The rift valley tightened around the gathering like a clenched fist. Turf booths squatted in ranks as if they’d crawled out of the lava and decided to stay, their sod walls sweating dark in the cold. Wind worked at every seam with a patient cruelty, worrying canvas, snapping rawhide ties, dragging peat smoke into long ribbons that cut the eyes and left the tongue tasting of old fires and damp earth.
I came in under a dark cloak that had seen more salt spray than sunshine, mail biting my shoulders in the way it always did when I was too tired to ignore it. My left knuckle, split in some petty shipboard argument weeks ago, had never properly closed. The cold kept it honest: a small hurt that wouldn’t let me forget where I was and what I’d been sent to do.
Men watched without looking. That was Þingvellir: everyone pretending the open ground made them safe, everyone mapping kinship and grudges the way a sailor reads weather. Booth doors hung like half-shut mouths. Inside, you could smell sour ale, wet wool, boiled fish. Poverty dressed up for an assembly, and power hiding behind polite hospitality. A laugh went up somewhere and died quickly, like it had remembered itself.
Downwind, the market noise came in gusts: clink of weighing stones, the soft clap of a ledger closed too fast, a Low German phrase spat out and swallowed by Norse again. Foreign cloth flashed under an awning like a bruise. A trader’s voice rose, then smoothed itself when he noticed whose men were standing close.
I kept my eyes on the lanes between booths, the little cuts in the crowd where an ambush could bloom and be denied. The rifts made their own rules here. A man could vanish behind a sod wall, step down into black rock shadow, and come up with a new story and a clean blade. I’d been ordered to quiet a dispute tied to trade, but the valley didn’t do quiet. It only did waiting.
At Lögberg the Lawspeaker stood like a post driven into bad weather, and his voice did the work of a drum. It didn’t have to be loud. The rift walls threw it back clean and cold, and the Öxará answered underneath with its thin hiss, like iron cooling in water.
He recited names the way a man counts blades after a fight, slow, certain, making sure nothing went missing. Wergild. Boundary stones. Old verdicts dragged up and dusted off as if the dead still cared about procedure. Each clause landed with a calm that pretended to be mercy. It wasn’t. It was a knife kept sheathed for appearances.
Men listened with their faces still and their eyes busy. You could see the kin-ties tightening in their throats when a familiar patronymic came up. A cousin’s name could turn the air sour in a breath. A disputed line of descent, a question of who owed who for what summer’s blood, and the crowd leaned in. Hungry to taste violence without taking the risk of swinging first.
I kept my hands under my cloak and watched who watched whom. The law was only words, but words could start a killing just as neatly as steel.
Downwind, Hrafnsey’s awnings snapped and worried at their lashings like shipcloth that wanted the sea back. The market was a cramped little labyrinth built out of barrels, bales, and bad intentions, with lanes just wide enough for a man to brush shoulders and pretend it was an accident. Foreign measures rang against the duller talk of Icelandic hand-scales and home-cut stones. Tar and brine lived in the wool; sour ale lived in the breath of men leaning too close. Every booth had a chest with a lock that looked brave and a guard who didn’t. Smiles were traded like coin, and each one had a ledger behind it: who owed, who could collect, who would bleed if the counting turned.
Men drifted in tight little knots where the ground did the spying for them: by the Öxará ford, along the rift’s black lip where a man could listen without being seen. They counted crossings like debts: who stepped into whose booth, who shared ale, who wore a spear like an argument instead of a staff. Every hand hovered near a seax, casual as prayer, ready to turn pious in a heartbeat.
Rumor ran ahead of the carts and never paid toll. Men spoke of sickness in the careful half-voice used for bad luck, of a healer slipping between booths at hours when only thieves and prayers were awake. Marriages were offered like clipped silver. Peace bought cheap, paid later in flesh. Deals were murmured over sour ale, and every gaze kept drifting back to Lögberg, weighing how much truth a man could name before it turned into a charge.
I came onto the assembly ground with road-grit ground into my seams and a damp weight in my cloak hem where I’d kissed too many streams on the way in. The mail under it had gone stiff with cold, like it resented being asked to play at peace. I didn’t stop to take in the booths the way boys do when they first see Þingvellir. Turf walls hunched against the wind, canvas teeth snapping, smoke crawling low like it wanted to hide its own smell. I took one breath. Peat, wet stone, old sweat, and the thin iron bite of the rift. Then I let my eyes do what my hands couldn’t.
Marks first. House-stakes, carved posts, painted shields hung where they could be seen from a distance: heraldry pretending to be decoration. I read them like runes: who was camped too close to whom, who had planted themselves upwind like they owned the weather, who left their lane open as if inviting company they didn’t trust. Men watched from door-flaps with the blank patience of sheepdogs. Some nodded when they saw me. Some didn’t bother to hide the way they measured my shoulders and the line of my sword belt, as if a blade could settle an account without witnesses.
I kept my pace even. A man who hurries looks guilty. A man who lingers looks hungry.
The market noise came in layers, haggling, laughter that had to be paid for, a cough cut short too fast. That last one snagged my attention. Rumors of sickness had traveled faster than my horse, and here the air itself felt like it was holding its breath, waiting to see who would fall first and who would profit from the falling.
A pair of traders argued over a length of foreign cloth, their hands clean but their eyes dirty. Beyond them, a guard shifted his spear point an inch toward a passing stranger and called it vigilance. My chieftain’s order sat between my shoulder blades like a hand: quiet the dispute, keep the peace, keep the trade flowing.
I angled toward Hrafnsey without making it obvious, counting faces, counting exits, counting the ways a man could be cornered and still keep his honor intact.
The cut on my left knuckle pulled when I tightened my hand on my belt, a small, stubborn pain that refused to become background. It kept time with my thoughts better than any lawman’s chant. The cold had worried it open again on the ride in; now it sat there, red and sullen, as if it had its own grievance to press at Alþingi.
I let it teach me what my chieftain couldn’t say aloud. No careless blows. No shouting match that turns into a grapple, no spear-butts in a lane where a dozen tongues can swear they saw the start of it. A man can kill his enemy in Iceland and still sleep. If he can name the right words afterward. Here, at Þingvellir, the words were the blade, and witnesses were the edge.
I flexed my fingers once, slow. The sting sharpened, then eased. Good. A reminder that my hand wasn’t free to do what my anger wanted. If honor was questioned, I’d answer with restraint first: because restraint, today, was how you kept your name out of other men’s mouths.
I read the market the way a priest reads a confession. Carved marks on stall posts told me whose hands had built them and whose coin had paid; painted ship-signs bragged about voyages and hid their sponsors in plain sight. Tally cords hung like dried guts, knots tight where a man trusted the count and loose where he meant to argue later. Weighing stones sat in neat little families, some too new, some worn as if they’d been passed through more lies than hands.
Household men gave themselves away. They stood too straight when a rival brushed past, eyes fixed on nothing, fingers restless near belts. Faces did the rest: the ones who looked past me too fast, the ones who watched my left hand, and the ones who smiled like a shield and expected it to hold.
I gave greetings the way my father taught me. I asked after roads, prices, weather. I got answers and watched the seams. A man told me who’d arrived; he didn’t tell me who hadn’t. Another named his patron twice, too quick. Three booths down, a lane went quiet when I let a certain family name drift out.
By the time I let the crowd take my shoulders, I’d already made my choice: no heroics, no hot blood. Restraint would do the work my sword-arm ached to do, and attention would cut cleaner than steel. If I had to “quiet” this mess, I’d do it with names remembered, marks recognized, debts counted, and the kind of leverage that doesn’t clang.
I kept my feet where the land did the sorting for me. The crowd wanted to swallow a man whole (voices, elbows, wool and tar) so I walked the margins where there was nothing to hide behind but honest stone and bad weather.
Almannagjá ran alongside the booths like a fresh-cut scar. The rift’s lip was clean, hard, and mean; one misstep and a man would be found later with a story already written for him. Wind came up from it with a mineral bite, as if the earth itself was reminding us what it did to pride. I stayed close enough to hear the market but far enough that I could see hands before they reached me.
Down by the Öxará the air turned knife-cold. The river didn’t talk much: just hissed over stones and kept its own counsel. People drifted there to wash blood off a sleeve, to cool a temper, to meet someone without too many ears nearby. Wet tracks told truths tongues wouldn’t. A man could claim he hadn’t been near a booth lane all night, but river mud clung to a hem like guilt. I watched ankles and boot-soles more than faces.
Between the turf booths, seams opened and shut as men shifted their weight. The lanes were narrow enough that courtesy became a weapon. You couldn’t pass without agreeing, even if the agreement was only a shoulder turned sideways and eyes kept polite. I gave way to the old, to women carrying water, to boys with firewood: small offerings that bought me space when I needed it. The ones who didn’t return it were either scared or paid not to be kind.
A scrap of foreign cloth snapped under an awning like a signal flag. A chest lid closed too fast. Somewhere close, a cough went into a palm and came back wet. I didn’t look toward it; I just noted where it came from and who pretended not to hear.
Order wasn’t something you found at Þingvellir. It was something you walked along, like a cliff edge, until the shape of it showed itself.
I carried the market in my skull the way a carpenter carries a blueprint. The Hrafnsey lanes looked friendly enough in daylight, all canvas smiles and stacked wares, but they had a throat to them. Some paths narrowed between barrel piles and driftwood racks until two men couldn’t pass without touching. That was where “accidents” got born: a shoulder nudge, a spilled ale-skin, a laugh too loud, and then someone’s head meets a post like it was always meant to.
I marked the blind spots: behind hanging cloth, under awnings where the light died, at the backs of booths where guards pretended to watch the front. A man could disappear there for the length of a prayer and come out with a new story and a clean blade.
The fords mattered too. Water tells on you. Öxará mud clings to hems and boot seams, and a hurried crossing leaves a signature you can read later if you know what to look for. I chose routes that forced truth to leave tracks.
When I opened my mouth, I made sure the words came out dressed for court: clean hems, no blood on them. I asked after safe-conducts the way a sober man asks after the weather: as if it could not be argued with. Who gave it, on what day, before which ears. I asked where the witnesses stood, and whether they were free men, and whether any of them had reason to shade their truth. I asked it all soft, almost bored, like I was winding yarn for a neat settlement and not laying fuses under old turf.
People hate a blade, but they hate a question they can’t refuse even more. It puts their pride in a corner and calls it lawful. And the Law has long arms in a tight lane.
I kept my shoulders low and my face blank, like a hired hand waiting for orders, but my mind stayed tall. I read the booth-row the way some men read scripture: banners above chests, brands burned into staves, foreign tally-marks half-sanded down. I caught names the moment they were paired with oaths, and I filed away who heard them. Because ears make bonds, and bonds make trouble.
Each answer I pried loose drew my patience tighter, like wet rawhide drying on a helm. Anger kept trying to climb my ribs and show its teeth, but I starved it. Here, under the Law Rock’s long shadow, a naked blade was a confession. So I kept to cleaner weapons: names, dates, witnesses, weights. A ledger of truths: sharp enough to cut, quiet enough not to spill.
Svan moved through Hrafnsey the way a man walks a narrow deck in bad weather. Steady feet, easy grin, and a spine that never quite forgave the world for being crowded. He let the lanes take him, shoulder brushing canvas, cloak taking the smell of brine and sour ale, but he never let the crowd take him. Every time someone stepped too close, his body shifted a finger’s width, polite as prayer and just as practiced. The short spear on his back looked like any guard’s tool until you watched the angle of his elbows and realized he’d already measured the distance to your throat.
The weighing stones on his belt clicked together as he walked. It was a small sound, almost comforting, like a man carrying his own luck in a pouch. But it wasn’t luck. It was counting. He hid his ledger in noise, and he hid his fear in a smile that offered everyone a bargain and no one a weakness.
He stopped where foreign cloth hung like captured wind. His fingers pinched a fold, tested it, let it fall. A merchant laughed too loud. A sailor’s hand drifted toward a chest-latch and drifted away again when Svan’s eyes found it. Svan didn’t accuse. He didn’t need to. He just held a look long enough to make a man remember the costs of being noticed.
He spoke softly, prices, safe-conduct, whose man stood watch last night near the back-lane, like it was all the same kind of business. Names slid through his mouth in a careful order, paired with debts and oaths the way a priest pairs sins with penance. He listened for the wrong pause, the too-quick agreement, the word “peace” said like a threat. When someone mentioned marriage in the same breath as trade, his smile stayed put, but his shoulders tightened, as if the air had turned colder.
All the while, his stones kept kissing. Gentle. Patient. Counting out who could be leaned on, who would break, and who would break you first.
At each stall, Svan let his hands do the talking first. He’d lift an iron bar like he was judging a nail for his own roof, thumb running the edge where a good bloom should bite back and a bad one flakes like old guilt. He’d pinch cloth between tar-stained fingers, feel the drag, the lie of the weave, and he’d nod as if it was all simple. His mouth kept up with the polite noises a market demands. Mine didn’t. I watched his eyes. They moved too fast for manners, skating from purse-strings to wrists, from a man’s boots to the knot that held his knife. He read payments the way I read faces at the Law Rock: honest silver with the clean ring of it, clipped coin that sounded wrong, promissory oaths spoken into open air like they could be spent.
A tally-stick passed hands. Svan’s smile stayed easy, but his gaze snagged on the shaved notches: thinned down, re-cut, made to forget what was owed. He touched nothing, accused no one. He just counted, and filed it away where it would hurt later.
I slowed where the lane pinched down tight, canvas on one side and barrels stacked like a bad idea on the other. It was the kind of choke a man chose on purpose. Two hired guards were posted there. Same pair I’d seen the last two nights, as predictable as a tide and just as dangerous to step against. Their spears weren’t held for show or for thieves; the points sat low and slantwise, polite enough to pass as vigilance, angled just right to say: not this way, not after dark, not unless you’re named.
One of them chewed something and watched the crowd without moving his head. The other’s eyes kept flicking to the back-lane, counting who went in and who came out. I could read the message in their stillness: someone had paid for a narrow world.
A whisper snagged on my ear like a fishhook. “Peace,” they said, and didn’t mean it: said it with “marriage” riding close behind, and Tora’s name sliding over a counter the way silver does when a man thinks he’s bought the right to sleep easy. Svan’s grin held, but it went tight at the corners. His eyes did the weighing, watching which hands closed around the bargain and which kept busy pretending deaf.
Svan kept walking like nothing had touched him, the weighing stones at his belt clicking a steady lie. But I could see his inner ledger reordering itself: trade debts turning into leverage, polite talk turning into rope. Those two guards by the pinch-point weren’t warding off thieves. They were a hinge on a door, set to swing one way, meant to funnel a body into the back-lane when the dark did its persuading.
Tora moved through the market’s thin veins the way smoke does. Finding the gaps nobody meant to leave, slipping past shoulders and stacked goods without ever quite asking permission. She never looked like she belonged, which was the point. In a place where every booth was a little kingdom and every blanket on the ground had a household’s colors stitched into it, she wore nothing that could be claimed. No bright thread, no man’s badge. Just that ash-brown braid pulled tight like a vow, and hands scrubbed raw by lye until they looked more like tools than flesh.
I’d seen fighters in mail and farmers with axes. They carried their danger loud. Hers was quiet. The satchel at her hip bumped against her thigh with the soft clink of bone needles and little wrapped bundles of dried green: yarrow for blood, lichen for rot, angelica bitter enough to make a healthy man swear. It was the kind of sound you didn’t hear unless you were listening for it, like a knife sliding back into a sleeve.
She threaded between booths and sleeping pallets where men pretended not to see the sick because seeing meant owing. A child with a wet cough tried to sit up too fast; she pressed him down with two fingers and the look she gave him did the rest. A woman reached for her, not for help exactly but for the comfort of being recognized, and Tora’s face softened for half a heartbeat before it closed again. Mercy, yes. But measured. Like she was rationing it the way everyone rationed flour.
Every time she stopped, she checked the lane behind her without turning her head. Not fear. Accounting. Who watched, who followed, who had business with a healer at night when healers were supposed to be grateful and quiet.
In the dim between canvas walls, the herbs at her belt seemed less like cures and more like provisions for a siege. I understood then: she walked as if the world had already tried to bind her once, and she’d learned how to keep moving inside the knot.
She made the sick smaller than they were, like shrinking a debt until it could pass under a man’s notice. A strip of cloth went over a mouth before a cough could bloom into panic. A blanket got tugged higher, not for warmth but for cover. She slid pallets a handspan at a time toward the shadowed side of a booth, away from the easy angles where bored men looked when they wanted a problem to become entertainment.
When a fevered boy tried to sit up and call out, she caught his chin with cracked fingers and pinned him with a look that didn’t leave room for argument. Then she shoved a cup into his hands, something steeped and bitter, angelica and whatever else she wouldn’t name, and watched until he swallowed. Not gentle, not unkind. Efficient. Like she’d learned that tenderness could be misread as weakness and weakness got you owned.
Curious eyes drifted; she turned her shoulder, became a wall, and the market’s little cruelties moved on to easier prey. She worked like secrecy was another herb: a harsh remedy, taken daily, meant to keep fever from becoming a story people could trade.
When she started angling toward the spring road, it wasn’t flight so much as craft. Habit with teeth. She took the downwind line where peat smoke and horse stink blurred her trail, and she kept to the rift’s bad angles where a watcher had to commit his whole body to see. The market swelled and ebbed like surf; she moved on the swells. When a trader laughed too loud, when a barrel fell, when two men argued over a clipped weight and everyone leaned in to listen. Her eyes didn’t dart. They tallied. This one staring. That one only pretending not to. A boy trailing her because he wanted a story. A guard planted like a post because he’d been paid to be there. She let them all stay in their parts and still slipped between them.
But another current kept tugging at her heels. Men in clean cloaks and cleaner words talked settlement the way gamblers talk odds, soft, precise, never naming the knife. Her name lay on their tongues like a wager: a peace-knot, they called it, as if tying her off could stop the bleeding. She didn’t break in. She just listened, running each phrase through her mind and marking who stood close enough to count as witness.
Every time they said it again, settlement, peace-knot, as if a woman were cordage, her softness went flat and bright. The stirring spoon paused mid-circle. The steam rose and she didn’t blink at it. She lifted her eyes, finally, and the booth quieted in the way a room does when a blade comes out without being shown. For a breath, the claimants felt counted, measured, found wanting.
The law-speaker’s voice carried off Lögberg like it had been forged for this one job. Words about boundaries, compensation, oaths. Men listened with faces that said they were thinking of justice, while their eyes did arithmetic on sheep, iron, and reputations. The recitations came out clean as iron, and the crowd answered with the kind of nods you give a scale when you’re pretending you don’t know how to thumb it.
I stood where I could see the lanes between booths and the rift edges beyond, the places a man could vanish if he had to. The wind worried at my cloak and found the cut on my knuckle like it was a debt. I kept my hands still. A tired hand makes mistakes, and mistakes at the Alþingi don’t bleed right away: they turn into lawsuits, outlawry, and sons who grow up memorizing your shame.
They came to greet me the way men do when they want something but don’t yet want to say what. Forearm to forearm, grip tight enough to test the bone. Each “welcome” had a hook in it. Each smile was weighed and found conveniently true. Names were spoken with care: this one’s mother from that farm, that one’s uncle fostered with my chieftain, this one owed silver three summers back and wanted everyone to forget it. Kinship wasn’t blood here so much as rope, and I could feel it tightening with every clasp.
A rival man let his eyes skim my mail shirt like he was reading a rune-stave. He said something about peace between houses, soft as butter in a warm hand. The kind of peace that costs you more than it saves. I answered him in my measured voice, the one that doesn’t give away the sharpness unless honor gets handled carelessly.
Above us the law kept speaking, indifferent as stone. Below, the bargains moved like rats in the dark, and I watched the lines of obligation draw taut, waiting for the first one to snap.
In the Hrafnsey enclosure I kept to the edge of Svan’s stall, close enough to smell the tar on his hands and the ink ground into the creases. He held his ledger like a shield, tucked under his arm, thumb on the tally notches, and spoke in that trader’s murmur that makes men lean in and forget who’s listening. He smiled when he had to. His eyes didn’t.
They moved in ones and twos, rival household guards with clean boots and practiced boredom, drifting toward the merchant chests as if the lane had simply carried them there. Too casual to be chance. Too steady to be drink. Wolves don’t rush the fold; they learn it, nose it, take the measure of the fence and the shepherd’s temper.
Svan’s weighing stones sat out like honest truth. I watched a guard’s gaze flick to them, then past, to the tied lids and iron hasps. One man palmed the rim of a barrel as though testing the wood. Another adjusted his belt and let his cloak fall just so, hiding the hand that might do the cutting.
Svan didn’t call them out. He just shifted his stance half a step, and his soft voice got softer, the way a prayer does when the gods are close enough to hear.
A cough went up the lane and rolled under the awnings like smoke. Men laughed it off but the sound left a clean little hole in the crowd, like someone had scooped the faces hollow for a heartbeat. I saw it in the way hands stopped mid-bargain, in the way eyes slid away from mouths.
“Fever,” someone said, not to anyone in particular. “Bad air from the rift.” The words hopped stall to stall quicker than any runner, changing shape as they went. Names followed, clipped short spoken like curses you didn’t want to finish.
People edged aside without making it look like fear. No one wanted to be caught admitting plague in a place built on witnesses.
Hallbera drifted between quarrels like a clean quill through dirty wool, ink on her cuffs and courtesy polished to a shine. She listened, nodded once, and the anger in a man’s mouth turned to “misunderstanding,” then to “settlement,” as if words were coins she could press into a palm. Marriage, trade, safe-conduct. She offered them all like mercy, tying new knots on old ropes and calling it peace.
At the market lane’s edge, Bjarhild stood half in shadow, cross at his throat and sour scripture on his tongue, blessing nothing. Men who wouldn’t meet his eye still heard the warning in it, like iron under cloth. The late light went thin and mean. Footsteps changed cadence. Quick halts, sudden turns, pauses too measured to be idle. Hands stayed near belts, as if everyone was choosing what could be seen before night made lies easier.
The dusk was thin as scraped bone, and it slid off the rift-rock into the market’s back-lane like it had debts to pay and no coin. Canvas edges snapped and worried at their lashings, and the awnings tugged like hands that couldn’t decide whether to bless you or throttle you. The air down there was all tar and sour ale, wet wool and cold stone, the kind of smell that makes men think of ships and sickness in the same breath.
A small knot of folk opened up ahead of me, not with the easy give of courtesy, but with the nervous parting you see when someone expects trouble and wants to be on the safe side of it. They made room as if a cart was coming through, though there was no cart. No wheels, no driver shouting, no honest reason for that kind of clearance. Just space, held like a secret.
