Morning came in work clothes. Frost on rope. Tar gone stiff. The fjord talking to itself in small, right ways.
Asgrim sat on the porch step—the country between hearth and wind—and thumbed the beads on his right wrist the way a man checks pockets before a journey.
"Hjalli," he said, and warmth answered through sea-glass.
"Crooked fence," iron washer, stubborn and familiar.
"Harbor first," the ugly knot Ash had made him tie.
"The brag," a plain washer for the baker's missing boast.
"Practice-line. Corner-post. Thunder keeps oaths."
He reached for the next with his tongue already shaped for a name he had said since he was small—his sister's—and met clean cold.
Not pain. Absence. A square hole where the word should stand.
He tried again, the way you pat the table for a knife you've put in the same place for ten years. The smell of sheep grease and alder smoke came back. A laugh that went up at the end like a gull that had learned manners. A crooked scar on a thumb from stealing pears. Her name did not.
He could have turned and asked the door for help—said "What do we call her?" and let the room feed him syllables so he could pretend remembering. He didn't. Lies cost worse than losses when you carry thunder.
"Ash," he said, keeping his voice between them and not asking it to impress anyone, "I've spent my sister's name."
Ash stepped out with pitch under her nails and the list for the day riding behind her eyes. She looked at his mouth, not his hands. "When?"
He found the fulcrum and pressed. "Two nights ago on the green," he said. "When I lattice-ran Fellgnýr. Three rails, four stops, Guardian Orbit on top. I paid with a place-name first, but the lattice wanted more on the second pass and I was proud. It took something easy to reach." He swallowed. "It took her."
Fen came from the hedge with a spear across his boots and that set to his jaw that means we will make this into work. He didn't ask which sister or how many syllables. He didn't speak any name aloud the way some men do to prove they own it. He nodded toward the yard. "Heartwood," he said. "And witnesses."
They set a plank across two trestles in the doorway so the house could hear without dragging him into Hearth-Bane. Ash fetched his round—the old shield whose rim already held Hjalli's name and the cove-hole he refused to prod. She oiled the face so the grain would rise to speech. Fen brought the little chest with chisels and the mallet that had cracked a dozen stubborn beams into honesty.
Svala arrived because some truths ring through a village like hammer on anvil. Ragna ghosted in with her ledger and did not open it. A boy carried a bucket of warm water without being asked, because even children can tell when a day has chosen to mean something.
Asgrim set the shield on the plank and put both hands on the heartwood until the thrum of the wrong iron under the sailcloth eased and the wood's old ship-smell came up like a reminder.
He did not say "Her name was—" and then look at Ash with apology. He said what he had instead.
"She was older by a mouthful of years. When I couldn't tie a clove hitch, she made my fingers into a rope until they learned. She stole pears and always left two for someone who came last. She could spit farther than me and did not lord it long. She told the sea to behave and the sea sometimes obeyed. She called me hard-headed and then taught me how to use it where it would break boards and not skulls. She—"
His throat closed, not with grief, with the body's offense at being asked to build a bridge over missing planks. He breathed. Ylva's rhythm: one for bread, one for breath.
Ash took the chisel, found the center of the shield with a thumb, and pressed a shallow mark. "Skin," she said, meaning begin, and looked at Fen.
Fen set the mallet in his hand. "Tell me where I stand in this story," he said. "Then strike."
Asgrim smiled without teeth. "You were the one who didn't like pears because they felt like lies," he said, and the room accepted the joke like a brace settling true.
He lifted the mallet and struck. The first groove went down the shield's heart like a river remembering a bed. Not letters. A bind-sign, the kind you cut when the mouth refuses tidy and wood deserves better than a guess: the slant of a pear leaf; the wedge of a spar; the notch of a clove hitch.
Ash spoke next, chisel already moving. "She could carry both ends of a story and lay them down without anyone feeling robbed," she said. "She sang the wrong line on purpose to make boys brave enough to shout the right one." The chisel made a curl that looked like a laugh interrupted and saved for later.
Fen took a small blade, a soldier's tool, and carved a short, blunt angle. "She told me I could come to table without apologizing for the chains I used to wear," he said. "She cut the last iron off my ankle and said I owed her jokes. I've been in debt ever since." His cut had no flourish. It didn't need any.
Svala put her palm flat to the rim and nodded like a judge approving proper weight on a measure. "And when she swore," she said, "the work got done. That's the only kind of cursing I respect." She didn't carve. Elders keep their hands for balancing the room.
Ragna did not write. She fetched the boy's bucket and wetted the heartwood so the cuts showed dark. "Don't hurry the last line," she said quietly. "If you rush, it will come out looking like a prayer and this is not that. This is a ledger where grief signs its name."
Asgrim breathed again and found the piece of himself that had held boys up by their belts while the ice told the truth. He drew the last cut with the careful laziness of a man who has learned not to waste hands: a hook tucked into the bind-sign where an absent word could seat later when it was ready to come home.
