brand shows dark against the hollow of his collarbone, a puckered mark like old rope‑burn, half‑hidden by his tunic’s lacing. Her eyes linger there a heartbeat, as if measuring not only the scar but all that comes with it: lost oaths, lost standing, the jarl’s cold decree.
Then her attention slants toward the door. One slow sweep: the shuttered windows, the banked hearth, Hrod’s bulky silhouette by the post pretending not to listen, the two carters nodding over their cups. She counts witnesses the way she would count enemy shields, lips tightening when she totals them.
“If this is just a raider’s grudge,” she says, turning back to him, “you drag me with you into the mud. His coin props half the garrison. His favor weighs heavier than three of me at the captain’s board. An exiled man muttering over bad iron is one thing. A squad‑leader standing at his shoulder while he does it?” Her jaw works, a muscle ticking near the pale scar that crosses nose and cheek. “That’s another tale entirely. That tale ends with both our names spoken at the lawstone, and not in honor.”
Ragnarolf meets that hard stare without rising to it. The urge is there, old habits, old pride, but he has learned the weight of stillness. “If it were a grudge, I’d have taken it to the dueling circle, not your stew pot,” he says at last, the words pitched so low they scarcely stir the air beyond their table. “Steel and witnesses, not stew and whispers.”
He draws his seax with a slow, open motion, no flourish, the kind of draw a man makes when he wants no one startled. The blade is clean‑kept and workmanlike, edge honed bright; it catches the candle‑light in a thin, cold line. He sets it down between them, not hard, but with the quiet finality of a wager laid. The hilt turns toward her, the blade angled back toward his own breastbone.
“If I’m wrong,” he goes on, eyes never leaving hers, “and you judge me for it, take this and lead me to the lawstone yourself. Name me liar where all can hear. I’ll walk at your shoulder and kneel when they bid me kneel. I’ll not bolt like some alley thief, or skulk out by the harbor caves.”
He lets the offer sit like a stone dropped into deep water, the ripples of it widening in the silence between them. Only when he is sure she will not simply rise and walk does he speak again, voice roughened down to almost nothing. “But if I’m right,” he says, “and we look away because his mark sits closer to the jarl’s chair than ours… how many more shields split when the wall closes? How many of your people go under the ice because their spears fold instead of bite?”
The questions land harder than any slight. Lidra’s mouth thins; the old raid is suddenly not old at all. She sees Svan’s mail bursting like rotten bark, Thora’s spear shearing clean at mid‑shaft. Heat climbs her throat, not at him now but at the memory of red snow and bent iron. For an instant her eyes shine, not with rage but with something rawer, the ache of names carved on stone that should still be walking beside her.
Eirikr moves then, setting down his stack of cups as if to busy his hands while he speaks, scholar’s fingers suddenly clumsy with clay instead of wax and rune. “No one here is swearing oaths or naming culprits,” he says, choosing each word like a step on thin ice over black water. “Curiosity is not treason. To note patterns, to compare ledgers, to see whether craft has slipped from haste or from something worse: that is still within the law.” His gaze finds Lidra’s and holds it, steadying. “If there is anything to bring forward, it must be clean. Witnessed. Sealed in proper form.” A faint tightness touches his mouth. “Else it dies in my hands before ever it reaches the lawstone.”
The narrow promise of a lawful gate through which this danger might pass, or be turned aside, bridges the last of the distance. Lidra exhales, some iron easing from her shoulders. She takes up the seax, weighing it with a veteran’s ease, testing edge and balance as if judging the man by his steel. Plain, sound, no vanity. She sets it back exactly where he’d laid it. “One try,” she says at last. “You bring me truth, I’ll stand in its shield‑wall. I catch so much as a whiff of tavern tale dressed as proof, I walk. And I take this blade, and its owner, to where judgment waits.”
Ragnarolf does not reach for the seax again. Let it lie between them, silent and honest. Instead he takes up the kettle from its slow place by the hearth, gives it a testing tilt. The stew at the bottom has thickened to a salty sludge, but the ale on top is still warm enough to chase the night’s edge. He tops off Lidra’s mug first, the gesture small and ordinary, as if they have only been speaking of weather and not of cracked iron and dead comrades. The lamplight finds the white line of her cheek‑scar as she watches him, eyes narrowed, measuring not the pour but the man.
“Last of the good stuff,” he says, pitching his tone back toward tavern‑easy. “After this it’s the sour barrel, and I’d not insult the jarl’s wolf with that.” The faintest twitch touches the corner of her mouth; not quite a smile, but not a snarl either.
He turns away before the moment can curdle, carrying a fresh clay cup toward the door. Hrod stands there as he has all evening, a piece of the threshold as much as the timber frame and the iron‑bound planks. The young man’s spear butt rests by his boot, his shoulders squared, eyes pretending to drift over the emptying room while catching every movement.
“For the watch,” Ragnarolf offers, setting the drink down on the nearest barrel‑table, within easy reach but not pressed on him. His voice is neutral, the sort of thing an innkeeper might say any night of any winter.
Hrod’s fingers tighten on his spear shaft. For a heartbeat he does not move, the drilled habit of refusing drink on duty warring with the unspoken summons in the older man’s gaze. His eyes flick, quick as a knife‑stroke, to Lidra. She has seen it too. The way the innkeeper chooses this watchman for his little kindness, the way he leaves room for answer.
Permission should not be needed between warriors of equal standing, but rank and habit are chains even looser than mail. Lidra’s jaw works. Then she gives a curt nod, one officer to one of her own. “Take it,” she says. “Cold in here, and you’ve one foot outside the door already.”
Only then does Hrod shift, stepping fully out of the shadow of the jamb and into the pool of lamplight near their table. The glow catches the pale line of the scar along his jaw, the careful trim of his gear. He lays his spear within arm’s length and wraps his hand around the mug with a soldier’s wary gratitude, as if this, too, might be a test.
Ragnarolf drifts back toward the hearth, but not far. The circle tightens by slow degrees: captain, scholar, exile, and now the quiet man from the door drawn in, as if by the gravity of something finally naming itself in the smoke‑thick air.
He does not leave when his relief clumps in, stamping snow from his boots and muttering about the cold. Hrod only rolls one shoulder, as if the leather there has stiffened, and jerks his chin toward the half‑emptied mug. “I’ll see this down and then crawl to my pallet,” he says, the sort of weary jest any watchman might make. The other man snorts, already eyeing the fire, and trudges off toward the back.
Hrod shifts to a bench a little nearer their table, turned three‑quarters toward the door as if still on the edge of his duty. He hunches over his drink, elbows on knees, and lets his voice carry just enough. “Armory tallies were off again,” he mutters to no one in particular. “Puzzling stuff. Spears marked issued that never passed my hands. A bundle of ash‑shafts that weighed light. Mail shirts stamped as mended, rings bright on the outside but filed thin beneath, like fish‑scale before frying.”
He scratches at his jaw, frowning as though wrestling thick numbers. “Probably I’m reading it wrong. Just a spear‑carrier. Ledger‑marks crawl when I look too long.” But the way he names shelf‑rows and seal‑colors is too precise for honest muddle.
Lidra’s temper flares first. “You had ledgers not matching steel in hand and said nothing?” she snaps, palm striking the table hard enough to rattle cups and send a thin ring of stew slopping over the rim. Her squad lives and dies by what comes out of those doors; the thought of hollow mail on their backs makes her voice rougher than she intends. Hrod takes the rebuke without flinching. He ducks his head a fraction, answering with a slow, respectful explanation: he thought it some clerk’s sleepy error, he did not want to brand an officer a thief on a hunch, he is “no law‑scribe, just a man who counts spears and hopes he’s right.” The humility is mostly a mask, and Eirikr, who has drifted closer under pretext of warming his hands at the hearth, hears the deliberate phrasing, the careful way Hrod leaves certain names unspoken.
Eirikr begins to ask the small, precise questions a man of ink cannot help: which ledgers, whose seal, which hook and row in the armory alcoves. As Hrod answers, pausing, squinting, playing the dullard while naming shelf‑marks and wax‑colors with telling care, a pattern emerges. The missing weight and hollow steel always circle back to one cluster of forge‑accounts, to side‑doors on smiths’ row that tie, again and again, to Bjorulf’s rune‑ringed mark. Ragnarolf keeps the ale moving and the pot of closing‑time stew within reach, ladling seconds, trading low jokes, his steady presence sanding each sharp edge from the talk so no one storms off or lets a word fly loud enough to reach the wrong ears.
Bit by bit a quiet division of labor settles over the table, no oath spoken, no hands laid on steel. Lidra drags every suspicion back to splintered shields and broken bodies, refusing ghosts that do not bleed. Hrod lays out the garrison’s hidden bones. Shift changes, odd requisitions, which sergeants sign blind. Eirikr stitches those scraps through law and writ, noting which charges might stand before the lawstone and which must be hunted in shadowed corners. Ragnarolf listens more than he speaks, tying rumor to wagon, seal to smith, mapping these currents of Frostmark the way he once read reefs and tides by starlight.
The fire has burned low by the time the talk turns inward, the great log collapsed into a red‑eyed heap that breathes more ember‑glow than flame. Shadows stretch long across the table, softening mail and leather into the same weary grey.
Lidra’s fist tightens around her spoon until the knuckles pale, tendons standing out like bowstrings. She has forgotten the food entirely; the stew in her bowl has skinned over, fat cooling in a thin, clouded sheen. When she speaks, it is not in ranks or tidy formations but in names, each one dropped like a stone into deep water.
“Svan,” she says first, eyes on the tabletop. “Herdis. Kol.” No titles. No ‘shield‑mate’ or ‘under my command.’ They are simply people the world no longer holds.
She does not stop there. Other names follow, weightier for being unremarkable. Watch‑standards from the south gate, a boy who laughed too loud on his first winter posting, a woman who could split a knot in one axe‑stroke. Some of them died on the same foreign strand that branded Ragnarolf a traitor. More fell on muddy tracks and ice‑rimed clearings since, on patrols so small and ugly no skald would waste breath on them.
Her voice, rough with drink and the hour, grows harsher when she describes how they went. Mail that should have turned a lazy cut instead splitting wide under a half‑hearted swing. Ring‑links stretched thin as wire, parting like rotten thread. Spearheads blunted not by battle’s wear, but mushroomed flat against the first hard shield they met, edges rolled like cheap tin. A sword that snapped clean at the hilt when its bearer needed just one more parry.
“They were good fighters,” Lidra says at last, jaw set, eyes bright but dry. “They held their line. They did what was asked.” Her spoon scrapes the bowl once, an ugly little sound. “If they fell to steel that was meant to fail, then someone sold their lives for silver.”
She does not spit curses or pound for blood. No vow of vengeance leaves her mouth. But the shape of it is there all the same, coiled behind her teeth: the cold, soldier’s promise that no more of her people will march out under treacherous iron if she can help it. In the quiet that follows, that unspoken oath hangs heavier than smoke, heavier than any words laid on an ancestor stone.
Eirikr has been making quiet marks on his wax tablet as they talk, rendering their mutterings into tidy strokes of rune‑shorthand no court would ever accept. At Lidra’s last name his stylus stills. The tiny pause is nothing, everything. He studies the tablet as if it has betrayed him.
“The seal that recurs,” he says at length, voice gone thin as scraped vellum, “is mine. My house’s.” He does not look up. “More precisely: my cousin by marriage. He holds the way‑station at Harkfell Ford, on the southern road. Wainwrights and drovers change teams there. So do manifests.”
The lamplight catches the tremor at the corner of his mouth as he goes on, each word measured like coin on a scale. Unsigned addenda appearing beneath the raven‑and‑scroll. Slight shifts in weight and count, always in the same direction. Drafts of orders that left his hand clean, returned to him with numbers…tilted.
“If it is forgery, I must prove it,” he says, finally looking at Ragnarolf, then Lidra. “Or else I must prove that my kin are guilty.” Either path could snap what little branch of nobility his family clings to. Yet to leave the question lying is to become, in his own reckoning, an accomplice. For a heartbeat the law‑scholar’s composure frays, and they glimpse the man beneath: torn clean down the spine between blood and the laws he has sworn his tongue and future to.
Hrod stands near the door as if still on duty, helmet tucked under his arm, gaze apparently on the emptying street beyond the warped shutters. To any casual eye he is only a tired watchman waiting out the last of his shift. Only when the others fall quiet does he clear his throat and speak, voice pitched low enough that it does not carry past their table.
He tells of quartermasters’ tallies that never match the racks he has personally counted, of spear‑bundles signed out in neat runes to men who never saw so much as a splinter of their shafts. Of flogging squares gone slick with blood from rankers condemned for “lost” gear that vanished on parchment, not in the field.
“The same names come up,” he adds, eyes still on the door, “when something goes missing…and when someone needs an example made.” No outrage sharpens his tone, only a tired patience worn thin. This pattern has gnawed at him for seasons, and tonight he lets the mask slip just far enough to show that he is done pretending not to see it.
Attention turns to Ragnarolf almost without anyone willing it. He has been topping cups, banking coals, moving with the easy habit of a man who belongs to the shadows of his own hall while their grief and anger spill across his boards. Now he rests both hands on the back of a chair, thick fingers whitening on the carved rail, seax hilt a dull, familiar weight at his hip.
“I have worn chains already,” he says, not loud, not soft, “for a betrayal I did not give.” The words fall flat as iron in the quiet. For a moment the room seems to narrow to the faded axe‑scar running from cheek to jaw, to the watchful stillness in his sea‑pale eyes.
“An oath twisted once cost me ship, crew, and name,” he goes on, gaze fixed somewhere beyond their shoulders, as if watching black water close over a longship’s prow. “I will not have another treachery taking root under my roof while I pour ale for the men it will drown.”
He frames it as duty: to his patrons, to the road, to the thin peace that lets his shutters stay unbarred at night. He speaks of fair trade, of travelers owing him safe rest and honest steel at their belts. But under the innkeeper’s careful cadence lies something hotter and older, a banked, personal fury that needs no name: the hard promise of a man who has already lost everything once to other men’s lies, and will see blood on the floor before he lets it happen again.
Their separate wounds and obligations begin to braid together, though no one draws the pattern aloud. Lidra’s rage for her fallen, Eirikr’s need for a clean cut of law even through his own blood, Hrod’s refusal to see more rankers flayed for ledger‑ghosts, Ragnarolf’s dread of another false traitor birthed beneath his rafters. Each lies on the boards between them like cards no one bothers to gather. What they name, when they finally let their gazes meet, is not vengeance but prevention: sound mail, straight spear‑shafts, ledgers that add rather than subtract men’s lives. Yet beneath those plain words runs a colder promise, iron under water, that whoever has been selling death by the wagon‑load will not walk away with clean hands or an unbroken name.
The hour is late enough that only embers and regulars remain when Knutr shoulders in from the cold, smelling of quenched steel and wet wool. A gust of night rides in with him, sharp with fjord‑salt and chimney smoke, before the door thuds shut and the inn’s warmth folds back together. Snow crystals cling to his brows, melting in beads that track down the soot already smudged across his angular face.
Ragnarolf, already clearing trenchers, barely pauses. He wipes his hands on his apron and sets one last mug and a bowl of stew at the corner table without being asked, as if the place had been waiting empty just for this man. The seax at his hip knocks softly against chair‑legs as he moves; his eyes, half‑lidded with end‑of‑night weariness moments ago, are suddenly keen.
“Your usual, Kjellson,” he says, voice easy as worn leather. “Before the pot’s scraped bare.”
Knutr grunts thanks and peels his gloves off finger by finger, flexing his left hand with a faint wince when the cold air hits the blackened veins. He takes the bench with deliberate care, shoulders rolling as if to shed the weight of the forges along with his cloak.
Lidra shifts along the bench to make room, mail creaking softly like distant surf on stones. Her shield leans against the wall within easy reach; her wolf‑badge catches the firelight in sharp flashes as she turns toward him. Hrod pretends to study the door latch, testing it once, twice, as though concerned about drafts rather than listeners. His helmet rests under his arm, his stance that of a man neither quite on duty nor wholly at ease.
Across from them, Eirikr finishes a last notation by candle‑stub and rolls up his ink‑smudged notes with fussy precision, twine looping twice around the slim scroll. He tucks it away at his belt as if sealing off the day’s proper business, adopting the mild, absent look of a man willing to be talked at, not drawn in.
To any eye drunk enough to blur the edges of the room, it is only the settling of a winter night at the Road’s End: a tired smith taking his stew, a squad‑leader nursing her ale, a law‑man loitering after work, a nameless ranker by the door, an innkeeper finishing his rounds. The last regulars drowse over their cups; the hearth has slumped to a low red glow. Yet there is a tautness under the quiet, a sense of pieces nudged into place. When Knutr wraps his fingers around the mug Ragnarolf has set before him, the steam wreathing his scarred hand looks, for an instant, almost like smoke from some older, darker fire.
Ragnarolf does not launch straight into rumor. He keeps his tone light, almost idle, as he tops off Knutr’s mug.
“Had any complaints, of late, about edge‑holding?” he asks. “Spearheads, mostly. Mix feel any different under your hammer?”
He nods toward the wolf‑badge at Lidra’s shoulder as if she were merely his example. She snorts, bitter.
“Complaints enough,” she says. “Three spears went soft in the same shield‑press. Bent like green hazel. Mail rings snapping in tidy lines instead of scattering. Not rust, not bad keeping. They fail together.” Her jaw works. “Too damned neat to be chance.”
Knutr’s brows draw together, thumb rubbing at a soot‑stain that will not come off. He asks quiet, precise questions. Batch marks, delivery days, which squad drew which issue. The more she answers, the deeper his frown cuts.
Only then does Ragnarolf lay out the trader’s tale, voice dropping. Wagons heavy with surplus blades no one ordered. Private smith’s marks filed thin but not gone, riding under fresh stampings. All of it passing, on ledger and cobble both, through Bjorulf’s row.
Eirikr does not interrupt. His fingertips rest flat on the table, as if feeling the slow, inevitable weight of each word accreting into a charge someone might one day have to speak aloud at the lawstone.
The moment Ragnarolf says “metal that doesn’t cool right” and “marks that drink light instead of catching it,” Knutr’s left hand curls against his will, tendons standing out like bowstrings. The blackened veins swell and throb, dark as spilled ink forcing its way toward his fingertips. Heat blooms up his arm. Forge‑heat, but wrong, as if his own blood were being poured into a mold too tight. The wooden cup almost slips from his grip; stew sloshes over his knuckles, hissing where it touches cursed skin.
Lidra’s hand comes up, soldier‑fast, to steady him, then stops halfway when she sees his face gone grey with more than simple pain. Hrod, at the wall, notes the twitch and the spreading stain with the same patient attention he gives to altered muster rolls and swapped spear‑tallies, storing it away. Eirikr’s gaze flicks once to Knutr’s hand, then down again, quill‑fingered mind already fitting this small, ugly fact into a larger, still‑nameless shape.
The flare strips him of his usual reserve. In a low, hoarse spill he speaks of ore dredged from drowned holds and raid‑stones, tied to oaths broken in foreign surf; of how his hand burns whenever that tale is twisted or softened; of sealed crates waved past him bearing marks no honest quartermaster should sign. If such metal now rides beneath Bjorulf’s protection, he warns, spears will not merely shear and blades betray the hand that trusts them. Luck itself will sour around them, battles turning strange and wrong. At a quiet murmur from Eirikr, “What could be proved, if one dared?”, Knutr drags a heel of crust through spilled ale, sketching the hooked, looping bones of older runes that can draw out what a blade remembers of its forging, make tampered seams and false stamps shine like fresh blood. He does not quite meet their eyes as he adds, flat, that each working feeds the curse up his arm, and there are only so many times he can pay that price.
Almost as if to flee from his own damning knowledge, Knutr adds that the ancestor shrine’s oldest galleries run deeper than any priest will own, some worming close beneath smiths’ row and the south‑road gate. Smugglers of an older age walked those darks; fools, or worse, might be walking them now. The table sinks into a long, measuring silence broken only by hearth‑crackle and distant forge‑ring. Glances cross like thrown knives, Lidra already mapping watch posts and choke‑points, Hrod quietly rethreading his patrol routes, Eirikr counting which seals and ledgers he dares to question, Ragnarolf judging wagon‑turning space and sight‑lines in the square. Knutr flexes his ravaged hand, jaw tight, and gives one small, grim nod. When at last they rise and drift away in ones and twos, no oath is spoken, no leader named, yet each bears a clear, uncarved appointment: the southern road, when the wagons crest the frost‑hard hills.
Over the next day and a half, Ragnarolf uses his inn as a listening post, topping mugs and prompting casual grumbles while he quietly traces routes in his head. He moves along the benches with a practised slowness, never lingering so long it seems he’s eavesdropping, never so brief that a man feels slighted of ale or attention. A fresh jug here, a salted herring there, a rough joke about winter roads to set tongues loose.
He lets the noise wash over him, dice clattering in the corner, someone cursing the cold, a snatch of song about a drowned jarl, and sifts for what matters. Merchants talk in tallies and delays; soldiers measure the world in bruises and missing teeth. Both, he has learned, will tell you where trouble walks, if you pour enough beer on the words.
“Road’s slick as a priest’s tongue,” a carter mutters as Ragnarolf refills his cup, flinging slush from his boots toward the hearth. “Southern pass is ice‑rutted, and the climb past the ravine’s murder on the wheels. Lost a spoke yesterday: no coin back for that.” Another boasts of shaving a day off the journey by cutting through the birch‑copse, only to admit his rear axle near went out on the stones. Ragnarolf nods, smiles, stores it: where wagons slow, where they groan, where horses balk.
From the harbor men he gets other morsels. A deckhand, half drunk, gripes about being turned back from the fjord mouth after dark by a horn on the wall, though “someone” kept a shore‑fire burning low beneath the cliff. Another sailor, young and raw, mentions lights winking under smiths’ row when honest folk sleep. Ragnarolf only grunts, wiping the same clean patch of table, mind already drawing lines between road, harbor, cliff, and the fat convoy due within two days.
Carters complain about the steep road from the southern pass and the tight turn by the old watchtower before the market square; one wagon always lags there to rest its team, a predictable choke‑point that men gripe about and Ragnarolf silently marks like a scar on a map. They curse the climb where the ravine wind knifes through wool and bites horses bloody‑lunged, talk of wheels slipping toward the drop if the ruts freeze wrong. More than one swears he saw a cart go over there in a past winter, spilling barrels and bones together.
“The turn by the tower’s where it all goes to piss,” one insists, tracing the air with a thick finger. “Steep down, tight left, stones loose as a gambler’s oath. Always some poor bastard’s team blowing hard, blocking half the way while the rest of us queue up swearing.”
Ragnarolf laughs with them, claps shoulders, but in his mind that bend becomes a place where guards look forward, not back; where a stalled wagon makes good cover, or a fine excuse for delay.
He hears it first from a pair of oarsmen off a broad‑bellied cog, voices low and sour. “Not just the harbor beacons,” one says, turning his cup, eyes fixed on the foam. “Little prickle‑fires down by the cliff, where no honest path runs. Same hours every gods‑cursed night.” Another, cheeks raw from wind, swears he saw lantern‑glow wink in and out of a sea‑cave mouth directly under smiths’ row, “like they was feeding the rock itself.”
Others grumble in agreement. When the harbor watch hugs the lee wall for shelter and the horn is manned by lads more worried about frostbite than smugglers, darker shapes work the shoreline. Bjorulf’s boys, by the guesses of those who know hulls and tides, ferrying crates ashore where no tallyman looks.
Eirikr and Knutr drift past the forges at dusk like any pair of customers nosing after iron prices, Eirikr mumbling about tariffs while his eyes count side doors, roof vents, shuttered windows. Heat shimmers oddly along one blank stretch of wall. At a narrow outflow drain where quenched water runs too warm in the frost, Knutr’s blackened hand throbs, curse‑pain spiking: metal and hidden hollow answering him from beyond the stone.