I slowed. I’d learned on decks and in doorways that you don’t hurry into a space people are afraid of. My left knuckle burned under the cold, the cut there refusing to close, as if my own skin had decided oaths were for other men.
I saw a flash of cloth, too fine for this lane, pale and smooth where everything else was rough, vanish between barrel stacks. Imported, the kind merchants keep under lock unless they’re buying something that can’t be weighed. There was a mutter, low and urgent, and then a woman’s shape turned sideways, swallowed by the seam between canvas and shadow.
I couldn’t see her face. I caught the line of a braid, tight as a vow, and hands that had done work: rough fingers, cracked at the joints. The wind kicked up, obliging as a paid witness, and covered the sound of whatever bargain or threat was being spoken.
Somebody near me lifted his eyes and then looked away hard, like he’d seen a lawman and remembered an unpaid fine. I marked that, and the direction of his glance. In places like Þingvellir, fear always had a patron.
Boots skated on the slick basalt like a man trying to keep his pride upright. The sound came wrong for a simple stumble, too fast, too committed, then a body hit a barrel stave with a dull, final thump that carried through the hoops of iron. The rings answered, singing a cold note that didn’t belong to trade.
Someone drew in a breath, sharp as a knife coming out of a sheath. It cut off at once. Not a cough, not a laugh. More like a mouth forced shut or a throat pinched between decisions. The wind took what little was left and worried it into nothing, and the ropes above me creaked as the canvas strained, making the whole lane sound like a ship riding out bad weather.
I shifted my weight, careful on the wet stone. The mail under my cloak felt suddenly heavier, like it had heard the noise and wanted to remind me what it was for. I caught a glimpse of pale cloth again, fine weave, clean edge, snagged and then yanked free, quick as a thief’s hand.
No one shouted. That was the part that made my stomach go tight. In a crowd, silence is never an accident.
A dark cloak slid in on the wind like it owned the lane. The man inside it crowded close to the awning’s belly, keeping to that strip of shadow where faces go to be forgotten. He didn’t reach: he didn’t need to. His presence did the work, pressing the air flat, making room for what came next.
At the lane-mouth another shape settled in, shoulder turned out, stance loose as a man waiting on a friend with bad timing. He made a soft wall out of his body, and he did it without looking like he was doing anything at all. That’s the trick: you don’t bar a way at Þingvellir, you merely become the kind of obstacle nobody wants to touch.
Eyes that had been sharp a heartbeat ago found sudden fascination in their own laces, barrel hoops, anything but me.
Hands came out of the clutter and found purchase like clamps and they turned her sideways so she’d fit the lane’s seams. They kept her pressed to the stacked casks and the draped goods, using barrels and hanging cloth like shields. I saw only a flash of braid, a pale wrist torqued too hard, then the canvas fell in and made it look like a drunk’s stumble.
They moved like men who’d done it before. Two for the hauling and one for the watching, or maybe my eyes were lying to me in the bad light. They found the tightest seam between a stall’s ribs and the booth-wall and slid her through it, shoulders and elbows speaking instead of voices. The lane swallowed them toward the lower dip where the market thinned, leaving only scuffed basalt and a silence that didn’t fit.
The nearest faces went flat as counting stones. A woman with a basket of dried fish bent her head like she’d discovered a new kind of knot in the twine. A boy who’d been hawking combs a moment before suddenly found religion in the grain of his own boot leather. Men who’d watched shipboard blood run between planks now studied a strip of homespun as if its weave held the answer to winter.
It wasn’t fear alone. Fear is honest, at least in the body. This was something tidier: trade-calm, practiced, bought and paid for in small favors. Shoulders turned to make a private pocket of air where nothing had happened. Hands lifted goods and set them down with care, the way you handle a knife when you don’t want anyone to notice you’ve got one.
I stood there with the wind worrying my cloak and tasted peat smoke and sour ale. The cold worked at the cut on my left knuckle, a little sting that kept time with my anger. I watched the lane like a man watching a shield-wall close, knowing he ought to step in and knowing what stepping in costs.
A trader with a neat beard slid a chest-lid shut, quiet, quick, like he was sealing away a bad bargain. His eyes flicked to mine and away, fast as a fish turns in dark water. He mouthed nothing, but his jaw said plenty: not here. Not now. Not with the Law Rock in earshot and too many witnesses who could become none at all.
Somebody’s guard (one of the hired spears with a leather cap and a grin that didn’t reach) shifted his weight so his back blocked the view down the dip. He pretended to adjust a strap, and he never once looked toward the seam where she’d been taken.
No one spoke her name. Names are hooks. In this place, if you say one out loud, you might have to carry it to court, to oath, to steel. So they all kept their mouths full of air and their eyes full of harmless things, and let the wind do the listening for them.
The sound in that lane didn’t die so much as snag on a nail and tear. For a heartbeat there was only canvas snapping and the river’s cold talk beyond the booths, and you could feel every man and woman weighing what they’d just been made to see. Then the market remembered itself the way a drunk remembers his song. Too late, too loud, too certain.
Laughter jumped up, raw and wrong. A man praised a bolt of dyed cloth like it had cured his mother. Someone shouted a price that was meant to be overheard, meant to prove his throat still worked. Coins clinked on purpose. Tally-sticks scraped. Voices crowded the air, piling words where a truth had been, laying them down like planks over thin ice so nobody had to look at the black water underneath.
I caught fragments. Every line had the same edge: keep it moving. Don’t name it. Don’t make it a matter for the Law Rock.
And underneath all that noise, the lane held its breath.
At the corner where the awnings met and the lane pinched down, a hired spear did a small dance with his boots. Not enough to look like a man taking post: just enough to make a wall out of his shoulder. He shifted his stance, then turned his head toward the bright side of the tents, where sun still caught on polished scales and dyed wool, and he studied it with the careful attention of a priest reading a psalm he didn’t believe. His eyes fixed on nothing that could testify.
Behind him the gap stayed dark, a slit between booth-planks and canvas where bodies could pass and not be counted. He never looked back. He adjusted a strap, scratched at his jaw, breathed slow. If he heard anything in that shadow, he buried it under the market’s noise and called it wind.
A trader with salt in his beard and worry in his eyes brought his chest-lid down like a verdict. The wood snapped shut hard enough to take a man’s fingers, and the iron hasp rang out. Too clean, too loud. Then he stepped sideways, not to mind his wares, but to seal the lane with his own ribs and elbows, a gate made of flesh pretending to be commerce.
Under the loudness, a murmur worked its way along the boards like rot in a beam. Leave it. Don’t give it a name. Because names have legs in this place: they walk straight to Lögberg, and once they’re there, the Law doesn’t deal in feelings. It wants witnesses. It wants breath in their chests and men behind them who’ll stand when the questions turn sharp.
At first light they found her where the lava dipped and the wind forgot to be merciful. Not in the clean open where a man could claim it was accident, but in a shallow rift-cut that took sound and gave nothing back. Tora lay on her side with her knees drawn up, like someone had arranged her for a story they wanted told. Not tossed. Placed. That was the first wrong note, and in a place made of old wrong notes it still stood out.
Camp-followers were there first. Boys with chapped faces, women with cracked hands, the sort who live between booths like smoke. One of them made the sign of the cross with fingers that shook, like he expected lightning for looking. Another whispered her name the way you say a prayer you’re not sure you deserve.
I pushed through and crouched in the black grit. My left knuckle split again when I braced on the rock; the cold worried the wound like a dog. I didn’t look at that. I looked at her wrists.
Fine cloth. Imported. Dyed deep, woven tight, the kind you’d see wrapped around a merchant’s chest, not tied on a healer like cord for a goat. It bit into her skin and left pale ridges. Somebody had time to tear a strip clean and make a point of it. Somebody wanted the market to read the message even if the Law pretended it couldn’t.
Her braid had come loose, ash-brown hair stuck to her cheek with frost and dried spit. There was grit under her nails, and a smear of blood at one cuticle like she’d tried to claw at whoever had her. A boot-print showed in the pumice near her hip, good sole, not the patched kind, and it ended abruptly at the edge of the cut, as if the man wearing it didn’t want to step down where the marks would linger.
“Don’t move her,” I said, more to myself than anyone. My voice came out flat and tired.
One of the women (freed, by her look) glared at me like I was already too late. “She was helping the sick,” she said. “They’ll blame her for it now.”
I didn’t answer. The wind took the words anyway and carried them toward the booths, where other men were already deciding what this would cost them.
Her face had taken the kind of work you don’t get from a fall. One cheek was puffed high, the skin mottled purple and yellow like old storm-clouds trapped under flesh. Her mouth hung slightly open; the lips had gone that dead, river-stone blue that comes before the body remembers to fight. Each breath came in short, stingy pulls, as if the cold had put a toll-gate in her throat. When the wind eased I heard a wet hitch in her chest and didn’t like it.
Her eyelids fluttered once, slow as a tired flag. She stirred, not rising, just turning her head a finger’s width as if sound hurt. A whisper leaked out. Half-words, broken bits of sense that wouldn’t lock together. Names maybe. Or prayers. Or the start of an accusation that couldn’t find its teeth.
I leaned in close enough to smell the sour on her breath under the peat smoke and brine. Fever was already staking its claim. The people around me shifted, hungry for a story. I watched her mouth instead, waiting for anything whole to fall free.
Her wrists were drawn together tight enough to make the hands look smaller than they were, the way a man makes a woman look harmless before he breaks her. It wasn’t rawhide, not the stiff, honest bite of hemp, nothing you’d cut from a farm coil and knot without thinking. This was a narrow strip of imported cloth, smooth, close-woven, dyed deep and even, the kind that slides through a merchant’s fingers like a promise and costs more than most men here keep in silver. It had been torn clean, not hacked, and the edges didn’t fray much in the wind. Whoever did it had time, and light, and the habit of owning good things. The cloth felt wrong against her skin, like a foreign tongue in a prayer.
They’d left the binding where any fool could see it, like a seal pressed into wax. Meant to be read. Not just that she’d been taken, but by someone with coin enough to waste imported dye on a knot. It said: I can reach into your lanes and back out clean. I can spare blood and still make you flinch.
Nobody said her name like it was safe to carry on the wind. Men crouched and counted the knots with their eyes, thumbed the cloth as if it might confess, then looked away too fast. Every booth-line heard its own warning in the same bound wrists: pay, yield, keep quiet, or you’re next. The valley held its breath, and so did they.
In the back-lane the ground told its own tale, the way a tight mouth tells you more than a drunk ever will. The ash underfoot had been dampened by last night’s thin rain, turned to a paste that held shapes for a few hours before the wind worried them into nothing. I crouched and let my fingers sift it. There. An ugly smear where a heel had skated and then dug in hard, as if the foot had tried to brace against being pulled. The track ran crooked, not a man walking his own way, but a body being argued with.
A few paces on, the grit was scored in parallel lines. Not a cart: too narrow, too light. Drag marks, shallow at first, then deeper where the weight shifted and whoever was hauling her adjusted their grip. The mark had the stutter of struggle: pull, stop, pull again. Whoever took her didn’t have the clean confidence of a man carrying a sack of meal. They had to fight for every span.
Crushed birch leaves were pressed into the ash like green-brown coins. You don’t find birch that far back in the lane unless someone’s cloak swept them in, or someone fell against the scrub at the edge where the booths thinned and the rift air came up cold. The leaves were bruised, wet, and split along the veins, as if they’d been ground under a knee. I smelled them anyway. Sharp and clean, the wrong kind of clean for what had happened here.
Then the stone itself had its say. A shallow gouge on the lava, pale where the surface had been scraped raw. A shoulder, maybe; a hip; the hard part of a person meeting a hard world and losing. The scrape ran downward and then stopped in a chipped notch, like an exclamation cut into rock. I looked up at the canvas walls hemming it in, at the narrow strip of sky above, and felt the old familiar certainty: this wasn’t chaos. It was work.
There wasn’t any spill to wag a finger at, no red argument on the stones. Just the kind of hurt you read in angles: a scuffed elbow-mark, a knee-print driven hard, the bruising you could feel without seeing it. The night had been cold and wet enough to tidy the world. Damp ash swallowed what drops there might’ve been, and the frost worked like a tight-lipped witness, stiffening everything into a story that looked respectable from a distance.
That’s the mercy of weather and the curse of it. It takes the heat out of a body and the talk out of a place. By dawn, footprints that should’ve named names were softened at the edges, polite as lawmen. Any smear that might have pointed to a left-handed grip or a limp had been rinsed into nothing by thin rain and wind. All that remained were the marks that couldn’t be denied without laughing: the drag’s uneven rhythm, the scraped lava, the imported cloth biting into wrists like someone signing a contract without ink.
Clean enough for liars, yes. But not clean enough for me.
The rift-cut did what rifts do: it kept secrets like a priest with bad faith. The walls dropped away sharp and close, and the air down there felt different. A shout wouldn’t have traveled; it would’ve thudded once, bounced along the basalt ribs, and died where no one could swear to hearing it. Above, the wind had its own business, worrying the canvas roofs, snapping guy-lines, turning loose flaps into applause for nothing. Any clean sound got lifted and spent elsewhere. Out toward the river, up toward the Law Rock, into the polite clamor where men could pretend they missed it. Down in that cut, you could do ugly work fast and never raise a proper witness.
Whatever smell the night might’ve carried off a mouth or a fist, sweat, ale, fear, was gone now, scoured down to nothing by wind and thin rain. Men love that kind of emptiness. They can lean on it like a staff and call it certainty. The watchers circled the blank air and argued hard, as if no scent meant no hands, no breath, no guilt.
What stayed put was what they’d used to make her stay put: a strip of imported cloth, fine as a merchant’s promise and twice as tight. It wasn’t meant for bandaging or bedwork. Too smooth, too proud. When I rubbed it between my fingers it gave off tar, and a foreign dye with a bitter-sweet bite. No farmwife’s loom made that lie.
Rumor got there first. It always does. Before the sun bothered to lever itself over the lava, before the first kettles could find a boil, the story of Tora had already been traded, trimmed, and stamped like bad silver.
At the edge of the booths the smoke hung low and stingy, and men stood close enough to share breath but not blame. They spoke in the careful way you speak when the Law is a stone’s throw away and your hands still smell like yesterday.
One telling said it was feud-work: plain and honest as an axe. Tora had seen something she shouldn’t, so someone taught her house a lesson without spilling blood where it could be counted. The man who sold that version kept his eyes on the ground and his friends on either side. He used the word “warning” like it was a legal term, not a sin. He didn’t name a house, but he didn’t have to. He let the listeners do the dirty part in their own heads.
The second telling blamed plague fear. A “cleaning” gone wrong. Someone said she was coughing, that she’d been tending a sick child, that men panicked and dragged her off like you drag a dead sheep from a doorway. The woman who said it spoke too fast and too loud, like volume could turn cruelty into caution. She wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye when she said “for the good of all.”
The third version wore soft hands. It talked about foreign trade, debts, a healer “owed” to a household by promise, marriage, service, peace-knot, call it what you like when you want a person to turn into property. In that telling, the assault was an accident of men enforcing a contract. A misunderstanding in the dark. The speaker smiled like a man weighing cloth.
I let it wash over me and kept my face nailed shut. I listened for what slid too smooth, for names that bent around tongues and never came out. Every phrase was a coin offered in change, and I could hear which purse it came from.
I kept my mouth in a straight line and let theirs do the work. In a place like Þingvellir, truth isn’t hunted with hounds; it’s sold in phrases, measured out with pauses and borrowed certainty. Every man talking had a weight in his hand, even if it wasn’t iron.
I watched who spoke first and who waited to be echoed. The loud ones weren’t brave: just insured. They leaned on half-names: “somebody’s men,” “a certain booth,” “you know whose.” They wanted the charge to land without anyone having to lift it. The quiet ones were worse. They trimmed their words down to clean edges, too clean for a story with bruises in it. When a sentence came out polished like a brooch, I knew it had been handled.
I marked loyalties the way my father taught me to read ship flags: a glance to see who stood behind whom, whose eyes searched for approval, whose jaw tightened when the healer’s name came near. No one said “Hallbera.” No one said “marriage” without spitting it into the dirt as “peace.” And that omission sat there like a knife you can’t accuse until it’s in your ribs.
Svan slid in close the way a man does when he’s carrying information like contraband. His quick smile didn’t show; what showed was the tiredness around his eyes and the ink-and-tar ground into his hands. He didn’t look at Tora. He looked past her, to where the booths made shadows you could hide a life in.
“Back-lane watch was Ketill from Hrafnsey first,” he said, voice down in his throat. “Then Hrani: midway through the night. That swap wasn’t chance. Someone asked for it.”
I let that sit. Wind tugged at my cloak like a creditor.
Svan touched the cloth with two fingers and sniffed once, sharp. “That smell? Not hearth-smoke. Not lye. It’s cargo-work: tar and brine, the kind you get from handling barrels and rigging. Whoever tied her had been at the stacks, not the wash-tub.”
The danger wasn’t the story. It was what the story would buy. If I named the wrong man, Lögberg would answer with outlawry, neat as a stamped seal, and my chieftain would wash his hands in my ruin. If I said nothing, the dragging became custom, the knots in that fine cloth became law by repetition, and my house wore the stain like a new color.
I took the narrowest step that still moved. No brawl in the lane, no noble silence that reeks of consent. I asked for sworn words, names, times, who relieved whom on watch, like I was balancing a ledger, not a grudge. Let the rumor-spinners choke on daylight. Let that strip of fine cloth sit in the open and start demanding an owner.
They kept trying to sell it as weather. Wind, fog, a stumble in the dark. Men loved the idea of an accident because an accident doesn’t demand a name. Plague fear, they said, like the sickness had grown hands and learned to knot cloth.
I let it roll over me. I’d learned young that arguing with a crowd is like swinging at surf. You get wet, you look foolish, and the sea doesn’t bruise.
What I watched was the strip of fabric, laid out where anyone could see it without admitting they were looking. Fine weave, tight as a miser’s mouth. Not wadmal from a farmer’s wife. Not a rope twisted from horsehair and need. This was import: foreign hands had loomed it, foreign coin had paid for it. It had the faint bite of salt and ship, the kind that clings to things that have lived too long in a chest beside tarred line.
Tora’s wrists were raw where it had bitten. A man doesn’t bind a healer by accident. A man binds her because he plans to come back for what he left tied up.
Around us, the booths creaked and snapped their canvas like old teeth. Traders pretended not to listen. Housemen pretended not to care. The ones who’d been loud about plague suddenly found their tongues busy with ale.
I kept my voice level, the way you do when you’re stepping around a blade on the ground. “Who has cloth like this?” I asked, not to the air but to the faces that mattered. “Who bought foreign bolts this week. Who cuts strips for packing. Who keeps their goods under lock.”
No honor talk. No feud talk. Just property: because property makes cowards brave enough to testify.
A few eyes slid away too fast. A few held on, hard. In that moment the wind didn’t matter. The sickness didn’t matter. Wealth had touched her wrists, and wealth always leaves prints, even when it wears gloves.
I didn’t dress it up as vengeance. Vengeance makes men reach for weapons or excuses. I kept it in the clean language the Law likes, the kind you can’t spit out without tasting your own guilt.
“This is not a threat,” I said, and let my gaze travel over the booth-fronts where canvas hid more lies than it kept off rain. “It’s a need. A strip like that doesn’t come from sheep and good intentions. It comes off a bolt. Bolts are counted. Counted things leave hands behind.”
I asked for names the way a man asks for witnesses to a land boundary. Who handled foreign cloth yesterday. Who cut packing strips. Who mended sail or wrapped iron with soft goods to stop chafing. Who keeps the keys to the chests and the pegs for the bales. Who paid in coined silver instead of weighed hacks.
If the cloth had an owner, the owner had a trail. Men could dodge an accusation; they couldn’t dodge a ledger. Somebody had seen it measured, fingered, argued over, taxed with a smile. Somebody had watched the knife bite the weave. And sworn eyes are harder to buy back than cloth.
Svan stood a little apart from the loud men, like he was pricing them. His dark eyes caught mine and didn’t flinch, but they didn’t give either. There was a pause: too clean to be fear. I’d seen that kind of stillness at a counting board: a man adding and subtracting what truth would cost him.
He knew. Not in the way a gossip knows, but in the way a guard knows who walked past his post and who didn’t. He’d been in these booths long enough to hear the late bargains when the ale went sour and the canvas walls stopped pretending they were private. He’d know which spear-hand took coin to look the other way near the back-lane.
His silence wasn’t emptiness. It was a choice, weighed out like silver on a stone. Contracts on one side, knives on the other.
My voice stayed even until the last word (healer) and then it cinched down like a belt on an empty stomach. Let them hear it. Here, under the Law Rock’s shadow, you’re supposed to meet your enemy with a summons, a witness, an oath you can choke on later. Not canvas-muffled hands at dusk. Whoever took her didn’t just grab a woman. They dared the law to blink.
I laid it out the way you lay out bodies after a storm: no poetry, no pretty shrouds. Either someone wanted to punish her for the sick she’d touched and the things she’d learned with her hands in other men’s blood. Or they meant to tuck her away until her tongue went harmless. Or they were moving her like cargo: a live pledge, wrapped in marriage terms and trade favors, hauled through canvas shadows.
I took the back-lane like I belonged to it, like I was just another cold-eyed nobleman pretending to understand the price of walrus ivory and how much tar a man could smear on a rope before it stopped being rope and started being trouble. The merchants liked that kind of talk. It meant you weren’t asking about blood.
But my eyes stayed low.
The ground there wasn’t soil so much as old ash, grit, and trampled straw. Everything the wind couldn’t carry and the boots wouldn’t forgive. In the thin light the marks showed plain: a pressed curve, half a moon, where heels had dug and pivots had bitten. The kind of print a man leaves when he changes his mind fast. Or when someone else changes it for him.
I slid the scabbard tip down and traced the edge, not deep enough for anyone to notice, deep enough for me to remember. There’d been a shoulder in that dirt: an imprint with the ash packed tight, like a seal pressed into wax. Not a long fight. Nothing sprawling. Just the quick ugly work of hands that knew where to squeeze and how long a body can thrash before it goes quiet.
I listened while I looked. Canvas snapped overhead; the ale awning was laughing too loud, the way men do when they’re trying to drown out what they saw. A pair of guards leaned on a post like it was their birthright, eyes moving only when they thought nobody was counting. I counted anyway.
A knot of straw had been kicked into the scuffle-mark and ground flat. Something had rolled there: maybe a dropped pouch, maybe a hand scrambling. And near the wall of stacked goods the ash was smeared, dragged sideways, as if someone had been hauled by the ankle or the cloak, not carried. Efficient. Mean. Quiet.
