By noon the sea had been ironed.
Not a catspaw. Not a seam. Sky polished to a bright lie, water taking the shape of a plate set wrong on a table too large for the meal. The oars made soup out of the wake. The sail hung like a thought a man had decided not to finish.
"Calm," Fen said, not admiring. He pinched the air and found nothing in it to argue with.
Low Drum shouldered forward anyway, because Ash made hulls that refused to be embarrassed by weather. Two other boats kept station: the broad-beamed Sister-Barrel with barrels for trade lashed honest, and Three Knots with a crew that could be trusted to watch and not invent. Villagers in all three stood quiet in that particular way men do when they can feel a door closing and are choosing not to pound on it.
Far out—neat triangles, clean as folded letters—three hush-sails trimmed themselves toward them. They wore the wind that wasn't there the way clerks wear mercy—by policy. Where they passed, the surface took on a sheen like skimmed milk.
"Hold your mouths," Ylva said, rope coiled at her hip. "Under calm the sky hears promises like excuses."
Ash flicked her eyes across her rig. "No panache," she told it. "Honesty and a little ugliness."
Asgrim stood by the mast heel, Fellgnýr wrapped, chain easy. The runes along his collarbones lifted like hounds that had learned to wait at the door. He took the ship's nail Ylva had given him and set it on the hammer's iron face. Ash had brought a stake anvil no bigger than a man's thigh for repairs; she'd driven it through a block into the mast-step—her anvil-fragment—because a boat without a place to make metal behave is a boat asking to learn humility in public.
He tapped.
tink tink—tink—tink tink
The sound didn't travel far. Calm eats traveled things. It stayed inside the boat like a lesson spoken under a blanket and then seeped up the mast grain by polite degrees. The sail's belly shifted a thumb's depth and pretended to be surprised at its own virtue.
"Three points," Ylva said, eyes shut, making geometry with the bones behind them. "Pin them in air. Keep them so shallow a gull could stand on them. Walk your tool between, not through."
"Aerial waypoints," Asgrim said, teaching his hands the words. He set them where the world would tolerate them: one off the bow at shoulder height, a coin of hush for air to lean on; one to windward above the yard, where any wind with manners would pass; one astern, low, to keep what little breath they found from falling off the table too soon. He didn't stamp. He pricked—three small cleats tied to nothing you could put in a book.
The hush-sails found their line and closed. They were cutters, clerk-trim, hulls painted the color of rules. At each bow a bell-mouth crouched under canvas, lidded, like a threat that had been told to save itself for the right line in the sermon. No pennons. No faces a man could hate conveniently at this distance.
"Truth," Asgrim said, because thunder, when it can be had, is earned up front. "No one drowns because of me today."
Nothing answered. Under calm even thunder thinks twice about getting up from its chair.
So he walked the hammer.
Not thrown. Not recalled. He drew Fellgnýr along the path of the three points like a shepherd's dog guided with finger and whistle—only the whistle was the nail's tink and the finger was a pressure gesture at elbow height. He felt the air take the hint: a lump of breath moved from the stern-cleat to the bow-cleat, then slouched windward and decided to be useful. The sail filled enough to take bad manners out of the tiller.
"Small," Ylva said, because a woman who has married the sea knows how to hold down a man's sugar.
"Small," Asgrim echoed, and put the sweetness back in his calves where it belonged.
The hush-sails grew. Low Drum's crew watched them the way men watch waves: attentively, without the stupidity of prediction. Ash let the sheet the width of a finger. Fen loosened his jaw. Hjalli, who belonged on the pier, counted belaying pins until numbers calmed him.
The first cutter turned abeam to show its neatness. At the forefoot a wedge of calm preceded the hull, laid from a bell hidden and half-fed: the sea smoothed in front of them so they needn't suffer friction like honest people. Clever trick. It also makes a thing less sure-footed when stone intrudes, but this wasn't a lesson for today.
"Get ready to be boring beautifully," Ash muttered, which is the shipwright's benediction.