In barracks and training yards, Lidra and Hrod quietly tally which guards drink on Bjorulf’s coin, which now swagger in his close‑linked mail, and which posts mysteriously thin after dark. Dice circles, shared flasks, knowing nods at the sight of soot‑blackened rings. Each small betrayal noted. By midnight, a pattern of bought loyalties and blind corners lies sketched between them.
By dawn the following day, the talk of oarsmen and dice‑circles has hardened into marks on wax and memory.
Ragnarolf watches the ebb and flow from his doorway as carts grind up from the southern pass in twos and threes, steam gusting from straining horses. The same steep bend by the ruined watchtower makes them all check their pace; harness creaks, curses float on the cold air, and, right on cue, one wagon in every small string lags behind to “rest” its team. Different drivers, different paint on the wheels, but always the last wagon, always the same spot where the cliff path drops toward the old quarry track. He notes which teamsters share winks with the gate‑guards and which keep their eyes nailed forward. A few he marks in his thoughts as simple men with sore backs. A few he files beside Bjorulf’s name.
Inside the walls, Hrod walks his patrols with the patient plod of any under‑sergeant, but his gaze counts barrels instead of flagstones. He traces how grain, iron, and pitch move from gate to storehouse, from storehouse to smiths’ row, from there to the armory: or not. One cask of nails goes missing between tally and forge. A crate marked for spearheads takes the long way round the alleys, following a route that brushes close to Bjorulf’s yard before “reappearing” at the quartermaster’s door. Hrod does not challenge. He nods, jokes about the cold, notes names and times on his little wax tablet when no one looks.
Eirikr, under color of checking levy ledgers, compares port lists with road tallies. Wagons that never appear at the ramparts still leave the city “empty,” according to the scribbled hands of sleepy clerks. Knutr, hearing the pattern, mutters about ore weights that do not add, about slag that should be piling higher than it is.
By dusk, they have not only men and corners mapped, but the very veins of Frostmark’s trade: which roads bear honest burdens, and which quietly bleed strength toward the cliff and the sea.
It is one thing to suspect a leak, another to hear it whistle.
From the doorway of the Road’s End, Ragnarolf watches the southern road as if it were a tide‑line. A carter touches two fingers to his brow as he passes the inn, but when he draws near the bend by the ruined tower, those same fingers flick once to the wagon’s sideboard. Another man spits over his left shoulder each time a wagon slows. A third, with a red scarf knotted twice at his throat, always shouts the same curse at the same stone in the road. Harmless habits, until you lay them side by side and see they all mark the waiting place.
At the harbor, sailors talk of lanterns hooded, then bared: one flash, two, a pause. Hrod notes which watchmen never seem to notice. Eirikr, squinting at battered manifests, sees the same crabbed rune in different hands beside “overweight” cargo.
Knutr’s cursed hand flares when those marks appear. Bjorulf’s men are not merely smuggling steel; they are speaking in it.
Once you know the tune, you hear it everywhere.
Ragnarolf starts serving drinks a heartbeat slower when the red‑scarved carter steps in, just to watch who raises a brow at that scarf, at that man. The same three guards at the corner table always look up, every time.
Hrod lingers on walls and in gate‑arches, testing which stretches of parapet lie just out of any officer’s casual glance, where a man could show a lantern twice without fear. A tower‑stair landing. The lee of a crane at the harbor. A blind angle beneath the ruined watchtower’s shadow.
Knutr walks past Bjorulf’s yard again and feels his hand burn near the warm outflow. Stone hollowed behind it, unseen from any honest path.
Angles. Shadows. The places law does not look.
They chart them like reefs. Ragnarolf marks the red‑scarved carter’s corner table, the stair where dice games drown out a footfall, the moment the inn’s roar hides a door’s soft latch. Hrod clocks the heartbeat between wall‑patrols, how long a man can linger unseen in a tower’s lee. Eirikr and Knutr count breaths between lantern flashes, between forged rune and clerk’s nod.
Response delays timed to the beat of human habit: how long a gate sergeant takes to answer a horn when half‑drunk, how many heartbeats pass before a harbor runner rouses his captain from warm furs, how slowly a messenger climbs the keep stair in deep night. All measured, all slack in the line Bjorulf’s folk already pull.
Patterns of guard inattention at the lawstone and harbor watch‑towers cross‑checked against smuggling rumors, revealing predictable blind hours Bjorulf’s men already exploit.
It starts with Eirikr’s ink. He sits near the back of the taproom with a slate and a wax tablet, pretending to copy a ship’s tally for a merchant too drunk to care. In truth, he notes when the lawstone stands empty and when it does not.
“Third bell of night,” he murmurs once, as Ragnarolf passes with a tray. “Always the same sergeant on watch at the law‑yard. Always gone ten breaths at least when he slips round back.”
Ragnarolf grunts. “Round back to what?”
“Latrene,” Hrod says later, uninvited, sliding onto the bench. “And to dice, if he thinks no one’s looking. You can tell by the way he smells of tallow smoke, not torch‑smoke, when he comes off duty.”
They lay the scraps together. Sessions at the lawstone end after evening bells when the cold bites hardest; the law‑speaker and attendants flee for the great hall’s fire. For a stretch of sky between last petition and first patrol, the square lies watched only by one bored man and whatever ghosts the ancestors can spare.
Down at the harbor it’s worse. Lanterns on the tower burn low when the oil’s been thinned to stretch the quartermaster’s books. The watch there trusts the chain‑boom and ice to do half their work, so they cluster in the lee of the stone, backs to the fjord, staring inland at the promise of warmth.
Sailors complain (in the right company) of skiffs sliding past in fog, oars muffled, timing their run for when the bell‑ringer slips inside to warm his hands. The bell is late by the same sliver of time on the same nights of the eight‑day. That sliver lines up neatly with the red‑scarved carter’s late arrivals and the glow of low, angry fire beneath smiths’ row.
Bjorulf’s men haven’t just found the blind hours. They’ve worn them into habit, like ruts in ice. The law’s eye closes at set times; their work flows through in the dark between blinks.
The steep southern road is worst of all. Snow hard‑packed to glass on the upper bends, wagon‑ruts frozen deep so a wheel cannot slip out without groaning loud enough to wake half the watch. The carters curse the grade and the way the wind cuts there, but Ragnarolf listens past their oaths. One lame horse, one “broken” axle at the right moment, and every cart behind must either halt or string out thin along the slope.
“The old tower bend,” he says once, tracing it on a spilled ale‑stain as if it were a map. “Stone on one side, drop on the other. No room to pass.”
Hrod has walked it in full mail, spear in hand, counting steps. The watchtower itself is half‑manned most days, men sheltering from the wind in its lee. A wagon stalled at the turn forces guards to choose: bunch close to shove it free, or stretch out along the blocked road to keep the line from backing into the pass. Either way, for a few precious breaths, any convoy there is not a wall of shields but two clumsy knots of men with their backs turned.
The smiths’ row yields other seams to pry at. Roof vents meant for smoke stand wide enough for a wiry man or a desperate one, iron grates long since warped by heat and winter. The narrow lane that skirts the cliff behind Bjorulf’s forge is choked with slag and discarded scrap, but Hrod’s boots find purchase where drunks and carters never bother to tread. Knutr’s cursed hand burns hottest near a low stone culvert where quenched water runs warmer than it should, steaming faintly even in night frost. Eirikr marks each vent, side‑door, and drain on his slate, noting which open to the street and which breathe toward hollow dark. Approaches and exits both, if men are quiet and quick enough.
Inside the barracks they sort men the same way. Who drinks late with Bjorulf’s runners, who owes silver in the gaming circles, whose hauberks shine a touch too bright for a common stipend. Lidra tests them with off‑hand questions and half‑formed commands on drill. The ones who hesitate at “hold your post” or glance toward smiths’ row go on a quiet list.
Supply irregularities are traced from forge to armory: deliveries that always run a watch late when Bjorulf’s carts are involved, batches of spearheads brittle at the tang, and odd surpluses of mail that never pass through Lidra’s requisitions. On Eirikr’s slate the patterns knot into thin, shadowed channels where contraband can slide unseen into the jarl’s own racks.
Hrod’s tallies look like nothing at a glance. Chalk scratches on a wax tablet, the sort any bored ranker might make while waiting for a horn. But each crooked stroke hides two meanings, and the little notches by the edge. Those are his alone.
He spends a day and a half walking the same dull circles: gate to wall‑stair, wall‑stair to yard, yard to barracks, barracks to mess. He trades jests with men on watch, rolls shoulders with them at drill, lets them think he is exactly what he seems: a steady spear you can forget about the moment he passes.
All the while, he counts.
Which sergeants take the midnight wall rather than the first watch, which prefer to be near the market gate where the inn’s warmth is a temptation. Which lads always volunteer for harbor duty when Bjorulf’s carts are due. Which squads are forever reassigned “for flexibility” by a captain whose purse hangs heavy with new coin.
On his tablet, the rotation becomes a lattice of numbers and small, private marks. There is a crooked line for a drunkard, a dot for a gambler, a tiny cross‑stroke for a man Bjorulf has kitted out in finer steel. The clean ones get a different sign altogether, thin and straight.
He notes the armory keys as carefully as the men: who carries them, when they change hands, which watch captain keeps his on his belt and which leaves them in a peg by the door. Twice in one week, the night‑key passes through fingers still black with forge soot.
By the end of the second evening, a pattern hardens. There is one night in the coming six when the armory watch thins to almost nothing that can be trusted: a sleepy third‑bell between market closing and dawn drills, with a debt‑ridden sergeant on duty, two of Bjorulf’s favored men on the hooks, and the one honest veteran rotated out “for rest.”
Hrod copies the innocent figures onto a fresh tablet, subtle changes in spacing and stroke turning routine tallies into a quiet signal. When he sets it down for Eirikr and Ragnarolf in a back corner of the Road’s End, he says nothing of what it means. He only taps one column with a calloused finger, the one marked for that thin‑eyed night, and meets their gaze.
“Slow watch then,” he says mildly. “Good time for trouble, if any’s coming.”
Inside the records hall, the cold bit deeper than the wind outside. Stone held the night, and the only warmth came from a guttering tallow lamp and Eirikr’s own slow breath fogging the air. He sat alone at the clerk’s high table with a stack of clay‑sealed orders and the jarl’s lawstone rolls spread like a fan before him, ink‑black fingers hovering, not yet touching.
On the surface, everything matched: spears, hauberks, horse‑tack, hinges. Bjorulf’s mark, bold and sure. The quartermaster’s countersign. Delivery dates that told a neat, well‑ordered tale.
But line by line, column by column, Eirikr compared them to the rolls kept for public reading at the lawstone. Quantities shaved here, swollen there. Three dozen spearheads invoiced where only two dozen were ever sworn to under the ancestors’ gaze. Mail listed as “repaired” that never appeared in the barracks tallies at all. Coin values rounded in Bjorulf’s favor, always by the same quiet fraction.
It was not sloppiness. It was a pattern, deliberate, repeating, threaded through months of campaigns. Enough steel and silver to arm a shadow host, hidden in ink and habit.
Knutr almost walked past the drain, half his mind on coal weights and hinge designs, until his left hand seized like it had been thrust into the quench.
Pain lanced up his black‑scarred veins, sharp and bright as forge‑slag in the eye. He staggered, shoulder brushing Eirikr, breath hissing between his teeth.
“Keep walking,” he muttered. “Don’t look.”
Steam feathered from the narrow outflow where water ran too warm for the hour, carrying a faint tang of oil and something older, metallic and sour, that set his curse alight. No open hearth in smiths’ row would bleed heat there unless it fed something buried deep: a lower forge, or a vault cut into the cliff’s gut.
“Cursed ore,” Knutr said later, flexing his ruined hand in the inn’s shadowed corner. “Whatever Bjorulf’s hiding, it sings to my blood from under his feet.”
Lidra never raises her voice. She leans on bunk‑posts, shares flasks, asks after bruises and pay. A jest about dice here, a careless comment about “lucky” new mail there, and men talk. By dusk she has names: sergeants whose debts run to the smiths’ row, whose armor bears Bjorulf’s hand, whose loyalties will bend if pressed.
From the taproom’s low murmur and the fickle dance of cave‑fires under the cliff, Ragnarolf counts cart‑loads, watch changes, and which nights the harbor horns fall oddly silent. Piece by grudging piece, the picture hardens: Bjorulf squats in a burrowed stronghold, walled not just in stone and iron, but in bought oaths and hidden ways no lawful raid can reach.
They traced Bjorulf’s reach the way one follows a crack in ice: hairline at first, then running everywhere once you see it.
What should have been simple grumbling in the barracks (helm straps rotting early, spearheads shearing on practice posts) never made it past the sergeants’ tables. Complaints written neat in a clerk’s hand vanished into cupboards. Hrod watched a corporal fold one such tablet, slip it under an arm…and emerge from smiths’ row an hour later with a new belt, a heavier purse, and his grievance forgotten.
Records that ought to tally (wagonloads of ore in, blades and mail out) wandered like drunken men. Eirikr, with Hrod at his shoulder pretending not to read, found whole pages in the armory accounts scraped thin and overwritten. A shipment of spearshafts that had broken in last month’s drill now existed only as “reassigned timber.” Faulty pommels had become “lost in transit.” Signatures wavered from one line to the next as if the same hand had learned to limp.
Bribes were rarely coin on the barrel. A veteran with a frost‑blackened foot received “extra” iron hobnails for his boots, stamped with Bjorulf’s modest rune. A quartermaster’s daughter suddenly paraded a mail shirt finer than most captains wore, the links darkly oiled, the maker’s mark filed to a blur. A sergeant with a gambling habit found his debts “reworked” after a private visit to the forge: thereafter, any protest from his men about warped blades died on his tongue.
When a spear snapped in a training bout and a recruit’s eye went red and blind, the formal charge was written up. By the time it reached the lawstone clerk, it named no smith, blamed “misuse,” and bore the neat rat‑scratch of Bjorulf’s favored scribe.
On bark, wax, and scraped horn, the pattern repeated. Every path that should have led to the jarl’s ear bent instead toward the heat of Bjorulf’s forges, where ink and oaths both were softened and hammered into more convenient shapes. What should have been fire under a corrupt man’s feet cooled into ash, cool and harmless, the moment it touched his web.
His smithy showed itself, under patient scrutiny, as a small keep nested within the greater one. Not merely a workshop but a red‑lit redoubt, walled in heat and habit. Iron shutters barred the roof vents that should have bled sparks into the dark; instead they sat latched from within, slitted like murder‑holes. The lane along the front narrowed between storage sheds until any rush of men would choke into a knot where three of Bjorulf’s apprentices could hold ten at bay. Barrels, woodpiles, and scrap‑heaps were not clutter but waist‑high cover placed just so, giving his people angles to throw or shoot from while attackers stumbled.
On the far side, where one might expect a tradesman’s yard or midden, the world simply fell away. The back of the smithy hugged the cliff’s lip so close a man could touch stone and sea‑mist at once. Twenty paces from his rear wall, the ground crumbled into spray and black void; below, only knife‑toothed rocks waited, white with guano and old wreck‑bones. A drop that turned any thought of flanking assault into suicide.
Subterranean routes could be read, if one knew how. Knutr’s cursed hand flared near the run‑off trench where Bjorulf’s quench‑water steamed against winter stone, far hotter than any honest forge should leave it. The drain vanished under the cobbles and toward the cliff, the current tugging like a tide, not a trickle: water drawn and fed from below as much as above. Sailors hunched over Ragnarolf’s ale spoke of low‑tide echoes in the sea‑caves under smiths’ row: the thunk of laden boots on hidden planks, the scrape of chests, a muffled clatter of chain. Once, a gull‑beaten watcher swore he saw lantern‑glow breathing behind rock where no door stood, and heard iron ring faintly under the jarl’s own foundations.
Worse, Knutr felt the tell‑tale bite of wrong metal not only in blade and mail but in the very bones of the place. Hinges that would shriek at an unfavored touch, bar‑pins that might seize or shatter around a forced door, locks that remembered the hands set to them. Break in clumsily and the building itself would bleed and bury proof.
Every approach they sketched bruised itself against stone and iron: street‑rush, roof‑crawl, fire from the eaves, even a bribed key in a friendly hand. All turned, in the mind’s eye, to slaughter or warning bells. In the end they let the maps lie and set their teeth to patience, watching, listening, waiting for some hairline crack in Bjorulf’s fortress‑routine.
The first sign was the way the light went wrong.
By mid‑afternoon the sky over Frostmark had curdled from hard blue to a low, iron lid. Out beyond the fjord mouth, the Broken Sea blurred into a smear of slate, whitecaps shearing sideways under a wind that had not yet reached the walls but could be seen in the distance: driving bands of sleet like thrown knives.
On the ramparts men spat and drew cloaks tighter. Ropes on the harbor chain began to twitch and hum, complaining in a higher pitch as the swell grew. Gulls that usually wheeled and screamed over the fish‑guts of the quay had already fled inland, beating ragged wings toward the pine‑line. That, more than the darkening sky, put an edge in old hands’ bellies.
By the time Ragnarolf stepped out with a pail to toss dish‑water into the gutter, the air had a taste like bitten iron; the kind that meant ice‑needles before moonrise. A spatter of half‑frozen rain pricked his cheek, sharp as cinders. Out on the quay, harbormen were swearing as they hauled at lines, trying to shorten sail and double‑moor the last stubborn cogs before the real blow came down.
It was the sort of filthy weather captains cursed and raiders prayed for.
On the sea‑wall, watchmen hunched in their furs, eyes watering, already dreaming of the warmer alcoves within. More than one would be sent below when the sleet came thick, to trade places with some luckless underling. Down by the palisade, the harbor patrol’s horn sounded thin and half‑hearted over the rising wind; no one expected smugglers to risk the caves in such a squall, and men said so, loud enough for the ale‑shops to hear.
Eirikr, passing under the gate, noted how the officer of the watch consulted the sky more than the rosters. Hrod counted who was sent to double‑check shutters and ladders, and who was waved off with a grunt and a shrug. Knutr felt the first dull throb in his cursed hand as pressure dropped, as if the very metal in the walls shifted uneasily under the coming weight of storm.
By dusk the first true scream of the wind came knifing up the fjord, sleet hissing sideways across the cobbles. Torches guttered; door‑bars dropped. It would be a hard night on the walls, and a soft one around the hearths.
The sort of night, Ragnarolf thought, when fewer eyes than usual would be looking seaward: or down along smiths’ row, where shadows thickened under the lash of the storm.
Word came in snatches rather than a single clean tale. A carter dripping sleet on Ragnarolf’s rushes, cursing the steep south road and that gods‑cursed bend by the old tower. A fishwife’s lad, wide‑eyed from the gatehouse, babbling of wagons stalled nose‑to‑tail where the ice lay treacherous under the ruts. Eirikr arrived later with the ink still damp on a hastily amended notice, confirming the rumor in neat, cramped runes: the southern tribute train, three days expected, had been checked at the turn and would not crawl in until full dark: or later.
Instead of a neat noon‑time arrival with plenty of watchers on the walls and space in the yard, the tribute would now nose into Frostmark’s teeth just as the jarl’s high feast swelled to drunkenness. Gold and grain and good steel all rolling up to the gates in the same tightening window that demanded guards at door and dais and parapet alike.
Ragnarolf read the lines and the silence between them, feeling the keep stretch thin in his mind like an overtaxed ax‑haft.
Hrod brought quieter news, scratched in his own neat hand on a wax tablet and then spoken low over the inn’s back table. The storm had done more than snarl the roads; it had given ambitious fools their chance. The day’s orders, he said, had come down in a flurry of last‑minute changes, “temporary reshuffle” stamped with the jarl’s seal, but the ink had Bjorulf’s stink on it. The steadiest sergeants, the ones who checked locks twice and drank on their own coin, were being drawn inward to mind the great hall and its swaying nobles. Outward posts, market square, south bend, smiths’ row, would be watched by men who owed the smith favors, and a sprinkling of raw youths dazzled by new mail and easy pay.
Near full dark, as Knutr and Eirikr made their casual circuit past smiths’ row, the pain in Knutr’s blackened hand leapt from dull ache to white‑hot, just as he crossed the warm outflow drain. A heartbeat later, a gust flung the Road’s End door wide and in lurched salt‑slick sailors, swearing about night‑fires flaring brazen‑bright by the sea caves, Bjorulf’s hidden forges waking for hard work.
Ragnarolf quietly lays these strands together: overburdened garrison, corrupted watch near the smithy, smugglers bold enough to work in foul weather, and a tribute convoy funneled past a predictable choke point. It smells too neat to be chance. And neatness cuts both ways. Enough alignment, at last, to close his doors early, summon his scattered allies, and lay out a bolder, more intricate plan.
Ragnarolf gathers them in the inn’s shuttered back room (Lidra, Eirikr, Hrod, and Knutr) after the last lanterns in the taproom have been doused and the night’s dregs snore into their cups. The room smells of smoke, spilled ale, and the sharp tang of cold iron from the seax at his belt. He bars the door himself, listening a moment to be sure no board creaks beyond, then turns to face them.
“We’ve a wolf in the byre,” he says quietly, voice low enough that even the walls must lean in to catch it. “And we can’t just put an axe in its skull. Not this one.”
They stand or sit where habit takes them. Lidra props a shoulder against the wall, arms folded over her mail, watching him with narrowed eyes that say she’d rather be solving problems with steel. Hrod stands near the door, like a door himself, compact, ready, listening more than he speaks. Eirikr has taken the lone stool, a wax tablet balanced on one knee though he does not yet write, his ink‑stained fingers worrying the chain at his throat. Knutr lurks closest to the small, shuttered window, his cursed hand flexing and tightening as if the very mention of metal has woken a hornet’s nest in his veins.
Ragnarolf lays out the bones of it, simple and bare as a winter‑picked carcass. “Tomorrow night the tribute wagons come up from the harbor. Bjorulf’s ore among them, on the manifest or off, I’d wager. Somewhere between smiths’ row and the cliff, his men slip the wrong metal into the right hands. There’s a tunnel below the shrine, old as the first stones of Frostmark, that carries more than sea wind. That’s where it changes wagons for boats. That’s where we must catch them.”
“We have law,” Eirikr murmurs, half to himself. “But not enough eyes. Not enough proof.”
“And we can’t cry ‘thief’ without naming a blacksmith the jarl leans on for every spear‑head,” Lidra adds, mouth twisting. “We do that empty‑handed, we’re the ones on the lawstone.”
“Open feud is forbidden inside the walls,” Ragnarolf agrees. “So we make it look like mischance and duty. A stumble in the road, a lawful question over cargo. No blades drawn unless they start it first. And even then, we finish clean.”
He glances to Hrod. “We need their masks off, not their corpses on the ground.”
Hrod gives a single, small nod. “Then we pull at their habits. Smugglers hate to miss a schedule.” He gestures vaguely downward, toward the unseen cliff and sea caves. “They’ll come if they think no one is watching.”
Knutr’s jaw works as if he’s chewing iron. “If that cursed ore is in the wagons, I’ll know when we’re near it.” He lifts his black‑scarred hand, the veins there a dull, sullen shadow. “But it will know me, too. We won’t have long before it…stirs things.”
“All the more reason,” Ragnarolf says, spreading his hands on the rough table between them, “to walk in seeming straight as a ship on a clear tide. What we do tomorrow must look like nothing but drunkards, clumsy wheels, and a pedant with a seal doing his duty. Under that, we carve Bjorulf’s name into this rot so deep the jarl can’t pretend not to see it.”
He takes a bit of charcoal from the hearth‑ledge and drags rough lines on the tabletop: a square for the inn, a crooked track for the road, a smudge for the old watchtower.
“Tribute wagons come in a snake,” he says. “Head’s at my door while the tail’s still by the tower. We bite the head, not hard enough to kill it, just enough to make it yelp.”
He taps the inn’s mark. “Here I spill a little ale and a lot of pride. Two merchants with loose tongues and looser coin: men who owe me a favor and can swing a fist without meaning murder. Chairs go over. A bench breaks. Someone throws a punch in the wrong direction. The sort of mess that makes bored guards drift closer for a better look.”