I kept my face empty and my pace steady. In a place like Þingvellir, the wind carried everything: smoke, gossip, and the wrong question spoken one notch too loud. Here in the market shadow, men didn’t need blades to start a feud. They only needed witnesses.
The barrel sat wrong, like a tooth that didn’t fit the jaw. Not toppled by wind or some drunk’s boot. I stopped with my body turned half away, as if I was just admiring the cooper’s work, and laid my thumb along the rim.
Fresh scrape-marks. Pale wood showing through, raw as a cut lip, with grit packed into it where it had kissed stone hard and kept going. You don’t drag a full barrel like that by accident. You drag it when you’ve got a plan and not much time.
It wasn’t set square to guard a chest. It was canted, a little off true, the way you angle a shield to make a blade glance. It broke the straight run of the passage so a man with panic in his lungs would have to check his stride, pivot, show his flank. Right there, where the awning posts and stacked goods made a pocket of shadow, hands could reach, clamp, and pull without anyone at the ale-laugh seeing more than a stumble.
A tidy trap. The kind made by someone who hated noise.
By the stacked goods where the passage pinched down, I found it: a smear of tar rubbed to a thin, ugly shine on the driftwood edge, black as old guilt. Not a spill. A handprint that had lost its patience. I laid my fingers to it and came away tacky, the cold making it slow to dry: fresh enough to still talk.
I tested the climb like I was just another man looking for his own shortcut. Boots placed soft, weight kept low. The crate lip bit my shin; the landing on the far side was wrong. Too high for a porter’s easy step, too cramped to turn clean. Whoever went over did it fast and clumsy, not with trade in their bones. And they weren’t empty-handed. Either they hauled a sack, or they held on to something that fought them all the way.
I drifted back under the ale awning’s ragged edge and let the stink of sour drink do its work. I didn’t stare; staring was an accusation. I watched with my lashes down, measuring the lane mouth through tears in hanging cloth, the narrow slits between stacked crates. From the right bench a man could see everything and look like nothing. One sharp call would carry, clean as a bell, and nobody would swear who rang it.
I walked it off like a man counting debts. Five paces to the rift’s broken teeth, where the ground turns ankles and swallows certainty. Nine to the ford, where the Öxará keeps its own counsel and rinses prints clean. Twelve to the turf-booth row, where a body can slip into kin and law like a coin into a purse. I timed it under my breath and knew: this wasn’t panic. It was practiced speed.
I started with the dawn-sweeper because he was the kind of man nobody remembered until he didn’t show up. He was bent over a bundle of rushes, hands red and split like old rope, sweeping somebody else’s filth into somebody else’s shadow.
I eased in like I was asking after the weather. “You were first through this lane,” I said. “Tell me what was different.”
He kept his eyes on the ground, like it had sworn him to silence. “Different?” he muttered, and flicked a pebble loose from the packed mud. “Wind blows, folk spill, dogs piss. Same as ever.”
I let the pause stretch until it got uncomfortable in the right way. “Which awning-lines were down early,” I said. “Which barrels moved. Who paid you to lay fresh rushes where the mud ought to show its teeth.”
That got his head up a finger’s width. Not to meet my gaze: just enough to see whether I carried trouble on my sleeve. “Some lines were cut,” he said at last. “Not snapped by weather. Cut. Clean. The cloth folk had their corner opened wider than they like. And those fish barrels by the back-lane. Shifted half a man’s width. Enough to make a straight run where there shouldn’t be one.”
“Bootprints?” I asked. “Any laid over others like a man practicing steps?”
He gave a humorless breath. “Too many feet to count, lordling. But there was a path, aye. Packed hard. Like three, four men walked it again and again before dawn, same line, same hurry.” He swept a new strip of ground as if he could erase the memory with straw. “And someone paid for rushes. Extra. Fresh-cut. To make it pretty. To make it quiet.”
“Who?” My voice stayed measured; my knuckle throbbed under the cold when I curled my hand.
He shrugged, but it was a cautious shrug, weighed and priced. “A man I don’t know. Not booth-kin. Cloak good cloth, not a farmer’s. Said there were strangers sniffing too close to chests. Said the lane needed clearing, quick, before tempers got hot.”
He glanced down the way the crates pinched the passage, and his mouth tightened. “It was cleared fast,” he said, like that was the only truth worth hauling. “Too fast for honest panic. Like they expected trouble. And wanted nothing in the way when it came.”
Under the ale-tent’s sagging belly I found the pot-boy. Narrow shoulders, quick hands, eyes that had learned early that being unseen was a kind of armor. He had a tray scar on one wrist and a bruise on the other, both old, both paid for in other men’s thirst.
I didn’t ask about Tora. That name was a spark. I asked about cups.
“Who’d you carry to?” I said. “Which bench. Which horn. Who paid in coin and who paid in promises.”
He blinked fast, then warmed to the safety of inventory. “Fewer men,” he said. “Not like the usual lot. No loud mouths, no dice, no songs. They stood like posts, lord. Like they were hammered in.”
“Where?”
He jerked his chin toward the back-lane mouth. “There. And there.” His voice dropped without being told. “I tried to slip through with ale for the cloth folk, and one stopped me.” He lifted his own palm, flat, a hard thing. “No curse. No shove. Just: done.”
I watched his fingers twitch. “How’d you know to listen?”
He swallowed. “A token. Shown low, by the belt. Not flashed for pride. Just enough. The others saw it and stepped aside like the ground had turned holy or cursed.”
Svan slid in at my shoulder like a man joining a prayer he didn’t believe in. He didn’t look at the lane; he looked at the seams of it: where watchmen ought to have been stitched in.
“Don’t ask who was seen,” he murmured. “Ask who was posted.”
He ticked off the usual hires the way a trader counts stones: the two spear-men that squat on the south corner every assembly, the gray one who snores unless he’s paid twice and shamed once, the boy with the scarred lip who watches chests like they’re his mother’s grave. Then he stopped, and the pause did the talking.
“They weren’t there,” he said. “Not one.”
In their place: men with no merchant badge, no house-mark on cloak or cap. They moved in pairs, traded corners on a rhythm too clean for ale or bravado, and took their cues from a figure kept just outside the torch’s honest light: only a nod, and they turned like oars.
I went to the woman with the sailcloth needle, because people like that look down and see everything. Her thread kept moving while her eyes took the measure of the lane. She’d seen a tight knot of men stop (no haggling, no heat) just waiting, like hounds held off the leash. Then a cue none of her business caught, and they split opposite ways, calm as craft. No names. One detail did bite: a dark cloak pinned with a fine brooch that didn’t belong on hired muscle, and another man kept checking the turf-booth row like he expected a door to open and swallow him.
I listened for the common bone under their different skins of fear. Then I made one more quiet circuit, asking after small things: who ordered lanterns pinched out early, who told late buyers to take the long way, who had the right to “tidy” a lane without catching a fist or a lawsuit at Lögberg. No man said a name. But the answers lined up clean: the watch had been tightened, timed, disciplined. Too controlled for merchant caution, too careful for a feud. Orders had come from outside the market’s own hands.
I didn’t need names yet. Names were flint at Þingvellir: strike them wrong and you got fire you couldn’t stamp out without somebody ending up outlawed or dead. I gathered reasons the way a cold man gathers kindling: small, dry pieces that would catch later.
First: who profits if Tora stops speaking. Not in the pious sense: profit the way merchants mean it, clean and counted. A healer isn’t just herbs and soft hands. She’s a mouth that hears everything the sick let slip when their pride has already leaked out onto the bedding. If Tora had a name and a detail that could shame a great man, then her silence was worth more than walrus ivory. Worth enough to hire strangers, worth enough to rearrange a lane.
Second: who loses if she keeps tending the sick. Plague rumors are a knife you can hold by the handle until panic makes you grab the blade. If she calmed people, told them to wash, to keep apart, to burn rags, then the market stayed standing. Booths stayed open. Trade kept its face. But if she lived and kept working outside the “proper” households, she also kept the poor from turning into a convenient scapegoat. That kind of steadiness is bad for anyone trying to move men like pieces.
Third: who gains if fear rises fast enough to thin witnesses and scatter booths. A sudden stampede of prudence does fine work: it empties lanes at the right hour, makes folk refuse to touch a body, makes a missing woman sound like mercy instead of crime. And if you’re clever, you can blame the whole mess on panic. On sickness. On God. Anything that can’t be cross-examined at Lögberg.
Svan watched my face and pretended he was studying a bolt of cloth. “You’re weighing it,” he said softly.
“Aye,” I told him. “And someone’s been shaving the stones.”
The first thread pulled tight around the hired merchant-soldiers. The night men with spear-haft calluses and a wage that came in clipped silver or good foreign iron. They weren’t kin to the booths they guarded, which made them useful and made them dangerous. A man loyal to blood will spit on an order he can’t stomach; a man loyal to coin will do the work and let his conscience sleep in the same pouch as the pay.
They could be told to “keep order” the way you tell a dog to mind a doorway. Block a market lane. Turn late buyers back toward the long path by the turf booths. Snuff a lantern on the excuse of fire-risk. Ask no questions, take no names. And if anyone barked about it later at Lögberg, they’d have the cleanest answer in the world: theft-prevention. Market rules. Safe-conduct. The kind of talk that sounds responsible until you realize it’s also a curtain.
I asked after who hired which hands, and who vouched their oaths. The answers were careful, like feet picking through a rift in the dark.
The second thread ran under the turf booths like a ratpath: household men from the feud families, boots always muddy, hands always too clean when you asked where they’d been. Not because anyone swore they saw steel in them, or blood on their cuffs. No, these men were craftsmen of noise. They knew how to lean on a shoulder in a tight lane, how to cough a slur about someone’s father, how to get two hotheads trading words until the whole market turned its head the right way. Then, when a woman vanished or a cry got swallowed, any man who spoke up afterward sounded like he was just feeding old spite. Vendetta-talk. The kind the lögsögumaður listens to with a tired face and a ready excuse.
The third thread was colder than coin and cleaner than blood. It smelled like ink. A planner with standing. Someone who could shift a watch as if moving a word in a sentence, who could decide which lantern went dim on “fire-sense,” which boy ran first with which tale. Someone who could dress a grabbing-up in the plain jostle of buying and selling, so even decent men shrugged and called it market business.
I kept a fourth shape in the back of my skull, where you keep the things you don’t want to name. A lone prowler, outlaw, or a priest gone wolf, living off other men’s noise. He wouldn’t need a patron’s nod or a booth’s oath, just a pocket of disciplined quiet someone else paid for. When the lane went blind, he could walk.
I tried the disappearance on like a mail shirt and listened for the chafe.
At the Alþingi you can kill a man with a smile and a sentence, but if you put hands on a woman in daylight you’re begging to have your name carried up to Lögberg on every breath. Folks here love law the way sailors love rope: not because it’s kind, but because it holds when the sea goes bad. No one with sense drags a healer through the open market unless he wants to be made a story, and stories at the Law Rock have teeth.
So I kept turning it in my head until it sat right. It hadn’t been a snatch-and-run. It had been an errand.
You take a person without noise by giving everyone a reason not to look. A man steps in close, not with a blade but with a palm held out like he’s offering guidance. “Come, Tóra,” he says, soft, respectable. “They sent for you. There’s sickness in Booth Row. A child.” Or: “There’s a summons, and if you don’t go now you’ll be named uncooperative.” People hear the right words and their eyes slide away. Nobody wants to be the one who delays a healer when coughing is in the wind.
And if she balked, because Tóra wasn’t the kind who drifted where she was pointed, the mask would still hold. Two men flank her like escorts, not captors. A cloak drawn around her shoulders against the cold, a hand at the elbow that looks like care unless you know what a grip costs. In the press of bodies and barter, coercion can wear mercy the way a knife wears a sheath.
The move had to be small. A turn down a lane where sightlines break. A moment when a lantern gutters and the market’s attention tilts toward a shouted price or a spilled ale cup. Then she’s past the booths that know her face, past the place where someone might owe her thanks enough to speak. After that, she isn’t taken. She’s “gone on.” Directed. Escorted. The kind of ordinary that makes extraordinary disappear.
I laid the motives out like three chipped weights on Svan’s little scale and watched which one made my stomach dip.
First was the marriage-knot, tied quick while the camp still smelled of travel and nobody had time to gather witnesses. You move a woman like you move a deed: before the neighbors hear, before her friends can stand up at Lögberg and make noise. The risk there was public. Too many eyes, too many tongues, too many men who’d been healed by her hands and might remember gratitude like a debt.
Second was silence. Not the pious kind. The kind you buy when someone has a name and a detail about a meeting that shouldn’t exist. A shameful clasp of hands between clean cloaks. If Tóra could shame a great man, then her voice was more dangerous than a knife, because law here loves words the way fire loves dry birch.
Third was panic, brewed on purpose: let coughs and rumors run, let merchants blame rivals, let chieftains reach for iron. If she vanished without a body, the fear could keep working without the inconvenience of vengeance. All three wanted her gone. Only one needed her alive and uncounted.
It wasn’t muscle that did it. Muscle leaves marks, and marks get talked about, even in a place where people pretend not to see. What fit better was borrowed authority. Somebody else’s name worn like a clean cloak. A message “from” a goði’s man. A summons with law-words sprinkled over it like salt: procedure, witness, settlement. Or a quieter hook: debt. The kind that makes a freedwoman’s shoulders tighten because she knows how fast gratitude can be counted as owing. Or the ugliest: accusation. Whispering that she’d spread sickness, that she’d broken quarantine, that she’d lied at the booths. You don’t have to show a blade if you can make the crowd believe the blade would be lawful. You just point, and people step aside.
The window was a narrow one, clean as a fresh-cut purse string. When the night watch traded places and men pretended not to see, a lane would empty for the span of a few breaths. Barrels stacked high threw a thick shadow, swallowing faces. A guard I’d seen laughing in daylight turned his head and let them pass, like he’d been paid in advance. No struggle. Just motion. From friends to strangers in ten steps.
In my head it ended with a handoff, neat as a tally-stick snapped clean. Get Tóra beyond the booths where kin know your brooch and rivals know your stride, and you can trade her like cargo. Someone waits just off the market edge, by the Öxará ford, along the turf-booth row, or down a sheep track, swallowed by Assembly traffic and nobody’s business.
I started the way you start when knives are still asleep: with talk that didn’t cost anything. The wind off Almannagjá had teeth; the river ran like a strip of dull iron; the rye price was up because some ship took the wrong weather and didn’t come in. I asked who had decent lodging, whose turf walls weren’t leaking, who’d traded for lamp oil instead of trusting the long dusk. Men loosen when the words are harmless. They like to feel safe in their own mouths.
Then, once they’d nodded along and their shoulders dropped a thumb’s width, I set the hook.
Not an accusation. Not a name. Just a small turn of the wrist, like shifting a cup so you can see the ring it leaves. “When you say you were ‘by the booths,’ where?” I kept my voice even, the way a lawman keeps his hands out of sight. “Show me. With your chin if you don’t want your fingers seen.”
Some pointed quick, like the act might stain them. Some did it slow, like a man walking onto thin ice. I watched which ones looked first to see who was watching them.
“Which way were you facing?” I asked, and I made them choose, because “everywhere” is what liars say when they’re trying to be useful without being true. “What did you have behind you? What blocked your sight? A canvas wall? A man’s back? The barrels? Tell me where the shadow fell.”
I asked about sound as much as sight. In Hrafnsey the lane carries talk the way a boat carries water: it sloshes. “Did you hear boots on plank? Did you hear the iron of a spear-butt? Did you hear coughing, close, or far?” The plague rumor had its own weight; people lied around it without knowing they were doing it.
I repeated the same questions later with different words, and I kept my face as dull as wet stone. A witness who’d rehearsed will keep the story, but they forget the world it’s supposed to sit in. That’s where the seams show.
I nailed every story to things the wind couldn’t move and a man couldn’t sweet-talk into changing. The barrel stack that leaned like a drunk against its own rope. The turf-booth row squatting low and dark, seams of sod showing where hands had rushed the work. The ford path, packed and black with wet feet and spilled brine, cutting toward the Öxará like it had a mind of its own. The ash pit behind the ale tents where the dregs went to die, still warm if you got there early, sour-sweet if you got there late.
“Stand where you stood,” I told them, not loud, not kind. “Tell me what was on your left hand. Tell me what you could smell.”
Men will swear to the shape of a ghost, but they stumble on a real corner. If they couldn’t put the barrels behind them, if they couldn’t find the ash pit without scanning for help, I let it sit in my memory like a bad rune. Pressing makes martyrs. I wasn’t here to make any.
I came back to them after an hour, after their tongues had dried out and their courage had found new places to hide. Same faces, same smoke, different angle on the blade. “Who passed first?” I’d asked before. Now it was, “What did you hear before you saw anybody?” and I watched what their eyes did with the extra room.
The honest ones rummaged. You could see them sorting sound from sight, trying to stack it in the right order. The practiced ones didn’t even blink. Answers slid out too fast, too clean, like coin from a sleeve.
I’d flip the sequence again. “When did the coughing start?” “After the footsteps.” “Which footsteps?” A pause. A swallow. A story that had been smooth a moment ago grew corners when I pushed it backward.
I kept the tally behind my eyes the way I kept kin-lists and oath-words, clean, cold, and hard to shake. Who said there were two shadows in the lane and who insisted on three. Who remembered a cloak-pin like a hooked raven’s beak, and who hid behind “a fine brooch” like it was safer not to see. They’d talk all night about footsteps on plank, then go thin-lipped when my questions brushed the guards and their postings.
I kept my own men back in the booth-shadows, close enough to pull me out of a bad corner, far enough that nobody could call this a raid in fine clothes. I spoke like I was buying sense, not blood: no names, no charges, just questions laid flat. Quiet voices don’t make martyrs. But they do make careful liars count their words like coins.
Svan didn’t lean in like a man sharing gossip. He leaned in like a man closing a deal he didn’t like but couldn’t walk away from. The quick smile stayed on his mouth out of habit, a trader’s mask, but his hands told the truth: thumb and forefinger rolling his weighing stones as if he could measure out a safer answer.
“Market lane,” he said, eyes skimming past me to where the booths made their own little kingdoms. “At the mouth (by the first canvas awning) there were two hire-spear men everyone knows. Kári with the split ear, and Njáll who walks like his left knee owes him silver. They’ve stood there before. They don’t spook easy.”
“And who paid them?” I kept my voice level. Names were tinder. Marks were smoke.
He hesitated a heartbeat, then nodded once, like agreeing to a price. “Not under their own household. Paid under a patron’s mark. A seal pressed into wax on a tally-stick, shown quick so nobody could stare too long. You know the kind. Not a man’s name: authority without fingerprints.”
My knuckle throbbed inside my glove. Cold makes a small wound feel like a confession.
Svan’s fingers clicked the stones together. “There was a third posted by the ale-shed, where the back-lane bends. Not to stop thieves. To watch who went behind the booths. He carried himself like a guard, but his eyes were on purses and faces both.”
“Same patron?” I asked.
He gave me a look that said he hated himself for noticing. “Same mark. Same way of paying. Like it was ordinary.” His smile tried to come back, failed, and turned into something thin. “It wasn’t ordinary.”
Wind worried the awnings overhead. Somewhere a lawman laughed too loud, the way men do when they’re trying to prove they’re not afraid of the dark.
Svan swallowed. “Those were the postings. That’s what the night was supposed to be.” His stones stopped moving, trapped in his fist. “Supposed to.”
Svan’s gaze went past my shoulder again, as if the booths themselves might be listening. “There’s one piece I can’t make balance,” he said. His voice stayed soft, but the words came out like a man laying down a weapon he’s tired of carrying.
“Say it,” I told him. Not urging. Just opening the door.
“Near midnight, when the ale goes warm and men start believing their own stories, the second watch at the lane-mouth changed.” He rubbed a thumb along the edge of one weighing stone until it shone. “It wasn’t supposed to.”
“Changed how?”
He drew a breath through his nose, steadying himself. “The usual man was sent off. The one who never leaves. Everyone knows it: he’ll piss against the post before he walks away from it.” Svan’s mouth tightened. “He left anyway. Like he’d been called by someone he couldn’t refuse.”
“And who took his place?”
“A stranger,” he said. “Plain cloak, no badge, no booth-owner claiming him, no ship-crew laughing about him after. Just… there. Standing the lane like he’d always owned it.”
I didn’t let the stranger’s shadow turn into a shouted name. Names were how men got cornered into blood they couldn’t wash off at Lögberg. I kept it clean, kept it dull.
“Who had leave to move him?” I asked. “Not who did. Who could.”
Svan’s eyes went flat, ledger-eyes. “Leave isn’t a word we use out here,” he said. “Not for hire-spear.”
“Then what is?”
He rolled the weighing stones once, slow, like he was testing my meaning. “Purse,” he said. “And the promise that if the wrong man sees you in the dark, the right man won’t see you in court come morning.”
“Safe-conduct,” I said.
He nodded. “Bought, not blessed. Whoever held it could shift a post without anyone asking why. Because asking is how you end up owing.”
I let the watch captain keep his public face and his listeners. I took Svan’s word and followed the authority sideways, where it liked to hide. In the booth that smelled of ale, wax, and quiet bargains. Men there didn’t swear oaths; they pressed marks into tally-sticks and pretended it wasn’t a promise. Payments get forgotten on purpose. Ledgers don’t.
In the dim back-lane I read the ground the way I’d read a deck after a boarding: by what men tried to hide. Scuffed lava grit showed a hard pivot, heels digging for purchase. A drag-mark ran crooked between stacked barrels, like something heavy had been hauled without care. The sweet-sour reek of spilled ale lay thick, but underneath it rode iron and piss: panic. My eyes went to a torn thread caught on a nail.
I stooped where the drag-mark thinned out into scuffed pebbles and nothing, like whoever hauled her had decided the ground would keep their secrets if they stopped looking back. The wind came down the lane in mean little gusts, lifting ash and the sour edge of ale from the back tents. It carried voices too each one pretending the next man’s trouble wasn’t his.
My left knuckle protested when I set my weight on it. The cut had sealed wrong on the road, a small betrayal that stung whenever the cold found it. I flexed my hand anyway and dug my fingers into the grit where the stones were pressed flat with traffic.
That’s when I felt it: not rope, not hair, not the rough bite of homespun. Something slicker. My fingers closed around a narrow strip of cloth half-ground into the dirt, as if the earth had tried to swallow it and given up halfway. I drew it free slow, the way you pull a blade when you don’t know whose blood is on it.
