The inlet always looked harmless from the hill—the kind of blue that pretends it is soft—and then you stepped onto it and learned that water, even when it holds still, is a thing with a spine.
Morning cut thin across the flats. Men and women were out early with ice-bars and augers, opening breathing channels for the water and fishing from the edges of the leads. They wore their winter silence like another layer of wool. Children ran buckets back and forth, boots slapping the hard white, breath streaming behind them like pennants. The cold was the sort that never let a thought grow fat. Everything you did received a small, exacting answer.
Asgrim came down from Helgrind with the hammer wrapped under torn sailcloth and the ship-chain riding his left forearm like a tame snake. The weight had begun to feel like a habit in his bones; every time he shifted, some old ache offered itself in exchange and was taken. He'd slept an hour on a bench with the door barred and the lamplight out, enough to keep his hands clever, not enough to knock the edges off of anything that ought to stay sharp.
He crossed the shore path without haste. A boy near the ice-stack looked up and, seeing a big man with a shield and a something wrapped on his shoulder, went bright-eyed and then appropriately uninterested as his mother's hand landed like a warning on his shoulder.
"Keep the buckets moving," Asgrim said, because the words were true and because it steadied him to start the day by speaking something that did not lean.
The boy grinned and went.
At the ice edge, the breath of the sea rose out of black leads. Men squatted on their heels, gloved hands on their lines, faces patience-stiff. An old woman knelt with a bar and punched a rim clear, the ring of ice she loosened sliding under like a coin dropped into a jar.
Asgrim set the shield down, flipped the torn sailcloth back from the hammerhead, and watched the way the light behaved on the dull-violet metal. It ate glare. It disliked very bright things. He could respect that.
"Morning," said a man with a spiral scar at his throat and the cautious tone people use with men they might have to depend on. "Hear anything up on Helgrind?"
"Enough," Asgrim said.
"Enough of what?"
"Enough to come down."
The man accepted that as a full answer. On mornings like this, using too many words felt like blowing warm on a frozen lock—counterproductive and vaguely insulting.
A shout came then, from farther out along the ice shelf, from a pair of boys who had no business out that far and knew it. It wasn't the frightened cry that hunts its mother; it was the high, excited kind that calls mischief across a room.
"Boats," someone said.
Asgrim didn't lift his head. He looked at the gray line of the horizon past the cut where the channel went black and deep and then turned his body to face what was coming. The boats were low black bellies against the ice line, hugging the channel like otters that had learned to hate. Six of them, maybe seven. Oars moved with an economy that had nothing of grace in it. No pennons, no bright paint, no animal heads carved at the prow. Nothing to tell a story that anyone wanted to hear. The men inside them had that winter-hollow look that turned faces into knives. He could have named the rocky cove they would choose to haul up under, except he could not; the neat cut-out absence in his mind where that name had lived pulsed once, steady as a bruise.
"Raiders," said the man with the scar, as if it were the name of a distant cousin who shows up drunk and requires feeding. "Or men too hungry to call themselves anything else."
The old woman with the bar rose, hands on her knees. "Children. Bucket line in."
The children went, because some orders are older than fear. Three of them were already out along the flat, one too near the fretted place where the feed channel bit farther under the ice and made false'blue. The boy who had been bright-eyed with the buckets kept looking over his shoulder, torn between obedience and the delightful horror of watching men he wasn't supposed to see.
Asgrim stepped onto the ice. He felt the change in traction come up through his boots—this was not the fjord as an idea; it was a surface that would permit him if he did not insult it. He took two steady steps, then a third, and the chain shifted on his forearm with a sound like a winter branch remembering it used to be leaves.
The boats came on without shouting. These were not the sort who liked to spend what they didn't own, even in noise.
"Truth," Asgrim said, very quietly, to the air and the water and the thing at his shoulder. "I'll turn you if you come at them."
He didn't shout the threat to the men. He wasn't interested in their measure of his voice. He built a small promise between the hammer and the edge of the world instead.
The first boat hit the shelf and the foremost men jumped, anchors in their fists—two-pronged, ugly as hunger. Half their number went to cut ropes and drag the prow higher, and half surged toward the bucket line as if that were where a day like this would break.