His finger traces the road to the tower. “While they’re craning their necks, Hrod and two sober lads of his choosing are all smiles and steady hands, ‘helping’ the lead wagon round the bend. Wheels slip where the ice always lies. No sabotage, no cut traces. Just winter, clumsy drivers, and bad luck doing us a small favor.”
Ragnarolf turns the charcoal toward Eirikr and Lidra. “Your hands keep this pretty,” he says. “Eirikr, you walk up with the jarl’s lesser seal like it’s a shield. No accusations. You ‘regret’ to delay honest tribute, but the law’s the law, and the quartermaster’s ink has smudged.” His mouth quirks. “Argue manifests with the wagon master until his beard frosts over. Loud enough for every guard to hear you mean rules, not trouble.”
He angles his gaze to Lidra. “While the words tangle, you place your own. A handful of your truest (no drunkards, no braggarts) spread along the verge. Leaning, smoking, sharing a jest. Shields slung, not shouldered. Close enough that any fool thinking to wander off the road thinks twice.”
He sketches the undercliff path with the charcoal’s nub: from shrine to side‑door, from side‑door to the narrow stair that smells of salt and old tallow. Once the road above clogs with argument and gawkers, he and Knutr slip away like men going to make an offering, then peel off, down, toward where Bjorulf’s lads will be sweating over forbidden crates.
Then they walk the edges of it, worrying at every weak spot. Signals if the convoy rides thicker with steel than rumor said. What if the stair is blocked? What if Bjorulf’s men already have a watcher on the shrine? Knutr speaks of binding‑marks, of cursed veins he can make scream at the lawstone. Ragnarolf offers his memory, oath‑sworn, to match each bar and crate.
Ragnarolf lays his palm flat on the table, as if pinning the plan in place. “My part starts with spilled ale,” he says. “Nothing men fear less.”
He sketches the taproom in words as easily as most men draw blades. The far corner by the hearth, where the ceiling’s low and sound jars against the beams: noise will swell there, roll outward. Old Torfi One‑Eye and his nephew, fresh ashore and hungry for boasting, will be sat together; they quarrel like crows over scraps once they’re three cups in. The pair of southern traders with their bright cloaks and thin patience will take the bench just behind. Between them, a table whose legs he’s been meaning to mend anyway.
“I’ll start their fire slow,” Ragnarolf goes on. “One more round on the house when the sleet starts. A word here, a jest there. Stir up pride over whose ship rode out last storm best. Let it climb across the benches till someone stands too fast.”
He chooses which mugs to overfill. So when Torfi’s nephew flings his arm wide to prove some point about wave‑height, foam will leap and splash a southerner’s fine cloak. Offense taken, voice raised. Ragnarolf will be there already, cloth in hand, “trying” to soothe. His staff will know which plates to clear early and which stools to leave in the way; he names them now, assigning places like pieces on a board.
“Benches, not blades,” he says. “If hands close on axe‑hafts, I break it there. I’ll stack the room so there’s nowhere to swing proper. Low beams, crowded tables, my people between the worst tempers. Let them shove, swear, crack one table leg, maybe a nose. Blood looks real from the doorway.”
He glances toward the shuttered window that faces the road. “We time it so the shouting peaks as the first wagon’s shadow crosses my door. Door wide, lamps high, noise spilling out like smoke. Any guard with half an ear will poke his head in, if only to make sure the jarl’s toll‑house isn’t burning.”
He runs through the beats again, trimming and tightening. If the convoy’s late, he’ll bank the quarrel with another joke, another song, keep it simmering just below boil until the creak of axle and jingle of harness come up the lane. If the convoy’s early and the mood is flat, he’ll have Kari “accidentally” slop hot stew onto Torfi’s lap to hurry matters along.
“And if it runs too hot,” he adds, voice gone flint‑hard for a moment, “I’ll take a fall myself. Let someone swing at the innkeep instead of at each other. They’ll pull their punches. I’m the man holds their credit and their secrets.”
He meets each set of eyes in turn, making sure they understand: his taproom will be the drum that sets their whole raid‑that‑isn’t a raid in motion, noise and splinters carefully counted, every curse and toppled bench a shield raised over what happens in the dark below.
Hrod listens to Ragnarolf’s outline without a flicker, then inclines his head once, as if accepting a drill order. “I’ll be the helpful fool at the wheel,” he says, dry. After, in a quieter corner of the barracks, he picks his men.
Not the loudest brawlers, not the cleanest shields: two he knows can hold their tongues and their drink: Arn Vidarson with the farmer’s shoulders and habit of nodding along, and little Svein of the south‑gate, who already plays the part of wide‑eyed youngster. He lays out the tale they’ll tell the wagon guards: the corner by the old watchtower ices slick in sleet, horses shy, wheels skid. Best let local lads walk the teams through, aye?
He drills them on hand‑signs: palm up to slow, two fingers to drift wide, a chopping motion to nudge the last cart closer to the crumbling verge. If a wheel bites wrong or a sergeant grows suspicious, they are to swear by the jarl’s stone they meant only to spare a broken axle and a night’s delay. Hrod makes them repeat the lies until they sound like grumbled common sense.
Eirikr turns the jarl’s lesser seal over in his fingers, feeling the weight of brass and expectation. In his head he walks the path he’ll tread aloud: the winter‑road exemptions, the clauses on hazardous cargo, the right of inspection when rumors of cursed metal touch the keep. He mutters phrasing under his breath, smoothing it to sound like bored diligence rather than a blade drawn.
He counts heartbeats for each stage. Long enough to seem thorough as he puzzles over mismatched tallies and blurred ink, not so long that some officer higher‑ranked than the wagon master comes sniffing after the fuss. At three separate points in his script he marks clean exits, questions he can “concede” so the argument dies quick if the air turns wrong.
Lidra takes the role that suits her best: visible steel without naked threat. She names six from her squad, steady tempers, quick eyes, no ties to Bjorulf, and walks them through the turn of the road, where to lean on a spear, where to laugh. No drawn blades without her order; any nosy souls are to be delayed with shrugs and easy jokes, then later swear before the lawstone they only kept drunken merchants from trampling each other.
Knutr spreads his tools on Ragnarolf’s bar: awl, hammer, a twist of chalk, three rune‑cut tags on iron wire. “I mark what sings wrong,” he says. “You mind the light and the footing. If we see ore in bulk, a tenth tagged, minimum, or the law will call it gossip.” They trade words for meeting smugglers: Knutr leads on curses and metal, Ragnarolf on routes and men.
They walk the plan until its seams show. No one pretends luck is on their side.
“If the road doesn’t glaze,” Knutr says, tapping the map with his black‑scarred fingers, “we make our own mischance. A slipped cobble under the rear wheel here” (he circles a narrow bend where the old watchtower’s shadow bites into the ruts) “a pulled pin there. Nothing that cracks an axle, only enough to stall them and make the team shy.”
Ragnarolf nods, weighing it against the habits of carters he’s known. “A wagon master will swear and curse, but he’ll get down to look. Hrod, that’s your moment. One of your ‘helpful’ lads spots the loose pin, calls it out like he’s saving the man’s cargo from disaster.”
“And if the wagon refuses to drift near the tower at all?” Eirikr asks.
“Then I misjudge the weight on the lead horse,” Hrod answers. “A sharp tug, a shouted warning, a stumble. They halt where we need them or they trample me under and explain it to my captain. Either way, they stop.”
They mark another fault: Bjorulf’s men running late or not at all.
“Then we do not lurk like fools beneath the cliff for ghosts,” Knutr says. “We treat it as a sounding of the tunnel only. I tag what metal I can reach, we test how close the passage lies to the shrine, and we come back with better measure.”
“And if they’re early?” Ragnarolf asks.
“Then you keep them in ale and lies,” Lidra says. “A spilled keg in the yard, a broken cart‑axle at your stable gate. You’ve delayed worse with less cause.”
They leave for last the sharpest edge: refusal of the seal.
“If the captain balks,” Eirikr says, “I name precedent twice, then once more for good measure. After that, I bow to his pride and ask to witness only the inventory tallies. I need not see inside the crates tonight to learn which ones stink of new ink.”
“And if he threatens the lawstone?” Lidra’s voice is flat.
“Then we let him,” Eirikr replies, though his jaw tightens. “I record his refusal exact, in front of his own men. Tomorrow I lay it before the jarl’s steward as a matter of procedure, not suspicion. The seal will weigh heavier in daylight than in the snow.”
Ragnarolf listens, counting the ways the whole thing can founder, and the smaller ways they might still walk away with something worth the risk.
Hrod leans over the map, callused thumb braced on the road’s inked curve. “If the captain’s the sort to roar and stamp,” he says, “we feed it. Let him bellow about delays and frozen ruts until his own breath frosts his beard. Every heartbeat he spends cursing me, he’s not counting crates or wondering why the night’s gone thin of guards.”
He sketches it out with a soldier’s plain economy. First, he drags the quarrel into formality: salutes sharp, words slow, every answer wrapped in “by your leave” and “as ordered.” Officers hate to admit they’ve lost their temper over nothing; pride will keep the man arguing just to win.
“If he presses hard,” Hrod goes on, eyes narrowing, “I give him a cleaner enemy. I point downhill to the inn: drunken fools, a scuffle in the yard, confusion on the road. I swear I pulled men off the convoy only to keep his wagons from being toppled by some trader’s brawl. Let his anger turn there. My mistake becomes zeal, his delay becomes duty.”
Lidra takes a fresh scrap of parchment and, with the butt of her knife, begins stabbing names into the wood of the bar as she speaks them. Officers first: the lazy lieutenant who likes to “inspect” wagons for bribes, the ambitious sergeant who prowls for chances to shout men down in front of their betters. Then the raider‑turned‑guardsman who drinks too hard and brags too loud whenever blades and plunder are near.
“These,” she says, “will smell a convoy and come sniffing.”
She assigns shadows one by one. Steady spearmen to the hotheads, chatter‑tongued shield‑bearers to the curious, a drill‑mad veteran to the ambitious sergeant. Sudden “readiness musters,” midnight shield‑checks, invented gate‑rotations: busywork forged into shackles to keep the wrong eyes elsewhere.
Eirikr and Knutr bargain their way along the knife‑edge between patience and peril. Smudged tallies, odd weights, a crate marked twice under different hands. Those go into Eirikr’s neat, invisible ledger, fuel for a slower fire. But if Knutr’s cursed hand flares near fresh‑struck sigils, or if they see Bjorulf’s hidden rune‑marks plain, Eirikr swears he’ll name the lawstone before the ink is dry.
Ragnarolf and Hrod fix the shape of retreat as carefully as any ambush. Two quick lantern‑shutters from the loft window if the tunnels prove bare, three if they crawl with steel. A snuffed candle in the taproom’s south niche means: end the quarrel, loose the wagons, drink away suspicion, and live to hunt Bjorulf with better proof another night.
They do not trust to memory alone.
In the quiet hours, when the last drunk has slid off his bench and the hearth coals are low and red, they drill themselves like raw recruits.
At the far end of the taproom, where the low beam forces even Lidra to duck, Hrod stands with his back to the wall and raps patterns against it with his knuckles. Once, twice‑pause‑thrice: guards peeling off the convoy. A slow double‑tap followed by a scrape of nail: unexpected officer in sight. Ragnarolf moves between tables with a rag and a tankard, never looking Hrod’s way, answering with the weight of his hand on the bar. Flat palm, curled fingers, the soft thud of an elbow. From a stranger’s ear it is only the creak and mutter of a settling inn. Between them, it is speech as clear as shouted words.
Knutr sits near the fire, “warming his bad hand,” while Eirikr lays out a row of wooden cups like chessmen. Knocks on rim, on base, on table edge; a fingertip drumming in a four‑beat cadence that means: pull back, too many witnesses. A different rhythm, sharp and uneven, is theirs for cursed metal close by. Knutr’s blackened veins prickle in answer, making sure he won’t mistake it when the time comes.
Lidra, ever a soldier, insists on whistle‑calls as well. She takes them into the frozen yard and makes them pace out positions as if for drill: one note for “hold the line,” two for “tighten the ring,” three, spaced and low, for “let them pass but mark their faces.” They test how far each sound carries under the wind, around stone corners, beneath the rumble of wagon wheels. Hrod times how long it takes a man at the gate to hear and answer.
Last comes the taproom’s quietest cue: Ragnarolf’s sleeve brushed three times across the same ale‑stain on the bar, cloth rasping wood. That is the signal of surrender: end the quarrel, loose the wagons, swallow pride and fury both. All of them watch his hand when they practice it, memorizing the humble motion that might be the difference between a night’s work and a noose.
Hrod and Ragnarolf walk the convoy’s expected route at dusk, when the frost is still half‑melt and treacherous. They pace it as a sergeant would pace a killing ground: slow, counting under their breath, measuring the wagon turn by boot‑steps from the Road’s End door to the crooked marker‑stone where the street kinks toward the old watchtower.
Ragnarolf scuffs his heel along the cobbles, marking where hooves slip easiest and where ruts have frozen hard as iron. Hrod notes the rest: a loose flagstone near the gutter, a patch where horse piss has turned to glass, the exact span where a wagon’s rear wheels will bite if guided a hand’s breadth too wide.
They pause at each doorway and alley‑gap, squinting to see which shadows will swallow a man and which only pretend. Hrod checks sight‑lines back to the inn’s loft window and to the ancestor shrine’s lanterns; Ragnarolf gauges how much noise wagon‑wheels will drown. By full dark they have the road held in their minds like a battle‑map, every slick stone and blind corner accounted for.
Eirikr takes his preparation as piously as a rite. For three evenings running he buries himself in the keep’s cold records‑room, breath fogging over stacked tablets and curled hides. By lantern‑light he reads the last season’s cargo manifests, weights of pig‑iron, counts of spearheads, the usual lies about wastage and river losses, until he can hum their patterns under his breath. From those bones he pricks out a new order on scraped vellum, phrased in the dry, fussy language of quartermasters, commanding a “spot verification” of tonight’s delivery. He presses the jarl’s lesser seal into the warm wax himself, then spoils the neatness with a thumb‑smear and two carefully placed ink blots, as if some tired clerk had sneezed mid‑stroke.
Knutr lays out his tools with a surgeon’s care: chalks wrapped in oiled cloth, thin slivers of slate scored with half‑finished binding marks, a roll of rune‑tags cut from old shrine parchment, a palm‑sized chisel set honed to whisper through stone. Ragnarolf, under guise of closing‑time chores, assembles lanterns, spare pegs, stout mallets and a pry‑bar: nothing suspicious for an innkeeper, everything needed for tight, wet rock.
Over the next days, they speak softly in corners and over shared trenchers. Two rankers with clean habits and long memories of Ragnarolf’s fair measures agree to be “helpful” at the crucial turn. A shrine‑keeper, half‑bought with honey‑cakes, half‑bound by Eirikr’s careful talk of law and proper rites, promises an unlatched side‑door and unremarked footsteps on the cliff stair.
Eirikr spends the afternoon entombed in paper and dust.
The records alcove is a narrow bite taken from the inner wall, just wide enough for a trestle table, a stool, and a man who has learned to hunch. The only window is an arrow‑slit filmed with frost, leaking in a thread of grey light that does nothing against the gloom. Lantern flame gutters in its horn casing when the wind claws at the stones, making the stacked tablets and rolled hides throw long, uneasy shadows.
He has already copied the dock‑warden’s last order for harbor tolls three times in his neat, cramped hand, letting ink dry between each, training his fingers to the clerk’s habitual errors. Now he unrolls the latest copy and begins his surgery.
Lines of runes for “tally,” “toll,” “harbor” and “cargo” march tidy across the scraped vellum. Between them, Eirikr adds three new clauses in a thinner script, as if a second, more pedantic functionary had come after: language of “extraordinary congestion,” “discrepancies in prior shipments,” “verification delegated to the bearer for the sake of speed.” Each phrase is drawn from genuine law, harmless on its own, yet together they widen a simple toll writ into an authority to halt, question, and inspect any wagon entering Frostmark by road or quay.
He pauses several times to consult other tablets, muttering precedents under his breath. A smudge here, a cramped rune there. He dulls one pen‑knife on purpose, leaves the telltale drag of a tired clerk at the end of a line. When he is satisfied that the new order looks as if it had grown from the older, he warms a pellet of wax over the lamp and presses the jarl’s lesser seal into it, firm, exact, official.
Then, with deliberate care, he ruins the perfection: a thumb pressed too hard into the edge of the seal, a faint blur where his sleeve “caught” the ink, a tiny blot mimicking a sneeze. To a captain or wagon‑master it will read as nothing more than dull bureaucracy spilled over a long day.
To Bjorulf’s men, if they notice at all, it will be one more piece of tedious law between them and their beds.
To Eirikr, tracing the drying wax with an ink‑stained nail, it is a thin shield of legitimacy he can hold up between himself and the storm he is about to walk into.
Hrod spends the waning light where no one really sees him.
In the barracks he sits on a bunk, back to the wall, dicing for smoked fish and old stories. When the watch‑sergeant grumbles over the roster, Hrod only shrugs and offers to switch his own gate turn for a later one, all the better to “be near the market when that southern convoy rolls in.” He loses a throw he could have won, lets a louder man take the coin, and in the noise quietly suggests that Sten One‑Eye and Torfi Broad‑Back would be better on road duty than on wall. At the gatehouse brazier he shares a crust and thin beer with the two rankers he has picked. Conversation is easy, dull. He mentions, as if idly, how wagons tend to slip at the tower’s bend and how officers smile on those who “lend a shoulder” at the right moment. No plots, no passwords. Just a simple tale: help guide the heavy wagons through bad ice, earn quiet favor, keep their noses clean.
Ragnarolf lays the ground for it two evenings early, when the market still hums and no one yet smells trouble.
He picks his moment at the end of a busy watch, when two south‑road traders with bellies like half‑full sacks have already salted the air with boasts of past profits and present grievances. He wipes his hands on his apron, rolls a small cask from the back (good enough not to insult, poor enough not to miss) and has it broached at their table with a nod “for old custom’s sake.”
Later, as he tops their cups himself, he leans close between their shoulders, voice pitched for them alone. “Convoy’s due on the morrow’s dark. Make your quarrel loud when it rolls in (break nothing too dear) and I’ll see your beds and board come cheap through thaw.”
Knutr goes to the cliff‑shrine at dusk with a leather pouch of iron nails and a rolled sketch of gate‑hinges, speaking soberly of “winter repairs” to the half‑dozing keeper. While the old man counts nails for the offertory ledge, Knutr palms thin steel tags, etching binding runes with his cursed hand’s blackened nail, and wins, with careful questions and shared ale, a murmured leave to use the lower stair after dark “for measurements.”
Lidra spends the last of the grey light in the scribes’ corner of the drill‑yard, leaning over the slate where watch duties are chalked. With a few brisk strokes she moves her steadiest spear‑hands to the stretch by the inn, replaces hotheads with plodders, and calls her chosen aside. “On my word,” she says, tone flat as frost, “you move fast and don’t ask why.”
A brief silence settles over the cramped back room as Eirikr rolls up the last of his notes, the weight of what they have agreed to hanging heavier than the ink still drying on his fingers. The rush‑light gutters, throwing the lines of his face into tired, angular planes; for a heartbeat he only stares at the rolled parchment, as if some saner clause might yet write itself between the fibers.
“It will pass the lawstone’s eye,” he says at last, voice low, more to the notes than to the others. “On the face of it, nothing but routine. A seal, a check, a bit of ice and bad luck.” He looks up. “But understand. If we misstep, this is no longer mischance. It is treason in all but name.”
Hrod shifts his weight, mail whispering. “We’ve all heard worse called loyalty,” he answers, expression unreadable. “Orders are orders. You’ve just not written these ones down.”
Knutr flexes his cursed hand, jaw tight as a smith’s vise. “The metal he’s moving is a worse treason than any of ours,” he mutters. “Let it go on, and half this keep swings from it sooner or later.”
Lidra’s knuckles drum once on the table, a sharp little report that snaps the gloom. “We’ve all had men buried for less than Bjorulf’s games,” she says. “My squad will hold the street. You do your parts clean and quick, and if questions come…” Her mouth twists into something that might be a smile. “Questions come to me first.”
Eirikr nods, though the motion is small and stiff. He slides the jarl’s lesser seal from his belt, its wolf’s‑head glinting dully in the lamplight, and lays it between them like a wager. “Then it’s set,” he says. “Once that convoy crests the rise, the tale is already told. We’re only choosing who walks out of it with their honor still breathing.”
Ragnarolf exhales slowly, a measured breath that seems to pull the room in and hold it. His thumb circles once along the worn edge of his seax’s hilt, feeling each familiar nick where old fights left their teeth, then he makes himself let go. Steel won’t help with what’s coming, not the way it used to. He straightens, shoulders rolling back under plain wool and leather as if settling a weight there, and lets his gaze meet each of theirs in turn.
Lidra first. Then Eirikr, pale and ink‑stained, already haunted by laws not yet broken. Knutr, jaw knotted, his blackened hand flexing like it aches at the very thought of the ore below. Hrod, grey‑eyed and still, soldier‑plain on the outside and something sharper beneath.
He says nothing. He doesn’t have to. The shape of it lies between them like a drawn line in frost: once the first wagon shows on the ridge, they are past oaths and second thoughts. Any flinch, any falter, and questions will come they have no safe answers for.
Hrod inclines his head once, the movement as clipped as a drill‑yard command. In his mind he is already walking the night ahead: the creak of wagon axles on the last rise, the moment the lead team slows by the inn, which watchmen are likely to grumble, which will jump at a shouted call for help. Faces, habits, weak points: he files them away like tally marks on a wax tablet.
Across from him, Knutr flexes his blackened hand, tendons jumping under ruined skin. Pain sparks up his forearm, bright as a forge‑flash, and he sucks a breath between his teeth but does not draw back. The ore they mean to catch Bjorulf shifting will not leave them untouched. It will either damn or vindicate them before the sun finds the fjord again.
Lidra squares her shoulders, thumb brushing once over the jarl’s wolf‑badge until the metal bites cold into her palm. Any hesitation, any flicker of doubt when Eirikr raises that seal, will read as disobedience. Or worse, collusion. Better to ride the knife‑edge of lawful duty now, to own the street and the tale, than live under a captain’s shadow of doubt forever.
With no more words to trade, they break apart to their appointed tasks, each step back into the keep’s corridors and torchlit streets tightening the invisible cord between them: the plan no longer a notion but an oncoming fact, fixed as the convoy’s wheels already turning miles up the frozen road. The air tastes sharper, thinner. Every lantern, every watchman’s cough, feels like part of the net they are casting around themselves as much as Bjorulf, and there is no gentle way to draw it back.
Frost–hard night settles over Frostmark as the distant jangle of wagon bells threads through wind and gull–cries, a thin metallic chime that makes a few heads turn toward the shuttered windows. Cold seeps through the plank–walls in slow, patient fingers; smoke from the hearth hangs in the rafters with the sour tang of old ale and wet wool. Somewhere out in the dark, the harbor chain creaks as the tide noses at it, and a horn moans once from the walls before falling silent.
Ragnarolf, wiping his hands on his apron, pauses with a tap–handle half–drawn, listening past the taproom noise the way a sailor listens past surf for reef–break. The Road’s End mutter, dice on wood, a muttered curse, the scrape of a bench, fades to a dull wash in his ears. Under it, the bells jangle again, closer now, the pitch of tired horses and over–loaded wheels on frozen ruts. Convoy, he judges. Heavy. Late.
His left thigh gives a familiar ache as he shifts weight, old spear–wound arguing with the cold. He rolls his shoulder once, easing a knot there, and lets his breath slide slow and even. No hurry. Tides turn on their own time.
His gaze slides to the door, then to each of his scattered allies, the boy at the corner table, the serving girl near the loud raiders, the stablehand drifting by the hearth, and he gives only the smallest of nods.
The boy, who has been pretending to carve a game board into the table with a dull knife, stops mid–scratch. One grubby hand goes to his ear as if to rub at a chill, the prearranged sign that he’s heard. He slouches deeper over the wood, ready to bolt or to blunder into someone’s path as need be.