They stood around the heartwood and let the grain remember them. The house listened the way wood does when it has walls to think with. The wrong violet under sailcloth stayed polite. The hole in Asgrim's mouth did not fill. That was right. You don't cheat. You anchor.
"Say it," Svala said. "What you will and won't spend."
Asgrim kept both palms on the shield until he could feel the porch boards through it, the post, the sill, the decent carpentry of a life he hadn't built alone.
"I will not spend a person's name for cleverness," he said. "Not for a wide throw, not for a pretty rail, not to prove I can count to more than two. If a life stands between silence and breath, I will pay. And I will tell the bill to its face before I set my hand on it."
He touched his cord. "I will spend objects first. Posts, ropes, doors, boats. I will spend work and places and tools. If I must spend a name, I'll earn it back by carving and chorus and witness."
Ash nodded without letting tears make a fool of her. "And when you forget the word, you won't wear a borrowed one like a hat," she said. "We'll carry it for you until it knows your mouth again."
Fen didn't speak. He slid two fingers under Skylaug, unhooked the chain from Asgrim's forearm, and looped it once around his own wrist. From a pocket he took a short length of tarred cord and a sliver of iron filed from his spearhead. Without asking permission—because certain debts ask to be taken, not granted—he tied the cord into the chain with a tight, ugly blood-knot and pressed the iron sliver through so it would catch on links and never ride free.
He set Asgrim's forearm out and lay the chain back on it, turning it so the knot would rest against the place where the recall thread sits under skin.
"My name," Fen said, voice even. "Fen. Put it in there. Not for tricks. For bailing. When your hand slides off something you love, it can hit me instead."
Asgrim met his eyes. "That will cost you," he said, because the world charges.
"It already has," Fen said, as if talking about a scar he kept well-oiled. "Let it buy again."
Ash took a strip of sailcloth and stitched the tarred knot into a little pocket on the chain so it would rub his skin when he reached for sweetness. "When your fingers twitch for theater," she said, "this will bite you first."
Ragna finally opened her ledger—not to write, to read. "You'll keep record aloud," she said. "Morning and sundown. The cord. The beam. The shield. I'll stand twice a week and make you say what you paid and what you refused." She looked at him over the book's top. "Not to shame. To keep math honest."
Svala lifted her staff and banged the porch once—approval, not sentence. "Work it into drills," she said. "Fen—every recall more than two beats earns a rest day where he does chores with both hands and no chain. Ash—if he names a person to power, you steal his hammer for a dawn and make him pound pegs with a mallet until he remembers the difference."
"I was going to do that anyway," Ash said.
They laughed, small, grateful. Even the porch boards liked it.
A woman from up-lane, hearing the tone without needing the words, brought hot bread because there are economies older than coin. Asgrim broke it. The right pepper. He did not reach for the missing brag line. The plank over the bake-house promised it would return when earned; he liked debts that kept themselves tidy.
He lifted the shield so the morning could see what it had bought. The bind-sign in the center looked like nothing and entirely like her. The wood held a shape that would seat a name when it wanted to be called. Until then, the story would be the handle.
He went to the beam over the door where HARBOR FIRST, WAR LAST lived and added a new cut beside it, plain:
NAMES ARE BREAD. SPEND LAST.
Ash wiped the blade on her trousers and added another under it, hers:
CARVE BEFORE YOU CALL.
Fen used the point of his spear to prick a small dot next to both.
"Witnessed," he said.
They didn't parade the shield. They didn't show it to anyone who hadn't earned the right to understand what honest work looks like. They hung it inside the door where the hearth could warm it without making the iron stupid. Asgrim sat with it for a piece of morning and taught his palms the feel of the new lines.
When he stood, the hole in his mouth remained. He did not hate it. He saluted it the way a man salutes the sea: you are bigger; I will be careful.
He went down to the green and took the lattice apart with his hands. Every third peg came up with a curse that sounded like sense. He burned the worst rail in Ash's pan and let the pitch thicken him with disgust for his own cleverness. Then he set two posts, ran one clean path, and stopped while the urge to add a flourish still itched. He tied the tar-knot on the chain in his fingers until it bit and let the itch turn to habit.
At dusk he spoke his ledger aloud at the threshold so the house and the wind could both be bored of him.
"Spent: two waypoints. One pressure step. One rope name. Refused: a third beat; a stamp; a person."
He touched the shield and the cord. He did not try the missing word on his tongue like a thief at a locked box. He told the wood the story again—shorter this time, just enough to keep the door open for when it wanted to walk back in.
On the ridge Fen's pace said safe. In the yard Ash muttered numbers that measured wood and grace in the same breath. From the bake-house drifted the wrong place where the brag should be, and he smiled at its honesty.
"By bread," he said into the little country between fire and weather, "by wind we've taught into a good job, by work—ours—I'll pay before I ask you to."
The runes under his skin cooled into lines that felt like rules and not chains. The tarred knot on his forearm itched once when his hand twitched toward a trick and then didn't. The night kept its shape. The field remembered its names. And in the house, on the shield's heartwood, a space waited—patient as oak—for a word that would come when he had earned the right to say it again.