Asgrim moved. He didn't run. He set his feet on the ice with the modest swagger of a man who knows he can stop on a toe and not slide. He uncoiled the chain, quick wind and backhand, catching loops on his hand so they would pay out clean, and swung the coil up around his forearm until the last curve lay just forward of his knuckles. The iron links were cold enough to whisper pain.
The first raider he reached swung his anchor for the boy with the buckets, because there is always one who will try an easy cut. Asgrim didn't bother with the hammer. He tucked the wrapped head tight against his ribs to keep his balance true and put the rim of the oak shield into the man's chest with enough straight truth to tell the story again. The man went down on his back as if a door had been shut in his face.
Then Asgrim reached for the weather.
"Hold," he said, and the word moved through his chest without bothering the air much.
Silence arrived around his thrown chain before anything else did—an egg of quiet in which the iron moved like a taught line drawn across paper. The links took the hush gladly. Asgrim felt it gather through the tar-black marks, through the smith's old stamps and the notches he had put there himself over years, and then the hush reached the hammerhead under the sailcloth and agreed. There was a breathless moment—a thumb held against the pulse of everything near—and then violet thunder answered across the links.
It traveled the chain like a thing that had been waiting for a proper road, and when it left the last link it didn't go out in a pretty branch. It went flat and fast as a slap, a concussive sheet that didn't burn the way stories say lightning burns; it shoved. The three men in the front rank stumbled as if someone had flicked the floor two fingers to the left. One's anchor flew out of his hands and skated across the ice toward the lead. Another went to one knee with the look of a man whose body is deciding to sit down whether he agrees or not. The third put both hands out to catch his balance, palms slapping flat, and then rolled his wrist wrong and shouted—and the shout didn't live, because the hush the strike rode had not entirely let the world speak again.
A second boat rammed the shelf and delivered more men into the morning. One of them had the bright ring in his eyes that means meth or madness or religion in other places; here it meant he had traded winter for the euphoria that precedes breaking your teeth. He trotted past his friends with a knife low, loving the idea of what he might do. He aimed it not at one of the men with bars but at the old woman, because some men like to prove something to themselves that way.
Asgrim threw the chain wide and called the hammer through it again. He felt the little tremor in his forearm that meant he was asking an honest tool to do two jobs at once and that it would do them but charge him later. Silence ran like a ribbon along the links and fluttered at the end, and then the violet came, a short-breathed boom that sent the knife-hand up as if jerked by a line. The knife went and the man folded around the idea of having his breath stolen by something he couldn't name.
Asgrim stepped in and set the rim of the shield into him, gently for a blow like that, because it was morning and there were children and he did not like the way skulls behaved on ice.
"Back," he said to the boy with the buckets, and the boy seemed to feel the order even if the word didn't last. He ran.
Another man came for him, heavy in the legs, shoulder-first, shield low in a style that had worked on better ice. Asgrim let him come and at the last instant lifted the edge of his own shield and let the other man's weight pass under and away. The raider took three sliding steps into the white and found his feet were voting against him. He windmilled with his arms and then committed the old sin of asking his anchor to be a rope. The anchor said what anchors always say to that: no.
From the corner of his eye, Asgrim saw a small form not doing what small forms had been told to do, and his stomach went colder than the chain. The bright-eyed boy had stopped to watch because boys stop to watch. The lead the men had cut for the feed widened at a weak seam under snow, and the edge did the treacherous little smile it does before it goes.
"Back!" someone bellowed. The sound cracked against the hush left by his own strikes and failed to go where it needed to.
The ice under the boy's left boot spoke in that old way that isn't a noise but is information: don't be here now. He put his weight on it anyway because he had been told to hold the bucket and he was a good boy. The rim broke. His leg went through to the thigh, and the black water took a sweet, cold mouthful of him and asked for more.
Asgrim didn't think. He did not weigh. He did what he had promised the ridge and the hammer and himself he would do. He ran straight for the boy, boots thudding twice against solid and then once against a surface that had decided to argue.
He needed the ice to behave for one heartbeat. That was the truth of the matter. The world likes a specific request better than a pretty one.
"Stay," he said, softly and without air, to the little circle where the boy's body would go if the world continued with its habit of indifference.