The serving girl, cheeks flushed from the heat and the pinches of men who think she’s harmless, tilts her tray the barest fraction in acknowledgment. A single drop of ale slips over the rim of a tankard and down her wrist; she licks it away, turns toward the loudest of the raiders, a broad–backed man with a scarred jaw and too much swagger, and laughs at something he hasn’t quite finished saying. Her eyes, though, flick to Ragnarolf and sharpen.
By the hearth, the stablehand’s slow drift pauses. He makes a show of warming his hands, palms out to the flames, but his stance shifts, weight balanced on the balls of his feet instead of his heels. Soot and hay dust cling to his coat; under it, at the small of his back, leather creaks softly where a truncheon sits snug against his belt. He bends as if to poke at a fallen ember, giving himself an excuse to be near the raiders’ bench when the time comes.
In the corner, two old regulars with cracked mugs and cracked voices fall quiet for a heartbeat, feeling the change without knowing its cause. One squints toward the bar, sees Ragnarolf’s stillness, and reaches for his drink with the solemn care of a man deciding to mind his own business.
Outside, the bells jangle a third time, loud enough now that the sound sneaks under the door and through the chinks in the shutters. Snow–light ghosts the leaded glass. Somewhere out in the yard, a horse snorts, and the iron–ringed laugh of a convoy guard carries faintly over the wind.
Ragnarolf lets the tap–handle fall, froth hissing into the waiting tankard. The motion breaks his moment of listening, folds him back into the role the keep has given him: innkeeper, exile, harmless man with barrels and a broom. But the set of his jaw has changed, and behind the practiced geniality of his face something old and cold and sea–hard begins to rise.
The signal ripples outward in quiet, practiced motions, no louder than the creak of benches. The hearth–tender throws on a split log and a twist of resinous pine; flames leap up, spitting sparks, casting the room in a warmer, rowdier gold that licks across faces and steel. Firelight spills toward the door, a beckoning glow to any road–worn fool passing in the cold.
Tankards are refilled with a generosity timed to loosen tongues and tempers. The boy at the corner table hops to his feet with a muttered complaint about a dry mug and weaves between benches, “helping” the serving girl by ferrying brimming cups to the thirstiest, most boastful throats. The cheapest ale is pushed hardest toward the men already half in their cups. Loud raiders, off–duty garrison, a pair of river–teamsters smelling of rope and fish.
Ragnarolf moves behind the bar as if merely tending to business, wiping spills with his apron, trading jokes for coin. Yet his shoulders have taken on the set of a man bracing for a heavy sea–swell, feet planted wide, weighing every voice and gesture the way once he weighed wind and wave.
Outside, the wagon bells grow clearer. A steady clink and groaning creak now, mingled with snorting horses and the low mutter of drivers hunched in their cloaks, making the last, tight turn around the market square’s iced–slick cobbles. Iron–shod wheels rattle over a loosened stone Ragnarolf had noticed days ago; harness buckles jangle, a whip cracks once in weary irritation. A gust of night air knifes in when a pair of latecomers shoulder through the doorway, letting in a spill of snow–pale gloom and the smell of cold iron, horse–sweat, and frost–bitten leather. Ragnarolf marks the convoy’s advance without so much as a glance toward the street, feeling it instead in the way the usual yard–shouting fades, the way even the drunkest patrons cant their heads, angling for a look past the threshold.
Within the Road’s End, sound begins to swell like a storm catching wind. One of Ragnarolf’s lads rattles a dice cup beneath a restless raider’s nose with a muttered jibe about “garrison pay buying sheep, not steel,” while another passes just a shade too close to a rival crew’s bench so shoulders glance hard and don’t quite apologize. Laughter grows sharper, boasting louder; tales of burning holds and narrow escapes are told with an extra bite, every oath and brag another dry twig laid on the pile. Ragnarolf steers a brimming round toward the table he knows is quickest to take offense, setting the mugs down with a deliberate clack that neatly punctuates a crude jest about Frostmark’s wall–watch sleeping on their spears.
By the time the convoy’s lead wagon clatters into view of the inn’s door, the snare is set tight as any boarding–grapple. Firelight pours bright and beckoning across the rutted ice, dragging with it the roar of half–drunk voices, the sour–sweet reek of ale, grease, and men too long in armor. The Road’s End shows the guards exactly what they crave on a killing–cold watch: warmth to thaw stiff fingers, drink to burn in their bellies, and a little bloodless chaos to watch. Inside, talk crests toward a shouting pitch, laughter turning sharp, shoulders bumping hard without apology, the air thick and waiting so that when the first insult lands it will strike like a spark into tar.
The jeer lands right on cue, thick with mead and malice, sharp enough to cut through the rising roar. Cards still in hand, the raider in the corner throws his head back and bellows, “Garrison pups wouldn’t know a real fight if it bit their soft arses. Too busy polishing the jarl’s boots and each other’s spears!”
Nearby heads pivot as if on a single hinge. A few of the off–duty soldiers at the far bench go rigid, knuckles whitening on their cups; one half–rises before his mate’s hand fists in his cloak and drags him back down. Laughter barks out from the raider’s own crew, a little too high, a little too eager, the sound of men who live off the edges of trouble and trust their leader to drag them through. At a nearer table, a pair of traders share a strained chuckle and suddenly find their ale of grave interest, eyes carefully not sliding toward the insulted uniforms.
Behind the bar, Ragnarolf drags a rough cloth around the lip of a clay cup that doesn’t need polishing, letting his face hold an innkeeper’s wearied patience. His gaze goes elsewhere. He watches the ripple spread: who stiffens, who sucks teeth and looks away, who counts the guards in the room instead of staring at the loudmouth. One shield–maiden in battered mail tilts her head, assessing, her jaw working once before she pointedly turns back to her drink. A garrison sergeant’s ears go red; he makes the sign against bad luck under the table, as if to wash his hands of whatever comes.
Ragnarolf files it all away in the same quiet place he keeps tally of unpaid tabs and whispered routes: the quick–tempered, the biddable, the ones who might sell a secret for another round. Then, as the raider slams his cup down hard enough to slop ale onto his own hand, Ragnarolf eases his weight to one hip, subtly shifting his stance so that the man has an open line straight to the youngest of his lads weaving through the crush with a brimming tankard and his best, nervous–rabbit smile.
At Ragnarolf’s slight nod, the boy darts forward, tankard high, threading through the press of shoulders and swinging elbows with the skittish grace of someone who has been told twice exactly where to be and what to do. He angles past a trader’s bench, skirts a dangling scabbard, times his steps to the sway of a drunk starting to rise. At the last stride, just as the raider leans back, mouth opening for another jeer, the boy’s foot kisses a scattered bone on the rush–strewn floor.
He makes a show of fighting for balance, eyes going wide, free hand windmilling. The tankard tilts, then goes fully over. Froth and brown ale arc through the torch–light like thrown seawater, sluicing across the raider’s gammon–greased tunic and pooling hot in his lap. Foam spatters his cards, runs in rivulets off the table’s edge, patters onto his boots.
The boy gasps, already ducking his head, words tumbling out in a rush, “Beg pardon, master, slipped, the floor, ” just a shade too practiced to be pure panic, a little too smooth for a true mistake.
The raider’s chair screeches back, skidding over the rushes; he blasts to his feet with a wordless bellow that snaps half the taproom’s attention his way. His meaty fist knots in the boy’s collar and hauls him up onto his toes, feet scrabbling for purchase. Cards slide from the table and slap wetly into the spilled ale as the raider’s other arm swings wide and wild, backhanding the nearest patron hard enough to knock him sideways off his stool.
Exactly as Ragnarolf had reckoned: a man three cups down and spoiling for witness. Heat, noise, humiliation: enough tinder stacked that any spark would do. Ragnarolf notes who flinches, who grins, who leans back to give space for the blow, and lets it run.
Ragnarolf does not rush to intervene; he pitches his voice instead, an innkeeper’s half–angry, half–resigned bellow that cuts through the din like an axe through driftwood. “Not in my bloody house, !” he roars, and in that instant a stool whistles through the smoke, a bench goes over, and men who owe him favors “lose their tempers” in all the right directions, driving the chaos outward.
Within heartbeats the taproom is a press of shoulders and swinging fists, crockery shattering against shields, pillars, and unlucky skulls. The brawl drives like a wave toward the open door, benches skidding, men staggering out into the yard. Noise and motion spill into the frozen street, loud enough to rake the cold air and tug the convoy’s front–rank guards off their posts.
The noise inside swells to a raw, drunken roar; curses and laughter knot together as a clay mug bursts against one guard’s raised shield, spraying ale across his mail while his partner shoves in behind him, club already half–drawn. Heat and breath roll at them out of the crush (meat–smoke, sour beer, old sweat) and for a heartbeat both men are back on some river wharf in high raiding season, when one thrown tankard could turn to knives.
“Back, you lot! Back!” the first guard snaps, though his voice wavers as a stumbling body caroms off his shield rim. He braces, boots slipping on beer–slick rushes, and rams the iron boss forward, trying to carve a pocket of order from the chaos. It only redirects the current. Men reel sideways, crash into other tables, and shouts of “Watch it!” and “He started it!” pile up like drift ice.
Someone hurls a half–gnawed bone that smacks helmet–hard off his brow–plate. Laughter spikes, high and ugly. The second guard ducks without thinking, club now fully out, leather strap looped around his wrist. His gaze snatches across the room: blurred faces, flashing teeth, the glint of a knife that appears and then vanishes as quickly as a fish in deep water.
“Steel stays sheathed!” he barks, more to himself than anyone, the jarl’s lawstone edict ringing in his ears. Trial by combat is for the circle outside, not for tangled limbs and overturned benches. Still, his thumb strokes the worn edge of his sword’s crossguard through the scabbard, habit as much as hunger.
Ragnarolf, behind the counter, is just another broad back in the smoke, shouting about broken mugs and unpaid tabs. He meets neither man’s eye, but the fight seems to break always just a little to either side of him, as if the tide knows the shape of its shore.
“Hold that doorway,” the first guard grits, teeth bared as a crockery shard skitters off his greaves. He plants his shield wider, blocking the jamb. In doing so he turns his shoulder to the street, to the open dark where cold air spills in around his legs, forgotten. Ale runs in little rivulets beneath his feet, cutting muddy channels through the rushes toward the threshold like meltwater seeking a crack in the ice.
A heavy bench slews across the floor, slamming sideways into his shield. For a heartbeat his view is nothing but oak slats and flailing limbs, the press of weight driving him one stumbling step backward into the inn. The second guard squeezes past him, deeper into the crush, shouting names he recognizes from the garrison, trying to bark them back into discipline.
Neither of them see the door gape a hand’s breadth wider, the spill of bodies drawing the fight inward and their focus with it, like gulls dragged toward a gutting table. Their world has narrowed to the shield–edge, to the next flying mug, to the next fist they must stop before it becomes a blade. The street, and the wagons beyond, might as well be on the far side of the Broken Sea.
The third guard, left outside, shifts from foot to foot in the brittle cold, visor tilted toward the window where bodies surge and shadows lash. Lantern–glare flashes on swinging arms and the brief white of someone’s teeth; the thick oaken frame chops the scene into jittering panels, like a saga carved badly by a nervous hand. His grip on his spear loosens by slow degrees as his attention tunnels inward, following every rise and fall of the brawl instead of the street behind him.
A roar goes up as a bench overturns, the sound muffled by shutters and horn–scraped planks, but still it thunders in his chest like distant surf. He edges closer, boots grinding on frost–salted cobbles, until he can feel the spill of heat on his greaves and the faint mist of thrown ale catching on his mail. The night at his back thickens, forgotten. Wagon bells jangle somewhere in the dark, small and unimportant, while his whole world narrows to that window’s flicker and the fear that, if he looks away, real steel might finally flash inside.
Out at the bend, the bell–jangle stutters into uneven clanks as the teamsters haul sharp on the reins, a chorus of leather creak and muttered oaths. Wagon wheels grind and pop over frozen ruts, iron rims chewing at ridges of ice that have refrozen slick over the day’s churned mud. The lead horses toss their heads, eyes rolling a little white, harness rings chiming as breath plumes out in heavy gusts, hanging like ghosts around their muzzles before the wind tears it thin. A driver stands in his traces, boots braced, peering toward the source of the racket spilling from the inn. The convoy’s long, cautious rhythm falters, then eases down into a wary crawl, every hoof–fall placed as if the road itself might give way.
Hrod times his approach to that hesitation, boots ringing dull on the frozen stone. He lets his cloak fall just so, shadowing any telltale glint of well–kept mail, and steps into the lantern–wash with a veteran’s easy nod. “Careful now,” he calls, voice level and unthreatening. “The turn by the tower ices treacherous at this hour. Seen wagons go sideways there.”
The wagon master, jaw clenched against the cold and the shouted reports from up the line, seizes on the offer. He snaps at his men to keep their eyes on the inn–side racket and not let any drunk fool near the teams, then leans down over his reins toward Hrod’s calm, pointing hand, attention snagged on the “helpful” guidance toward the slick, shadowed corner.
At Hrod’s low-voiced signal, his two chosen comrades peel off from their posts with the unhurried air of men bored witless by night duty, taking their time as if grateful for any excuse to move cold-stiff legs. One swings a half-frozen arm to knock frost from his cloak, the other stretches until his back cracks, then both drift toward the waiting sand bucket like men fetching a necessary evil rather than answering a command.
They scoop coarse sand in broad, careless gestures, letting it rasp loud against the wooden lip so any watching eye will mark nothing more sinister than routine winter work. Grain spills over their gauntlets and patters onto the cobbles, a faint hiss under the distant roar of the inn’s brawl. Their boots crunch softly as they amble toward the treacherous bend, shoulders slouched, spears carried low and loose instead of at ready.
They grumble as they go, voices pitched to carry just enough for the nearest teamster to hear.
“Every year the same cursed patch,” one mutters, exaggerating a sniff and a shiver. “Could salt this road with silver and still it’d take a wagon.”
“Aye,” the other answers, with a theatrical sniff of his own. “And the smell. Frozen mule-shit’s worse than fresh. Gets in the beard, never leaves.”
That earns a snort from the wagon master, half attention already turned back to his restless teams. One of the guards riding beside the lead wagon glances over, sees only a pair of garrison drudges doing their thankless work, and looks away again, more interested in the shouting and crash of overturned benches spilling from the inn’s lantern-lit doorway.
The two soldiers keep the pace of men in no particular hurry, pausing now and then to scatter a showy handful of sand where it will do no harm, all the while drifting closer to the marked place where road, ice, and stone will conspire exactly as Hrod intends.
One of the soldiers drops into a crouch with a theatrical grunt, as if his knees pain him more than the cold. “Gods-cursed stone,” he mutters for any nearby ear, gloved fingers splaying against the ice in a show of testing its bite. His hand, though, finds exactly the cobble Hrod loosened earlier.
Under cover of his hunched shoulders and the sweep of his cloak, he digs his fingertips in, feeling the faint give. A careful press from the heel of his palm rocks the stone a hair’s breadth out of true. Nothing a casual glance would catch, everything a heavy wheel will feel. The cobble settles at the slightest wrong angle, ready to roll when weight comes on it.
With the same casual motion he uses to push himself “upright,” he takes the salt from his comrade’s bucket and drags it in a rough smear across the safer edge of the turn. Fresh crystals crunch soft, bright in the lamplight where no danger lies, leaving the true slick hidden: only a thin, treacherous glaze veiled beneath a dusting of innocent grit.
The foremost wagons creak and sway through the bend without mishap, wheels seeking the truer line by long habit and good luck. Hrod walks just ahead of the wagon master’s knee, gloved hand sketching out harmless patches and safer ruts in the lamplight.
“Freeze comes late, it bites harder,” he says, voice easy, almost apologetic. “Road’s never the same twice in a winter like this. One thaw, one storm, and all the careful work’s for nothing.”
The wagon master grunts, following the shape of Hrod’s pointing more than the words, gaze dragged toward the bright glare where sand lies thick and harmless. Behind them, where the light falls badly and shadows pool blue on stone, the thin new glaze tightens like glass.
Then the rear wagon, heavier with iron and ill-balanced in its load, rumbles into the curve. For a heartbeat its wheels grip, wood groaning, teams straining against the traces. Then they bite the glazed patch and treacherous cobble. Iron rims shriek sideways, spraying plumes of frost-scoured stone, and the whole wagon slews and slams broadside into the watchtower buttress with a skull-rattling crunch.
Shouts and curses rip along the line as mules rear, harness-rings clanging like alarm bells, and men flounder on the slick stone; half the escort, already pressed forward by the choke of the turn, find themselves penned tight ahead of the jam, shields askew, while the rest mill in a ragged knot around the stuck wagon. Every gaze jerks to the snarl of wheels and bellowing teamsters, backs momentarily bared to the cliff-face and the dark, half-forgotten mouth of the ancestor shrine above, its shadowed arch drinking the lamplight like a waiting throat.
Eirikr shoulders through the bottleneck with a thin, irritated, “Make way,” not bothering to raise his voice. He does not have to. The seal-ring on his hand and the law–speaker’s token at his throat ride just high enough for the nearest lantern to catch, throwing a brief, sharp gleam across the carved raven and scroll. Authority, in Frostmark, is often no more than metal in the right place and a man willing to look bored while wielding it.
The nearest guard, already off balance from the jolt, straightens by reflex, fist thumping his breast more from habit than respect. “Law–man,” he blurts, stepping aside. That half–salute opens the gap Eirikr needs. He slides into it like water in a crack, cloak brushing wet stone, the stink of mule–sweat and iron heavy in his nose.
“Hold there,” he snaps without looking back, and three more men check themselves, reins jerking tight in their hands. The movement stills the immediate chaos just enough that the crash and bellow of the jammed wagon become a backdrop rather than a flood.
Eirikr plants himself squarely before the wagon master, boots just at the edge of the lamplight, and lets the delay breathe like a long, cold sigh. His ink–stained fingers curl around his wax tablet, thumb worrying the stylus as if this were nothing more than one more tally, one more tedious night in a winter of them.
He fixes the man with a cool, professional stare, voice flat as ice. “Name. Route. Purpose. Show me the jarl’s seal on your writ and the armory’s mark on your tallies.”
The wagon master swells with outrage, already dragging in a breath for a protest about road work, about garrison fools who cannot salt stone in time. Eirikr speaks first, not louder, simply earlier.
“These wagons,” he goes on, cutting across the forming complaint like a knife shaving curls from wood, “are declared as armory freight. Yet I see no prior notice at the lawstone, no mention in this week’s harbor register.” He taps the wax tablet with his stylus, as if the blank surface already condemns. “So either my records are in error, or yours are.”
The men closest shift uneasily. No one in Frostmark likes the idea of being at odds with the lawstone.
“Choose your insult, wagon master,” Eirikr says mildly. “Call me negligent, or call yourself suspect. But you will call it under oath, before witnesses, and in my hand I hold the jarl’s right to make note of which.”
The wagon master’s breath leaks out in a gusty cloud. His anger finds a more comfortable target than the slick curve of the road or a nameless soldier’s misjudged sand.
“Fine,” the man growls, rummaging under his cloak for a leather case. “Here. Writ. Tallies. Proper seals, all of them. If there’s a fault, it’s in your office, law–man, not mine.”
Eirikr inclines his head as if considering a generous offer. The papers reach his hand. He turns slightly, angling them into the lantern–light so that his body blocks the view of the wagon’s skewed wheels from the officers behind, and begins to read with the air of a man settling in for a long, dull argument that might last all night if it has to.
Around them, the line of wagons waits, snorting teams and stamping guards held in the web of his bureaucracy, while up on the cliff, the dark throat of the ancestor shrine swallows and keeps its secrets.
He fixes the wagon master with a cool, professional stare, voice gone flat as ice. “Name. Route. Purpose,” he says, each word clipped, shaved clean of any warmth. “You’ll show me the jarl’s seal on your writ and the armory’s mark on your tallies.”
The questions fall in a dry, rote cadence, as if he were reciting from a tablet only he can see. There is no heat in them, no particular suspicion: only the weary inevitability of a man who has done this a hundred nights in a hundred sleets, and has never once been surprised in a way he enjoyed. His tone promises tedium, not trouble; promises delay, not danger.
The wagon master’s first instinctive puff of anger meets that chill like steam off snow. Eirikr lets it wash past him, unblinking. His thumb taps the side of the stylus against his wax tablet in a steady, impatient rhythm that says very plainly: This is nothing personal. This is merely the weight of the jarl’s law leaning, as it always does, on the nearest convenient neck.
The wagon master sputters about blocked roads and idiot teamsters, beard bristling, breath fogging the air between them. Eirikr lets the bluster wash past like sleet off a cloak. Behind his still face the quill–thin gears of his mind tick and tally: the way the man skips a date, stumbles over a village name, rushes past a missing tally–mark. Outwardly he is nothing but bored duty, shoulders slightly hunched against the cold, eyes half–lidded over the parchment.
He exhales a faint, pointed sigh. “Smudged ink. Misnumbered crates. An out–of–season writ,” he observes, tone tinged with professional annoyance. Gently, relentlessly, he tugs the man’s fury away from the jammed wheels toward safer ground, petty forms, distant clerks, the eternal stupidity of bureaucracy, bleeding dangerous outrage down into familiar grievance.
Around them, helms tilt and shoulders bunch as guards crane to squint at seals and tally–marks instead of at cliff–face shadow and shrine. Eirikr’s dry instructions send one man trotting toward the quartermaster’s clerk and another back along the line to “confirm” an armory stamp, bleeding steel and eyes from the bottleneck. The convoy’s wariness knots around parchment and his clipped, officious questions, while above, the ancestor shrine’s dark bulk seems to recede, just another hulk of rock and carved stone in the night, forgotten at the edge of lamplight and concern.
Incense ghosts coil and fray around them as they slip from niche to niche, breath shallow, cloaks brushing soot–cold stone. Knutr’s blackened fingers twitch with each curve of the old rune, pain flickering along the veins like banked coals. Ragnarolf keeps his head bowed in feigned devotion while his calloused thumbs find the hidden pins; iron sighs in its channels, ancient dust sifting down.
The air closes around him like a wet fist. Sound dies to a muffled hush (no tavern roar, no gulls, no harbor–chain groan) only his own breath and the faint hiss of moisture weeping down stone. His palm skims the wall, finding channels cut by tools long dead and newer scrapes where something broad and metal–shod has brushed past.
Steps twist, shallowing, then steep again. The angle tells him they’re cutting under the road and outer wall, nosing down toward tidal stone. He can almost feel the mass of the keep overhead, a weight of rock and timber and sleeping warriors. Exile or not, if he is caught down here, among smugglers’ holes and cursed ore, there will be no patient hearings at the lawstone. Only a short rope and a long drop.
The thought lands, cold as the air, but his body moves as if on an old raid, breath measuring each step, feet hunting for the safe center of the treads. He has gone down stranger ways in stranger lands: storm wells in foreign harbors, smoke–choked breaches under burning walls. This, at least, is home stone.
A scuff above. Knutr curses under his breath, a sharp intake that scrapes ragged against the close dark.
“You all right?” Ragnarolf pitches it low, barely above the drip–drip.
“Fine,” comes the strained reply. “Just… louder metal, all at once. Like a shouted word.” The smith’s voice thins, edges frayed. “It’s close. Whatever Bjorulf is nursing down here. It’s not just iron and greed.”
Ragnarolf’s hand tightens on the rough rock. “Can you walk?”
“If I stop, it will drag.” Knutr’s boots resume their careful descent. “Better to follow the pain while I can still see straight.”
“Then we follow,” Ragnarolf mutters, more to the rock than to Knutr. The steps widen under his feet, the ceiling lifting a handspan. The drip–drip swells to a steady patter, echoing off broader walls. Somewhere ahead, beneath the water’s pulse, comes a different rhythm: a faint, irregular thud, as if a hammer were being wrapped in cloth between blows.
Bjorulf’s shadow, breathing in the deep.