It was smooth as sailcloth but tighter: tight enough that even wet it kept its shape. The dye was true, deep and even, not the kind that runs at the first kiss of rain. I rubbed it between thumb and forefinger and listened to the weave. Cloth talks if you know its language. This one spoke in ledgers and locked chests, in men who count silver by feel and don’t haggle unless it’s sport.
I brought it close. It smelled faintly of tar and salt, not the smoke-and-sheep stink of most Icelandic wool. Along one edge, nearly lost in the grime, there was a faint stamp, more pressed than painted, like the kind used to mark bolt-lengths for tallying. A merchant’s quiet fingerprint.
Behind me, boots crunched. Someone was pretending it was accident. I kept my face still and the cloth hidden in my palm, because the thing about expensive knots is this: they’re tied by people who can afford witnesses to look the other way.
I rolled the strip between thumb and forefinger, slow, letting the threads speak up under pressure. It had a hard discipline to it. Tight-woven, obedient, like good mail when you worry a link and it refuses to give. Not the fuzzy, forgiving stuff spun in smoky rooms from sheep that never saw a ship. This was cloth that had traveled. It kept its dignity even filthy.
The thought of it sitting on her wrists made something in me go cold. A healer dragged from her work, bound like a goat for slaughter, and whoever did it chose finery to do the ugly part. That kind of expense wasn’t carelessness; it was a statement. A man with empty pockets uses rope. A man who fears rope uses law. A man who uses this uses money the way some use steel, quiet, certain, and meant to be noticed by the right eyes.
I pinched the edge, tested it again, and felt the insult of it land. No camp-sneak, no hungry thief with frost in his beard, wastes foreign cloth on a nobody. This had come out of a chest with a lock, not out of a sleeve with holes.
Along the frayed edge my thumb caught on something that wasn’t damage. I angled the strip until the weak light between awnings slid across it, and there it was: a pressed stamp, shallow as a whisper, repeating in tidy little intervals. Not a crest. Not a saint. Just marks. Meant to be measured in a merchant’s handspan, counting bolt-lengths the way men count days owed and favors due. Practical, ugly in its honesty.
A household loom doesn’t bother with that. Farmers spin and pray and call it good. This was ledger-work set into cloth, the kind of proof that keeps its mouth shut until the right fingers read it. Trade had touched this. Foreign hands, foreign coin, and someone at these booths who knew exactly what they were doing.
I angled the strip into the thin seam of daylight between awnings and let the stamp show itself clean. I read it the way my father taught me to read runes on driftwood, once, twice, then I put it behind my eyes where it couldn’t be stolen. My thoughts walked the booths: who handled foreign bolts barehanded, who counted by marks, who’d laugh and miss it.
I started to fold the strip small, making it disappear the way I’d been taught to make my face disappear, plain, patient, uninteresting. It slid under my cloak against the mail, where it could lie like a second oath. Then leather soles worried stone. A scrape, a pause, another scrape closer in. Low voices, clipped and arranged. Not the loose noise of drunk traders: this had direction.
Three men came around the corner like they owned the air between the awnings. They wore their clan the way some men wear mail. One had a wolf-fur collar slick with rain, one carried a cudgel he didn’t need, and the third kept his hands empty on purpose, palms out as if to say he was only here for talk. That was the one I watched.
They didn’t come straight at me. They fanned so the lane had to notice, and the market folk did what they always do when trouble wants an audience: they leaned in without moving their feet. A kettle simmered somewhere, peat smoke and sour ale and wet wool, and the wind worried the canvas like it wanted the whole place torn open.
“Tell it again,” the cudgel man said too loud, and it wasn’t a request. “So old Þórir there can hear. So the Hrafnsey boys can’t say they missed it.”
The wolf collar laughed, quick and thin. “Aye, I’ll tell it. We were taking the back way, because honest men mind their own at night, don’t they?, and there, by the stones, a shape.” He dragged the word out, tasting it. “Black cloak. Hood up. Like a priest hiding from his own God.”
The empty-hands man clicked his tongue as if he hated exaggeration. “Not a priest,” he said, softer, reasonable. “Priest-shaped. You know the kind that got cut loose from a church and took to knives. Broad in the shoulders. Moves like he’s learned to keep quiet.”
They spoke over each other until it stopped being three voices and became one story with three mouths. Details changed as needed, where the moon was, how close they were, how sure their eyes had been in the dark, each revision aimed at the ears closest to them. They didn’t look at each other for approval; they looked past, searching for nods from bystanders, collecting agreement like coin.
And when they had enough eyes, enough breaths held, they turned the tale toward the rift as if pointing was proof.
They didn’t have to say where. Their fingers did it for them, stabbing down the lane where the wind ran hard and clean, out toward the teeth of Almannagjá. The gesture was practiced. Wide enough for everyone to catch, casual enough to pretend it wasn’t an accusation.
“Near midnight,” wolf-collar said, and made it sound like an hour you could buy and sell. “Right there by the stones. Black cloak. Hood. Head down like he was praying or hiding.”
Cudgel man snorted. “Praying. Aye. He moved quick as guilt moves when it thinks no one’s watching.”
Empty-hands kept his palms out, mild as milk. “Not one of ours,” he added, for the benefit of any ears that still remembered kinship. “No honest man walks alone there at that hour. Not unless he’s carrying sin, or sickness, or both.”
Plague was a good word to throw. It made people step back from questions. It made them want a shape to blame, something you could chase into a rift and forget.
I watched their faces as they watched the crowd: measuring fear, tasting it, passing it back and forth like a shared cup.
Each time the tale came back around it lost a ragged edge and gained a spine. The wolf-collar dropped the parts that sounded like guessing; the cudgel man kept the parts that sounded like law. Midnight became a nailed-down thing, not a drift of dark. The rift became a single stone by the path, as if the earth itself had signed as witness. The “shadow” stopped being a man-shaped doubt and turned into a black certainty with shoulders and a hurry.
They spoke it in the same rhythm, like a chant you could buy loyalty with. Traders who’d been counting pennies started counting nods instead. A fishwife with a red nose repeated it to a sailor; a sailor repeated it to a booth-guard; by the third mouth it was no longer a story but a fact that had always been there, waiting for someone to remember it right.
They salted the tale until it stung. Sick-houses out on the lava folds, leeches working in secret with burned rags and sulfur steam, curses you could catch like smoke if you breathed wrong. They said the priest-shape laid hands on the fevered and walked away clean, and that was proof enough of devil-work. Soon the lane wasn’t weighing cloth or questions. Just looking for a throat to hang blame on.
One of them hawked a wad of spit into the gravel like it could carry the sin away, then dragged two fingers across his brow in a crooked cross. He warned loud enough for the booth-guards and the timid wives that any man who sheltered such a priest-shape would earn sickness in his lungs and outlawry on his name. The crowd took the hint and shifted, eyes sliding toward the rift paths like the verdict was already spoken.
Bjarhild didn’t belong in the honest crush where men argued over cloth by the ell and fish by the stink. Outlaws had their own air, smoke, dark corners, and the kind of patience that comes from being hunted. But there he was anyway, planted on the market’s edge like a burr in a wool cloak, close enough to hear prices and promises, far enough that a hand could find a knife without an audience.
He kept downwind, where the peat smoke and sour ale rolled over him and made him another blurred shape among barrels and sagging awnings. It was a smart choice. The smell did half the hiding for him. People blame their own noses before they blame a man.
His eyes didn’t go where a guilty man’s eyes should. He wasn’t watching the back-lanes for lawmen. He watched hands. Fingers. Purses that opened and closed. The small betrayals. Weight-stones palmed, tally-sticks tucked, rings flashed to buy favor. He tracked them like a priest tracks lips at confession, waiting for the stumble that turns a man into a sinner.
He had that tonsure-mark that looked like someone had tried to scrub him clean and failed. Under the patched cloak he was built broad, and he carried himself like a man who’d slept on stone more nights than straw. One hand was never still. It worried the little cross at his chest, thumb rubbing the wood until it shone, not like prayer but like a habit you pick up when you don’t trust your own thoughts.
A pair of booth-guards shouldered past him and he didn’t flinch. A child darted between legs and he stepped aside without looking down. Too controlled. Too practiced. He was measuring the crowd the way I measured a shoreline before a landing: where the footing gives, where the line breaks, where a man can disappear if a name gets said too loud.
He wasn’t hunting shelter. He was hunting leverage, and in a place like this the cleanest leverage is a secret you can sell twice.
I had no trouble keeping him in my sights. The tonsure wasn’t a holy mark so much as a bruise of light on his head, a pale ring that caught every shift of the awnings. Men like that think they can vanish by standing still. He stood half-turned, shoulder offered to the crowd, hips already pointed away. Like a ship that says it’s anchored while the oars are in the water.
I pulled my cloak tighter and let my face go blank. My left hand curled where no one could see it, and the cut on my knuckle answered with a cold sting, sharp as a needle through old mail. The urge was there, clean and stupid: step in, collar him, demand names. That’s how you spill blood openly, even when you don’t mean to.
So I didn’t move. I watched the way his eyes kept counting exits, not men. I watched his fingers worry the small cross as if it were a knife he missed. The market noise rolled on but around him there was a thin pocket of silence, like everyone’s breath was waiting to be blamed.
He felt my stare the way a dog feels a stone lifted off the ground. His lips moved (slow, careful) shaping something that could’ve been a blessing or a curse, depending on what you’d paid for. The words never made it out into the wind; he didn’t give the market that much of him.
His hand closed hard on the little cross at his throat until the knuckles showed white under grime. Not devotion. A grip on the last clean thing he could pretend to own. For a breath he made himself small, harmless, holy: just another broken priest clutching wood and mercy.
But his eyes betrayed him. They slid past me, past the barrels and bright cloth, and cut for the rift paths, counting steps, counting gaps, measuring how fast a hunted man could turn into a rumor.
A rival’s man (one of those who wore piety like a bright belt) threw his voice into the crush as if the Law Rock itself were listening. “Bjarhild!” he barked, too certain, too clean, like he’d practiced the syllables. The name snagged on the wind and took hold. Nearby faces turned with quick hunger, looking for the priest to twitch, to confess with his body.
He flinched. Just once, the way a man flinches when a net tightens and he decides he’d rather drown than be hauled in. His shoulders dipped, his boots spoke to each other in a quick pivot, and he slid for the seam between two booths. Canvas swallowed him; bodies obliged. Too smooth. Like he’d been planted there only to be witnessed fleeing.
A voice rose in the market-lane with the easy confidence of a man who’d already been paid for the ending. He didn’t shout; he didn’t have to. He pitched it like a law-speaker pitches a clause. “There,” he said, and pointed like he’d found God in the mud.
Between two boot-prints, set neat as a lure, lay a single weighing stone. Not half-buried the way honest things end up in Þingvellir muck, but sitting up, proud of itself. The wet grit around it had been pressed down, smoothed, as if a hand had placed it and patted the lie into shape.
Men leaned in. Women drew their cloaks tighter, as if guilt carried fever.
The voice turned, gentle as a knife turned sideways. “Who carries stones but a trader? Who weighs out silver and foreign cloth? And whose hands are always black with tar and ink?” He let that hang until every eye found Svan on its own. “Hands like that drop things when a man runs. When guilt runs.”
Svan stood very still, spear slung easy, smile gone thin. I watched the lane, the faces, the way a rumor slides into a man’s ribs and sets up house. This wasn’t about the stone. It was about giving the crowd something they could hold, something dense and simple. A pebble-sized verdict.
The accuser stooped like he meant to be helpful and lifted the stone with two fingers, careful not to dirty his own story. He held it up to the gray light. A few men made satisfied noises, like they’d just found their missing sheep.
I’d seen the trick on ships: toss a man’s knife overboard, then find it in his chest. The only difference here was the water was mud and the blade was shaped like commerce.
The voice softened, almost regretful. “Count his debts. Count his oaths. Count what he’s sold us.” Then it sharpened, and the lane tightened around us. “Count his stones.”
Svan didn’t reach for his spear or his pride. He reached for his work.
He stepped out of the ring of eyes, knelt in the wet grit, and unhooked the little pouch at his belt like he was about to buy peace by the ounce. His hands, tar-dark, ink-stained, honest in their ugliness, moved with the practiced care of a man who’d watched silver turn to trouble too many times.
He spread a scrap of cloth on the ground, the kind you wrap a seal-skin in, and poured his weighing stones onto it. They clicked together like teeth. Not fast. Not dramatic. Steady as a counting-board.
“No songs,” he said, soft enough that you had to lean in. “No honor-talk. You want truth, you measure it.”
One by one he set them out, each stone turned so its marks showed: the little cuts, the nicks that come from years of being knocked against iron scales and ship rails. He didn’t glance at the accuser. He looked at the stones, like the stones were the only men in the lane who couldn’t be bought.
And when the murmurs rose, his mouth tightened. Not fear, not rage. More like recognition. As if he’d seen this bargain offered before, and hated that it still sold.
I stepped in before anyone decided a spear-point was an argument. No steel, no sermon. Just my hands and the small, ugly arithmetic men trust when they don’t trust each other.
“Let me,” I said, and it came out flatter than I meant.
I counted Svan’s stones the way my father taught me to count kin: slow, in order, without looking up. One, two, three: each one with its familiar scar and honest dullness. The set made its complete little circle on the cloth. Nothing missing. Nothing extra.
Then I reached into the mud and took up the lone stone the crowd had already tried on like a verdict. It sat in my palm wrong. Too eager. The weight settled like a lie that had learned the shape of truth. A maker’s hand had chased a number, not balance, and the cold in it felt bought.
I held it up beside Svan’s set and read the cuts the way I read runes on driftwood or flags at sea: by the hand behind them. The lines were too clean, too recent, like they’d been bitten in yesterday. The notches fell in the wrong rhythm: counting like a stranger counts. And that scratched nick, meant to mimic his habit, missed the quiet angle of Svan’s work by a hair.
The clean charge lost its shine and slumped into a low churn of talk. Men shifted like cattle deciding which way the stick was pointed. Svan kept his eyes on me, steady as a scale beam: no plea in it, just an invoice for judgment. I let my face stay empty and slipped the false stone into my pouch. Not for his sake. For the hand that paid to make a lie this exact.
The wind off the rift worried at my cloak like it wanted a turn at my throat. I kept to the thin track the sick had made: boots and bare feet, stumbling in the same direction, a trail you could read even when the sky went flat and colorless. Skjólholt sat tucked in a fold of lava and scrub, pretending it wasn’t there. It fooled no one. The air gave it away: sulfur and wet wool, the kind of heat that doesn’t comfort, only sweats truth out of you.
Steam rolled off the hot seep behind the turf wall, and inside the leech-house the light was low and yellow, trapped under rafters blackened by years of peat smoke. A pot hissed with rags boiling. Someone stirred it with a stick as if they were afraid to touch what they were trying to clean. The sound had the patience of punishment.
Bodies lay on pallets like cargo, spaced with a care that looked like mercy until you saw the burned heap of old cloth in the corner and realized it was also fear. A girl (no, a woman) moved between them with a bowl of water and a rag. Her hands were red raw, not from work alone. There were other things in that redness: washing, lye, urgency. She looked up when I entered and read my cloak, my mail, the way a good judge reads a face before a witness opens his mouth. She didn’t ask my business. In plague-time, no one asks questions they might not like the answer to.
Tora lay near the wall where the draft couldn’t quite reach. Her wrists were wrapped in clean linen that had gone stiff at the edges with dried blood. The skin above the binding was rubbed raw, the angry kind of injury that comes from struggle, not accident. Her breathing came shallow, quick, like she was trying not to spend air. Fever had put a bright glaze on her eyes, but it hadn’t dimmed her. Refusal sat in her jaw like a second bone.
I knelt beside her and kept my voice low. Around us the leech-house breathed and hissed, every sound turned inward, as if the whole place was trying not to be overheard.
I leaned in until my breath warmed the linen at her wrists. “Who did it,” I said, soft as a confession, hard as a demand. “Who put the cloth on you.”
Her hand came up like a trap. Cracked fingers, split at the joints from lye and cold, clamped on my sleeve with a grip that had no right to be in a body this wrung-out. It wasn’t a plea. It was an arrest. The mail under my cloak bit my skin where she pulled me closer, and for a second I tasted iron and peat smoke and the old, mean patience of laws that don’t care who’s bleeding.
Her eyes didn’t find mine. They fixed somewhere over my shoulder, past the turf wall, past the steam, like she was staring down a lane between booths, watching something happen again in perfect detail while the rest of the world kept pretending it hadn’t.
Her mouth worked. Nothing came. Pain chewed at the words before they were born. She swallowed, winced, and tried to shape sound around it anyway, as if silence would finish what the hands hadn’t.
What came out of her was no clean name, no neat accusation I could carry back to the Law Rock like a sealed pouch. Just a splinter of a thing, and a small, ugly fact she kept worrying between her teeth as if it might cut her free.
“Ink…,” she rasped, and the word dragged over her throat like a hook. Her gaze sharpened a fraction, fever turning it glass-hard. “On… cuffs.”
Not ink the way any booth-scribe wore it after counting fishhooks and silver. This was ink that lived on wool a long time, ink that meant papers and promises and hands that pretended they didn’t shove.
She coughed, wet and deep. Her fingers tightened on my sleeve again, refusing to let the point slide away. “Hal, ” she tried, and the sound broke, fell apart into breath and pain before it could become a man or a woman.
Outside, the words got loose and went walking. Men with clean breath and dirty aims took “ink on cuffs” and hammered it into whatever shape fit their feud: booth-scribes with tally sticks, Low German traders with contracts, even a priest with scripture and a knife. The story ran faster the farther it got from her pallet, picking up certainty the way boots pick up mud.
I didn’t take it for a trade-mark, not for any ink-smeared clerk in the market lane. It was a habit, a tell: someone who drafted oaths and settlements, who talked clean law while their cuffs stayed dirty with the proof of it. I set the detail in my head the way you set a rune: cut deep, meant for one pair of hands.
I folded the strip of foreign cloth small and mean and slid it inside my cloak where the wind couldn’t worry it. It sat against my ribs like a bribe. The weave was too fine for a freedwoman’s bedding, too costly to be charity, and the stamped mark on it (pressed hard into the edge like a seal) kept catching the corner of my eye. Everyone else saw rope and panic. I saw a hand that spent silver the way other men spent threats.
Then I went down on one knee again, slow, as if my joints were older than they were. Not for the cloth. For what the cloth had been hiding.
The pallet slats were rough driftwood, dragged here in a hurry, the kind that holds on to splinters and secrets. Under one slat, where the turf floor dipped, something pale lay tucked tight: too square, too clean-edged to be the usual refuse of a sick-house. No fish skin, no chewed horn, no greasy rag. Paper.
Parchment, really. Thin, good. It shouldn’t have been within ten paces of this place unless someone with ink on their cuffs had brought it.
I eased the slat up with two fingers. The wood complained, a small noise that made Svan glance over without moving his feet. His eyes asked a question. I didn’t answer it. Answers were coin here; you didn’t spend them until you had to.
The scrap came free with a little drag, like it had been pressed down and forgotten in haste. One edge was torn, not cut, as if ripped from a larger sheet mid-sentence. The surface was faintly ruled: light lines scored into it to keep a hand honest. That wasn’t market work. That was law, or diplomacy, or the kind of letter you fold three times and hide in a sleeve.
It smelled of smoke and damp wool, and underneath that, the sharp bite of iron gall. Whoever had held it hadn’t been careful. Whoever dropped it had been in a hurry.
I pinched the scrap free and held it up where the thin daylight could do its work. The ink had bled in places, dragged sideways by damp fingers or a wet sleeve. Somebody had handled it while they were sweating or shaking or both. But the hand behind it didn’t vanish just because the lines ran. The letters stayed disciplined, their bones showing through the blur: tight strokes, careful hooks, spacing measured like a man laying out a shield-wall.
It wasn’t a trader’s tally. No quick slashes, no impatient sums. It wasn’t a sailor’s mark either, the kind of brute sign you make with a nub of charcoal when the deck won’t hold still. This was the writing of someone who expected their words to outlive them, someone who knew how to make a promise look clean while it did dirty work.
I turned it, slow. The surface had been ruled faintly, like a guide for a steady hand. Along one torn edge the ink broke off mid-curve, as if the sentence had been yanked apart before it could lie.
Near the fold there was a stamped device, small as a fingernail, pressed into the skin hard enough to bruise it. Not a merchant’s flourish, not the proud mark you put on bales so every thief knows whose fist will come looking. This was tidy, official: an orderly little bite meant to keep accounts honest and men afraid. I’d seen that kind of stamping before, on safe-conducts and debt-witnesses, on papers that traveled under a cloak with a dagger and a prayer. It was the sort of sign that says: this obligation has teeth, and someone with standing will claim it.
I tipped the scrap, letting the light rake it. The impression caught, clean despite the smears, like its maker expected no one to question it.
I ran my thumb along the ink and the crease. It had been folded inward, the way a message is taught to sit tight against itself, then opened and slapped shut again. Not thrown away, not burned. Used as packing instead, tucked among barrel hoops and canvas scraps where no one looks twice. A careful kind of hiding: keep the words alive, make them seem like trash.
I laid the scrap against the strip of foreign cloth in my head and listened again to Tora’s fever talk (ink on cuffs) until it stopped sounding like nonsense and started sounding like a profession. This didn’t point to some knife-hand slipping through the rift’s dark. It pointed to a pen that lived in forms and seals, that made bindings look lawful and ruin look accidental.
Svan took the ruled scrap from my fingers like it might stain him. He held it up where the thin Þingvellir light could pick out the lines, the faint ribbing in the parchment, the way the ink sat clean instead of bleeding like a market scrawl. For a heartbeat he wore that trader’s smile. Then it tightened, went brittle at the corners.
“This isn’t a tally,” he said, soft enough that the men behind us couldn’t make a feast of it. “Not a ship’s count. Not weights. See the margins?”
I’d seen margins. I’d seen men hide knives in sleeves, too. But I let him talk. Svan’s tongue was a measuring stone; he liked to set it down and watch the table tip.
He traced a line without touching the ink, as if the words had teeth. “Clean spacing. Ruling like a clerk’s. And this turn here, ” He mouthed it without sound, the way a man mouths a prayer he’s not sure he believes. “It’s legal hand. Settlement hand. The kind they use when they want you to swear to a thing that sounds fair until you’re choking on it.”
The wind carried peat smoke and sour ale through the booth-lane, and somewhere a man laughed too loud to prove he wasn’t afraid. Svan lowered the parchment and glanced toward the turf booths where the better cloaks moved like dark fish under canvas.