The silence came first, and the ice heard the absence like pressure on the shoulder. The water under the boy stiffened—not whitened, not frozen; it made its surface thick, like a drumskin deciding for an instant to have a back. The boy's other leg hit the black and did not go through. He kicked at nothing that agreed to be something. His face showed that animal-bright fear that visits you once and changes every room you walk into afterward.
Asgrim hit the edge with the rim of his shield and slid the old oak across until it bridged the split. He threw the hammer across his forearm so he could spare the hand and reached with his other arm, digging his fingers into wool and flesh and hauling before his body had finished stopping. The boy came up in a spray that was all breath and no sound. Asgrim rolled backward, spine agreeing with the ice on the terms of the exchange, and the boy collapsed against his chest in that boneless way the saved always do. Asgrim smelled river iron and wool and the too-clean smell of water.
"Go," he said, and because he put the order in the boy's bones instead of the air, the child went.
The raiders did not. They had been promised what they called need all winter, and their bodies had agreed to do the work of men who believed they had been wronged by weather. Three came as a bunch, because hunting packs do not always learn the right lessons from wolves. One lifted his anchor with that ugly low swing; one had a board with three nails in it; the last had a hand-axe and a mouth that showed too many teeth in the cold.
Asgrim had no interest in spending the hammer on them in a way that would end matters in a single story. He stepped once on his right foot to find the bite, shifted the chain on his left forearm so the last loop lay where he wanted it, and then turned the hammerhead into the blow the anchor was making, not to stop it but to multiply the inconvenience. The iron face kissed the iron prong, and the hush that lived in the metal made the man's arm forget an instant that it understood force. The anchor hit wrong, and the jar went up the man's elbow and into his shoulder the way it always does when iron speaks that particular truth.
The second man brought his nail-board up and sideways with the exact timing of someone who had done good work on softer days. Asgrim dipped his shoulder and let two of the nails rake his shield and the third skate the rim. He did not enjoy the sound, but the old oak had been hit worse and remembered how to tell the story later. He gave the man back a fraction of his shove, just enough to send him onto his heels. Ice is not a loyal friend.
The third, the one with the hand-axe, raised it too high, because people think a big motion makes a big thing. It does not. It makes a gap. Asgrim put the boss of his shield into the man's armpit and shoved him past. The axe went after its owner with reluctance and then enthusiasm. The three of them went down together with that household crash that always sounds like more than it is when it happens on ice.
"Enough," Asgrim said—not to them, because he had learned over the years who listens and who does not, but to himself. He could feel the hammer wanting to make a larger shape of the moment, to prove something about being in the world. He pressed his hand flat to the head, and the runes under his skin calmed like animals under a net that fits.
The boats, seeing how this kind of morning was going to go, made the calculation men make when their hunger is not yet large enough to tell them that mathematics is imaginary. They heaved at the rails. Oars came up. Someone spat in a way that suggested ritual and not insult, and the black hulls began to back-water, turn, and go.
A few men lay on the ice, considering other ways to spend the day. One groaned and rolled. One did not move at all for a while and then decided to start again at breathing. None of them were dead yet. It was not the sort of morning that wanted to pay out death early, and Asgrim had no desire to teach it bad habits.
Someone behind him began to shout and then remembered that shouting was often the way people took the shape of panic and left it standing in the room with everyone else. The old woman with the bar was already moving among the fallen, like winter itself checking the nails on its own construction. She had a bar for the wrist that had bent wrong, a coin for the man who had seen the wrong end of a shield rim too closely, a steady voice for each that did not ask stupid questions.
The boy with the buckets was crying and trying not to. His mother had him by the shoulders. The cry was a sound Asgrim was glad to hear—not because he had any love of it, but because any sound after silence is a proof that the world is still willing to play by the old rules.
The man with the scar at the throat came up and stood beside him with his hands empty and his eyes doing the respectful version of bright. "That was work well done," he said.
"It was work," Asgrim said. Praise tasted like sweet ale in the mouth and left a bad head if you took too much before noon.
He reached for the shield without looking away from the ice and found the dent in the boss because his hand always did. He slid the hammer's wrapped head down until it rode where the curve of the oak wanted it, and only then did he let his eyes go where they wanted.