“Stay close,” he breathes, the words shaped more by old raid–habit than any thought of command. His fingers find cold iron, then empty air; he swings his weight through and lets go.
For a heartbeat he hangs in nothing, stomach lurching, then his boots bite stone. The step is slick, cupped deep as a ladle by years of passing feet and the endless seep of moisture. His soles skid; he rides it, dropping his weight low, shoulder turning into the unseen curve of the wall. Stone grates his palm, rough and wet, skin rasping over tool–marks and algae film. He catches himself short of pitching headlong, knees jarring, breath leaving him in a tight grunt that dies at once in the close.
Dark folds him in, thick as wool. No lantern, no hearth–glow: only a smear of lesser black where the opening must be above. He feels more than hears Knutr shifting at the lip, stone giving a muted complaint under the other man’s boots. A few dislodged grains of grit patter down onto his hood and cheek like the first, testing drops of rain before a storm.
Knutr lowers himself after, boots feeling for purchase before he commits his weight. His cursed hand scrapes the stone lip and he sucks air between his teeth, a serpent‑sharp hiss. Heat flares under the skin, blackened veins along his wrist swelling with a dull ember‑red glow that pulses in time with his heart.
“There’s metal under us,” he whispers, so close Ragnarolf feels the words on his neck. “Old. Wrong. It pulls.”
He lets that hand hang out before him, fingers crooked, more talon than man’s. Each fresh throb jerks it a fraction sideways, dragging his arm toward the deeper dark. He follows the pain, body angling after the unseen tug, shoulders brushing damp rock as the passage coils down.
They fall into a rhythm. Knutr shadows him, breath shallow, muttering broken scraps of saga and measure, tracking each flare and ebb of agony in his fingers. Twice Ragnarolf lifts a hand to still them, listening: only drip and distant surf reply, no scrape of boot‑leather, no rasp of steel on stone to betray other travelers in the dark.
The last smear of shrine‑light dies behind a bend, swallowed by rock. New sounds seep forward: slow, irregular dripping keeping time with a dull, far‑off thud of metal on metal, each strike blurred by intervening stone and water. The air thickens, tinged with coal smoke, quenched steel, and something sour‑metallic that has no business this deep in the cliff. Ragnarolf glances back; Knutr’s eyes catch the faint ember‑pulse of his own cursed hand. No word passes, but both men know they are angling toward Bjorulf’s hidden forge‑cave, not some dead smugglers’ burrow, but the raw, beating heart of an operation still very much alive: and listening.
The heat pressed closer as they moved, not the clean, dry heat of a forge-face but a damp, smothering warmth that stuck cloth to skin. Their breaths came back at them off the low ceiling, turned sour by old smoke. Water, thin as sweat, tracked down the stone in slow, gleaming veins, but it carried no grit. This place had been wiped clean.
Knutr ran his scarred left hand along the support nearest him despite the ache that sparked at his knuckles. The wood was solid, green-heart fir by the feel, not the punky drift-timber smugglers liked to steal. Axe-bites showed in it, sharp-edged and bright, and when he pressed harder, a tacky bead of sap glued to his thumb. No more than a week, he reckoned. Maybe less.
“Saints drown him,” Knutr muttered under his breath, more breath than sound. The curse in his blood stirred, a faint crawling under the blackened veins, as if some dead Kjell at his back were taking notice. “He’s shoring it for load. Not just passage. Heavy carts.”
“Ore?” Ragnarolf’s voice was low, too, shaped to die against the stone.
“Could be.” Knutr’s eyes tracked the ceiling: wedges driven where the rock bellied down, neatly placed, no waste of timber. “Could be bars. Could be bodies. Whatever it is, he expects weight, and he expects it often.”
Ragnarolf grunted, the sound half agreement, half unease. He brushed another beam with his shoulder as they edged on, counting the rhythm of timbers the way he once counted oar-strokes. This was planned, paced, measured. Not some forgotten rat-run a few bold thieves scraped clear in a lucky year. Bjorulf had spent good wood and better sweat down here. Men, too: no smith spared apprentices from the hammers without profit promised.
Far behind them, the faintest draft tugged at Ragnarolf’s nape, breathing from the cave mouth and the doubled crew they now knew waited there. Ahead, the air thickened and grew warmer still, bearing a ghost of quenched steel that set his old battle-scars to twinge.
“This isn’t a side-path,” Knutr said at last, voice gone grim. “It’s a spine. Take it out, and something big in Frostmark starts to limp.”
Ragnarolf thought of the foreign-marked ingots Eirikr might even now be fingering above, of wagons and ledgers and lawstone speeches. He thought, unwillingly, of Bjorulf’s thick hands on a hammer, shaping not just blades but routes and debts and men’s lives.
“And if we mis-step on it,” he answered, “it won’t be the keep that breaks first.”
Ragnarolf dragged his fingers along the wall and felt the stone give under them, not with moisture but with a slick that clung. When he brought his hand back into the lantern’s thin wash, his fingertips were blacked with coal-dust, threaded with a faint rainbow sheen. Not old ash, dry and grey, but the fresh smear of lamp smoke and forge-filth that hadn’t yet had time to go flat.
He rubbed thumb to forefinger and the residue tugged, greasy. Whale oil, or tallow thickened with something harsher. The sort men used when they wanted flame steady in bad air, when they expected to come this way often enough to refine the mix.
He breathed in and the taste of metal rose at the back of his throat, that ghost of hot iron half-quenched. Someone had been moving fresh work down here, blades or bars or something worse, while the rest of Frostmark slept above, none the wiser.
Once, in his raider years, he’d have blessed such a passage as a gift from the sea-gods: a secret road into a fat town’s belly. Now, with an inn to lose and an exile-brand on his name, it looked like a strangler’s cord drawn tight around Frostmark’s throat. And looped a second time, snug, around his own.
A faint scuff ahead, boot leather on grit, stills them both. Ragnarolf’s hand comes up in warning before he thinks, the old captain’s sign sharp against the lantern-glow. Knutr drops into a crouch without needing to be told, shoulders tightening, cursed hand cradled close.
The tunnel toys with the sound. It should roll away in a clean echo, one man’s careless shift bouncing down the stone. Instead it comes back muddled, overlapping, as if three, four different feet have just finished moving and are trying to pretend they didn’t. Beneath it, Ragnarolf catches the rasp of leather against a shield-rim, the damp click of a ring on spear-haft.
Not two bored watchers at a cave mouth. A knot of men, settled in, used to waiting.
Knutr leans close, his words barely breath against Ragnarolf’s ear. “Old tales said a fall choked this stretch,” he murmurs, gaze tracking the bare stone where jagged rubble ought to lie. Instead, the floor is combed with drag-marks: sledges, barrel-rims, grooves worn deep as healed wounds. “Not chance. Someone’s been nursing it clear for seasons.” His cursed hand twitches, blackened veins itching as if the rock itself remembers what’s been hauled through it.
The neat little map they’d traced in ash by the shrine’s votive fire shreds in Ragnarolf’s head: slip a forgotten choke, pluck quiet proof from a dead cave, ghost away. Instead every fresh beam and scraped wall hisses another truth, Bjorulf has been fattening this artery, feeding it men and metal. Ragnarolf’s gaze crawls back the way they came, seeing the passage not as an escape but a shepherded lane, propped and pampered by the same careful hands. No easy rockfall now to bury pursuit; they walk the living spine of Bjorulf’s trade, and any stumble will snap on flesh and iron, not harmless, senseless stone.
Improvisation required
Ragnarolf lets the thought of a rush die before it’s born. He studies the bend. The way the glow bleeds round it, the rhythm of noise. Not just men, but work: haul, pause, grunt, scrape. A pattern you could slide a blade or a body between, if you were patient and stupidly lucky.
“Look there,” he breathes, tilting his chin up, not daring a hand signal so near all that listening stone.
Above the main track the passage ribs out, stone teeth and black gaps where old torch‑brackets bite into the wall. A narrow ledge rides there, no more than a man’s boot and a thumb’s breadth in places, running like a shadow‑scrape along the upper curve of the tunnel toward the forge‑light.
Knutr squints up, follows the line. His mouth hardens. “That’s no road,” he mutters.
“Didn’t say it was,” Ragnarolf replies. “But it’s not watched.” His gaze flicks to the lower path, where drag‑marks gleam faintly, polished by sledges and crates. “Down there, they’ll have their eyes. Up here, they’ll trust the rock.”
Knutr hesitates, flexing his ruined hand. The black veins crawl like ink under skin, angered by the nearness of whatever cursed ore Bjorulf is nursing. “My grip is not what it was,” he admits, the words tasting like ground glass.
“Then you go second,” Ragnarolf says. “If you slip, you fall into me, not past me.”
A faint, humorless snort. “Comforting.”
The voices ahead swell, then dip. A laugh cut short, a clatter of chain, the scrape of something heavy dragged aside. Ragnarolf listens, counting breaths, letting the rhythm settle into him the way oar‑strokes once did. There. A lull where only the sea can be heard, a soft shush through the hidden cave mouth.
“On the next quiet,” he says. “We climb. Three heartbeats between us. No talking, no heroics. If one of us falls, the other keeps going.”
Knutr’s jaw knots, but he nods. “If we live through this,” he murmurs, “I am redesigning this cursed tunnel.”
“If we live through this,” Ragnarolf answers, “you can lay a curse on every stone.”
The lull comes. He doesn’t wait for courage to argue. Fingers find cold iron of an old bracket, then rough stone. Boots smear for purchase on the narrow bite of ledge. Heat presses from ahead, cool damp from behind, and below them Bjorulf’s men keep hauling their secret war, deaf to the two shadows clawing their way above their heads.
Improvisation required
Knutr’s cursed hand spasms, black veins flaring in a sudden prickle that feels like needles hammered from inside the bone. He sucks a breath through his teeth, swallowing the hiss before it can carry. The ache is wrong. Too sharp, too near. This close to the bend, the metal ahead is not sleeping ore or quiet ingots; it’s hot‑worked, hammered, woken.
“Too many,” he mouths at Ragnarolf’s ear, the words barely a brush of warmth. “He’s doubled them. This isn’t a trickle‑run: this is a full turning of the tide.”
He’d pictured some forgotten smugglers’ crack: three men, perhaps four, shuffling crates through dust and bat‑reek. Something mean and narrow you could choke with one good rockfall and call it justice. Instead the sound rolling round the bend is forge‑noise: chains biting, sledges dragging, men swearing over bulk. A heartbeat’s pause, then all of it again. Work, not skulking.
The old tales of a half‑fallen escape route crumble; what waits ahead is no dead passage but a living artery, ribbed with fresh beams and oiled timbers, pulsing metal and intent under Bjorulf’s careful hand.
Improvisation required Ragnarolf counts in the dark, letting sound paint what sight cannot: one voice giving orders, clipped and sour; another laughing too loud, ale‑loose; the grunt of at least four men under weight; iron knocking iron; and, beyond, the vicious spit of quenching water on hot steel. A forge, then, not just a way‑station. A straight rush would mean meeting a wall of iron backs and ready blades with nowhere to fall back to but the long, echoing throat of tunnel they’ve just walked: no gate to slam, no corner to die around. His shoulders tighten, feeling the old ghost of the shield‑wall rise in his muscles, that urge to lock, to drive. And he forces it down. This is not a deck to storm; it is a den to slip through, where courage is a liability and quiet is king.
Improvisation required He drags his gaze up and sideways instead of forward, learning the stone like a coastline: every jut a headland, every crack a hidden cove. Above the main path, the rock breaks into a narrow lip where the ceiling arches, pocked with old torch‑sockets now black and empty, salt‑white dribbles like dead tallow marking their mouths. There, a faint dusting of ash and boot smear says someone once used it, long ago, but not recently; Bjorulf’s men keep to the broad, easy floor where sledges run smooth. Ragnarolf taps Knutr’s arm, then points with two fingers: up, not on, the old raider’s chart‑sense already tracing a new, perilous route along the stone.
“No charge,” he breathes, pitching his voice low enough that only Knutr catches it. “We climb. We listen. We move when their noise covers ours. If they fall quiet, we freeze.” He tests the first handhold, then another, feeling damp grit rasp his skin as he hauls himself toward the ledge. Each movement must thread the beat between clinks and curses below, their progress a slow, silent tack through danger toward the furnace‑glow pulse of Bjorulf’s hidden forge, the heart of the operation they came to expose.
Eirikr lets his thumb wander the plank as if merely idle, tracing that faint, unnatural ridge where grain should run smooth. Up close, the seam feels wrong beneath his nail: too straight, too cleanly cut for a trader’s wagon that has seen years of frost and mud. He presses, gently at first, the way one tests a suspect clause in a contract. The wood yields with a soft, damp protest, a guilty little creak that seems loud as a shout in the cold yard.
No one moves. Hooves stamp, a harness jingles, a man clears his throat behind him; all the small noises of a scene meant to be theater. Eirikr slides his fingers into the narrow gap, heart thudding in a rhythm he knows too well from long nights at the lawstone when a question cuts deeper than it should. He lifts, not all the way. Just enough.
Beneath, not rough ballast or grain sacks, but neat, deliberate order: bricks of dull, heavy metal laid like loaves of dark bread. They catch no light, but the marks on them are sharp all the same. Each ingot bears a crisp foreign crest: a forked spear over a broken wave, every line struck with the bite of a die unfamiliar to Frostmark’s forges. Not the jarl’s wolf. Not any ally’s sign he can plausibly pretend to mistake.
His breath knots in his chest. The old teachings unroll in his mind as if someone were reading them aloud: edicts on forbidden trade across the eastern border, judgments passed at winter moots, tallies of fines and blood‑prices. Those marks mean embargo. They mean that iron is flowing where law has barred it. They mean a hand reaching past Frostmark’s walls to arm an enemy.
Treason, he thinks, with a clarity that makes the world narrow to the plank edge and the glint of alien sigils. Mishandled, this is not some clerk’s error to be scolded away. Mishandled, this is a pretext for war.
He forces his face blank, fights the instinct to recoil. The yard feels suddenly smaller, the ring of guards closer, the weight of unseen eyes on his back heavier than any cloak.
The wagon master, watching too closely, catches the tiny betrayals Eirikr failed to school, the brief tightening of his jaw, the scholar’s frown of recognition that is nothing like a carter’s bafflement, and all his bluff geniality peels away like wet bark. “Careful with that, law‑man,” he snaps, voice gone sharp and thin as a drawn saw. “You break my bed and the jarl can pay for a new wagon.”
A morsel of panic gleams in the sudden wide whites of his eyes. Sweat beads along his hairline beneath the fur cap despite the bite of the wind, tracks glistening where the frost should cling. His shoulders square, feet planting wider in the rutted snow, not in deference but in readiness. One thick‑knuckled hand lifts, slow as if idle, brushing his belt and lingering near the curl of the signal horn.
Not a reach, not yet. Just a drift, the sort drunk men make toward a knife they swear they aren’t thinking of. But Eirikr has watched enough hardened farmers lie on witness stands to know the language of a man edging toward a choice he cannot easily take back.
Eirikr straightens, heart stuttering hard enough that he feels it in his throat. The cold bites his ears; he is bareheaded among fur‑hatted men, wrapped in scholar’s wool and ink‑stained gloves instead of mail and helm. No shield, no oath‑sworn hearth‑guard at his back. Only a short sword that he barely drills with and the thin armor of parchment authority. The jarl’s wolf on his badge, polished, suddenly feeling like tin. Around the wagon stand half a dozen carters and guards, boots planted wide in the churned snow, men who owe him nothing and Bjorulf’s coin perhaps everything. The hidden ingots under his fingers feel suddenly like a noose of metal, tightening, tying him body and name to whatever crime he has just uncovered, should this moment turn bloody.
The wagon master’s gaze flicks from Eirikr’s hand on the lifted plank to the nearest gate‑tower, weighing distance and how long it would take a horn‑call to bring running feet. His mouth twists as he tallies and finds no easy lie left to spend. “You don’t want to poke at things above your station, ink‑raven,” he hisses, turning the nickname into a blade. Then, with a strangled oath, he surges forward, shoulder angling as if merely to barge past a fussy clerk. Yet his true lunge snaps downward, thick fingers clawing for the signal horn at his belt, the little twist of polished bone that, blown once, could summon allies enough to drown Eirikr in bodies, shouts, and muddied blame.
For a heartbeat, the yard narrows to that reaching hand and the horn’s dark curve; Eirikr is too close to draw steel without inviting a spear in his ribs, too isolated among hard, hooded faces to trust that a shouted citation of law will be worth more than spit. Cold realization sluices through him, icy as fjord water: if that horn sounds, this ceases to be a harmless pageant and becomes an ambush he is neither armored nor authorized to survive, a tangle of blades and accusations with his thin scholar’s body at the center.
Lidra lunges, body moving before thought can catch it, old battlefield instinct snapping her like a bowstring loosed. Her shield comes up not as cover but as a weapon, turned half‑sideways so the iron boss leads like the head of a hammer. The rim bites the air with a hiss.
The boss cracks into the wagon master’s wrist with a meaty, wet thud. Bone meets iron; something in the joint gives with a muffled pop. His fingers spasm open before they can close on the horn, and the polished curve of bone tumbles from his grasp, spinning end over end, kicking up a little spray of dirty snow as it lands. A sharp gasp cuts from one of the onlookers; another man swears low and vicious.
Eirikr hears his own breath hiss between his teeth, loud in his ears as steel on whetstone. For a blink the whole world shrinks to the narrow space between his ribs and Lidra’s shield‑edge as it streaks past, close enough that the iron scent of oiled leather and cold‑kept mail washes over him. The impact shudders up his arm through the wagon’s planking, through the hidden ingots beneath his hand; he feels the weight of that illegal metal sing with the blow, as if the crime itself thrums along his bones.
The wagon master half‑staggers, half‑folds around his injured wrist, a strangled bark of pain torn from him. His other hand, thick and calloused, clutches at the splintered plank for balance and finds nothing firm. He stumbles sidewise into Eirikr’s shoulder, and Eirikr’s boots slide in the churned slush. For a heartbeat he is terrified he will go down under them both, dragged into a tangle of limbs and anger that ends in a knife between his ribs and a neat line in some forged report calling it “resistance.”
He jerks back instead, spine jarring against the wagon’s frame, fingers still spread over the foreign‑stamped ingots like a man swearing an oath on cursed altar‑stone. The harsh reek of sweat, wet wool, and fear rises around him, as sharp as the winter air knifing his lungs. Around the wagon, the ring of carters and guards tightens by half a step without anyone quite meaning to move, shoulders hunching, hands drifting closer to spear‑hafts and knife‑hilts as they watch what was supposed to be harmless theater turn, in an eyeblink, into something else.
The wagon master snarls, lips skinning back from his teeth, and lunges for Lidra’s forearm with his good hand, thick fingers clawing for purchase on leather and mail. She twists before he can lock his grip, weight dropping, turning with the grab instead of fighting it. Her cloak snaps about her like a wind‑torn banner. She plants one boot hard on the wagon’s wheel‑rim, heel grinding into frozen mud on the spokes, and drives herself upward on that braced leg.
The sudden rise turns his own pull against him. He lurches off balance, shoulder slamming flat into the wagon’s side with a hollow boom of planking over contraband weight. In the same breath, Lidra rolls her shoulder under his arm and drives forward. Her shield slams across his chest, iron boss digging under his collarbone, pinning him between painted wood and rough cart‑board so that his feet scrabble uselessly in the dirty snow.
Her other hand snakes down, fast as a striking adder, seizing the horn’s thong. A hard wrench tears it clean from his belt. The bone arc flashes once in the pale light as she rips it up and away, well clear of his reaching fingers.
The brief, vicious scuffle, no more than a heartbeat’s worth of bared teeth and bruising force, rings louder than any shouted command could have, its meaning carrying to every listening ear in the square.
Around them, the square stills, as if a cold hand has closed over its throat. The lazy shuffle of boots halts. Guards who had been feigning indifference straighten by instinct, cloaks falling back from mail, hands finding spear‑shafts and sword‑hilts with that half‑casual, wholly ready grip of men who expect steel to follow raised voices. A pair of gate‑watchers on the far steps lean out for a better view; one nudges the other, chin angling toward Lidra’s shield.
Merchants and drovers draw back a step, boots rasping in the slush, then edge forward again by slow degrees, curiosity warring with caution and the old hunger for a story worth repeating over ale. The clatter of hooves and mutter of trade‑talk fades as heads turn toward the knot of struggle at the wagon’s side, a ripple of attention tightening like a noose.
Eirikr steps into the knife‑edge hush that follows, voice cutting sharp as winter wind as he names the jarl’s law, the lawstone, the penalty for false marks, and claims the right to seize and search suspicious cargo in the jarl’s name. But there is no putting the moment back into its sheath. The wagon master, red‑faced and panting, looks every inch a man under arrest, sweat beading in his beard; his crew glance between him and the gate, measuring chances. Lidra’s stance, shield high, jaw set, feet braced, marks this no longer as routine tallying to be forgotten by dusk, but as open challenge that will be spoken of by name.
Lidra feels it like ice water down her spine. Their harmless‑farce is dead, gutted in the square. She sees it in the stall‑keepers’ averted eyes, in the way men and women peel off in ones and twos, heads ducked, already rehearsing what they’ll say. A ragged boy bolts for the alleys. By the time his bare feet stop skidding on frost‑slick cobbles, gossip will have outpaced any runner the garrison can send. Word will fly along beam‑lofts and barrack benches, through market booths and smoke‑low kitchens, up into the keep’s stone gut. Every step it takes above will be another heartbeat stolen from the dark, narrow space Ragnarolf and Knutr are counting on below, where Bjorulf’s men will hear the first hint of alarm like hounds catching blood‑scent.
“Ragnarolf Skaldson!”
The bellow hits the rafters like a thrown shield. Talk snaps off mid‑word. Dice hang in a calloused hand and tumble, forgotten, across the board. Even the hearth’s roar seems to duck its head.
“Thought you drowned, you cursed bastard!”
The man is up on his feet now, broad‑faced and red‑eared, sway‑legged from drink, one boot half on the bench, half on the rush‑strewn floor. Ale slops from his cup in a bright arc. A couple of his fellows catch at his belt too late.
Ragnarolf feels the name strike him like a fist to the ribs. Not the “Ragni” or “keeper” folk use here, but the full weight of it: Skaldson, spoken as it was shouted across oars and waves. It hangs in the smoky air, sharp as a seax point. The man’s next word lands heavier still.
“Exile,” he crows, rolling it on his tongue with a drunk’s glee. “That’s him, sure as storm‑spume, Ragnarolf Stormwake, the jarl’s own bloody curse!”
A murmur runs through the taproom, starting close and spiraling outward like rings in a fjord pool. “Exile?” someone near the fire breathes. “Stormwake? I’ve heard that name.” Benches creak as men twist to look. A woman with flour on her sleeves pauses halfway to her cup, eyes narrowed. At the far end, the minstrel’s fingers catch on the harp strings with a sour twang, then still.
For a heartbeat, all sound draws in on itself. Smoke hangs unmoving in the rafters. The Road’s End feels suddenly smaller, the beams lower, the walls nearer. Ragnarolf can hear the tick of spilled ale dripping from the guard’s cup to the boards.
He knows, without needing to search for them, the watchers in the room: the ones who drink slowly, who never quite lose their focus to the dice or the song. Two sit in shadow near the door, cloaks still on despite the heat. One, all sharp elbows and a trader’s knife at his belt, has been nursing the same cup since dusk and listening more than he speaks. Another, a pale‑haired wisp by the window, lifts his gaze just enough to mark Ragnarolf’s face and the guard’s words, then lowers it, too carefully, to his bread again.
If Bjorulf has ears in the inn tonight (and Ragnarolf has wagered more than coin on the fact that he does) those ears have just pricked like hounds at a horn‑blast. The story he has kept drowned under years of ale and routine has been dragged out gasping into the firelight.