“Whoever wrote this,” he went on, “knows how to leave doors ajar. They write ‘as is fitting’ and ‘with witness’ and ‘until such time’: phrases you can hang a man with, if you pick the right nail. Traders don’t bother. They count. They curse. They spill ink. This is… composed.”
“You’ve seen the hand before?” I asked.
He didn’t answer straight. He weighed the question the way he weighed silver, then set it back in my palm like it was both proof and trouble. “I’ve seen hands like it when mediators come to sell peace. They draft the rope, and call it a ribbon.”
Around us the market kept breathing: barrels creaking, canvas snapping, whispers moving faster than feet. Svan’s eyes stayed dark and alert, missing nothing, flinching at nothing he couldn’t name.
“If this was found near Tora’s lane,” he said, “then someone wasn’t buying cloth. They were buying an ending.”
I rubbed my thumb across the last stroke of ink, slow, the way you test a blade for burrs. It stayed sharp. No smear. No cheap soot-ink a booth-scribe mixed in a horn with spit and hurry. This had bite and patience, like it had been ground and strained and kept dry for the right moment.
Tora’s voice came back to me, rasped from too many nights over fevered bodies: ink on cuffs, she’d said, the kind you can’t wash out with lye because it’s not really about dirt. It’s about habit. A mind that lives by the pen, not the edge. A mind that can put “as is fitting” in front of a threat and call it a kindness.
It didn’t hang anyone. Not cleanly. No blood in the fibers, no name bold enough to drag to Lögberg. But it narrowed the world. This wasn’t a sailor’s hand, or a farmer’s, or a man who solves things with a stone in a sock.
This was someone who hid intent inside correct wording. And expected the rest of us to choke on it politely.
They hauled the market boy out like a sack of bad fish, the booth-holder’s fingers locked in the back of his tunic. The kid’s eyes bounced from face to face, hunting for one he could trust and finding none. He swore by God and by the Law Rock, by his mother’s good name, by whatever he thought might keep him from a cuffing.
“At first light,” he sniffed, rubbing his nose raw, “when the frost was still on the hoops. He was there. Neat cloak. Fine wool. Not a trader.” He pointed with a shaking hand toward the better booths, then yanked it back like pointing could burn.
“He lifted the planks,” the boy went on, “and took the waste notes. The scraps. Like… like they mattered.” He swallowed. “Like litter could talk.”
I walked the booth-lane slow, letting the wind do my listening. Two men, one a cloth hawker with cracked nails, the other a household runner with a new belt and old eyes, spoke the same stamped cloth-mark as if they’d rehearsed it. Same careful cadence. No curse, no heat. Just an offer of arbitration, phrased like “as is fitting,” thrown wide like a net. Only a mediator talks that clean.
When Hallbera’s name finally surfaced, it didn’t come up like a spear-point. It slid in, smooth as ink on vellum, carried on little proofs nobody wanted to call proof: retainers with tidy hands scooping scraps, that legal spacing I’d seen before, the same cloth-mark yoked to talk of “peace” and “as is fitting.” I felt the Alþingi lean, hungry for a clean sentence to blame on necessity.
The last hour before sunrise was the color of old tin, and the valley held its breath the way a man does before he lies. I took the sheep track toward Skjólholt with the river noise behind me and the wet-stone smell in my nose, thinking of Tora’s cracked hands and the way fear can be laundered into law if you scrub hard enough.
That was when the cord showed itself.
Fresh rope, new enough to still have its bite, stretched tight across the narrow cut between two basalt teeth. Somebody had chosen the stones like they were pegs on a board. Natural posts, hard to move, harder to argue with. Along the rope were small carved notches, neat little wounds in the hemp, evenly spaced like tally-marks on a trader’s stick. The kind of counting a careful mind does when it wants to remember every mouth it turned away.
Four men stood off from it, not touching, not admitting ownership. They were spaced like they’d practiced it, leaving the cord alone to look innocent while their bodies did the threatening. Spear shafts in hand, shields slung, faces half-hidden under hoods that weren’t meant for warmth. None wore a healer’s rag or the badge of a goði’s household that I could see. Just clean iron and the posture of men paid to be sure.
A man coming up from the camp, head down, tried to duck under. One of the four spoke without raising his voice. “For public safety.”
The traveler straightened like he’d been struck. He muttered something about a sick child. The answer didn’t change. “For public safety.”
Another passerby, a woman with a pail, asked who had set it. Same phrase, same measured tone, like prayer said by men who didn’t believe. “For public safety.”
The rope hummed faintly in the wind. The notches caught what little light there was, and for a moment I could almost see each mark as a decision somebody had made in the dark: this one goes back, this one doesn’t. Somewhere up the path, mercy was being boxed in like contraband, and down here they were selling fear by the word.
I asked the nearest one whose cord it was, and he gave me a look like I’d asked who owned the wind. “The assembly,” he said, careful as a clerk. I tried again. What healer, what lawman, what goði had put their name to it. The four of them shifted their feet in the gravel, not a step back, not a step forward, and none of them said a name.
They had phrases instead, rubbed smooth with use. “Panic spreads,” one murmured. “Men must be guided.” Another nodded toward a side track that wasn’t a road so much as a bad idea running uphill. “That way is safer.”
Safer for who, he didn’t say.
A boy came up with a bundle of linen under his arm and a fever shine in his eyes. He hesitated at the cord. The nearest spearpoint tilted (just a small adjustment, like a man straightening his belt) but it answered more cleanly than any law.
I could feel what they were selling: not quarantine, but permission. The rope wasn’t a boundary. It was a claim, laid across the land like a signature, daring anyone to contest it out loud.
The wind brought it to me before my eyes did. Scorched greens, resin, and that sweet-bitter sting you get when something meant to heal gets made into a warning. Around the bend lay a heap of herbs dragged out like bodies after a bad verdict. Angelica and yarrow, tied in careful bundles, still sorted as if someone had emptied a shelf with a tidy mind and a dirty purpose. The fire had been laid right. Too hot, too fed, no stumble of chance about it. Pitch or fat had kissed the kindling; it clung to the air like guilt.
I nudged the edge with my boot. Blackened stems snapped, light as old promises. A few pale sprigs had survived only to be ground into the mud by boots that wanted to leave no medicine, and plenty of blame.
At Skjólholt the air was wrong. Too open, too clean of the soft rustle of work. The linen strips that should’ve been hanging like pale flags were cut down and worried apart: some sliced neat as a jurist’s line, others smeared in ash and tossed into the spring’s runoff to foul what little wash-water remained. Inside, the pallets were stripped to reeds. In that bare hush, every cough sounded like testimony.
Whoever arranged it had left a verdict in the dirt. Let the sick rot without clean bindings, then point at the healer when the fever jumped its fence. Or drive Tora, bled of herbs and linen, into the arms of the men who claimed they could “restore order,” for a price she hadn’t agreed to pay. Each strip slashed, each bundle burned, tightened her throat a little more. Less room to refuse, less strength to speak.
I took the long way along the rift, where the ground drops off like the world has had enough of itself. It was half a habit (shipboard men learn to read angles and exits) and half a need to put air between my thoughts and the sick-sweet stink of burned herb.
From up there you could see how the booths sat, tight as clenched teeth, and how the Öxará cut its cold line past the ford. A man could go from Hrafnsey’s back-lane to the water in the time it takes to finish a lie, if he knew where the lava shelves leveled out and where the scrub hid a crouched body. The assembly pretended it was open ground. It wasn’t. It was corridors made of stone and custom.
I’d just marked, in my head, a narrow descent where a rider could lead a horse without breaking its legs, when three men stepped out of the basalt’s wind-shadow like they’d been waiting for my boots to find that particular patch of gravel.
They were dressed like any other hands, plain wool, no bright dye, no crests, and if you didn’t look twice you’d think they’d wandered off from somebody’s booth to piss in peace. But they moved like a crew that had practiced standing close without touching. Smiles first, easy as trade. Then the soft split: one to my left, one to my right, one in front, leaving me a view of the drop and no clean line back.
“Leif,” the one in front said, like he’d earned the right to spend my name. His voice was mild, carrying just enough to sound friendly if anyone happened to be listening.
I didn’t greet him. I watched their hands. Cold makes honest men fumble and guilty men careful.
“We’ve heard you’ve been asking after the night watch,” he went on. “Market lane, by the ford.”
Wind worked at my cloak. My left knuckle throbbed under the skin, a small, stubborn pain.
“That’s a merchant matter,” the man on my right said, still smiling. “Names and postings: better left to ledgers.”
The third shifted half a step, casual as a man making room at a fire. His thumb came to rest on his knife-hilt as if it had wandered there on its own and found comfort.
“Folk are skittish,” front-man said. “Sickness talk, plague talk. Alþingi doesn’t love men who stir panic.”
No one said the word outlawry. They didn’t need to. The rift said it for them, deep and patient.
They spoke the way men do when they want you to thank them for the rope. Gentle voices, a little concern in the eyes, as if we were all kin under the same bad sky. The market lane’s watch was “a merchant matter,” they said, and merchant matters had their own laws. Names weren’t for a young blade to worry over. Better I spent my sharpness on something that could be cut clean.
The one in front kept his hands open, palms out, like he was showing he carried nothing. It was a good trick; it made you notice the other man’s thumb settled on his knife-hilt, not gripping, just resting there as if it belonged. No draw. No flourish. A threat delivered with manners, like offering a seat while you measure a man for a shroud.
“The Alþingi’s ears are long,” the left one said. “And folk are already skittish. Talk of sickness makes them jump at shadows.”
“What you call prying,” the front man added, voice still mild, “others call stirring panic.”
I kept my voice level, the way you do when you’d rather not give your temper a witness.
“Then it’s a matter of oaths,” I said. “Safe-conducts. Who swore to keep peace on that lane, and under whose name. I read runes well enough to remember a promise when it’s dressed up as courtesy.”
Their smiles held, but the edges went brittle. The front man’s eyes flicked, quick as a tally-mark, taking the shape of my words.
“You’re careful, Leif,” he said. “Careful men can still trip.”
“Men trip when the ground’s shifted,” I told him. “So tell me who posted the guard, and who stood surety if blood was spilled.”
The one on my right let his hand drift closer to his belt. “Questions,” he said softly, “can be hammered into accusations. And accusations turn into lawful trouble.”
I came back to my booth with the early dark riding my shoulders, the wind cutting low between the turf walls. Something sat just inside the doorway: a stone, plain as ballast, placed where a man couldn’t miss it without looking like he wanted to. Parchment was lashed around it. The ink was crisp, dry. Law-talk. Stirring panic. Hindering peace. Words that could buy you outlawry if enough lawful mouths agreed.
I turned the strip under the lamp until the grease-smoke glazed it. No flourish, no proud hooks: just letters laid down like stones in a wall. I’d seen that discipline before, tucked into wool bales and tied to tally-sticks: the kind of hand that never smudged because it never hurried. This wasn’t only a threat. It was a frame being built, law-words and merchant reach ready to call my questions a plague.
I read the strip again until the neat black strokes stopped being letters and turned into a pattern. Fence rails, grave slats. The lamp guttered and made the ink look like it moved. Outside, somebody laughed too loudly at nothing, the way men do when the cold has got into their joints and they want to pretend it’s only ale.
I folded the parchment along the creases it wanted, careful, like folding a blade into cloth. Smaller. Smaller. A man can hide a lot under wool if he keeps his hands steady. I slid it under my left cuff where the mail met skin, and the edge of it bit like a confession.
Then I sat with my back to the turf wall and listened to the wind worry the booth seams. I could smell peat smoke and wet stone and the faint sourness of fear that always hangs around an Alþingi when old names start getting spoken with new teeth.
The flap lifted without ceremony. No greeting. No questions asked that didn’t already know their answer.
My chieftain’s man ducked in, broad in the shoulders, cheeks raw from the weather. He didn’t look at my table. He looked at my face the way you look at a horse you’re thinking of selling: sound legs, but will it bolt.
“You’ve been walking,” he said.
“I’ve been listening,” I told him.
He let that sit, then took a step closer, close enough that I could see the threadbare seam on his glove. He spoke like he was reciting a price, not an order. “There’s talk in the market. Foreign tongues. Worrying about sickness, worrying about knives. Bargaining turns thin when men think they’ll die before winter.”
“I’m aware.”
“The goði doesn’t want noise,” he said, and his eyes flicked, quick, to my cuff and back as if the wool had spoken. “This thing gets quieted before the next weighing of silver. Before the next round of hands are shaken.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
His mouth tightened. Not anger. Calculation. “Then a name will be given to the law whether it fits the man or not. Better you choose it than have it chosen for you.”
He turned to go, then paused at the flap. “Remember,” he said softly, “settlements are made with goods, and with men. Sometimes with silence.”
The words stayed after he left, hanging in my booth like smoke that won’t find the hole in the roof. Settlements are made with goods, and with men. I’d heard that line before, in different mouths, dressed up as wisdom. Tonight it was a knife slid between ribs where the mail doesn’t reach.
In the old days a man paid weregild in silver, in horses, in land. At Þingvellir you could pay in something cleaner: a story agreed upon, a witness who forgot what he saw, a question never asked at Lögberg. Silence had a weight, same as walrus ivory, same as a bolt of foreign cloth. My chieftain was telling me he knew the measure of mine.
He hadn’t said my name. He didn’t have to. The careful phrasing did it for him. Like a legal noose with the knot already tied. If I kept digging, if I pulled the wrong thread from the wrong merchant sleeve, he could offer my oath up as surety. My family’s standing, too: traded across a bench like a tally-stick, paid out to keep the market calm.
Honor is a fine cloak until someone else starts pricing it.
Svan caught me where the market lane pinched tight, between tarred barrels and a curtain of hanging wool that made its own little night. Up close his trader’s smile looked like a door left ajar on purpose. He kept his voice low, like he was pricing fish.
“I’m bound, Leif,” he said. “Not by friendship. By marks.”
He showed me a tally-stick, the notches clean as teeth, and tapped it with a tar-stained thumb. Names lived in those cuts: booths he’d sworn to keep safe until the last weighing and the last oath-speech. The kind of promise that doesn’t forgive.
“Those booths,” he went on, and his eyes slid away, “they sit under Hallbera’s shadow. Touch them in public and my partners call breach. They’ll strip me, or they’ll make me carry a spear for their feud to pay it back.”
The wind shoved at the awnings. Svan flinched like it had a hand. “I won’t be your enemy,” he said. “But I can’t afford to be your help.”
I stood there with the market stink in my nose and ran the choices through my head like coins across a scale. Lean in hard and I’d drag it all up to Lögberg: my house’s name in every mouth, foreign buyers turning their backs, old feuds finding fresh excuses. Step back and it would end clean, the kind of clean that needs a body: some camp-follower, some debtor, somebody too small to shout.
I kept seeing Tora’s hands in my mind. Split skin, soap-bitten, still sure when she laid yarrow to a cut or pressed a fever down. That steadiness was the only honest thing in this whole valley. What my chieftain offered wasn’t justice. It was a hinge: one innocent life to wedge negotiations shut, and my tongue knotted tight to hold it there.
Svan took me off the main press of the booths and into the narrow dark where men went to forget their names. He walked like his bones were counting steps for him. His eyes were half shut, not from drink but from too many nights bought on credit.
“Everyone’s got the tale,” he murmured, “but they’re repeating it like a verse they never learned.”
I let him talk. A man who carries weighing stones in his pocket learns that truth has its own weight, and you can feel when someone’s trying to shave it.
“First bell after dusk,” he said. “I was at Ketil’s cloth-lean, paying out for that green wadmal the foreign lads like. Two ells, short by a thumb, and I made it right. You remember Ketil: scar at the ear, talks big about law and can’t count past ten without his boy.”
He didn’t look at me when he said names. He looked past me, at the lane, like it was laid out on a tally-stick and he could read the cuts in the dark.
“Hallbera’s runner came through,” he went on. “Not the tall one with the red braid: the other, thin as a fishbone. He bought nothing, just asked after Tora. Polite as a priest. Left with his hands empty and his mouth full.”
The wind slapped at the canvas and made it sound like a sail straining. Somewhere a horse squealed, sharp as a man learning he’d been fooled.
“Then those guards,” Svan said, and his voice tightened the way a knot does when you pull the wrong end. “The ones swearing they watched the lane all night. I know them because one owes me three weighed pennies from last spring. Haki. Broad nose, bad teeth, thinks debt is a joke if he laughs first.”
“You saw him.”
“I sold him ale,” Svan said. “Not my pride, Leif: ale. Back-lane, by Þorgrímr’s tub. He had a companion too. They were warm in the throat at the very hour they say they were cold-eyed at the rope.”
He finally met my gaze then, and the quick trader’s smile didn’t come. There was only fatigue and a kind of quiet disgust.
“Men forget faces,” he said. “They don’t forget what they paid, and who watched them pay it.”
The all-night watch was the first thread to go, and once it loosened the whole story started to show its seams. Svan didn’t deal in impressions. He dealt in measures. I walked the market edge with him, not openly like a lawman, but like a man looking for a missing strap on his own gear. I asked after ale in one booth, then another. I let my questions land soft, the way you lay a hand on a skittish horse.
Same answers, different mouths. Haki had been there. So had the other one with him. Face forgotten, purse remembered. “Paid in foreign copper,” one woman said, spitting to the side like it soured her tongue. “Wanted it hot, wanted it quick.”
I could see it: two sworn watchers warming their bellies while the lane went unwatched, while somebody else tied a rope and called it quarantine. A man can lie about where he stood. He can’t lie about who poured his drink, not when the debt still sits on the table between them.
I tested their claim the way my foster-father taught me to test a shield strap: don’t admire it, don’t argue with it: pull where it ought to bite and see what slips. I went booth to booth with my hood up, letting my questions sound like boredom, like a man counting barrels, not counting lies. Same answers, different throats. The guards were “steady.” The lane was “sealed.” The rope was “for safety.” But when I asked which hand held the cup, which side of the fire they took, men’s eyes moved first, and their mouths followed a heartbeat late. That’s the tell. Not fear of plague: fear of forgetting the verse. Someone had taught them the story, and it didn’t fit the night’s feet.
Then the cord spoke up, the way a cheap witness does when you finally press his throat. They’d sworn it went up “at first light,” in righteous haste, but the knot was a shipman’s hitch. I thumbed the twine. It was rough with salt grit, and it breathed tar at me, faint as a confession. No leech-house hearth makes that smell.
The meaning of it dropped into me like cold iron. This wasn’t Tora’s kind of work: no healer tying off sickness with a shipman’s hitch and tar on the cord. It was rigging, the market’s own handwriting. “Safety” was the painted word on a rotten plank: mercy on the front, blame sliding off the back and into the dark where a freedwoman could be made to carry it.
I wanted the whole mess to have one face. Hallbera’s, calm as a pond with a knife sunk in the mud. I’d watched her talk “mercy” the way a trader talks “fair weight”, soft, reasonable, and always with her thumb on the scale. A freedwoman healer grows inconvenient, plague rumors start to crawl, and suddenly there’s a clean remedy: bind her into a marriage, call it peace, and if she coughs too loudly, call it quarantine. The sort of settlement that leaves everyone’s hands washed except the one woman who does the washing.
It fit too well. That’s how you know to distrust it.
I set the thought down like a token on a board and started counting moves I could prove. Who had feet in the market lane after dark. Who could lay hands on cord and tar without asking. Who had men that wouldn’t flinch at pushing sick folk around like driftwood. Panic is a wind; it doesn’t blow itself. Someone had leaned into it, shaping it, turning fear into procedure. At Þingvellir, procedure is just violence that learned to speak.
Authority mattered more than muscle. Any fool with a knife can threaten a healer. It takes a certain kind of backing to do it without steel coming out in reply. Backing that makes a man swallow his pride and call it “the law,” or “the safety of all.” That pointed, again and again, toward Hallbera: diplomat’s brooch, ink-stained cuffs, words that could turn a room and make men grateful for the rope around their own necks.
But when I followed the profit, it forked. The merchants wanted calm lanes and open chests. The goðar wanted no blood under the Law Rock. My own chieftain wanted the dispute gone, neatly folded, traded away like bad cloth before foreign eyes soured on it. A scapegoat would do. A marriage would do. A dead healer would do best of all. Quiet as turf over a grave.
Hallbera was still the most likely hand on the reins. Only now I had to admit the horse might be running for someone else.
Svan brought him to me the way you bring a skittish horse to water. No yanking, no shouting, just a hand on the rope and a low voice that made the animal decide it was his own idea. The camp-follower’s lips were chalk. His eyes kept flicking to my cloak, to the men behind me, to the wind like the wind might be carrying lawmen.
He smelled of smoke and old ale and that sour edge fear has when it’s been sitting up too many nights. He wouldn’t give me a name. Names are handles. Handles get you dragged.
“I’m not saying who,” he whispered. “I’m not putting my neck under a stone.”
Svan’s weighing-stones clinked once, soft as a cough. The man swallowed and forced out what he could afford: a fact, ugly and stubborn, like a chipped tooth you can’t stop worrying with your tongue.
“That night (when the Skjólholt place was spoiled) Hallbera’s folk weren’t creeping in rifts. They were at arbitration. Late. By the booths. In full view.”
He blinked hard. “I saw the brooch. Counted them. Four, with her. Named in the speaking. Others saw. Ask them.”
That scrap of witness didn’t wash Hallbera clean; it just smeared my neat accusation into a wider stain. If she’d ruined the leech-house, it hadn’t been with her own sleeves rolled up in the steam. It would’ve been done earlier, cord bought in daylight, tar borrowed with a smile, then passed down a line of hands that didn’t leave ink on their cuffs. And if she hadn’t, then someone had learned the oldest trick at Þingvellir: borrow a powerful woman’s calm like a cloak. Let her sit in full view, weighing words and calling it peace, while the real work crawls behind the booths where the peat smoke sits low. Either way, I couldn’t point and be done. The board had more pieces than I’d counted, and some of them moved in the dark.
I leaned on the next proofs, not the pretty theories. Who took the watch off the market lane, who had lamp‑oil to spare, who carried rags like a healer’s helper, who stood to lose if Tora spoke a name. Every answer came with a hand on my sleeve. A trader wanted silence “for business.” A rival wanted a body “for honor.” The rest swore it was only safety, only fear.
My chieftain wanted the knot cut before noon, clean enough to show at the Law Rock and quiet enough not to spook the merchants. The crowd wanted a single throat to hang the whole stink on. I could feel the trap in it. The kind laid with polite words and straight faces. Say one name too loud and the jaws would close, and I’d be the fool caught holding them.