The boy who had nearly gone under was standing with his mother, his wet wool steaming, his lips blue-purple and his teeth trying to count each other. He looked at Asgrim with the solemnity you only get once, the first time you learn you have an edge.
"What's his name?" Asgrim asked. It was a fair question to put to a morning.
The man with the scar smiled. "Everyone knows," he said, and because saying the name is a kind of love, he said it. "Hjalli."
Hjalli, Asgrim thought, obligingly. Hjalli with the chipped front tooth and the too-large boots his cousin grew out of last winter and a way of carrying a bucket like it owed him an apology. The name slotted where names slot when the day behaves.
He nodded and turned away and set his hand on the old shield and then looked down at his own palm as if the wood had said something surprising. The neat rectangle of absence where the cove name had been waited obediently in its corner of him. He put the boy's name next to it, not because he meant to lose it but because he had begun to learn the manner of the cost this new tool would take from him. He tried to take Hjalli and put him where boys go when they are not being looked at—into the background with the other proofs that life continues while a man works—and found there was a catch on the edge of the thought, like a burr.
"Hjalli," Asgrim said aloud, to find out if the word would come back dressed in itself.
The sound left his mouth and came back. But when he reached for the picture of the boy—the chipped tooth, the just-now rescue—the edges slid a little.
He stood very still and looked at nothing. Then he crouched and set the shield on his knee and took out his knife, the little one for cords and kindling and work that doesn't need pomp, and put the point to the iron rim and pried it half an inch from the oak where it had sat for years. The oak complained with a noise that reminded him of all the days it had seen. He carved slow, not caring that the metal protested. He cut a small mark—the top of a stave, the curve of a letter, the beginning of a thing not contained by any alphabet he owned—and he said the name while he worked.
"Hjalli."
The old woman glanced over with her bar and nodded without being asked. The mother held her son closer and watched the knife with a complicated love.
Asgrim carved another stroke, the way a man teaches his hand to remember what his head has been told to pay. He set the knife aside, thumbed the fresh mark until the steel smell went to his skin, and then pressed the thumb to the chain on his forearm. The cold bit and took. The boy's name warmed in his mouth as if he had held a cup to the fire a moment.
"All right," he said, to the hammer and the ice and the morning that had decided to be honest. "All right."
He rose and the ice did not shift under him. He lifted the shield and the old dent in the boss met his palm like a handshake from a friend you trust but have learned to keep sober. He looked once at the boats growing smaller against the black channel and then let them go, because men who are going are sometimes more useful than men who have been made to stay.
The boy and the mother came forward then, because gratitude is a brave thing when winter has taught people to hoard everything. The mother's mouth made the shape of a blessing and then closed around prudence. She touched her knuckles to the rim where the mark lived.
"Thank you," she said.
Asgrim met her gaze and let the truth be easy for once. "You'll keep him by the fire until he steams through," he said. "And keep the buckets moving after."
She almost smiled; it didn't fit well with the morning, but it tried.
He watched them go with that dislocation a man gets after he has pulled someone out of dark water and returned him to a world that stands up and walks away. Then he slung the chain across his shoulder again, wrapped the head of the hammer, and found that the tide had already begun to lift along the edges of the leads where the sun allowed itself the indulgence of being brighter than the cold.
Behind him, the man with the scar said, low, "You'll be wanting to attend the council tonight."
"I'll come," Asgrim said, because it was true and because the habit of refusing invitations was for men who didn't carry another world on their shoulder.
He took a last look at the neat cut-out absence where the cove's name ought to have been and at the warmed little mark where the boy's name now lived. The ledger was already writing itself on him. He had agreed to the currency. He was not surprised to find the market had opened before he could haggle.
He went back across the ice with a steady, workman's stride, as if all he had done was raise a beam into place. The day took the shape of that explanation because nothing else asked loudly to be chosen.
On the shore, the wind remembered the trick of rasping down alleys. The harbor smells stacked themselves in his nose like old debts. He adjusted the lay of the chain and the balance of the shield and felt, in the metal under cloth, a soft almost-joy—a tool that had been asked to do a proper thing and been allowed to do it.
"No more than needed," he told it, and perhaps himself, and the runes under his skin cooled like iron set on snow.