Ragnarolf freezes for the span of that heartbeat, every old instinct screaming to reach for the axe that is no longer at his belt. He forces his hand instead to the ale jug, steady enough to pour, jaw tight under his beard. The clay rasp of jug on table sounds too loud in the hush. He tips amber into the guard’s cup as if this were any other evening, any other fool.
“You’ve had more mead than sense, Bjarti,” he says evenly, the words shaped around a tongue gone dry. But the old raid‑name (Stormwake) has already been flung into the air, and he can feel the room weighing it, measuring the man who once bore it against the quiet innkeeper they thought they knew.
Ragnarolf lets the name wash over him like a cold wave, locking every muscle rather than turning toward it. For the span of a heartbeat he stands as he once did on a rearing deck, when the only choices were hold or go under. Every old instinct screams for steel (for the weight of a haft in his palm, for the clean answer of an axe laid across a throat) and finds nothing at his belt but worn leather and empty habit.
He makes his hand go to the ale jug instead. Fingers close around rough clay, not ash-wood. He pours, careful as if he were measuring out poison, not drink. The stream runs true, not a tremor in it, though his jaw knots under his beard until it aches.
“You’ve had more mead than sense, Bjarti,” he says, voice low and level, pitched to reach the nearest tables and no farther. The lie tastes of salt. Stormwake hangs over them like a stormcloud, and he can feel the weight of every eye in the room, testing the truth of it against the man who does not reach for a weapon.
Benches rasp back, feet scuffing the rushes as men twist to stare. The Road’s End heaves on its timbers, every regular finding some excuse to look and keep on looking. Wagon‑drivers with frost still in their beards squint as if distance might turn Ragnarolf into someone less dangerous. Fishwives, hands red from the gutting bench, go still over their bowls, mouths pursed thin. A pair of off‑duty sentries straighten without meaning to, gauging lines of reach and retreat, palms drifting toward where their spears are not.
In a shadowed corner, two “merchants” in travel‑stained cloaks do not gape with the rest. They share one brief, flat glance. Under the table, one curls thick fingers around a small token stamped with a blackened chisel‑mark, then ghosts it away into his sleeve.
Old gossip seeps up like marsh‑gas. A jarl’s son, face‑down in foreign surf. A longship cracked like bone. A name carved off the raid‑stone as a traitor’s. Ragnarolf catches snatches (“Skaldson?” “He sold the course for silver, they say…” “Broke oath, broke kin”) each word a pebble thrown his way. Behind the counter his folk go taut. Torvi ducks her head, hands flying over trenchers, but her gaze keeps snagging on the door, as if she half‑expects wolf‑badged warriors to push through on a shout.
He wipes a spill that isn’t there, choosing each word like a step on river ice. Then he leans over the bench, shadow swallowing the drunk’s grin. “You want a bed or the street, Bjarti? Those are your choices. Tales of old raids buy nothing here.” Laughter flickers. The guard blinks, swaying, muttering apology. Ragnarolf is not watching him. He’s watching the sober men at the walls, the ones who leave without finishing their cups, shoulders set with the tidy purpose of runners bearing news.
Below, where the cliff’s roots sweat warmth and the air tastes of old quench‑water, Knutr stops so abruptly Ragnarolf almost barrels into him. A thick timber props the ceiling where the rock bellies down; Knutr shoves him into its shadow as a wash of torchlight spills around the bend ahead.
Ragnarolf eases his shoulder against damp grain, breath measured. The tunnel they’d been promised is anything but. Fresh wedges bite the stone where the support has been driven in. Chips of pale rock lie scattered, unstained by soot or mold. Bjorulf’s work, recent and careful. A throat meant to be forgotten, kept open instead.
Torchlight flares again, brighter. Voices, closer than rumor had put them.
“…cold piss of a place to stand watch.”
“Rather cold than buried. Master says this roof’s twitchy. Keep your spear butt to the wall, feel it if it starts to go.”
The two guards Knutr had counted on in his whispered map have become four, their silhouettes crowding the tunnel’s mouth where it opens into the sea cave. Mail gleams in dull plates and patched rings, bulky under leather. Their spears rasp the rock as they pace, iron tips ticking like impatient fingernails. A crate sits just inside Ragnarolf’s limited view, lid pried back, the glimmer of wrapped bars within: a way‑station, then, not a dead end.
Knutr leans close, his voice no more than the heat of a word in Ragnarolf’s ear. “He’s been running more through here than we knew. That bracing is this season’s work.” His cursed left hand flexes once, then stiffens, a tiny wince cutting across his features. “And there’s bad metal near. I can feel it.”
Ragnarolf’s mind runs quick, old habits breaking surface. Four men. Narrow ground. One good rush and the first dies before he shouts, maybe the second: but steel on stone in this echoing gut will ring all the way to the cave, and sea wind will carry it farther. A lure? Send one man limping back, crying cave‑in, draw the rest? But any cry at all may send them bolting for help and close the noose above, around wagons and inn alike.
“Could take them quiet,” he murmurs, half to test the thought. “Choke them before they speak. Use the dark.”
“Four throats,” Knutr whispers back. “And you’ve two hands. So have I, but one of mine’s half ash on nights like this.” His eyes flick to the shoring. “If we bring that beam down, it won’t be quiet either.”
Ragnarolf pictures it anyway. The timber kicked loose, rock grinding, dust and screams, blood and broken stone blocking the way. It would seal Bjorulf’s path, trap the cursed ore and whatever else he’s hiding. It would also trap them, unless they outran the fall. Or misjudged it, and brought the ceiling down on the wrong side.
Every option sets his teeth on edge. Lure a guard down the tunnel with some thrown noise, knife him in the dark: if the others notice, the shout goes up. Try to bluff past as smugglers late to the meet. One wrong word, one man who’s seen his face before, and blades come out. Double the guards means Bjorulf smelled a shift in the wind; somewhere between the inn, the yard, and this sweating stone, their careful misdirections have started to bleed together.
Knutr’s breath ghosts his cheek. “We can’t go back without knowing what lies in that cave. Eirikr’s counting on proof. So is your own name.”
“And if we go forward clumsy,” Ragnarolf answers, gaze fixed on the sway and turn of torch‑shadows ahead, “we give Bjorulf warning and hang them all instead.”
The torchlight brightens again as one of the guards turns square toward their stretch of tunnel, as if scenting a draft. In the narrow dark, Ragnarolf feels the shape of the choice harden. No good path, only the one whose ruin he can live with.
Above, in the lamplit chill of the wagon yard, Eirikr’s fingers hover over the foreign crest stamped into the hidden ingots, recognition tightening his throat. The lines of the sigil are wrong for any border ally: too sharp in the beak, the crown prongs set in a pattern he last saw inked on a confiscated treaty draft and buried in sealed chests. His stomach drops. This is not petty skimming. This is someone feeding steel to a rival jarl.
The wagon master’s eyes catch the flicker of understanding and go wide; his hand darts for the horn at his belt. Before the first breath of a note, Lidra’s shield slams his arm aside with a crack that makes nearby mules start, and her dagger is at his ribs, the move crisp, public, impossible to dress as anything but a takedown. The horn clatters, spinning on the packed snow.
“Easy,” she growls, loud enough for the yard. “Only guilty men call the whole watch on themselves.”
Guards and haulers freeze. Breath smokes in small, uncertain clouds as their “routine inspection” hardens into an accusation that smells of treason, not bookkeeping error. Eirikr hears armor creak, hands shifting on spear‑hafts, the space between one shouted order and a brawl stretching thin as wire.
The wagon master, red‑faced and sputtering, shouts about misunderstandings and misplaced seals, but the word “foreign” is already in the air, passed from mouth to mouth on low, nervous murmurs. Eirikr can feel the eyes of every teamster and soldier turning, measuring not the truth of the mark but which side of this moment they should stand on if it sours. If he presses the matter, he brands the jarl’s own supply road suspect and drags half the quartermaster’s office into the mud; if he softens it, he risks letting a live conduit of outlaw steel slip back into the dark.
Lidra holds her blade steady, jaw tight. This is no longer theater. Every heartbeat of hesitation feels like gifting their unseen enemies time to scatter, to warn, to bury tracks.
Back in the Road’s End, the guard’s slurred shout of “Ragnarolf Skaldson, oath‑breaker!” still clings to the rafters even after Ragnarolf’s quip buys a ripple of uneasy laughter. Conversations that had been comfortably careless knot into pockets of gossip, glances flicking between his scarred face and the door. Two convoy men settle their tabs too quickly and slip out, shoulders hunched, not staggering but marching. Hrod, by the hearth, files each exit and who follows after. Ragnarolf pours, smiles, wipes the same clean stretch of oak again and again, feeling his exile made fresh with every hissed repetition of his name.
Across Frostmark’s layers, the cave, the yard, the taproom, pressure builds along invisible lines. Any shout from the wagons could send loyal or bought men pounding toward the cliff path; any careless boast over ale might reach Bjorulf’s ears and shutter the very tunnel Ragnarolf and Knutr are threading. Their neat lattice of misdirection collapses into knife‑edge improvisation. Choices come in half‑breaths, wagers laid with futures none of them can properly see, as if each is tugging blind on a noose they helped braid, unsure which sharp pull will jerk it tight around all their necks at once.
The wrong kind of command voice
The words drifting back along the stone root Bjorulf squarely in the center of things, not lurking at the fringes. This is not some side‑door bargain; it is the sound of a man speaking as though the whole keep stands behind his back.
Ragnarolf and Knutr freeze against the damp wall, breath held, the chill of the rock soaking through wool and leather. The tunnel is a throat of stone, carrying every sound too clearly: the grunt of men heaving weight, the creak of ropes under strain, the hollow thud of crates being shifted on wet planks. Over it all rolls Bjorulf’s voice, iron‑rough and impatient, snapping out orders like hammer blows on an anvil.
“Stack the marked ones near the inner passage. No, you thick‑skulled whelp, those go to the armory stores. The others are for…private hands. If we miss the tide again, it won’t just be my hide.” A low growl of displeasure follows, then the smack of flesh on flesh as someone is cuffed for slowness.
Ragnarolf flattens further into the shadow, seax hilt pressing cold against his hip. He knows that tone. It’s the cadence of a deck‑leader calling time on oars, of a raid‑captain certain every man will jump when he snarls. Only now the sea‑spray has been traded for stone drip, the longship’s deck for a hidden cave under Frostmark’s walls.
“He sounds like he owns the place,” Knutr breathes, voice barely a thread.
“He sounds,” Ragnarolf murmurs back, eyes narrowing, “like he’s been told he does.”
Another order rolls down the passage, sharper, with a weight that doesn’t belong to any guildmaster. “These crates are council‑sealed,” Bjorulf raps out. “You scuff those marks, you answer at the lawstone. We’re not running dock‑thief scraps here. This is war stock. The jarl’s war stock.”
Knutr feels the hairs rise along his arms. Council‑sealed. Lawstone threats. Those are not phrases tossed around by smugglers eager to stay unseen. Those are the words of a man who believes the law is a cloak on his shoulders, not a blade at his throat.
Ragnarolf’s jaw tightens. He can picture Bjorulf there in the dark. Broad as a gatepost, eyes bright with that greedy hunger he’s seen in the forge, but now bolstered by something worse than coin: permission. Authority. “Not excuses,” Bjorulf had said. The jarl wants steel, not excuses.
Once, Ragnarolf had heard that same line in a war‑meet, from a commander whose word came straight from the high seat. To hear it echoed in a sea cave stinks of rot in the beams.
Beside him, Knutr’s cursed hand flares with a thin, needling pain, as if the veins themselves wince at each command. “He’s not hiding from them,” Knutr whispers, half to himself. “They’re hiding behind him.”
Shares in a larger game
Then the second voice cuts in, educated, precise, almost bored, as if this whole business were nothing more than ink and sand on a clerk’s board. It corrects Bjorulf on ledger terms and shipment counts, turning curses and seawet crates into columns and tallies.
“Not ‘that lot’ and ‘the others,’” it chides softly. “Shares, Ironbrand. Shares allocated to inner‑circle backers, to our…friends on the council. This row to garrison stores, this row to private armories. The quartermaster’s books will show what they must and no more.”
It speaks of “keeping tallies comfortably ignorant,” of “ensuring the jarl sees abundance in the racks while the treasury auditors see only frugality.” A dry chuckle follows. “We arm the border, we calm the war‑council’s fears, and still there is surplus for those willing to shoulder…additional risk.”
Each polished phrase lands like a hammer blow for Knutr. Under the academic cadence he hears the lawstone’s language turned sideways: oaths and ordinances twisted into shelter for thieves. Clean words wrapped around dirty work, giving shape and blessing to the rot.
Cursed metal, clean on paper
As they edge closer, a stray lantern‑glow flares through a crack, licking over stacked ingots banded in pitch‑black iron. On each, a foreign crest has been half‑chiseled away, talons and crowns blunted but not quite erased. Knutr’s cursed hand throbs in answer, a hot nail driven through spoiled flesh.
The smooth voice goes on, patient as a tutor. “Any…problem crests will vanish beneath Frostmark’s wolf‑head. Once struck and tallied, iron is iron. As for the troublesome lots, the ones old wives call ill‑starred, those go to units whose captains value results over superstition. If misfortune dogs them, well…war eats men. The bards will name it valor’s cost.”
The pattern clicks into place: foul ore laundered by stamps, ledgers, and where it’s sent to kill.
A familiar signature made flesh
The cloaked man steps nearer the light to inspect a crate, pushing back his hood with a practiced, impatient gesture, and Ragnarolf’s breath knots in his chest. The hawk‑nose, the neatly braided beard gone to iron at the chin, the thin white scar at the temple. Unmistakable. Here stands the same senior officer whose name sits at the bottom of Ragnarolf’s exile decree, the one law‑speaker Eirikr cited in dry tones as “beyond reproach” in council records, the jarl’s steady right hand in every tale. Seeing that face here, nodding along as Bjorulf outlines falsified tallies and “shares,” turns Ragnarolf’s old wound from rumor and bad luck into a deliberate cut, a knife guided by a hand he once trusted to keep the law straight.
From petty crime to sanctioned engine of war
In that cramped dark the pattern resolves, horrible in its neatness: not a greedy smith skimming coin, but a hidden artery pumping cursed and foreign iron straight into Frostmark’s war‑racks under council seal. Strike here, Ragnarolf understands, and he does not merely fell a criminal; he tugs a live vein that runs through war‑council benches, quartermaster rolls, oath‑stones, even his own damned exile writ. One wrong pull, one loud word in the wrong ear, and the cloth does not mend: it tears, folding Bjorulf, their nameless patron officer, and any would‑be accusers together in the same noose of treason.
The sound of Bjorulf’s voice reaches them first as a rough murmur in the stone, not from the forge‑road above but from the black throat of the passage ahead. A rasping cadence of orders, punctuated by the clack of wood, the thud of weight set down, the hard, bright chime of metal on metal. The words smear and warp in the rock, but the tone is unmistakable: not bluff tavern talk, not the lazy curses of dockside hands, but a smith bellowing over work he owns.
Ragnarolf throws an arm across Knutr’s chest, halting him, then flattens himself to the damp grit. “Down,” he breathes, barely a word at all. The cold seeping through his tunic is an old, unwelcome acquaintance. Together they crawl, elbows and knees slipping on slime‑slick stone, until the tunnel kinks and a knife‑thin crack opens at eye‑level.
Lantern‑glow flickers through, a thin smear of yellow on their cheeks. The air that leaks with it is thick and close, tasting of pitch smoke and salt, of wet rope and freshly bared iron. It is not the muddled reek of some outlaw’s hidey‑hole (fish rot, cheap oil, and fear‑sweat) but something harsher and more exacting. Tar to seal, brine to preserve, metal to arm. The smell of an armory being fed, Ragnarolf thinks, and his jaw clenches until his teeth ache.
Beside him, Knutr sucks in a careful breath. The cursed hand, pressed to the stone to brace his weight, gives a faint, traitorous twitch. Heat licks along the blackened veins as if the rock itself were a forge‑floor. “There’s a lot of it,” he whispers, the words barely fogging the air. “Close.”
Ragnarolf risks an eye to the crack. Shapes move beyond. Lantern shadows, the swing of shoulders under mail, the rise and fall of stacked silhouettes. Each metallic clink comes clean and measured, counted rather than snatched. No hurried scrape of contraband being hidden, no frantic hiss of lookouts warning of trouble. Work, then. Work expected to go on undisturbed.
Above the steady racket, Bjorulf’s gravel cuts through again, clearer now, carrying the easy contempt of a man who fears no listening ears.
Ragnarolf feels the old sea‑raid instinct buckle against the years of innkeeper caution. In a back‑alley den he would already be weighing how many men, how many exits, how best to flip the table and take the room. Here, with the law’s own stink on the air, every move smells like a trap. He gestures for Knutr to steady, to listen, to learn before they think of steel.
Through the fissure they glimpse not outlaw scramble but disciplined routine. Lanterns hang at even spans along the rock, their light caught and tamed with horn shades; no wild swinging, no lurking dark. Crates sit in squared ranks, stencilled with neat rune‑marks and foreign glyphs, stacked by weight and purpose as in any quartermaster’s yard. Tally‑sticks click and turn in calloused fingers, each notch matched and murmured, then echoed back by a second voice for certainty.
Men in regulation garrison cloaks move in practiced pairs, shoulders loose, helms tipped back, trading the idle, bone‑deep complaints of soldiers on dull duty: cold joints, bad porridge, a sergeant’s temper. No lookouts posted, no blades half‑drawn; their unconcern is its own shield. They heft heavy ingots stamped with unfamiliar sigils, sliding them onto low sledges whose runners are already greased and ready to haul deeper into the earth.
On an upturned crate sits a cloaked scribe, legs comfortably braced, ledger spread on his knee. His quill rasps across oil‑waxed parchment in neat, unfussed columns, every figure entered with the easy assurance of a man whose books always balance when the lawstone calls.
Knutr’s cursed hand throbs in time with the clink of metal, a hot, needling pulse that climbs his forearm as his gaze catches the stamps on the ingots. Sharp‑edged sigils he knows from border tallies and war‑levies, from neat columns on campaign reports that never matched the tales from the field. “Those aren’t raider spoils,” he breathes, voice no louder than the scrape of cloth on stone. “That’s state steel. Muster‑marked.”
The words taste like rust. In their wake the scattered oddities he has been circling for months suddenly fall into brutal order: the “lost” shipments, the mis‑sealed crates, the petty shortages Eirikr and Lidra chased. Not rot in the rafters, but chaff. Noisy, clumsy irregularities flung into the open road to bait suspicion and give it something small, tidy, and safely explainable to gnaw.
Ragnarolf, long trained to read the twitch of a guilty crew, finds himself cataloguing absences instead of tells: no lookout posted like a cutpurse boy, no sidelong watching of the tunnel mouth, no coded knocks, no flurried shoving of tarpaulins over awkward shapes. These men stand easy, blades peace‑bound, shoulders loose, trading the bored gripes of routine duty. Bjorulf moves among them like a quartermaster, not a fence: finger‑testing seals, weighing bars with a craftsman’s indifference to whose blood will oil them, discussing quotas and delivery windows in the same tone he might use for coal allotments. The “smuggling” in the harbor (the late wagons, the mis‑tied lashings) shrivels in Ragnarolf’s mind to stage dressing, noisy fraud thrown up to draw the eye while the true theft and treason walk here under lantern‑light, clean‑handed and comfortably sure of protection.
Another pair trudges in from the seaward tunnel, sled runners squealing, a fresh crate thudding down hard enough to shake frost from the ceiling. Ragnarolf’s eye snags on the brands scorched into its lid: the jarl’s wolf‑head, clear as oath‑stone, pressed right beside a foreign crest Knutr once traced in dusty margins as the mark of “peace.” His gut knots to ice. This is no sly contraband ducking under the jarl’s notice, but metal marching openly beneath his banner, washed clean by doctored tallies and orderly columns on the quartermaster’s rolls. The jarl is either blind: or holding the other end of the ledger. Before he can spit a curse to match the thought, a deeper voice rolls along the stone, educated and measured, cutting across Bjorulf’s growl. It speaks of “shares,” “cover routes,” “deniable shipments,” with the cool precision of a man who has never swung a blade for his own bread, drawing their gaze toward the cloaked overseer whose face, when bared, will turn mere suspicion into something far more dangerous: recognition.
He steps nearer the nearest lamp to watch a crowbar worry open the crate’s lid, and in that unthinking, workmanlike motion the hood snags on a splinter and falls back. No flourish, no villain’s reveal. Just cloth slipping and a bare head turning to check the tally‑marks burned into the wood.
Knutr’s breath leaves him in a thin, involuntary hiss. Pain lances up from his blackened palm to his shoulder, sharp as if some unseen hand had driven a nail through the cursed flesh. The sight of the man’s face does it: more than the nearness of the ore, more than the foreign sigils. Recognition, spoken only in his bones.
This is no back‑alley broker in borrowed cloak. This is a man whose name sits in the first lines of orders and decrees, whose seal, wolf‑head over crossed spears, has pressed its way into half the wax Knutr has ever warmed. Hawk‑keen nose, cheeks scraped clean as a priest’s, dark hair braided close to the skull in the sober fashion of the inner circle. The thin silver torque at his throat glints in the lamplight, stamped with the jarl’s own hall‑knot. A voice accustomed to being heard over feast benches and in the echoing hush before council oaths; Knutr has heard it pronounce tariffs, ship‑levies, the grain‑share due from outlying farms.
He has watched that profile from the edges of long tables, an honorable line cut against firelight as the man rose to speak of vigilance and the burden of command. He has taken down his dictated judgments in a careful, cramped hand, back when Knutr’s fingers still answered him without black sparks of pain. To see that same fine‑cut face here, frowning not over muster tallies but over the depth of a contraband crate, makes the stone under Knutr’s boots feel suddenly thin, as if hollowed by old water. The curse in his hand bites harder with every heartbeat, as though his dead kin clawed from within, spitting their own wordless verdict on the officer’s presence in this place.
For Ragnarolf it lands a heartbeat later, not as Knutr’s scholar’s shock but as something heavier, dragging up from a different firelit memory. Not the great hall with its long tables and jesting voices, but the cold open space before the lawstone, breath smoking from a hundred watching mouths. There, years ago, the same officer had stood just off the speaker’s shoulder, hands folded, jaw set in that carved‑from‑oak stillness while Ragnarolf’s doom was spoken and the carver’s chisel ticked each word into the stone. No triumph, no pity. Only that mild, unreadable gaze resting on him like an accounting mark, as if exile and dishonor were no more than a line adjusted on some invisible tally.
Now, in the cave’s murk, that voice has shed all its public gravitas. It moves soft and matter‑of‑fact through the lamplight, discussing “keeping our hands clean,” “using intermediaries,” “clear chains of blame,” as if men and oaths and drowned foreigners were coins you could stack and spend. Hearing it here, applied to cursed ore and foreign steel, Ragnarolf feels something in his chest twist. Not surprise, but the bitter click of pieces sliding into place.
Pressed tight to the damp rock, they listen while the officer sketches ruin as if planning a harvest. His voice stays smooth, almost bored, as he stacks the fall‑men in tidy order: first nameless dockhands, faceless in the fog; then “overzealous quartermasters” with their ink‑blotted ledgers; perhaps, if need presses hard, some loud‑mouthed petty captain greedy enough to have earned no friends. The blame, he assures Bjorulf, will break and run downhill long before it laps at the boots of the inner circle. He speaks of “acceptable losses” in coin and in men, his tone making no distinction between spilled silver and spilled blood. Bjorulf only grunts, promises no tally, no brand, no scrap of parchment will ever point past his forges.
Knutr’s jaw tightens as he hears his own craft reduced to an instrument for washing sin from ledgers: the officer remarks that once the ore is “properly refashioned,” no smith in Frostmark could swear which campaign any given blade bled for, nor which border‑truce its metal once betrayed. To him, the faint, wrong‑coloured sheen in the ingots is merely another hazard to be priced and layered beneath assurances and scapegoats. To Knutr, every offhand mention of “taint” plucks at the buried oath that blackened his hand, each clinical word setting his nerves alight as if his dead kin were being weighed and melted down alongside the foreign steel.