At Lögberg the cold had teeth. It climbed into my mail and worried the little cut on my left knuckle until it throbbed like an accusation. Men packed close, shoulder to shoulder, cloaks snapping in the wind like dark sails, and the Law Rock sat there as clean and indifferent as a whetstone. Voices rose and fell in practiced rhythms, claims, counterclaims, the soft legal chant that makes murder sound like a boundary dispute.
I stepped into the ring expecting familiar faces to hold the story steady. I’d counted on them the way you count on a known ford in flood season. But when I met their eyes, they slipped away, quick as eels in a bucket. It wasn’t fear exactly. It was calculation. What a man could afford to remember out loud.
The law-speaker’s voice carried, calm as a priest’s. He asked who stood watch near the market lane. He asked who heard the struggle. He asked who saw Tora taken, or saw her blood, or saw any hand laid on her. The questions landed and slid off, like rain off basalt.
A farmer from my quarter cleared his throat and answered in the same flat cadence I’d started to hate: he’d heard shouting, yes; felt the wind, yes; seen only moving cloaks. Then he pressed two fingers to his lips as if silence were a pious duty rather than a choice.
Another man swore he’d been asleep. Another said the rift shadows play tricks. A third offered that the sickness had everyone seeing specters. They wrapped their nothing in oaths like it was precious cloth, and the crowd nodded along because nothing costs less than the truth.
I tasted iron where I’d bitten my cheek. This was the part of the Alþingi they don’t sing about: when honor gets weighed like silver and comes up light. I could force it. Call names, press harder, let my voice go sharp and watch the old grudges wake up. But here, in open sight, violence doesn’t just spill blood. It makes outlaws.
And out on the valley floor, somewhere beyond the booths and the smoke, a healer coughed behind turf walls and quarantine signs, getting worse while men at the Law Rock practiced not seeing.
The first man up was one I’d shared dried fish with on a storm-tossed deck, a steady hand when steel came out. Now he stood in the circle like he’d been carved from driftwood, plain, useful, and easy to burn. The law-speaker put the question to him with all the patience in the world, as if patience could pry loose a memory.
“I heard shouting,” he said. “Felt the wind. Saw only cloaks moving.”
Same words he’d poured out all morning, measured to the same dull cup. No names. No directions. No color of wool, no cut of hood, no gait, no weight of boots on stone: nothing a man with eyes and a living ought to have missed. His gaze went past me, over my shoulder, to where the chieftains’ booths hunkered like squat beasts waiting to be fed.
Then he lifted his hand and pressed two fingers to his lips. Not a man swearing an oath, not a man praying: just a man signaling what kind of truth was safe today. Silence, offered up like devotion. I watched his knuckles blanch, and I understood: he wasn’t saying he’d seen nothing. He was saying he’d seen too much to keep breathing.
I tried to catch them the way you catch a liar. On the small, useless things nobody rehearses. Who held the market lane after the ale tents shut their flaps. Which booth lamps were still burning, and whether the light was whale-oil yellow or a cheap tallow smoke. If anyone heard the splash at the Öxará ford. If a ship-flag was up (red, striped, foreign) on the night the shouting started. If the guard had a spear or an axe. If the ground was frosted hard enough to hold prints.
Each question should have snagged on someone’s tongue. Instead it came back to me blunted, rounded, agreed upon in advance. “Hard to say.” “Wind was bad.” “Smoke in the eyes.” Details sanded smooth until there was nothing left to grip.
The law-speaker kept his feet on the old stones and his questions in their proper order, like a man walking a measured path through thin ice. Who, what, where, when. Clean as runes cut deep. But every answer came back with the same dull rhythm, a drilled litany. No slip of temper, no stray detail, no oath to worry at. Just a chorus that turned each sharp point into weather.
I heard it then. Not in what they said, but in the hollow they kept stepping around. A wall, built quick and tight from debt, threats, and favors that would be called “friendship” in daylight. These weren’t dumb men; they were scared men. If I leaned harder at Lögberg, I wouldn’t pull truth loose. I’d only make steel find hands, and my name attached to the first swing.
I weighed my questions the way Svan weighed silver: not by shine, but by the pull they made on a man’s face. A true thing drags a different way than a rehearsed one. You ask about the night watch and a liar talks too fast, eager to be done; you ask about a lamp and an honest man pauses, seeing it again. I tried to keep my voice level, the way my old drill-master taught. Flat as a shield rim so no one could read where I meant to strike.
It didn’t matter. Every answer came back clipped, cautious, trimmed to fit the lawman’s box. Names were swallowed. Times were rounded. Distances turned to “not far” and “down by the booths.” Men who could boast an hour about a bad catch or a good bargain suddenly found their tongues tied like sailcloth in a storm.
What bothered me wasn’t the silence. It was the neatness of it.
One fellow with a trader’s cap, normally loud as a gull, kept glancing past my shoulder, not at my household men, not at the law-speaker, but at the dark split of Almannagjá as if the rift had ears and a long memory. Another answered with his eyes on the ground, tracking pebbles, like a man afraid to be seen thinking. A third spoke carefully, each word laid down as if it might be used later as evidence, or as a noose.
I asked about the ford. “I didn’t go that way.” About shouting. “Could’ve been the wind.” About blood. “Maybe someone spilled ale.” It was the kind of clean talk you got when a strong hand had been over every mouth in the row, pressing just enough to leave no bruise.
Behind the testimonies, I could feel the traffic of favors moving like rats under turf: debts counted on fingers, promises traded in murmurs, a marriage mentioned without saying the word. A man didn’t have to lie when he could be made afraid of the shape of truth. And at Þingvellir, fear wore a lawful face.
Across the market lane the rival household’s men drifted into the gaps the way cold fog finds every crack. They didn’t block my path. That would’ve been honest, and honesty has a price at Þingvellir. They just arranged themselves where they could be seen. Leaning on barrel rims, sharing a strip of dried fish, laughing at nothing with the kind of ease that meant their eyes were working.
A name slid under the laughter, soft as a whetstone whisper. Mine.
One of them, clean beard, good boots, too much leisure for a man claiming poverty, lifted his cup in a friendly nod. It wasn’t greeting. It was a mark, like chalk on a door. Another stepped close enough to brush my cloak and apologized loudly, so the whole lane could hear how patient and peaceable he was. I felt the trap’s shape: if I snapped, if my voice rose, they’d carry that sound straight to Lögberg and call it feud-talk. If my hand went to my sword, they’d swear I bared steel first.
They were laying bait in daylight, counting on the law to do the killing for them.
Svan found me where the market thinned into mud and wind, his tar-stained hands closed around his weighing stones like they could anchor the world. He didn’t look at my face at first. He watched the lane the way a man watches a door he expects to be kicked in.
“Your name’s traveling,” he said, soft as a clerk reading figures. “And not in the good way.”
I waited. Svan always made you pay for the last word.
“They’re saying your steps are bad for business. That you bring feud-scent into the booths.” His thumb worried the edge of a stone. “A few of them are already talking about ‘making it right.’ Not truth. Not testimony. Silver. Cloth. A share of a cargo. Something to lay over the wound so no one has to see it.”
He finally met my eyes, quick and guilty. “They’d rather buy silence than risk a blade.”
He came on a half-run, a boy with a split lip and my chieftain’s colors knotted at his throat like a leash. No greeting, no breath wasted. He pressed a bit of scraped birch into my palm. Runes shallow, meaning deep. Quiet it. Not at Lögberg, not under oath, not where tongues could be bought or broken. End it clean. End it unseen. And for the love of trade, let no foreign ear taste blood in the wind.
The valley narrowed around me the way Almannagjá narrows sound. Everything funneled toward one hard moment. If I leaned in, they’d name me the trouble and let the law do their strangling with clean hands. If I eased off, the men with ledgers and smooth smiles would “settle” it in private and sell the silence twice. I felt the snare draw tight and understood: my next step would write my face.
I walked the valley without moving, going back over what I’d pocketed these last days the way a man thumbs a worry-stone until it turns smooth and useless. The clues were all there, laid out in my head: peat smoke clinging to cloaks, the metallic river smell under it, the coughs tucked behind hands like stolen goods. Skjólholt sat half a day off like a bad conscience: steam rising from the spring, rags hung to dry, burned when they should’ve been washed. A place meant for mercy that felt built for secrecy.
But none of it put Hallbera on that turf floor.
I had her too clear in my mind: ink-stained cuffs, expensive brooch, eyes like still water that didn’t care what drowned in it. She moved through the booths with a diplomat’s calm, turning men into signatures. I could picture her arranging a marriage the way you stack weights: make the scale look fair while you decide what it will read. That kind of woman leaves marks.
So I tried to find them. Footprints in wet ash. A scrap of fine cloth snagged on a door-latch. A witness who’d seen her retinue taking the sheep track toward the hot spring. Something small, something stupidly human: mud from the leech-house on a hem, sulfur in her hair.
I had nothing. Only the hush.
Svan had spoken of guards posted near the market lane, names and shifts, the kind of detail that doesn’t lie unless a man is being paid to. The healer’s patients had given me looks that slid away, not because they were protecting Hallbera, but because they were protecting themselves. Quarantine makes cowards of honest people. So does law.
The more I tested it, the more my certainty felt like a shield I’d picked up off some dead man and called my own. Borrowed conviction. Convenient anger. I’d been ready to nail Hallbera to Skjólholt’s turf walls because she fit the shape of my fear: and because if she was the spider, then my own house could stay clean in the web.
Wind worried the rift and I heard, under all my hard thoughts, how thin my proof sounded when stripped of rage.
My own oaths kept coming back like a bad refrain. I’d sworn to my kin over a shared bowl, the kind of vow that sits in your ribs and warms you until it doesn’t. I’d sworn to my chieftain with my hand on cold iron, the words clipped and clean, the sort that makes you feel like a straight-backed man even when your thoughts are crooked. And at Lögberg I’d spoken the law-form, not because I love it, but because in this valley the law is the only fence between grievance and slaughter.
Listening to those promises in my head, I heard the thin place in them: the spot where duty had been eating from the same plate as rage. Rage is efficient. It wants a face, a name you can push into the dirt and call it justice. It doesn’t care if the story fits; it only cares if the ache stops.
I’d been letting that ache do my choosing. Easier to hunt a convenient villain than to ask why my own household needed this dispute “quieted” in the first place, and who, exactly, stood to profit from my silence.
The thought hit like sour whey: if I named the wrong hand at Lögberg, I wouldn’t just miss the mark. The law loves a man who loses his temper in public; it can turn his honor into a rope and call it procedure. One bad accusation and my rivals would step forward with clean faces and say, See how the vendetta has rotted him. He came not to seek settlement but to start a feud under the shelter of oaths. And the worst of it was this: the more I spoke, the less anyone would hear Tora. Her sickness, her fear, her stolen choices: those would become noise behind my family name, and I’d have made her suffering into a weapon for men who never touched her.
I made myself picture other hands doing the work: hands that didn’t wear an expensive brooch. A messenger bought with a bolt of foreign cloth and a promise. A guard with a debt like a stone in his gut, paid off in trade-goods and silence. A signal slid down the booth-lane (two knocks, a lantern turned, a tally-stick lifted) clean as Svan’s weighing stones. Hallbera wouldn’t need to smell of sulfur at all.
I put my anger on a short tether and let it pace instead of bite. Faces were smoke; the thing that mattered was the hinge the night swung on. In Hrafnsey a man only “saw nothing” if someone had arranged his blindness. The watch near the market lane wasn’t a rumor. It was a lever. Whoever set the posts set the truth that could be sworn and the lies that could stand.
I quit circling the corpse and started stalking the ground it fell on. Men wanted me to chase motives because motives are fog. Positions are stone.
The Hrafnsey lane ran like a seam between booths: canvas bellies swelling in the wind, ropes staked low where a boot could catch, barrels stacked two and three high to keep ale cool and hands honest. There were only so many ways through it at night. A man coming from the river had to pass the ox-hide tarp where the foreign cloth was rolled, then squeeze by the ale awning’s narrow gap (one shoulder at a time) before the lane widened into the knot of stalls again. Another path cut behind the driftwood racks and a pile of whale-bone, but it funneled you under a guy-rope so tight you had to duck. In the dark that rope was either a snare or a signal.
I walked it slow, pretending I was just another tired nobleman looking for sour beer. I stopped where the barrels made a blind corner and listened. The wind did what it always does here: it took a sound and made it someone else’s problem. Still, a runner would have scuffed the grit, knocked a stave, breathed hard in that narrowness. A watchman posted there didn’t need keen eyes; he only needed to be awake and not bought.
I marked the places a man could stand and own the lane without showing his face: behind the ale awning’s rear pole, in the lee of the cloth rolls, by the tether post where the shadows from the booths overlapped like knives. If you were there, you saw every passing shape as a choice. You saw it: and decided whether it counted.
By the time I reached the end of the lane my knuckles had opened again from the cold, and the little sting in that cut felt like a warning. Someone had stood watch. Someone had watched. And the “nothing” they swore to was work, not ignorance.
I tried the names the way Svan tried weights. Held them up, listened for the false ring. Þorsteinn the Tall, who’d stood shipwatch in my father’s time. Ketill with the frostbitten ear. A lad from the north booths whose face I knew but whose patron I didn’t. Each one I cornered in a different patch of wind and smoke, each one gave me the same answer polished smooth as a lawman’s stone.
“Saw nothing, Leif. Night was bad. Wind took it.”
They said it like a prayer that cost them nothing. No oath broken, no lie you could pin with a clause. Their mouths moved, but their eyes did the talking: sliding past me, past my cloak and my rank, to the market line where canvas bellies swelled and settled. Toward Hrafnsey, toward the men who counted in silver and favors instead of kin.
One of them rubbed his thumb against two fingers, not a begging gesture. More like wiping grease off a scale. Another kept glancing over my shoulder as if waiting for a nod that would grant him memory. It wasn’t fear of me. It was fear of permission.
Svan let me draw him into the thin shelter between two booths where the wind couldn’t listen so well. He kept his smile, but he held it like a lid on a pot. Tar and ink stained his fingers; the weighing stones at his belt clicked once, like a warning.
“You’re asking for eyes,” he said. “The eyes were hired.”
I waited. Silence is a kind of coin if you don’t spend it too fast.
“There was a roster,” he went on, softer. “Not for order. For holding men. Names, hours, whose spear stood where. Enough to turn ‘I saw nothing’ into perjury if the right mouth recites it at Lögberg.” He glanced toward Hrafnsey as if the canvas could bite. “It’s folded in a merchant chest. Worth more than silver, because it can ruin men who think they’re safe.”
I didn’t bare steel or spit threats. I offered something cleaner: a bargain cut to the shape of honor. Safe words, held close, and a path where no man had to bleed for telling what he knew. It should have landed like a hand on a shoulder. Instead it scattered them. Suddenly straps needed tightening, tally-sticks needed counting, horses needed fetching: each “urgent errand” raised between us like a shield against being named.
The pattern cinched down like a wet thong on a shield rim. This wasn’t raw fear; it was organized quiet. Somebody with fingers in both purses and spear-racks was buying forgetfulness by the handful and spending it in public. Until I found the hand that kept the roster folded and dry, every man I questioned would study his boots and swear the wind had flattened all sounds into one.
First light bled in sideways, gray as old tin, and the market lane looked honest in it the way a knife looks honest on a table. Until you remember what it’s for. The booths were still half-asleep, canvas bellies sagging with dew. A few men moved like ghosts with purpose: a pot boy sloshing yesterday’s shame into a ditch, a guard pretending not to guard, a trader’s wife rubbing sleep from her eyes while she watched everybody anyway.
I walked it alone, because company makes a trail wider than it needs to be. I put my boots where my mind insisted other boots had gone in the dark. Heel to toe, toe to heel. The ground held the night’s story in small bruises: scuffed grit, a pressed bit of moss, a drag-mark where someone had been pulled or had limped. Cold had stiffened it all, but not enough to lie.
From the corner of a stall, driftwood uprights lashed with rawhide, I counted paces to the nearest barrel-stack. Eight if you wanted to look casual. Six if you were running and didn’t care about noise. From the barrels to the rift lip: twelve, with a blind angle where the canvas awning and a pile of walrus-ivory offcuts made a little pocket of shadow even at dawn. A man could step into that pocket and be gone to anyone watching the lane, without ever taking the open ground that makes witnesses feel brave.
I tested it. I moved the way an anxious man moves when he thinks the law is behind him and steel is ahead, quick, but not straight. I crouched where the barrels were stacked two high, smelling tar and brine, and I watched the lane through a crack between staves. You could see a body pass. You couldn’t always see a face. That was the point.
Something pale snagged on a nail head near the stall corner. A thread, maybe linen, maybe bandage. I didn’t take it yet. I just noted it, like a rune you don’t speak aloud until you know the whole line.
Above me, the wind worried the canvas and made it sigh. Under that sound, a man could do almost anything and later swear, clean-mouthed, he’d heard nothing but weather.
I went down to the Öxará ford where the market’s noise thinned out and the valley pretended to be only stone and water. The river was the color of hammered lead, dragging its cold belly over rocks that never learned mercy. Wind came through the rift like a long breath taken by something too big to see.
I stood there and listened until my own pulse stopped trying to argue.
Then I spoke. Nothing clever, nothing that would stick in a man’s throat. Just a few plain words, the kind you’d use to send a boy for a bucket or tell a guard to turn his eyes. I pitched them low, like I was talking to the water. The ford took them and broke them up, flung them against the far bank, hid the edges in the hiss of current and canvas.
From ten paces off, my sentence could have been a prayer. From twenty, it was only tone: hard enough to be an order, soft enough to deny later. A man could stand in the pocket of shadow by the rift, speak once, and let the valley do the lying for him. And under oath, he’d tell the truth: he’d heard only water-noise.
Back among the booths, I went down on one knee like the dirt had sworn something to me and I was the only fool left who could read it. I pinched the pale thread off the driftwood lashings: too fine for a farmwife’s wadmal, dyed a deep color that had no business bleeding into this gray world. It clung like guilt. A pace on, there was a smear of pitch across trampled grit, fresh-black and sharp in the nose, not the old tar you get from honest boatwork but the kind a man carries on his hands when he’s been sealing more than seams. Then the print: a heel sunk hard, clean-edged, as if someone stopped and planted himself while everyone else kept moving. Not a stumble. A decision pressed into the earth.
I turned each scrap over in my head until it stopped being evidence and started being a test. Who wore foreign-dyed linen that fine? Who kept pitch under his nails from sealing chests and not ships? Who lived by ledgers and tally-sticks and could time his breath between watch turns? I threw out every tale that needed drunken chance and kept what a careful hand could plan.
When it finally lined up, it didn’t read like a brawl. It read like a route. I set it in my head the way you set runes in stone: here, a voice used low so it could be denied; there, a pause timed to the watch’s blind side. No chase: just a man walking inside fences made of custom and shadow, until he was alone and no one could swear they saw without swearing to their own part in it.
The loose end wasn’t a thread so much as a silence you could feel between your teeth. In the back-lane the night had been full of bodies and ale-breath, the kind of chaos that usually makes its own music: boots skidding, men laughing too loud, someone vomiting like a heathen horn. But what sat in my memory was the way the sound had been shaped. Not swallowed by distance or wind, not broken by chance. Guided.
A drunk scramble rises and falls in ugly waves. This had been level, like a lawman’s voice when he’s already decided the verdict. There’d been a cough, a low plea, then: nothing. Not the sudden, frightened quiet of people who hear steel. A measured hush, held for a count and released. As if someone had stood close and put a hand over a mouth, not in panic, but in practice.
I’d heard that kind of control on a ship when the captain wanted mutiny to die before it learned its own name. You didn’t need swords. You needed timing and a few men who understood which noises to allow. Let the right curse carry. Let the wrong shout die in cloth.
It made me think of the watch: those half-hearted guards the merchants hired to look dangerous and stay bored. On the night in question they’d been posted like stones on a board: close enough to be seen doing their duty, far enough to miss anything worth seeing. If someone wanted a lane to go blind for a breath, all they had to do was offer a story the watch could repeat without shame. “He was drunk.” “She stumbled.” “I saw nothing in the dark.” Men love a lie that lets them keep their sleep.
I walked the line again in my head: not a chase, not a fight, but an escort. A small procession moving through other people’s rules. Noise trimmed down to what could be denied later, as if the whole valley were a courtroom and the night itself had been coached.
And then my eyes found the cloth. Folded square. Clean edge. Pressed down and lifted again with economy. Used the way a clerk protects ink and wax from weather, not the way a healer stanches blood.
I kept coming back to the cloth because it didn’t behave like kindness. It had been a neat square. Foreign linen by the look of it, tight weave, the sort you pay for by weight and not by pity. The edge was clean, folded true, no frayed hurry to it. When the hand pressed it down, it didn’t fumble for purchase the way a healer’s fingers do when the blood won’t stop and the patient won’t hold still. It landed flat, covered what it meant to cover, and stayed there for the count of a man measuring his own risk.
Then it lifted. Not ripped away in panic. Not clinging like it had soaked through. Just up and off, with the economy of someone used to keeping ink from running and wax from cracking when the wind comes in under an awning. A clerk’s reflex. A diplomat’s habit. The kind of gesture that says: this is handled, this is closed, this is not for you.
In that moment the cloth wasn’t a bandage. It was a seal.
The hurried hand came back to me later with a different kind of hurry. Not the wet, clumsy haste of fear, no trembling, no grasping twice for the same grip, but the clean speed of someone who’d spent years watching people move when told. A hand that didn’t ask space, took it. It slid in, did what it came to do, and slid out again as if the air itself owed it right of way.
I’d mistaken it for mercy because I wanted to. In a place like Þingvellir you learn to dress your doubts in decent cloth and call them prudence. But this wasn’t tending. This was management. The kind of quick, practiced touch that closes a mouth without making a scene, that turns a body an inch so the eyes of the lane see only what they’re allowed to see. Obedience, done quietly.
The muffled voices in my memory stopped being fog and started lining up like men at a weighing-stone. An offer made low, a refusal clipped shorter, then a pause held just long enough to make the next breath feel like obedience. It wasn’t alarm; it was bargaining, terms pressed and tested, shaped to sound like a petty market quarrel to any ear passing by.
Profit came into it then, gritty as sand in the hinge of my jaw. This hadn’t been chaos that found them by accident. It was disorder spent like silver: paid out in just enough noise to turn heads, just enough confusion to make men say later they’d seen nothing. No steel, no shouting at the wrong pitch. Nothing the Law Rock could pin to a name. Only the clean kind of harm that leaves no witness but appetite.
I kept my face as flat as a shield boss while Svan talked. Let him think I was only listening with the part of me that knew weights and law-phrases. Inside, I was back in the Hrafnsey back-lane where the booths huddled like bad intentions under canvas, and the wind worked its fingers through every seam.