For Ragnarolf, each phrase strikes like a hammer on half‑healed bone, recasting the night his crew died. The failed expedition that branded him oath‑breaker becomes, in that cold cadence, not mischance or botched courage but a trial run, a proof of concept. If a raid falters, if a convoy vanishes into fog and blood, it is merely another entry on a tally: ships and men burned as kindling to keep the true patrons’ hands unsinged. The weight of it settles in his gut. His exile was never an unlucky eddy in the jarl’s war, but an early, expendable piece in the same design now feeding cursed and foreign steel into Frostmark beneath the pious mask of loyal service.
The officer’s voice, precise and almost bored, drifts through the fissure as he parcels out damnation like winter rations. He names specific cohorts and captains. No faceless masses here, but men and women Ragnarolf has poured ale for, drill‑sergeants Lidra has cursed beside the yard, badges Eirikr has copied onto orders. Elite border companies set to hold the high passes when the snows break. Handpicked raiding crews whose longships bear the jarl’s carved beast‑heads. A favored ring of hearth‑guards who sleep within shouting distance of the great hall doors. Those whose steel the jarl trusts most, those whose victories are sung loudest at the feast‑boards.
“These blades go where outcomes matter,” the officer says. “Where an extra heartbeat of sharpness decides which song is sung.”
He stresses again that the arms must be indistinguishable from standard issue once they reach the racks: lengths and balances matching the fortress tallies, grips wrapped by the same apprentices, peened tangs and rivets in the same unassuming patterns. No foreign maker’s runes half‑filed and lingering, no odd weight to twitch in an old warrior’s hand. Only a quiet edge that “performs better when it matters,” honed a fraction keener, holding bite a breath longer in frozen bone and boiled leather.
“This is not about show,” he goes on, almost irritated. “No jeweled hilts. No clever inlays. The jarl must look into the yard and see nothing amiss. When they lay these blades beside any others, they must swear they are all one brood.”
Below the words sits a colder condition: if some units falter, if some captains’ men fall strangely quick while others carve through the melee, the difference must be put down to luck, training, the gods’ whim. The metal itself is to move like a rumor in a crowded hall.
Bjorulf answers with a low, purring certainty, the sound of a man lecturing apprentices rather than conspiring treason. He sketches the process in broad, confident strokes: these ingots will not move as ingots for long. They will be shattered, slagged down in his great hearths, melted into the same sullen glow as honest Frostmark iron. Layer by layer they’ll be folded with scrap from broken mail, rust‑flaked axeheads, bent hinges from the keep’s own gates, until no lawspeaker, no rival master with file and chisel, could swear which shard once bore a foreign king’s stamp or a grave‑priest’s rune.
He grows almost playful as he speaks of quenching. “We’ll give the ghosts their due,” he says, listing “appropriate symbols” on thick, scarred fingers: sea‑salt brine carried up from the fjord; water muddied with grave‑soil from old raider mounds; oil that has once been brushed across ancestor pillars in the shrine. His journeymen murmur at that, one making a quick warding sign. Bjorulf only laughs, promising any curse will be thinned like smoke on the wind, spread so fine it cannot find purchase on the hands that sign the orders.
The officer shifts to timing and cover as if moving pieces on a gaming board, outlining ledgers already bent to the purpose: hull repairs logged for merchant cogs that never touched Frostmark’s piers, replacement spearheads and arrow‑heads charged to forest patrols still marching with last season’s gear. Warehouse tallies have been “corrected” in advance, gaps buried beneath the noise of winter shortages and long‑delayed shipments from inland bloomeries. All “trials,” he insists, must conclude before the snows rot along the passes and the next border clash flares. That coming violence is to serve as proving ground and advertisement both; if the chosen companies carve through their foes with unsettling ease, then larger, quieter consignments will ride the armory cycles thereafter, unremarked.
They speak of “seasoning” the jarl’s chosen warbands, salting his favored cohorts with blades that bite a breath deeper, while the ledgers swear every company bears equal steel. Let others die with dull iron so the contrast looks like fate, training, the gods’ whim. If these trials please, the officer murmurs, wider issue follows, any balky tale dismissed as shield‑wall gossip and battlefield fog.
As talk loops back to “shares,” “paper shields,” and which quills will stain which ledgers, Ragnarolf and Knutr grasp the true forge‑fire at work: not some rogue smith skimming from the jarl, but a blessed‑by‑silence scheme feeding foreign, possibly cursed iron straight into Frostmark’s ribs while every scrap of writing points elsewhere. When Bjorulf and the officer calmly discuss caving in side passages, torching records, and hanging blame on “over‑eager underlings” if questions come, both men see how any blunt strike at the smith would only give the higher hands excuse to butcher witnesses, salt the ashes, parade a scapegoat at the lawstone, and claim the jarl’s house has cleansed itself of rot even as the true rot tightens.
Knutr’s first instinct is to recoil. The words “acceptable losses” slide from the officer’s tongue like grease from a slaughter‑table, and “paper shields” lands with the soft rustle of a shroud. His gorge rises all the same. This is how they do it, he thinks. Turn men into numbers, graves into columns, oaths into ink. The old stories never spoke in ledgers, only in blood and waves and the hard weight of a vow, but somewhere between saga and seal these men have found the space to hide.
Heat flares along the blackened veins of his left hand as the officer skirts the truth of past raids, speaking around them the way a man circles a rotten plank on a pier. Each polished evasion rasps against the unhealed oath in Knutr’s bones. The curse bites like tongs on bare flesh, bright and clean and undeniable. They lied this way about us, he thinks, jaw locking. They lied about the drowned and the taken, about what came up from the deep and what they hammered into steel, and my kin swallowed the lies because it was easier than tearing up the beams they stood on.
The urge to jerk his hand from the rock, to scramble back up the tunnel and away from the officer’s voice, is almost overwhelming. But the worse the pain, the clearer it makes things. The curse is not punishing him for hearing the lies; it is ringing against them, like a struck anvil, pointing. These are the same twists of tongue and tally that blackened his line in the first place. If he flees now, he will be leaving the same rot untouched, letting it burrow deeper into Frostmark’s foundations and his own.
A thin, grim understanding settles where his panic had been. If there is any road at all toward cleansing his bloodline, toward easing the fire in his hand and stilling the whispers of drowned kin, it will not be through private apologies hammered out in some back‑alley forge. It will be through dragging this kind of careful deceit into the cold air of the lawstone, forcing the lies about raids and metals and “necessary losses” to stand naked before ancestors and living witnesses alike.
He presses his scorched palm harder to the damp stone, welcoming the fresh spike of agony as a whetstone for his resolve. Every evasive phrase, every coy reference to past actions “better left unwritten,” he catalogs with an engineer’s precision and a smith’s stubbornness, mapping them against old rumors and half‑burned records in his memory. He begins to see a pattern of raids left off official rolls, of strange ore arriving on unnamed hulls, of his family’s disgrace occupying a perfectly convenient gap in the tale.
They thought my house would carry the stain quietly, he realizes. That a cursed name makes a fine lightning‑rod for blame.
If that stain is ever to be lifted, he will have to prove whose hands truly carried the soot.
The thought terrifies him. It steadies him too. For the first time, the curse’s gnawing feels less like blind punishment and more like a goad, a hard ancestor’s hand between his shoulders shoving him toward the truth. Exposing this, properly may be the only hammer‑blow strong enough to crack the rusted chain around his blood.
Ragnarolf, chewing on the bitter revelation that the same measured voice arranging tonight’s offload also signed him into exile, feels years of shame tilt on their axis. The memory of that day at the lawstone comes back not as a blur of fury, but in sharp, humiliating detail: the officer’s careful wording, the way he never quite met Ragnarolf’s eye, the way the charge had been framed as “regrettable necessity” and “for the safety of the jarl’s house.” He had carried that phrasing like a brand, told himself that somewhere in it lay his own failure: too slow, too soft, too careless with plans and loyalties.
Now, in the damp dark, hearing that same voice haggle over crate‑counts and deniable routes, he understands that his disgrace was never the point, only the wrapping. The raid, the dead heir, the outcry: useful storms to sail a different cargo beneath. His name, his honor, his crew’s bones on a foreign shore had all been tallied and spent to clear space for this: a clean ledger and a dirty vein of metal running unseen into Frostmark’s heart.
The more they listen, the clearer the hierarchy hardens in Ragnarolf’s mind like cooling steel: Bjorulf barking about weights and balance, berthing depths and how long a half‑loaded hull can ride a winter swell without drawing notice, while the officer’s voice glides above, calmly assigning which cargoes will be logged as “border tithes,” which as “salvaged spoils” from raids that never quite happened. Men and ships reduced to entries on a slate. Yet beneath both tones runs the same refrain (“as the council wills,” “if the council is satisfied,” “the council bears the risk”) a faceless, plural authority never named, never described. It hangs in the air like a shield held just out of sight, the thing they intend to hide behind when the cut rope finally snaps.
When talk turns to “closing the lower throat” and “letting the sea finish what the rock began,” Knutr understands with a sick lurch that the tunnel they crouch in is already written into their ledgers as a dying vein. After one last, fatter cargo-run, they mean to drown it, men, crates, pilfered ore, and any screaming witness, under a planned fall of stone and black water. Any alarm now, any panicked rush or clumsy strike, would only make them pull that cord early, sealing proof and bodies alike in a cold, unmarked grave beneath the fjord.
Resolve hardens between them like quenched steel. They will not spend their fury on crates and hirelings tonight, but on the joists of the scheme itself. Ragnarolf traces, in silence, how these hidden tides feed Frostmark’s armories and winter feasts; Knutr ghosts binding and counting-runes into stone, a buried testimony that can later be summoned at the lawstone to haul smith, officer, and the faceless “council” into daylight before they can bury their own spoor.
As the haggling grinds on, coin-shares, risk-shares, which losses can be written off as “storm‑fall” and which must never be spoken of, Ragnarolf lets his breathing slow until it matches the drip of unseen water and the faint suck of the tide below. He fixes every detail as if he were laying out boats along a hostile shore.
The officer’s voice first: smooth as oiled leather, with that clipped, educated lilt that comes from reciting law at the jarl’s table, not shouting orders in sleet. A fractional catch on certain consonants, a habit of ending bargains with a soft “mm” instead of a word. The way he favors his left leg when he shifts weight, plant‑drag‑set; an old spear wound, Ragnarolf judges, or a break poorly mended. The smell drifting with him: good wool and sealed ink, a faint trace of hall‑smoke, not the barracks’ sour reek.
He notes the cut of the cloak, the quality of the brooch, the gleam of a signet ring when the man gestures toward the stacked cargo. Not gaudy; a man who knows his rank is secure enough to whisper rather than roar. A man whose signature could exile another with a stroke and sleep well after.
His gaze tracks to the nearest open crate, where an ingot’s edge catches torchlight. The crest stamped there is foreign, wrong as a southern god on an ancestor stone: a three‑tined crown over a broken wave. Ragnarolf files it away beside snatches of tavern talk about uneasy truces and missing patrols, tying this quiet transaction to banners he has seen flapping on far, hostile masts.
He lays it all out in his mind as once he mapped a raiding coast: the narrow approach, the hidden shoals, the fat warehouse on the hill. Voice, limp, ring, crest, phrases like “council cover” and “border adjustments” become skerries and sandbars, markers to steer by later when there is time to strike.
Below and slightly ahead, Knutr crouches lower, shifting so the rock itself swallows the tiny rasp of his boots. His cursed hand hovers near a chiseled seam where dressed stone gives way to rougher, older rock. The air there feels…thicker. Wrong.
He inches his black‑scarred fingers closer until they almost brush the place where seawater has seeped and dried in a thin, salty crust. Pain answers at once, sharp and climbing: first a prickle under the skin, then a hot, needling burn that lances up his arm and sinks claws behind his eye.
He does not flinch. The curse has its own language, and this is a word he has learned too well.
There, behind the damp, he can taste the echo of what lies boxed and tarred in the shadows: the same tainted lineage of metal his forefathers stole from drowned temples and foreign war‑shrines, the same ore that blackened their name in saga and in law. The same strangeness that set his own veins alight the night he first forged with it and woke screaming to find his hand burned from within.
The foreign crest on the ingot is only a surface mark. Beneath it, the metal sings the older tune his line is chained to. It hums through bone and blood, through whatever thin thread ties him to the whispering dead at his back.
Another spike of heat climbs toward his shoulder, and with it comes a flicker at the edge of hearing: half‑formed words, a chorus of drowned kin muttering about broken oaths and debts unpaid. He forces them down, focusing instead on the cold mathematics of it: if this ore is here, in Bjorulf’s crates, under an officer’s eye, then the rot is not at the margins. It is in the spine of Frostmark itself, running through armories and ship‑chains, through contracts sealed under the jarl’s roof.
He and Ragnarolf had guessed as much. The burning in his hand is not revelation so much as confirmation, branded doubly deep.
Knutr grits his teeth and holds his palm close to the seam a moment longer, memorizing the feel of it, the strength of the pull. Then he eases back by slow inches, careful not to scrape leather on stone. Above them, the bargaining drones on, shares, deniability, councils and storms, but down here the truth is simpler, cleaner.
The metal that ruined his bloodline, and helped ruin Ragnarolf’s name, is flowing unseen beneath Frostmark like a poisoned vein. Now he knows its taste. Now he knows where it runs.
When the men turn away to tally crates, Knutr presses his blackened fingers deeper into the shadowed crevice, feeling out the faint tool‑marks where some long‑dead mason once worried at the stone. Into those old scars he nests his own, tracing compact, almost invisible runes that ride the grain instead of cutting across it. Date‑staves first, knotted to this moon and this tide; then weight‑marks in the terse shorthand of guild tallies; then a pared‑down image of the foreign crest: three tines and a broken wave reduced to the barest strokes, enough for recognition by any law‑speaker who knows how to look.
Last, more carefully than all the rest, he inscribes a binding phrase in the older script his tutors warned him never to use for trade: words that tie place, metal, and named men together, an oath‑knot that, if spoken aloud at the lawstone, will drag ancestor‑witness to stand with whoever dares accuse.
Each stroke costs him a fresh spike of pain, nerves flaring as if the rock itself were hot iron under his hand, but he grits his teeth and works on. Ink can be scraped from parchment, tablets shattered, ledgers conveniently lost to “hearth‑fire” or “rat‑gnaw.” This, once set, will sink into the cave’s memory, harder to burn than any book, waiting in the dark for the day someone calls it to speak.
Ragnarolf, meanwhile, silently counts heads, weapons, and routes: how many men ring the skiff, which wear good mail and which only padded jerkins, how often the lookout at the tunnel mouth lets his gaze blur and his shoulders sag. He marks who stands easy with their back to the black water and who pointedly does not. He traces where the torch‑glow leaves blind corners, where wet rock might turn a rush of feet into a killing slide, how long the tide takes to suck and slap between each exposed ledge.
He files away the officer’s offhand talk of “the next convoy before the thaw” and named feasting days in the jarl’s hall, already seeing the crates walk in as tribute and walk out again as “repairs” and “gifts,” washed clean by ale and applause.
By the time the last crate screeches onto the skiff, they have tallied the night’s truer plunder: a name to pin to the smooth officer’s voice, a face to match the seal on Ragnarolf’s exile decree; a pattern of mixed foreign and tainted ore; a calendar of sailings and feast‑day “deliveries” that knots smithy, harbor, and inner keep into one pulsing vein. Ragnarolf can already see how Eirikr will follow that vein through contracts and manifests, how Lidra can corner lazy captains with dates, weights, and crests they cannot shrug off as rumor, how Hrod’s quiet tallies of missing mail and blades will suddenly click into place once he knows which numbers have been salted. Threads, all of them. And in the right hands, threads can strangle without anyone daring to name it treason until the noose is shut.
Only when the skiff shoves off and the voices thin to a murmur under the slap of oars do Ragnarolf and Knutr ease back from the crack, muscles cramped and lungs burning from held breath. They leave nothing disturbed but ash‑smudged runes and the tight‑fisted weight of what they’ve learned; no stolen bar to betray them, only a carefully hoarded hoard of knowledge. Ragnarolf risks one last look at the dim smear of torchlight on water, then taps Knutr’s shoulder. Together they begin the long, silent withdrawal through the sweating dark, bearing their invisible plunder toward allies who will know how to spend it without bringing Frostmark down in the spending.
Ragnarolf sets a steady pace through the sweating-dark, one hand skimming the tunnel wall, counting heartbeats between the dull hammer-thuds bleeding down from Bjorulf’s forge. Each blow is a reminder that the man who ruined him works unsuspecting above, close enough to feel in the stone, far enough that steel would be useless now. The rock is slick with centuries of seep and old smoke, cold enough that his fingertips burn. He breathes slow and shallow, matching the rhythm he once kept in a shield‑wall, when panic meant you died and calm meant the man next to you might live.
The tunnel stinks of damp earth and old coal, with a sour under-smell of rat and forgotten offal. His boots slosh through thin films of black water, the sound swallowed almost at once. Overhead, the hammers ring again: fainter now, then strong as the stroke of a war drum when the tunnel curves back beneath the smiths’ row. Ragnarolf notes the swell and fade of the noise, marking in his mind where the roof lies closest to Bjorulf’s domain, where stone might crack if someone ever wanted it to.
He forces himself not to imagine it: the roof giving way, the great smith plunged into his own coals, justice delivered by falling rock and blind chance. That would be the raider’s answer. Storm the hall, take the head, damn the consequences. Instead, he measures paces, counts cross‑tunnels, notes every crumbling brick and rusted support pin. Places a man could hide. Places contraband could be dragged off the main way and lost.
His thumb finds a notch in the wall. A deliberate chisel mark, not the lazy scratch of time. He pauses just long enough to trace it, committing its angle and depth to memory. Someone has mapped this place before him. Bjorulf, or one of his runners. Or someone older, from the days when jarls planned for sieges and needed secret doors to the sea.
The air thickens, warmer with each step, carrying the ghost of furnace heat that should not reach so deep. Ragnarolf tastes iron on his tongue and knows, without seeing, that somewhere ahead the tunnel widens into a chamber where metal has passed often, in weight enough to tilt a war.
He swallows the urge to turn back and drag Bjorulf into the dark by the beard. Not yet. Not while the law is blind and the walls still stand. Information first. Witness first. Axes later.
He shifts his grip on the tunnel stones, letting his palm slide over them like a man greeting kin. Here, in the hidden bones beneath Frostmark, he understands the shape of things better than in the bright, lying light of the great hall. Up there, they call him exile and innkeeper. Down here, counting heartbeats under the ring of a guilty hammer, he feels again like what he was: a man who knows how to read a coast, a current, a way in and, if luck holds, a way out.
Behind him, Knutr’s limp grows more pronounced, the drag‑step of his right foot scuffing a counter‑rhythm to Ragnarolf’s measured pace. The cursed hand is the anchor of it, blackened veins pulsing with each heartbeat, a slow, ugly throb that seems to answer the distant ringing from above. He keeps the ruined fingers curled tight against his chest, elbow locked in close as if he’s afraid the hand might betray him of its own will. Sweat beads along his hairline despite the chill, catching coal‑dust and tunnel grime until his face looks as smudged as any forge‑slave’s.
When his control slips and his knuckles brush the stone, the rock hisses faintly, as if offended. An ashy smear blooms where skin met wall: pale grey at first, then darkening along spider‑fine lines that echo the branching of his veins. Knutr lets it happen more often than he needs to. A stumble here, a steadying touch there. Each mark is half accident, half intent: a ghost‑script only he will later know how to read, a trail of curse‑burn and rune‑ash proving that forbidden metal has been driven like a splinter beneath Frostmark’s skin.
The first time they halt is at a sudden rattle of boots overhead and the scrape of something heavy dragged across stone. Ragnarolf’s fist snaps up, sharp as a knife‑hand on a longship bench, and both men freeze, breath caged in their chests, listening. Dust filters from the ceiling in slow, lazy grains that sting his eyes; a tiny pebble ticks off his shoulder and skips into the black water at their feet. The scrape resolves, by inches, into the mundane clatter of a guard changing post, a muttered curse, the thunk of a spear‑butt against flagging. Ragnarolf forces himself to wait three full hammer‑blows longer than caution demands, jaw clenched, before he risks another step and looses his breath.
The second halt cuts colder. A knife‑thin breath of winter spills from a narrow vent where pallid torch‑glow wavers far above, laying a trembling bar of gold across the tunnel filth. Ragnarolf palms Knutr’s shoulder and flattens them into the damp shadow, feeling the smith shudder as the nearness of worked iron overhead sends his blackened hand flaring, veins burning like buried wire. Voices drift down, blurred orders, a tired laugh, the scrape of mail, close enough that a single cough would damn them. Ragnarolf counts heartbeats, waits for the light to sway on, for boots to fade into stone‑muffled distance. Only when darkness settles thick again does he ease them forward, silent as thieves in a burial mound.
The tunnel finally yawns wider even as the ceiling stoops, forcing Ragnarolf into a bent, half‑crawling lope. The air knives thin and salt‑bitten into his lungs; ahead, the sea‑cave mouth glimmers, star‑shiver broken on black water. They halt just inside the lip, swallowed in rock, taking in fjord and faint harbor‑lamps. Sanctuary and snare in one. Ragnarolf tastes wind and current with a raider’s tongue, gauges watch‑fires and wall‑lines, then nudges Knutr toward the shadowed skiff, knowing that once they cross that silvered strip there will be no more stone or darkness to hide them if any eye chances their way.
As they shove off, the skiff’s hull grates once against hidden stone: loud as a war‑drum in Ragnarolf’s ears. The sound rings up through his boot‑soles, a harsh, splintering shriek that to any harbor watchman would be nothing, but to a man who has slipped chains and surf at midnight feels like a confession shouted to every wall. He bites back a curse, jaw locking, and throws his weight with the easy, bone‑taught balance of longship days, letting the skiff roll with the scrape instead of fighting it. The little craft shudders, then rocks free into deeper water.
Knutr staggers with the jolt, one hand flying to the gunwale. His fingers clamp down hard enough to whiten the knuckles of his good hand; the other is a shadowed claw of tendon and blackened veins, every line along it flaring like coal‑threads dragged from the forge. Pain lances up his arm and into his shoulder, sharp as a spike driven between bones. He sucks in a breath through his teeth and holds it, refusing the groan that wants out.
“Easy,” Ragnarolf murmurs, under his breath, not daring more than the single word. His eyes never leave the slit of fjord beyond the cave mouth, where moonlight lies in broken shards on the chop and every shard might hide a prow.
Above, the harbor’s horn‑call rolls over the water, a low, mournful note drawn out until the stone seems to hum with it. The sound presses into the cave, flattening their small noises beneath its weight. Both men go still as reefed sails. Knutr’s gaze snaps up toward Frostmark’s looming walls, their black angles cut clean against the ragged clouds. In his mind’s eye he sees spearpoints sprouting along the parapets, mail flashing, silhouettes leaning out with bows half‑drawn and bored faces turned suddenly sharp with interest.
The cursed veins in his hand throb in time with the horn, a sick drumbeat. Somewhere in that distant maze of stone, coils of iron chain and heaps of forged blades lie piled in armories, and the nearness of so much worked metal scrapes against his curse like whetted steel on bone. For an instant he is certain the call is for them alone, that some watchman has scented guilt on the wind and loosed the note as a summons to close the jaws.
Ragnarolf feels old instincts hitch tight: muscle memory screaming to duck under oars, to run for open sea, to meet alarm with speed or steel. But there is nowhere to run that has not already been measured, weighed, and judged by the keep on the heights. He forces his breathing slow, counting in the quiet space between echoes, and keeps his hands gentle on the oar as if soothing a spooked horse.
“Hold,” he breathes, so soft the word barely disturbs the mist at his lips. The skiff drifts, a dark sliver half‑swallowed by the cave’s mouth, while the horn’s last threads unspool across the fjord and fray into silence. Only then does he let the next heartbeat come.
A second horn answers, higher and shorter, and Ragnarolf’s knot of dread loosens by a fraction. Different rhythm. Not the hawk‑cry that meant boats cut loose, not the triple blast that had once sent him running for shield and oar. “Watch change,” he mutters, low and certain, as much to anchor Knutr as himself. Names it, cages it.
The wind veers, a knife‑edge gust sliding off the cliff, and the skiff’s nose swings out from the cave’s shadow. Pale moon‑glare licks along wet planks and the worn leather of Ragnarolf’s seax hilt, turning the simple blade at his hip into a bright, accusing line. Too loud, that glimmer. Too much like a signal. He forces his fingers to ease, peeling them from the hilt one by one until his hand rests flat on the thwart. Steel won’t help them here. Not against walls and horns and a dozen bored men grateful for any excuse to shout alarm.
He snaps the small sail half up, careful and slow, letting the canvas catch just enough of the fickle wind to nudge them across the silvered lane toward the fjord’s deeper band. Not bold, not skulking. Only another fisher’s boat taking advantage of the tide, nothing for an idle guard’s eye to linger on. The mast gives a soft, familiar creak, and the skiff begins to ghost along, sliding between moon‑shards like a shadow that has remembered how to move.
Lantern‑light flares across the water as a patrol boat noses along the chain‑boom, its hull bumping soft against ice‑slick timber, oars creaking like tired bones in a crypt. Frost‑fat iron links sag between the posts, each ring rimed white and singing a low, teeth‑set hum in Knutr’s cursed hand. The blackened veins along his palm writhe, answering metal with a pulse of fire; he hisses between his teeth, jaw clenched, knuckles whitening as he fights the sudden, sick urge to clutch his chest where the pain seems to echo in his ribs.
Ragnarolf catches the twitch in the corner of his eye and, without comment or wasted motion, feathers the tiller. He eases them back into the cliff’s deeper shadow, loosing the sail entirely so the canvas flutters down and the skiff surrenders to current. They yaw broadside, no purposeful prow, no cutting wake. Just another jag of darkness broken out from the rock’s uneven face. The lantern’s glow washes past in wavering bands, touching slick stone and tossing ice, but the skiff lies still as a drowned log, its men swallowing breath and curse alike.
The patrol draws so near that Ragnarolf can pick out frost in the guardsmen’s beards, the weary slump of shoulders that have leaned on too many spear‑shafts. Their grumbling carries clear: bitter shifts, thin ale at the Road’s End, a forge‑coughing smith who never sends spears on time. One man lifts the lantern higher, its beam sawing the black water in a slow, methodical arc. Ragnarolf narrows his world to that swing of light and the soft slap of waves on timber, holding his breath as he once did on a boarding rail, counting the rhythm of enemy strokes, measuring the exact heartbeat when the glow must pass over them. Or catch and cling.
The lantern’s glow skims just short of the skiff, glare swallowed by ripples against the rock, then swings outward to probe the fjord toward the scattered skerries. “Smugglers in every shadow, they say,” one voice scoffs, already bored; another laughs about fat fines and thin pay. The patrol’s oars dip again, turning the boat back toward the harbor lights. Only when the last horn‑note fades and the chain‑boom’s bulk lies between them and Frostmark does Ragnarolf dare breathe fully. He raises the sail once more, feeling the current take them, and the skiff slides silent toward the jagged teeth of the outer rocks and the narrow, ice‑slick strand that will put them back under the keep’s looming shadow by land, ghosts slipping in by the back way.
The climb up from the strand is brutal. Frozen scree that slides treacherous under heel, crusted snow that takes weight one step and crumbles the next, and always the faint, hollow grind of surf far below, like teeth working bone. Wind slaps up the cliff‑face in icy gusts, snatching at cloaks and the edges of Ragnarolf’s hood, driving needles of blown frost into any scrap of exposed skin.
He goes first, as he always has on bad ground, testing each foothold with his weight before committing, shoulders hunched to present the smallest target to any stray eye above. His fingers, already numbed, find old cuts in the rock, places where sheep once came and raiders before them, but age and ice have widened them treacherously. He grunts once as a slab shifts, sending a clatter of pebbles into blackness; he freezes, muscles locked, until the rattle fades into the sea’s distant roar.
Lidra comes after, close enough that the toe of her boot nearly touches his heel when they pause. Shield slung across her back, spear lashed down, she climbs like a woman used to heaving herself up ship‑sides in a gale, but her eyes never stop moving. They rake the dark slope above for the silhouette of a sentry against starlight, for the flicker of a patrol’s lantern, for the sudden, betraying glint of helm or spearhead along the lower road.
Behind them, Knutr’s breath saws harsh, not only from the climb. Whenever his cursed hand brushes stone near where the buried tunnel runs unseen, pain flares bright; blackened veins knot and tighten, and he has to bite off a hiss. The cliff itself seems to resonate with the memory of the ore he’s disturbed below, a faint, buzzing wrongness thrumming up through his bones.
Hrod and Eirikr bring up the rear, trading the lead between them when the path narrows to a single boot’s width. More than once Hrod reaches forward, steadying Eirikr with a firm hand at his belt when loose stones skitter away. They halt as one when a distant horn barks from the harbor, sharp, questioning, and then dies without answer. Five still as carved figures on the cliff, they listen for the scrape of hurried oars or the clamor of alarm. Only the wind answers. When no second call comes, they move again, slower now, every man acutely aware that one misstep, stone or scheme, could send them pitching into the dark.
By the time they reach a half‑collapsed sheep wall overlooking the lower road, lungs burning, they drop into a crouch in its lee, five dark shapes nested among frost‑rimmed stones. The wall breaks the worst of the wind; their breath steams and curls along the rock like ghost‑smoke.
“We speak with one tongue,” Eirikr murmurs, drawing his cloak tight, voice barely louder than the scrape of wool. “At dawn I am merely the over‑diligent clerk. A procedural review of seals and tallies. A mis‑scratched rune here, a misplaced wax stamp there. No tunnels. No ore. No mention of anyone not on the rolls.” He runs through the phrasing as if before a lawstone, softening each edge that might cut too deep.
Opposite him, Hrod squints toward the faint glow of the harbor. In a level undertone he recites the faces he marked in the torch‑glare below, tying each to rank‑rings, cloak colors, habits. “Two of Bjorulf’s men in dock cloaks. The wagoner with the broken tooth. That wall‑guard who never meets the eye.”
Knutr flexes his blackened hand against the stones, jaw tight. “What lies down there is only the slag on the surface,” he says. “The true vein runs under Frostmark itself. Older than these walls. It’s in the bones of this place: and it’s waking.”
They part ways along the outer track beneath the walls, each slipping back into their accustomed skins before the keep quite notices they were anyone else. Lidra veers toward the garrison gate, rolling her shoulders back, already straightening her posture into parade‑square rigidity. By the time the torch‑wash touches her, her jaw is set, her stride all clipped purpose, rehearsing the barked orders and icy glare that will make the wagon‑master’s arrest look like nothing more than hard‑nosed discipline from a weary squad‑leader tired of fools.
Hrod lingers just long enough at her shoulder to be seen as dutiful escort, helmet under his arm, then peels off toward the barracks stairs, another tired ranker coming off a cold night. His face slackens into anonymity, steps slowing to match the shuffle of men whose only concern is warmth and stew. No one watching would guess his eyes are quietly counting sentries and noting which officers’ cloaks hang on pegs.
Ragnarolf waits until both are nearly swallowed by torchlight and shouted challenge, until their silhouettes blur into the rhythm of the gate. Only then does he turn his back to the walls and trudge toward the market square, boots loud on frozen ruts, shoulders set in the weary slump of an innkeeper who rose before dawn to haggle with fishermen and salt‑stiff traders. By the time the Road’s End lantern comes into view, his raider’s prowl has been filed down to the slow, patient gait of a man whose battles are with spilled ale and overdue tabs.
Eirikr peels away at the inner wall, disappearing through a scribe’s side door with his cloak drawn tight, the picture of a minor noble overburdened with scrolls and tedious duty, mind already arranging phrases and loopholes. Knutr, alone for the short stretch between smiths’ row and the inn, pauses once by a frost‑rimmed ancestor pillar. He rests his ruined hand against the carved runes until pain flares, whispering a half‑prayer, half‑bargain that the spirits will take tonight’s trespass as the first stroke toward mending, not another fracture in his family’s oath, and that the metal he has stirred will sleep a little longer.
Ragnarolf comes in the back way with a mumbled word for the yawning stable‑boy, shrug already shedding snow. By the time he has checked the hearth and straightened a bench, the innkeeper’s mask settles on his features like an old helm. Coals glow low, candles gutter, the room staged for Eirikr’s prim knock and Hrod’s ranker’s grumble for ale “on his way past.” When Lidra at last shoulders through the front, helm tucked under one arm, she brings the iron tang of the yard with her, but the taproom smells only of oats, smoke, and yesterday’s spilled beer. Ragnarolf drops the crossbar on shutters and door in turn. In the snug, fire‑ringed hush that follows, none of them can quite lie to themselves that this was only smugglers’ luck and crooked tallies.
The room’s warmth closes around them as they take their accustomed places, the scrape of benches and the soft clink of clay cups the only sounds for a few heartbeats. Ragnarolf moves with the easy certainty of a man who has hosted feasts and plotted raids both; he sets a small lantern on the scarred corner table and trims its wick low, thumb and knife working with unconscious care. The flame narrows to a tight, steady bead of light, enough to catch ink, scars, and the small betrayals of expression, but not to cast shadows against the shutter slats where a passer‑by might notice motion.
Beyond the door, the inn is only creaks and settling timbers, a draft fingering the main‑room coals. Here in the snug, heat gathers in the low rafters and in the wool at their shoulders. Their breaths fog faintly in the in‑between chill, quickly swallowed by the close air. For an instant the Road’s End feels less like a business and more like a war‑tent pitched on a hostile shore: a circle of tired, armed people hunched over a bare board, each laying out spoils that cannot be shown at the lawstone.
Ragnarolf takes the outside stool, his back to the wall, the habit of years at sea and in smoky halls. From here he can see all their faces, and the door besides. Lidra chooses the seat with her shield within a hand’s span, jaw working as if on gristle. Hrod sits as any off‑duty ranker might, but his shoulders angle to the table with quiet intent. Knutr rests his blackened hand flat on the plank as if to steady it, iron‑scented leather creaking softly. Eirikr shrugs off his cloak with care, folding damp wool away from the lantern’s little circle.
None of what they carry out of the tunnels and the yard is safely spoken above a murmur. Names, sigils, flashes of cursed ore and compromised orders. Weight enough to crack stone if dropped in the wrong place. For a long breath they let the silence hold it for them, listening to the faint ring of some distant hammer and the muted roll of the fjord against the harbor pilings, as though measuring whether the keep itself is listening.
Ragnarolf’s gaze moves from face to face, reading the set of Lidra’s mouth, the tightness around Eirikr’s eyes, the way Knutr’s hand already twitches near his sleeve as if feeling heat that is not from the hearth. This is not the loud, boastful reckoning of raiders drunk on silver and slaughter; this is the leaner, colder division of knowledge, each piece sharp enough to cut its bearer. Only when he is sure the shutters are firm, the door‑bar true, and the inn’s hum has sunk to the slow breathing of sleepers, does he give the smallest of nods toward the cleared space on the table. An unspoken signal, more war‑captain than taproom host, that it is time to reckon what they have taken and what it will cost.
Eirikr is first to unpack his share, unrolling a still‑damp scrap of parchment beaded with melted snow. The ink has bled in places from his haste, but his hand is neat regardless, the runes marching in tight, economical rows. He smooths the page flat with two ink‑stained fingers, careful to keep it clear of the lantern’s heat.
“Mis‑sealed,” he murmurs, more to the parchment than to the others. His stylus has already sketched the crate‑marks: the wagoner’s crude brand, the smiths’ row tally‑runes, and, here, the sigils burned into the sides of tonight’s suspect cargo. With a scholar’s detachment he wishes he still possessed, he has circled an unfamiliar crest that is not, in truth, unfamiliar at all.
“That,” he says, tapping the circle, “should only appear on shipments drawn straight from the jarl’s own reserve.”
His fingertip pauses over a particular flourish in the quartermaster’s sign: an extra hook on a stave, a habit of his own which a lazier scribe had once copied wholesale. Proof that the rot touches not just smugglers and wagon masters, but the very forms meant to guard the keep’s stores, and the hand that first taught those forms.
Hrod clears his throat, makes a show of rolling his shoulders as if shaking off the cold, and grumbles for ale in the tone of any man just off watch. Ragnarolf humors him, topping his cup, and that small, ordinary act covers the moment Hrod’s posture sharpens by a hair. He talks as the rankers do of captains strutting in fresh‑riveted mail though their stipend would barely cover new straps, of spear‑racks that empty like clockwork whenever certain wagons creak in from the forest road.
He lets his finger drift over the tabletop, dull nail sketching paths between gatehouse, outer yard, armory doors, smiths’ row, never quite touching the lantern’s circle. In that wandering line is a pattern of watches trimmed here, extended there. Just enough slack in the net for marked cargo to pass through unseen. He names no officers outright, only mentions whose lads always seem reassigned on nights when Bjorulf’s men are busiest, which sergeant prefers dice in the lower barracks instead of standing the midnight turn he’s written for. To an inattentive ear it is nothing but griping over poor discipline.
Eirikr, head slightly bowed as if merely warming his hands, follows every casual remark. In his mind, the gossip stiffens into entries and cross‑references: dates of altered rosters he has copied, odd requisitions he has witnessed, signatures that will not sit easily beside each other when laid in a neat line. What Hrod scatters like crumbs, he gathers into the first, fragile bones of accusation.
When Knutr speaks, the inn seems to lean closer, rafters creaking as the hearth‑heat thins. He names the seized ore not in weights or purity, but in how his blackened hand locked and burned when it brushed the grain. Like silt scooped from a riverbed at thaw, heavy with drowned oaths and temple‑cold. In a scholar‑smith’s murmur he ties that taste of metal to half‑forbidden sagas: foreign shrines stripped in stormlight, hoards dragged screaming from under other men’s ancestor‑stones, the ruin that followed and the curse that bit his bloodline. His scarred fingertips tap out the tunnel’s hidden run beneath Frostmark (here a bend, there a hollow) marrying Ragnarolf’s memory of side‑passages to his own pain‑pricked sense for where such iron would be buried safest, and where, if roused, it could rot walls, oaths, and men from within.
Ragnarolf adds his part last, dragging a stub of charcoal across the bare wood while Lidra quietly rolls and unrolls the leather strip of her roster, lips moving on unspoken names. He sketches the tunnel’s crooks and choke points, the shallow alcoves perfect for caches or killings, marking each with a raider’s curt signs. Cross‑slashes for blind corners, circles for echo‑traps, dagger‑runes where a single spear could hold a passage. Lidra matches inkless names to those marks, sorting in silence which of her stalwart shield‑bearers must never be set near such temptations, and which already stand too close to the stink of it to be wholly clean. When they at last push back from the scarred table, no one head bears the whole tangle. The burden lies broken along old grain, ship and forge, hall and barracks and lawstone, each of them walking away carrying only as much truth as their station, and their secrets, can plausibly bear.
They settle on the shape of their patience in few, clipped words, the sort that do not echo if the shutters are thinner than they look. No one speaks Bjorulf’s name loudly, but it sits in the middle of the table all the same, heavy as an anvil and twice as cold. Every time someone says “the forge” or “the big one on smiths’ row,” they all know whose soot‑stained shadow they truly mean.
It is not a war‑plan they draw up, but something meaner and longer: the kind of slow squeeze a winter puts on a poorly thatched roof. The aim is not to break him, not yet. A broken beam crashes loud; they want creaks and subtle sagging, the kind a proud man convinces himself he imagined. They will not rush the smithy doors with blades bare or drag wagons back to the lawstone in chains. Instead, they will lean quietly on every timber that holds his hidden hall upright and listen for which groans back.
They mark the pillars they can touch without showing their hands. The smithy itself: who goes in late, who comes out early, which apprentices start turning up with new boots and dice‑worn fingers. The ore: every cartload that smells of river‑mud and grave‑cold, every ingot that makes Knutr’s cursed hand twitch like a hooked fish. The officer’s quill: the signatures that approve those shipments, the patterns in requisitions and “lost in transit” notes that Eirikr can comb from the archives like bones out of ash.
They agree the forge, the shadow‑touched metal, and the unseen patron behind tonight’s wagon will be mapped and watched rather than stormed: pressure without open challenge, until they know which way the cracks run and whose weight, when finally dropped, will bring the whole rotten scaffold down instead of the keep with it.
Eirikr gathers the disputed seals and tally‑sticks with almost fussy care, as if afraid rough fingers might smear the story they already tell. He turns each cord and blob of wax to the light, noting the tiny flaws: a house‑mark pressed a hair off‑center, a fiber wrong for the stated warehouse, a color that belongs to the harbor reeve, not the armory. In his mind he can already see the path their ink will take once he sets quill to parchment.
His report will read like any other dry correction. Misbound bundle, miscopied weight, a clerk’s error that must be rectified before winter stock is certified. Yet he weighs each phrase the way a raider chooses a landing beach, testing for hidden rocks. He writes so that the scroll must pass across particular desks, through the hands of certain quartermasters, a captain of stores, the jarl’s grizzled law‑clerk who forgets nothing. If some high officer has begun to think Frostmark’s codes are mere decoration, Eirikr means for the parchment trail to find them like creeping frost under a door, thin at first, then biting.
Hrod excuses himself with a soldier’s shrug, muttering something about an early watch, and slips out into the barracks chill where lamps burn low and voices are thin as smoke. Frost–rim crunches under his boots; from the yard comes the distant clack of a late–night sparring bout, safely noisy. In a quiet corner by the gear racks he props his wax tablet on his knee and draws the stylus in tight, abbreviated strokes, turning tonight’s faces, cargo‑marks, and half‑heard oaths into a pattern only his distant patron can fully read. He omits names that would be ruined too soon and bends others just out of shape, trusting that far‑off eyes will see enough to prepare, but not so much they yank on the knot and tear Frostmark’s garrison apart before its rot is mapped.
On the walk back toward the forges Knutr talks only of hinges and gate‑pins, of warped gudgeons and how frost chews iron. Harmless matters for any listening ears to recall. Once alone he plunges his blackened hand into the trough; cold bites, curse bites deeper. Tomorrow he will stand at his own anvil, nodding through captain’s requests and quartermaster’s grumbles, outwardly bored. Inwardly he will count every spasm of his fingers when “fresh ore” or “replacement blades” are named, a secret measure of how close Bjorulf’s trade runs to the keep’s old bones and to his family’s buried sin.
Lidra is the last to leave by the outer door, pausing only to re‑tie the wolf‑head badge at her shoulder, armor of rank and duty and a reminder of who is watching. In the days to come she will drill her squads harder on weapon checks, demand one extra answer when a spear‑head snaps or a mail link parts too easily, and keep a quiet tally of whose gear fails too often to be chance. To Ragnarolf she gives only a brief nod before stepping into the night, but he understands: she will test the armory and the hands that draw steel from it, while he turns the Road’s End into a place where gossip, like bad metal, shows its flaws under the right strain.
Ragnarolf moves through the emptied room in a slow circuit, righting a stool where the wagon master fell, setting a spilled horn upright to drain its last sticky ring of ale. The Road’s End feels thinner without the press of bodies. Only the creak of the signboard outside answers the settling timbers, a tired old voice complaining to the wind. He stoops to gather stray rushes kicked loose in the scuffle, flicking aside a splintered chip from some panicked man’s boot‑heel, and his shoulders roll with the motion in a rhythm older than innkeeping: clear the deck, check the lines, make ready for whatever weather comes next.
He pauses by the door where Lidra vanished, fingers brushing the groove her shield‑rim has worn in the frame over long months of comings and goings. Calloused tips find the notch without looking; his hand knows the measure of her passage as well as his eye. For a breath he lets himself imagine what it would be to have her stride in as a guest and not as the jarl’s hand: mail off, wolf‑badge unpinned, only a tired woman walking in from the cold, asking for heat and stew and a place to sit where no order waits in her mouth.
In that little imagining she laughs more easily, tilts her horn without scanning the room, leans her shield in a corner where its painted wolf can sleep instead of watch. Maybe she jokes about some green recruit who froze at the horn tonight, or curses the mud in the yard, or asks him, bold as any raider, why a man with rowing scars on his palms serves ale instead of taking ships.
He knows better than to build a life on such fancies, but the thought still settles in his chest like a coal that refuses to go out. Outside, the keep mutters to itself (forge‑ring, gull‑cry, distant footfalls on stone) and he stands with his hand on the scar in the doorframe, weighing duty, desire, and the thin plank of safety his inn still offers. Then he lets the groove go, turns back to his work, and starts laying benches straight for whatever faces the next night will bring.
At the cloak‑peg he notices the sag of forgotten weight. The trader’s cloak smells of wet wool and foreign tar, a hint of some softer southern pitch under the rank of horse and smoke. Its lining is patched in tight, neat crosses with a blue‑dyed thread he has not seen sold in Frostmark’s market for three winters at least. Some man from farther west, then, or one who deals with them. He lifts the cloak down, old habit already narrowing his eyes, and thumbs along the seams and hems the way he once checked boarding‑nets for hidden hooks. Fingers seek the familiar press of a knife‑hilt, a slim stiletto sewn low for a panicked hand to snatch.
Instead his hand closes on the stamped ingot. No strange chill, no metallic taste at the back of his tongue, no whisper from unseen depths. Only the dense, workaday promise of straight iron. A thing meant for hinges, nails, plough‑shares. He exhales, a short, humorless huff that ghosts white in the cold air of the room, and sets the cloak aside for morning, when some nervous carter will shuffle in with cap in hand and a story ready‑made about lost property and over‑keen guards.
Behind the bar he turns the ingot over and over, the weight of it dragging old ghosts up through his skin. His palm remembers the bite of haft and shield‑rim, the jar of impact through ash‑wood when hull met hull in a grey, heaving sea. This is what a keep is meant to rest on, he tells himself: honest metal for ploughshares and spearheads, mail that holds when an axeblow falls, hinges that do not tear free in a storm. Not the tainted scraps Knutr flinches from, not the slyly thinned tangs and hollow‑forged blades that cost Lidra’s comrades their lives.
Outside, gulls squabble over fish‑guts, harsh cries riding the wind. From smiths’ row comes Bjorulf’s forge‑song, hammer, anvil, bellows, steady as if nothing beneath the walls has shifted, as if the night’s crawl through the gut of Frostmark were only some tavern tale. Ragnarolf weighs the little bar against that distant rhythm, against Knutr’s white‑lipped pain in the tunnel’s dark, Lidra’s hard eyes over a snapped spear, Eirikr’s careful words at the lawstone, Hrod’s watchful silence in the ranks. Iron, he thinks, should be simple. It is the hands around it that rot.
He reaches for the ledger‑board almost without thought, clearing aside tally‑stones and a half‑dried scrawl of casks and credit. The point of his seax bites the grain once, twice, a third time before his hand steadies. Slowly he carves a single binding rune. Oath‑memory, as the old law‑speakers taught, the kind that does not name the oath but remembers that it was sworn and who stood beneath it. Around it he breathes five names into the wood: his own; Lidra’s; Eirikr’s; Hrod’s half‑forgotten patronymic; Knutr’s contested house‑name that tastes of old scandal. No blood, no grand rite at an ancestor pillar, only a quiet cut on a board that has watched more truths than most witnesses at the lawstone.
When the cut is done he sets the seax down and lays the ingot across the groove like a weight on a scale, as though the metal itself were witness. The rafters creak; someone laughs far off in the night; wind pushes salt and coal‑smoke through the shutters. His exile brand throbs in remembered flesh, Bjorulf’s grip feels as solid as the stone beneath his boots. Yet the rune gleams pale in the lamplight, a splinter of defiance amid figures of debt and ale. Whatever this costs (trade lost, patrons frightened, blood on his rushes) he knows that from this night the burden of reckoning has shifted, spread across other backs that have chosen to stand beside his.