Night at the market had its own smell: tar from the ship-men’s hands, sour ale ground into trampled straw, wet wool that never quite dried. Men bumped shoulders and apologized like it was custom, not cover. A scuffle started the way a spark starts in dry moss: with nothing and then suddenly enough that everyone could point at it and swear it was all they saw. No blades out, no clean blows. Just a loud, stupid wrestling match staged to draw eyes and make silence respectable.
Svan’s voice stayed soft, but the details came sharp. He’d been counting, the way merchants do even when they pretend to drink. Who stood where. Which hired guards chose to look away. Which booth flap opened a finger’s width and closed again. He said “marriage” like it was a debt instrument, not a vow. Ties used to bind a healer’s household the same way you lash cargo before the sea kicks up.
I remembered Tora’s mouth close to my ear, the cough she tried to hide in her sleeve, the words she’d pressed out as if each one cost blood: ink on cuffs. At the time it had sounded like nothing: some petty mark, some clerk’s stain. Now it landed with weight. I’d seen ink like that only on hands that lived with vellum and oaths, on sleeves that leaned over settlement terms and made men think they’d chosen what they’d been cornered into.
And the voices, gods, the cadence of them. Not drunken brawlers, not hotheaded kin. Measured. Legal. Threats filed down into clauses. A promise of protection with the price left implicit. The kind of talk that made violence unnecessary, except as punctuation.
The cloth strip came back to me with the kind of clarity you don’t ask for. It wasn’t some torn hem off a farmer’s shirt or a beggar’s sweat rag. It had the feel of foreign looms. Tight-woven, smooth as a lie, pale enough to show every speck that dared land on it. Too clean for a back-lane. Too deliberate to be an accident.
I’d thought it was a bandage at first, something pressed into service when a knife kissed skin and men wanted to pretend they were helping. But the way it had been handled didn’t fit mercy. It went on fast, neat, with a turn-and-tuck that kept the edge straight and the fold flat, like whoever did it had spent years binding things that mattered, letters, ledgers, sealed bundles meant to cross water and politics without spilling their guts. You don’t learn that in a sheep shed.
And the knot. Not to stop bleeding. To keep something closed. To keep it quiet.
Svan’s account of the voices pinned the whole thing to the ground the way an iron spike pins a tent in bad wind. It wasn’t drink-talk: no bragging, no slurred courage, no clan-names spit like curses. It was business. Measured phrases, clipped and careful, with little pauses that fell regular as tally-marks on a counting board. One voice laid out terms like he was setting weights on a scale. Another answered with the smooth patience of someone used to hearing men bargain against their own throats. Obligations were never named outright; they were “understandings,” “proper ties,” “the peace of households.” The warnings came wrapped as favors: protection offered, conditions implied, refusal made to sound like ingratitude. Even in the dark, you could hear ink drying.
I listened past the mutter, past the wet coughs and the peat-smoke breathing, and I could feel the outline of it. Threats wearing other men’s faces. If anyone asked, it would be market jostling, a clumsy shove, a drunk’s stumble. If anyone pressed harder, it would be plague panic, people skittering from a fever-scent. Anything but a deliberate grip closing on a healer’s right to choose.
My anger wanted the easy shape of it. An outlaw’s blade in the dark, a rival’s petty spite paid out in blood. That would have been honest, in its ugly way. But the small things wouldn’t line up: the clean fold, the practiced hands, the hurt designed to leave no single wound a man could point to. It was paperwork done with skin. Fear filed, sealed, and left to do its work.
Svan shut his eyes like he could bar the whole valley out with his lids. The wind worried at the booth-ropes and made the awnings snap, and for a moment his face went slack, merchant-calm sliding into something older and meaner. When he spoke again it wasn’t to me so much as to the dark he’d been standing in.
“I was in the back lane,” he said. “Not drunk. Not looking for trouble. Just making sure my chest stayed mine.”
He listened inward, and I watched the muscles in his jaw tighten as if a hand had found a purchase there. In his head the Hrafnsey booths came back: the sour ale, the tar on the ropes, the soft scuff of boots on packed earth. Voices carried in that lane the way secrets carry when men think the canvas makes them invisible.
“It wasn’t haggling,” he went on. “No one said, ‘two ounces,’ or ‘half-price,’ or any of the words that belong to honest trade. They talked about a woman the way you talk about a bale. Not her name at first. Just ‘the healer.’ ‘The freed one.’ Like that made it cleaner.”
He swallowed. His fingers worried his weighing stones in his pouch, the habit of a man needing something true under his thumb.
“They spoke of marriage,” he said, and spat the word like it had grit in it. “Not as blessing. As tie. As guarantee. Like you could bind a household the way you bind a bundle for shipping: tight enough it can’t shift on the road, tight enough you don’t care what breaks inside.”
I could hear it with him: the low, patient cadence of bargaining, pauses placed as neatly as marks on a tally-stick. Questions that weren’t questions. Offers that weren’t offers. The kind of talk where every sentence already has a rope knotted in it, and you only find out you’ve taken hold when it goes taut.
Svan opened his eyes into the wind again. “And there was ink,” he said. “Not on parchment. On cuffs.”
In Svan’s recollection it wasn’t the words that held, it was the way they were set down: like stones in a ford, placed so you’d step where you were meant to step. The speaker had a patient voice, the sort that never rushed because it didn’t need to. Every phrase came with its own shadow: a second meaning laid under the first, ready to catch you if you tried to wriggle free.
He talked like a lögmaðr without the Law Rock. If someone bristled, the tone softened. If someone asked who would answer for it, an answer was already waiting, wrapped in fine cloth. There were no threats, not the kind you could call out and point to. Only “settlements,” “terms,” “proper guarantees,” spoken like remedies, like a salve rubbed into a wound that was still being opened.
And when objections might have come, about consent, about honor, about the healer’s right to refuse, the speaker stepped around them before they existed, turning them into “misunderstandings” that could be “corrected” if everyone stayed reasonable.
A face rose out of Svan’s back-lane dark like it had been waiting there all along, Hallbera’s, smooth as worked stone, eyes weighing men the way Svan weighed silver. I’d seen her at the edges of the Law Rock crowd, where words are weapons and everyone pretends they’re only air. The firelight would have caught her brooch and made it flash: too fine for a woman living on goodwill alone, a bright little flag for whatever foreign purse backed her.
But it wasn’t the ornament that stuck. It was the cuffs: neat wool gone faintly black at the seams, ink ground in where careful hands forget themselves. A mark of a scribe, yes. But also of someone who ties knots with phrasing, who seals trouble into tidy bundles and sends it walking.
Tora’s fever-talk lined up with Svan’s back-lane picture like two notches on the same blade. “Ink on cuffs” wasn’t a spirit-wind fancy; it was observation. The kind you make when you’re on a pallet, lungs burning, and someone bends close enough to sell you a chain as shelter. The sick hear tone. They see hands. They remember the sleeve that brushed their cheek.
Then the other clue finally earned its keep. The cloth strip wasn’t some trader’s scrap torn off a bolt in Hrafnsey: too tight-woven, too clean at the edge. It was the kind you cinch around message-bundles, the kind that takes wax well and doesn’t fray when a seal is broken. Carrier’s work. Diplomat’s habit. Svan’s “maybe” hardened into a line, and it ran straight to Hallbera.
Once I stopped dressing it up as honor, the shape of it came clean. This wasn’t a feud that ran hot and stupid. It was bookkeeping: cold fingers counting bodies the way Svan counted weights. Hallbera wasn’t trying to spill blood in the open where the Law Rock could see it and the lawmen could name it. She was trying to move a person from one column to another without anyone noticing the ink.
A marriage-binding is a neat tool in this country. No ships to burn, no farms to raid, no outlawry risk if you can make the right mouths say the right words. Tie a healer to a powerful booth-house, and suddenly the sick don’t belong to themselves. Their care becomes a favor. Their gratitude becomes a debt. Their fear becomes a leash you can pull from the far side of the rift.
I’d watched men swagger about oaths like they were iron. They’re not. They’re wet rawhide. You can stretch them, twist them, let them dry into whatever shape suits you. If you’ve got the tongue for it and the witnesses lined up. Hallbera had that tongue. She had the kind of careful phrasing that doesn’t sound like a threat until you wake up bound by it.
And she had patrons with a reason to want peace that wasn’t peace. Traders don’t love calm; they love predictable violence, the kind you can price into a cargo. A “settlement” that keeps chieftains from cutting each other in public while forcing their hands in private is worth more than silver, because it buys routes. It buys protection. It buys silence.
Tora’s knowledge, whatever she’d seen, whatever name she carried like a stone in her mouth, made her a problem you couldn’t solve with a knife. Dead women talk through their kin, and sick camps breed rumors the way bogs breed flies. Better to scare her, to make her think the only safe roof was the one offered with a ring and a clause attached.
That was the motive when you stripped off the saga varnish: not vengeance, not justice. Acquisition. A living knot cinched tight enough to hold chieftains and foreigners in the same harness.
Tora wasn’t just a pair of hands that knew yarrow from angelica. She was a small jurisdiction all by herself, the way a booth is a jurisdiction when the ropes go up. Freedpeople who ate at her fire, boys sent to fetch water without being asked, women who whispered names over a bowl of broth and walked away owing her more than thanks. That kind of web doesn’t look like power to men who measure it in acres and armed followers, but it holds all the same. Tug the right strand and you get a promise; tug harder and you get an oath someone will swear was voluntary.
I’d seen chieftains buy obedience with silver and call it generosity. Hallbera’s sort did it with wording. If you can make a healer “belong” to a household by marriage, then every pallet she lays out and every poultice she ties becomes a service rendered under that household’s shadow. Gratitude turns into obligation; obligation turns into leverage. All you need is for consent to stop being a choice and start being a surrender dressed up for witnesses.
But Tora wasn’t just stubborn. She had a small, sharp thing in her pocket that didn’t look like much until you held it up to the light: a name, a phrasing, some stumbled-over scrap from a night meeting that wasn’t meant to have ears. The kind of detail that doesn’t kill a man outright, just strips the paint off him in front of the right witnesses. One loose thread, and the whole pretty settlement Hallbera was sewing would come apart in the Law Rock wind.
So you couldn’t leave Tora walking around with that stone in her mouth. Unpressed, she could trade it for mercy, for time, for a different husband, for no husband at all. She could stall, refuse, or make it public out of spite. And that was leverage Hallbera couldn’t afford her to remember she owned.
Killing her would’ve been sloppy: too many eyes, too many tongues. A corpse at the edge of a leech-house turns into law-talk by noon and a saint’s story by nightfall, and every coughing pauper would take it personal. No. Better to leave her breathing and bleeding just enough to remember. Better to peel her away from her grateful little crowd, make her feel alone in a valley full of booths. Make her wonder which roof would still open if she let that name fall.
Then the whole thing took its proper shape in my head: not feud-madness, not a thief’s hurry, but instruction. A measured beating, delivered like a legal notice: hurt set to the edge of bone, terror poured in slow, and the breath left in her on purpose. Leave her upright enough to be led, quiet as a lamb, into the marriage-knot Hallbera needed tied.
I turned the strip of cloth over in my hands until my fingers went numb and my patience went mean. It wasn’t homespun, not the coarse, honest stuff you tear off a sack when you need to bind a splint. This had a tight, obedient weave, the kind that keeps its shape even after a hard pull. Foreign. You could feel it in the way it slid: like it had never known sheep grease or smoke until it got here.
The edge was the first thing that spoke. Not ripped. Cut. Clean as a vow, straight as a lawman’s staff. Whoever took it had a blade worth owning and time enough not to rush, which told me it wasn’t some panicked grab in the dark. It was a piece taken on purpose.
I held it up against the light and watched the thread count line up like ranks. Too fine for packing fish. Too dear for wrapping boots. No trader would waste it on barrel hoops, and no farmer would keep it just to show off. I’d seen it once or twice in the hands of men who didn’t haul their own goods. Thin strips wrapped around folded letters, the cloth laid over the wax so the seal wouldn’t smear when the road got ugly and the rain came sideways. A polite little invention for people who move power around without lifting anything heavier than a stylus.
There was a faint crease in it, like it had been pressed hard against something flat. Not a knife handle. Not a coin. Paper, maybe: vellum if the sender had money and a taste for permanence. I rubbed my thumb along it and caught a ghost of resin, the sort you warm between finger and nail before you stamp it with a ring. My cut knuckle complained, and the cold made the blood sting like a reminder.
I didn’t like what the cloth implied. Messages meant intent. Intent meant someone had planned this valley like a board game, moving pieces through lanes and booths while the rest of us pretended it was all weather and fate.
I asked him one question, who moved through the Hrafnsey back-lane after the lamps went thin, and Svan’s eyes went a shade darker, like he’d opened a chest in his head and didn’t like the inventory.
He counted men the way he counted weights: by what they didn’t waste. Two runners, not drunk enough to be honest and not bold enough to swagger. Cloaks pulled close, arms held tight, like they carried something flat and precious against the breast: no bulge of bread, no clink of coin. They didn’t stop to jaw with the booth-keepers or lean in for ale. They slid through, heel to toe, quiet as a debt.
He remembered the turns, too. Down past the barrel stacks, where the wind carries voices away from the Law Rock. Across the lane where a watchman ought to see you. Except that night the post was thin, men “borrowed” to settle a scuffle that never amounted to anything.
“And they came back,” Svan said, soft. “Same pair. Same pace. Empty-handed, but careful still. Like they were carrying words instead of goods.”
The picture went hard-edged when Svan started naming the small things. He’d seen messengers before, real ones, men who don’t saunter because time is a coin they’re spending for someone richer. These two had that same clipped gait, shoulders tucked, eyes straight ahead, hands kept close like they were guarding a seal more than a purse. And Svan, who could smell a lie in a weight-stone, said they carried themselves like hired steel pretending to be harmless trade.
Then he gave me the words. A phrase tossed low over a counter, neat as stitched hem: with witness and word, binding upon breach. Not market talk. Not sailor talk. Law talk. The kind that comes from ink-stained cuffs and a mouth trained to make a trap sound like fairness.
I walked the market lane again, only it was inside my skull, laid out like a case on a board. The watch list wasn’t wrong; it was edited. Men hadn’t vanished: they’d been redirected, peeled off to chase noise where nothing mattered. That left one cold stretch between stacked barrels and canvas shadows where you could pin a woman, speak your “lesson,” and have her gone before the first cough woke the camp.
With that foreign strip of cloth tying the knot, and the watch thinned like watered ale, it stopped looking like a brawl that got out of hand. It read like steps counted in advance. Two “runners” to carry sealed words, a stretch of lane emptied on purpose, and a pair of eyes paid to look elsewhere. A corridor built for a lesson.
I read the Hrafnsey lanes the way my father taught me to read a ford: not by the water you see, but by the pull underneath. Where the foot traffic thickened and slowed. Where the rift’s long afternoon shadow cut the canvas walls into blind corners. Where a man could step aside and become nobody, or step forward and become the whole story.
The market had its own currents. The loud bargains by the front awnings, meant for ears and reputation. The quiet exchanges behind stacked barrels, meant for hands and knives. I kept my cloak closed and my face plain, letting the tiredness sit on me like an honest thing. A nobleman who looks too awake in a place like that is either hunting or hunted.
I watched where men clustered. Guards with nothing to guard, pretending at dice; sailors leaning like posts; booth-thralls carrying water, eyes fixed on the ground as if the ground might swallow them. I listened for the kind of talk that doesn’t rise. Legal phrases don’t shout; they slide. A clean sentence can cut deeper than a seax if the right men hear it.
There was a turf booth on the edge of the main flow, not one of the great enclosures with carved posts and banners, just a serviceable hump of sod and driftwood ribs. Its threshold made a narrow mouth: two men could stand there and keep it from becoming a circle. Inside, lamplight would catch ink stains and frayed cuffs, the small betrayals cloth can’t hide. Outside, the lane stayed busy enough that nobody could claim we’d dragged her into darkness.
I stood there a while, measuring the distance to the nearest barrel stack, to the ale back-lane, to the open strip that led toward Lögberg. Close enough for witnesses to wander past. Far enough that no one could turn words into theater without looking like they’d come to make trouble.
Steel stays sheathed when you’re trying to catch a spider. You don’t smash the web; you set a finger on one strand and wait for the tremor. Here, with the right doorway and the right noise around it, a question could be a hook. And an answer, a knot.
I sent the word the way you send a spear point under a shield rim: quiet, deliberate, aimed where it has to go. Not a challenge: no man’s-name shouted down the lane, no kin called to stand in a half-moon and dare the other side to bleed. I wrapped it in procedure and let the law do the threatening for me.
A small hearing, I said. A question of lost property, one strip of imported wrapping-cloth, marked and mislaid, and the kind of disputed sign that merchants and oath-drafters pretend to hate but live on. Let those who knew weights and marks attend. Let tempers be kept, as the law-speaker likes to hear it. Let it be in daylight, with passersby enough to make knives feel heavy in their sheaths.
Hallbera couldn’t refuse without looking like she feared simple questions. She couldn’t turn it into feud-work without stepping out of the tidy role she wore like that expensive brooch. And she couldn’t demand steel without admitting she had something worth defending with steel.
I made sure the wording was clean. Clean words are harder to wash off than blood.
I set Svan where a man like him belonged: half in the flow of the lane, half out of it, close enough that his words could land but not so close he looked like my blade with a tongue. He kept his weighing stones in one hand like a prayer and his spear easy at the other, eyes on the ground as if counting dropped pins.
I leaned in and let my voice stay small. “You don’t sell me a story,” I said. “You sell me what you can swear on. Cloth you touched. Words you heard clean. Faces you can name. Guards you saw posted, and when.”
He nodded once. He understood the trick: where certainty ends, silence speaks without perjuring itself. In this country, that can be sharper than steel.
Hallbera came in like a clean clause. Calm eyes, neat wool, two men behind her who watched hands more than faces. I kept mine open, palms empty, voice flat. I started with the harmless things: whose mark was on the bale-rope, what seals went with what cloth. Then I laid the strip down, foreign weave, cut true. Last, the night watch. Who stood the back-lane, who didn’t, and why. Each question was nothing. Together they made a narrow passage she had to walk.
At the hinge of it I drew the net tight and kept the word assault out of my mouth like a coin I didn’t want to spend. If this strip was message-wrapping, court cloth, not stall cloth, then it had ridden in a pouch with oaths and seals. If the night watch went thin by arrangement, then safe-conduct and market order had been used like tools. I gave Hallbera a clean door: answer straight, take a binding protection for Tora, or refuse and let the matter widen past her hands.
I had Svan move like he was doing business, not errands for a blade. He slipped between awnings and barrel stacks, trading a nod here, a soft word there, the way a man does when he doesn’t want to be remembered. When he came back, he didn’t look at Hallbera. He didn’t look at me either. He set what he’d brought on a flat stone that served as a table when the turf was too wet for dignity.
A strip of imported cloth first. Tight weave, pale as old bone, cut clean as if by a small knife meant for paper and not meat. Then two wax seals in a scrap of hide, one broken, one whole. The whole one still held a thumbprint like a confession.
I didn’t call it evidence. I didn’t call it anything that would wake men’s pride and start them reaching for iron. I let my voice sit in the cold air like smoke.
“Lost property,” I said. “Found near the back-lane where the ale tents lean together and men forget their names. By custom it can’t stay ownerless. Somebody claims it, or somebody disowns it, and we all hear which.”
A few heads turned. That was the point. Not the kind of turning that brings a crowd. Just enough witness to make lying expensive.
I let my fingers hover above the cloth without touching. You don’t paw at a thing you’re offering back to the world; you show you’re clean of it. “This isn’t stall cloth,” I went on, plain as a lawman counting sheep. “Not for wrapping fish or patching a sail. It’s the sort a man uses when he sends words he wants kept dry.”
Hallbera’s men watched my hands. Hallbera watched the seals. Her face stayed smooth, but her eyes tightened a fraction, like a knot drawn under wool.
Svan cleared his throat, quiet as a man entering a church. “It was caught on a thorn behind the lodging awning,” he said. “Near where folk step off the lane to talk low.”
“Good,” I said. “Then let whoever owns it step forward the same way. Low or loud, but in front of witnesses.”
I asked for the watch to be said out loud, not argued. Plain order, like counting fish on a line.
“Name them,” I said. “Who stood the market lane. Who took the back-lane by the ale tents. Who was at the ford. Speak the turns as they were sworn. What call, what hour-mark, and under whose leave.”
Men hate that. Not the truth, not always. Just the shape of it. Spoken straight, it leaves no room to hide behind tone and offended honor. One guard started with a shrug and a half-smile, like it was nothing but damp boots and boredom. I held his gaze until the smile died.
He recited. Another corrected him. A third added the part nobody likes to say: who told them to trade places, and who nodded it through. Names fell into the cold air and stayed there.
A gap opened where there shouldn’t have been one: two turns thin at the same time, the back-lane left to whatever shadows wanted it. Not a feud’s hot accident. A procedural fault. The kind you can drag to the Lögberg without ever drawing a blade.
Svan didn’t touch the cloth like it might bite, but he knew it the way a man knows coin by weight. He held it up to the flat daylight and let the wind worry it. “Tight-woven,” he said. “Not bolt cloth from a stall. This is wrap. What you fold around letters and knot with cord before the wax. See the crease? Made to sit flat under a seal. And the cut’s too clean. Done with a small knife, not a trade blade.”
I watched Hallbera’s ink-dark cuffs in my mind more than her face in front of me. This kind of wrapping didn’t belong with fish-sacks and wool bales. It rode with words that could start feuds or end them, with oaths written neat and cold, and with the hands that carried them.
I spoke of Tora the way the law likes you to speak of a woman: under protection, not under pity. “Safe-conduct covers her booth and her hands,” I said. “You can’t lean on that by night and call it bargaining by day.” I nodded at the cloth and the seals. “Pressure by stealth poisons the market peace. Any settlement wrung from fear is a dirty thing, and it stains the wringer.”
With the thing boxed in law-terms, I gave Hallbera the kind of choice that isn’t a choice, just a doorway with a knife behind it. “Bind Tora under your word,” I said, “and let the marriage talk die until she speaks freely. Or deny it.” I lifted the cloth and seals. “Then this ‘lost property’ walks to the Lögberg with the watch-gap, and your friends come running when their names are called.”
I called it a hearing the way you call a knife a tool, true, but only if you keep your fingers clear. We took a strip of ground at the edge of Hrafnsey where the wind worried the awnings and the market noise thinned into something you could count. Not the Law Rock, not a booth with a banner over it. Neutral dirt, hard as an oath.
Men drifted over because men always do when there’s a chance to see someone bleed without taking blame for it. I made sure the first faces were the right ones: two householders who’d rather arbitrate than swing, one old goði’s man with a memory like a tally-stick, and Svan at my shoulder with his weighing stones in his pouch like he meant to measure the truth.
Hallbera arrived as if she’d been invited to bless the proceedings. Neat cloak, expensive brooch, ink on her cuffs that said she’d rather fight with words than steel. Her eyes touched me, then slid off like water off oiled leather.
“This is not feud,” I said, and kept my voice level because level voices make men listen. “This is market peace. Safe-conduct and protection. If anyone wants to call it insult, do it later in proper form.”
I set the rules where everyone could hear them. One matter at a time. No speeches that wandered like sheep. Each claim tied to a person, a mark, and a date: names you could take to the lögsögumaður if you had the stomach.
Svan opened his ledger, not like a showman but like a man counting losses. I watched Hallbera’s hands. People tell on themselves with their hands.
“Start with the cloth,” I said. “Not what it means. What it is.”
A gust snapped an awning line. Somewhere a baby cried. Hallbera smiled small, like she’d already drafted her answer. I didn’t give her room to unwrap it. I pointed at the plank I’d laid out and the empty space waiting on it, and I made it plain: we were going to speak in facts until her diplomacy ran out of air.
I had the “lost” cloth unrolled on a scrubbed plank, pale as bone against the dark grain. Wind tried to worry it back into a secret, but I held it flat with my knife’s spine. The dye was the first thing: a deep madder red that bled to rust at the fold, the kind the foreign men brag about because it costs more than a cow.
“Look,” I said, and kept my finger just off the weave. “Not stories. Marks.”
There was the trader’s tally-cut along the selvedge: three short bites and one long, a language merchants trust more than God. Near it, a wax smudge, dull brown, where someone had pressed a borrowed seal and lifted it too soon. The wax held a faint grit from peat ash; it hadn’t been made in a clean hall.
Then the corner stitch: a clumsy repair in pale thread, two loops crossed wrong. I’d seen that same ugly hand on a bolt Svan logged three nights back.
I named each thing out loud and tied it to a mouth and a day, pinning it down until Hallbera couldn’t float above it.
Svan didn’t look at Hallbera when he spoke. He looked at the air, like the numbers hung there and he was only pointing. “Third day after we came in,” he said, “I weighed Ketill’s chest (iron nails and a roll of Low German linen) on my stones. Half-mark short until he swapped his weights.” A couple men grunted; nobody likes being reminded.
“Same day,” Svan went on, “Þorsteinn paid for two guards on the back-lane by the ale tent. I crossed from the ford side to the turf row at mid-sunset, past the barrel stack, then cut through the narrow lane behind Hrafnsey.” His voice stayed soft. His memory didn’t.
He named the watch shift like he’d been there to bless it: who stepped off, who took the spear, who didn’t show. I followed, laying the postings in order (east awning, barrel stack, ford turn) until the missing man made a hole you could walk a bolt of red cloth through.
I kept it in the grooves of procedure, where pride can’t swing a blade. “This is breach of safe-conduct inside the booths,” I said, “and meddling with protections another household has claimed.” I didn’t ask what she meant by it. Intent is a fog men hide in. I asked who ordered the watch thinned, who spoke for that seal, and why her intermediaries put hands on a healer under shelter.
Hallbera tried to stand on the high ground, talking in smooth legal weather about balanced interests, calming plague-panic, keeping the Alþingi from tipping into feud. I didn’t let her. Each time she climbed, I tugged her back down by a name, a seal-smudge, an absent spear at the barrel stack. “Answer that,” I said. “Here.” The choice was simple: specifics now, or daylight later.
Svan set his ledger down on the plank between us like you’d set a shield in a doorway, flat, honest, and hard to step around. The pages were creased from damp and handling, the ink dark where tar-stained fingers had worried it. He didn’t dress it up for the crowd. He didn’t need to. Names sat in rows the way men stand in a shield-wall: each one there to keep the next from falling.
He tapped the first mark with a nail. “Ketill. Low German linen. Nail-iron. Third day.” Then the next. “Þorsteinn’s payment for two spears: back-lane by the ale tent.” He spoke dates and sums like they were prayers he didn’t believe in but said anyway because the words held.
I watched Hallbera’s face the way you watch weather over the rift: calm until it isn’t. Svan went on, voice low, eyes never lifting to hunt approval. “Mid-sunset I crossed from the ford side. Past the barrel stack. Cut behind Hrafnsey. I met Hróarr at the east awning, and he was on duty early. Wrong by half an hour.” He paused, only long enough to let the wrongness breathe. “Then the lane was thin. One spear where there should’ve been two. The second man didn’t show.”
There are stories you can argue with. A timeline like that is just a net.
He turned the ledger a finger’s width so the nearest men could see the notches. “Here is my crossing. Here is the handover. Here is the gap.”
Only then did I bring the cloth out. Not like a banner, not like a knife. A scrap, cut clean from a bolt, red as a fresh-sealed oath. I laid it beside the ledger and let the wind worry its edge.
Svan leaned in and touched the stitch: one tight foreign loop that merchants pretend is nothing and lives are built on. “Same trader’s work,” he said. “Same cut. Same handling. You don’t get this on your hands by hearing rumors.”
Hallbera spoke like the Lögberg had an ear pressed to her mouth. Every sentence came out weighed and polished, the kind of words that could pass for truth if you didn’t look at their hands. She didn’t deny; she elevated. She offered “stability,” “public calm,” “the need to keep plague-fear from turning the booths into a slaughter-yard.” It was all sky and no ground.
I kept my questions low where boots leave prints. “Name the man who told Hróarr to take the east awning early. Name the man who didn’t show. Who had the bolt before it was cut. Who carried the message.”
She tried to turn it into a lesson. “A prudent watch is not. “Which hour.”
Her eyes flicked once, quick as a fish under black water, toward the ledger and back to me. “I did not issue orders to individual guards,” she said carefully. “I spoke to arrangements. To general placement. To reduce provocation.”
“Then who translated your generalities into a gap,” I said, “and who paid for it.”
She inhaled, slow. “There are intermediaries,” she said. “Men who hear what they want and act too eagerly. If they overreached, that is regrettable.” Then she added, softer, like a clause slipped into a contract: “But we can mend it without tearing the assembly open.”
Something shifted in her mouth the way a knife shifts in a sleeve: same weapon, different angle. The flat denials thinned out, and what came in their place was framing: “misunderstandings,” “misread instructions,” “overreaching intermediaries.” The kind of phrases you hang over a mess so you don’t have to name the hands that made it.
She stopped asking for more men to be called. A moment ago she’d wanted the whole valley to swear for her; now she only wanted the right words on the right breath. Procedure. Form. A clean little fence of law around an ugly fact.
Her gaze kept returning to the plank, not to the faces. “If we are careful,” she said, measured as coin, “we can settle this without stirring panic. Or inviting accusations that cannot be proved.”
I put the terms down like you set iron on a wound: calling it healing, knowing it would sting. Skjólholt, strict quarantine, with guardians named aloud so no one could “misplace” her in the night. A public word at Lögberg: no binding, no marriage-knot, not until next Alþingi. And a pledge, sworn, no household to claim Tora “for safekeeping.” Reasonable on the surface. Fatal to refuse if your hands were in it.
She didn’t say “I did it.” She didn’t have to. She accepted like a woman signing a debt she’d sworn wasn’t hers, and the acceptance rang louder than any oath. She “welcomed counsel for calm in plague-time,” praised “mercy,” and agreed to the guardians by name: too quick, too exact. The circle heard the space her words kept clear: no wider questions, no daylight on the hands behind her.
I let her have the first word. It cost me nothing and it made the room show its seams.
Hallbera stood with her hands easy at her waist, ink on her cuffs like she’d been writing down mercy all morning. She didn’t look at me when she began. She looked past, toward the Law Rock, toward the wind, toward whatever horizon she kept in her head. The sort of gaze that said she was already speaking to people who weren’t here yet.
“In plague-time,” she said, and the phrase landed soft but heavy, “we do not govern by appetite. We govern by steadiness.”
A murmur ran along the benches. Relief dressed up as agreement. It wasn’t her words. It was the way she gave them away, like bread.
She went on, careful as a clerk counting out silver. A public declaration, for calm. Not an accusation, not a quarrel. A safeguard “for the weak and the fearful,” for “those who would be quick to name sin when they smell sickness.” Her mouth made a place where everyone could stand without admitting they’d been pushed there.
I watched Svan out of the corner of my eye. He didn’t move, but his jaw tightened the way it does when a man sees his own figures borrowed.
Hallbera’s offer had a spine hidden in velvet. She spoke of “keeping the healer apart from the market lanes” as if she’d worried over it in prayer. She spoke of “named guardians, so no one can say later that a woman was stolen under cover of care.” The room nodded like it was all plain sense and no trap.
When she said Skjólholt, she said it with the familiarity of ownership, like a place she’d built with her own hands. When she named the guardians, she laid the names down in a clean row, letting them sound like an administrative kindness instead of a cage with the key held in public.
I kept my face flat. If I smiled, she’d take it as tribute. If I frowned, she’d take it as proof.
She finished by lifting her chin a hair. “And let it be said at Lögberg,” she added, “that no binding be pressed in fever-season. Not until next Alþingi, when men can think without the taste of fear in their mouths.”
It was my settlement, wearing her cloak. And for a breath, the whole valley wanted to believe she’d put it there.
She spoke Skjólholt the way a goði speaks a boundary stone: like it had been there since the first settler cut turf, like no living man could argue with it without looking childish. The names of the guardians came next, clean and clipped, each one set down with a little nod that made it seem she was honoring them, not handcuffing them to a duty they couldn’t wriggle out of later. My terms, yes, but filed down and fitted into her own tongue until they sounded like her habit of mind.
That was her gift: taking a knife off your belt and showing the crowd how sensible it looked in her hand. She didn’t say “Leif demands,” or “we are compelled.” She said “it is fitting,” “it is orderly,” “it is better for all households.” A settlement dressed up as good governance.
I watched the ring of listeners shift with it: men who’d been ready to hate me for forcing a woman’s safety into public record now nodding at Hallbera as if she’d invented mercy between breakfast and law-chant. Even Svan’s ledger, quiet as ash, had been turned into a virtue. And in the space where blame should have stood, she left only air and a smooth path for herself to walk away on.
When she set the postponement down “until the next assembly,” she did it like a woman placing a cup on a table that wasn’t hers. The words were clean of blood. No “wrong,” no “forced,” no “threat.” Only “for the sake of order,” only “lest unripe claims sour the peace,” only “so that no household need answer for heat-born talk.” She stitched in the small legal hooks the way a sailor knots a line in the dark: the declaration was “counsel,” not judgment; the delay was “customary,” not compelled; the guardians were “named for clarity,” not to bar anyone’s hand. Anyone listening for guilt heard none. Anyone listening for advantage heard it sing.
It still shaved her, though she kept her smile. The moment her phrasing became the valley’s phrasing, men began to scurry to prove they’d always meant it that way. I watched the little tells: a messenger cutting across the turf like his feet were borrowed, a booth-man folding his awning fast, weights clinking, and three merchants shifting their talk in the same breath. Alignments leave tracks if you know where to look.
I let her have the face-saving shape of it. Pride can starve a man faster than winter, and I needed the cage shut more than I needed a cheer at my back. Tora got air to breathe and names to shield her, in lawful daylight. But I watched the quick turns, hands that had been empty suddenly offering support, and I set each one aside like a rune in my mind, because Hallbera hadn’t yielded reach, only paid for it.
I didn’t come to Lögberg to howl about old blood or to make a clean duel out of a dirty thing. That’s what men do when they want a story more than an outcome. I came with tired legs, a knuckle that wouldn’t close right in the cold, and the kind of anger that can make you stupid if you feed it in public.
So I made it about procedure.
I spoke the words slow, like counting coin where everyone can see your hands. Not “Hallbera did this,” not “my house is owed,” not even “Tora is being hunted.” Those were sparks. Sparks start fires and fires get you outlawed when the smoke clears. Instead I set the question down the way the law likes it: if sickness is loose in the valley and if contracts are being bent until they squeal, what narrow thing can the Assembly say today that will still be true tomorrow?
There were merchants in the ring who’d sold their own mothers for a half-mark, and farmers who’d fight a bear over grazing, and goðar whose honor had more holes than their mail. None of them wanted open violence near the booths. Violence is expensive. Witnesses are worse.
I offered them a door they could walk through without losing face. A hearing small enough to hold in two breaths. No blame laid that would demand steel to answer it. No sweeping judgment that would drag half the valley into feud. Just a ruling on custody and delay: who might guard a healer during plague-time; whether a marriage promise could be pressed while quarantine held; whether a “peace-knot” made under threat counted as binding.
Hallbera watched me like I’d brought a knife into a church. I didn’t look at her much. I looked at the crowd. If I could make them think this was about keeping order and keeping trade from rotting, they’d police it themselves. And if they did that, I wouldn’t have to.
We kept it plain, because plain is what the law can swallow. I had a strip of foreign cloth laid out on a shield. Dull red, salt-stiff, with a maker’s mark worked into the selvedge like a small lie you can hold between two fingers. Svan didn’t smile when he named it. He didn’t have to. Half the booths on that lane knew which bales came in under whose seal, and which hands had handled them.
Then we walked the watch, step by step. Not with drama. Just names and posts, the way you’d recite kin at a wedding. Who stood by the back-lane. Who was at the Öxará ford. Who was paid to look the other way, and who was too proud to admit it. Each man’s answer tightened the circle.
Svan opened his ledger like a priest opening a book of sins. Tar-stained thumb, neat scratches: third bell, moved iron weights; fourth, took ale by Hrafnsey; fifth, carried a chest for Ketill’s factor. Times you could hang a body on. Hallbera’s tale still had air in it. If she let it be leashed in public words.
Hallbera didn’t reach for outrage. Outrage is for men with axes and nothing to lose. She weighed the circle the way a trader weighs silver. By feel, by the twitch in a wrist, by what won’t be said twice. Then she gave ground the way a river gives ground: slow, so no one sees where the bank ends.
Her voice stayed mild. She spoke of “prudence,” of “stewardship in sickness,” of the Assembly’s duty to keep hands clean when plague rumor was already staining them. She even nodded once toward Tora, as if mercy had been her idea all along. No confession, no admission. Just an offer wrapped in law-words, like a blade in felt.
It was concession, dressed up as care, and everyone in the ring let themselves be fooled because it was cheaper than calling it what it was.
We set the terms down in words so plain a child could carry them, and that was the point. Tora would go to Skjólholt, not as chattel but as a sick woman under quarantine, with two named guardians to answer for her: one from my side, one from the booths. And the marriage talk? Hung up like a wet cloak: no binding pressed, no “peace-knot” tightened, until next Alþingi.
Justice came down like a net, not a hammer. We didn’t break Hallbera; we boxed her in, gave her a clean corner to step into and call it choice. Tora’s life was written into the settlement the way debt is written: paid in delays and witnesses, not mercy. Hallbera walked off with her brooch still bright, name still usable. For now, she was contained. Not ended.
After the ring broke and men went back to pretending the world was simple, Svan didn’t smile. He didn’t slap backs or take a cup like the thing was finished. He took his weighing stones out of his pouch and let them rest in his palm, the way some men thumb a prayer-bead when they don’t trust their own thoughts.
I watched him drift down the market lane, between stacked barrels and canvas walls that snapped in the wind. He moved like he belonged to everyone and no one. Merchant when a trader hailed him, guard when a hard-eyed boy tried to shoulder past. He listened more than he spoke. That was his real weapon.
The phrases started showing up the way a bad smell does: first faint, then everywhere once you noticed. “For prudence.” “To keep hands clean.” “In sickness we must be stewards.” Words that sounded like they’d been washed and hung up to dry, not spoken from the gut. Hallbera’s words, but walking on other men’s tongues.
A guard by the ale-lane mouth said it to a cloth-seller’s wife, careful as a man handling hot iron. Another guard near the ford said the same thing an hour later, to a pair of farmers who didn’t know why they were suddenly being guided away from Skjólholt talk. Svan didn’t challenge them. He just let the lines spool out, nodded as if he agreed, and kept moving.
He made small trades as he went. Half a measure of salt for a rumor, a friendly word for a name. He asked after nothing directly. He asked after everything sideways: who’d been posted where when the light went thin; who’d carried messages between booths; who’d been paid in coin and who’d been paid in “later.”
When he passed me again his eyes didn’t meet mine, but his hand tightened around the stones. That told me enough. In a place like Þingvellir, men don’t repeat a diplomat’s phrasing unless someone taught them the mouth-shape. And teaching takes time. Time leaves tracks. Svan was already counting them.
Svan went back to his booth like a man returning to confession. He squatted by his chest where the ink-knife lived, drew out the folded skin of his ledger, and let the numbers stare up at him in their neat rows. Then he laid the day beside the watch like two blades on the same whetstone: his own movements against the watch-posting timeline he’d coaxed out of tired mouths.
Back-lane mouth: Ragi, at first light. Then a swap “because the wind turned,” which was the kind of reason men used when they didn’t want the true one spoken. Ford-side: Þorleifr, who swore he’d never left his post and then “remembered” a piss break that lasted long enough to deliver a message and come back clean-handed. Ale-lane: a boy too young for law, old enough for coin.
Svan didn’t write accusations. He didn’t have to. He put tiny marks by names, one for debt, one for favor, one for fear, signs only his own head could read without spilling blood on the page.
I made them say it again, not because I loved the sound of my own voice, but because men grow brave in the gaps between words. We stood where the wind couldn’t steal syllables and where enough ears were close that forgetting would take effort. Skjólholt, I said. Quarantine, I said. Not “kept safe,” not “looked after”, quarantine, with the path named and the door counted. The guardians were spoken plain, by name and kin, so no one could swap in a cousin with a loose temper later and call it the same thing. And the marriage claim: postponed until the next Alþingi, said in the legal way that turns a wish into a hook. I had the phrasing repeated until it sat like a rung in the law, something a man could slip on and break his teeth.
Skjólholt stopped being a hiding place and turned into a rulebook. Rags went into the fire the moment they left skin; water came from one bucket and went out another, no swapping, no mercy. There was one path to the door, trampled hard and watched harder. My men kept their hands low and their voices lower. Svan fed the leech-house in plain trade bundles, salt, linen, lamp-oil, so Tora’s fever stayed a fact, not a story.
Back among the booths, the terms shifted like weather off the rift. No thunder, just a cold turn you felt in your teeth. A clothman who’d been all smiles yesterday now wanted two witnesses and a man of mine to swear the weights. Another offered me “help” for Tora (linen, lamp-oil) with a knot of obligation hidden in it. Svan marked every twitch in his ledger. I read it like a pressure map: the agreement was holding, and already being tested for weak seams.
The market lane settled the way a ship settles after a squall: still rocking, but on an older rhythm men pretend they chose. The noise didn’t vanish; it just learned manners. Voices dropped into the cloth and smoke. Jokes went thin. Hands that had been white-knuckled on spear-shafts loosened, then found other things to grip: a bale cord, a purse-string, a prayer bead. A man who’d been hungry for a spectacle an hour ago suddenly remembered a debt, a missing kid, a horse that needed shoeing. Funny how courage keeps its appointments until the law walks into the room.
I watched the faces more than the wares. The rival boys kept their shoulders high, but their eyes kept sliding to the open ground where a challenge would carry. No one wanted to be the first to raise his voice and have it echoed at Lögberg like a curse that won’t come off. There’s a special kind of shame in being right and outlawed at the same time.
A cloth-seller with a foreign stitch on his cuffs made a show of measuring again (slow, careful) like his weights had only just grown honest. A guard I’d seen near the back-lane the night before drifted to a new post with a casualness that was too smooth. Even the ale-tent kept its rough laughter behind the canvas, as if the wind might testify.
A boy darted past with a message-stick, and every man’s head turned just a fraction, like dogs hearing a distant horn. That was the shape of the calm: not peace, just attention distributed evenly enough to keep anyone from pouncing.
My left knuckle throbbed inside my glove, the cold worrying the cut like it had teeth. I kept my hands where they could be seen. Discipline isn’t a virtue here; it’s camouflage.
No formal challenge was shouted. No blood hit the stones where witnesses could count drops. But the lane stayed tight with it, the way a scabbard stays tight with the idea of a blade.
We kept our house like a blade kept in its sheath: clean, quiet, and giving nobody a reason to call it bare steel. My men stood where they could be seen, not where they could strike. When we spoke, we spoke in the law’s dry tongue. About weights, witnesses, boundaries of booths, the old phrases that let a man cut without showing a knife. Courtesy is a kind of armor at Alþingi; it dents, but it doesn’t splash.
The boys from the rival booths came by in ones and twos, faces set like they’d rehearsed anger in a mirror. They wanted a flare-up: something loud enough to carry to Lögberg, something that would turn my name into a stone in their sling. I gave them nothing to throw. I answered their bait with questions: who saw it, when, under what oath, with what surety. That kind of talk makes hot blood look childish.
They tried laughter. They tried insults tucked into compliments. They tried to stand too close. Each time, I stepped back into form. It forced them to do the same, or show themselves as what they were. The day went by without a shout worth repeating, and my name stayed unspotted.
Quiet eyes shifted all the same. The corners that used to be empty got company: guards who’d learned to stand like furniture, lingering a heartbeat too long, watching the lane the way a wolf watches a sheep track. I saw the same runner met twice between the barrel stacks, stopped with soft questions and a hand held out for the message-stick as if it were a knife. Men who never cared for names began to ask them, and men who never cared for time began to count it. It wasn’t rough. It was careful. That was the point.
Hallbera’s reach still brushed the booths, no grand gestures, just the light touch of obligation and ink, but it moved now like a thief in a room full of sleepers who have started to wake. Under notice, not under blessing. I kept my face still and let my memory do the staring.
Svan let me see his marks by lamplight. Tally-scratches and ink like a man confessing without saying he’d sinned. A cart that should’ve rolled at second bell waited until third. A witness who never cared for law suddenly demanded names, oaths, sureties. A “gift” of cloth that felt like a hook with wool on it. Taken alone it was noise; together it read like one careful hand worrying a knot, testing where our settlement might fray without snapping.
I rode out with my cloak snapping like a bad thought in the wind, my house’s honor still clean in the eyes that mattered. It didn’t loosen anything inside me. The pattern lay plain as rune-cuts: the old killing that feeds my vendetta and the traders’ marriage-bindings weren’t two quarrels anymore. Same braid, different fingers, pulled tight. Law could hold it: for a season. Not forever.