Asgrim shifted the bow cleat two handspans higher. He pulled breath from the stern and paid it forward along the windward point, then kinked it—not break, bend—so the little gust would miss Low Drum's sail and find the cutter's. A catspaw rose where no cat had shaved the paw. The hush-sail caught it and, with neat disapproval, let it go.
"Again," Fen said, satisfied, because the day prefers repetition to bright ideas.
He walked Fellgnýr slow from point to point—bow, yard, stern—just ahead of the cutters' angle of approach. At each pass he nudged a lateral thumb of pressure toward a masthead, nothing a god would notice, plenty for a spar that had learned to expect wind to be well-behaved. A stay twanged. A topmast complained in a way only men who have slept under masts can hear.
"Don't break it low," Ash said. "If you must break, break where a man can fix without drowning."
He pictured where the hounds sat, where yard met mast, how much purchase a man has on a spar in a sea that refuses to help. He set his waypoints a thumb higher again and spoke to vector with patience a boy would hate.
The second cutter turned their bell-mouthed wedge toward him as if to shave the middle out of his quiet, and his recall thread across the triangle sagged. Calm eats threads. The cone of cut nibbled what he hadn't spent.
He didn't bite it back with hush. He tightened the ladder between the three points: shorter rungs, closer-spaced, no room for erasure. Fellgnýr moved between them like a carriage drawn through narrow streets—steady, not startled. The air obeyed because it loves rhythm more than arguments.
The first mast snapped.
Not noble. Not a ballad. A crack like a bad joint being told the truth. The top third went by the lee and hung there sulking in its own rigging, sail draped, bell under it muffled by accident. Men on that clean deck swore, and the sea kindly put the middle back into their swear-words.
"Lines," Asgrim said, and Three Knots tossed two toward the cutter without being told. No drowning. He would not buy speed with bodies.
The second cutter tried to slide to leeward and box them. Ash pinched Low Drum's sheet and made a duck out of a hull that oughtn't to duck, blessed woman. Asgrim shifted the stern cleat a boat-length back, took the catspaw he'd just taught to live there, and rolled it into the second masthead. He didn't shove. He reminded the spar of leverage. A lashing parted. The yard dipped as if reconsidering its vocation. The cutter's bell-mouth tilted down and lost its taste for shaving.
The third cutter stood on—stubborn, correct. At its prow a true bell hung ready to be honest about its cruelty.
"Don't give him a front to aim at," Fen said, never taking his eyes off the angle.
Asgrim split his ladder into two—bow-to-yard, yard-to-stern—and left a hunger where the missing rung had been. Pressure loves a valley. The third cutter moved to pass across the gap and discovered a small wind waiting to be offended. Its forestay took a petulant punch. Not a break. Slack. Enough for a man up high to grab at a thing he couldn't quite catch. The bell under the prow rang itself wrong—a burp, a cough—and lost the shape of its appetite.
Low Drum and Sister-Barrel slipped through the space decent men leave even when they had meant to close it. The hush-sails bobbed like good hats in a street gone unexpectedly clever.
"Don't be proud," Ylva said without opening her eyes.
Asgrim wasn't. His ribs ached from holding his breath small; the runes under his skin felt like lines on a map where there are no roads. Every recall thread asked to be a shout and had to be a gesture. He was doing voiceless work and learning what would be asked of him in a city that planned to take sound away altogether.
The second cutter recovered faster than he liked, mainsail grumbling its way back into work. The helmsman on that trim deck had hands he respected. The bell-mouth hunted his triangle, trying to eat the waypoints, not the threads, and wherever the mouth grazed, air went paper-thin.
"Walk behind your own points," Ash said, seeing the way his wrist tensed and not needing to ask for permission to correct him. "Make your shadow heavy where they can't shave it."
He did, and the lesson held: he moved Fellgnýr on the far side of his rungs and let the wake of the hammer's path carry pressure. The mouth took what it wanted—there was virtue in letting it—but it grabbed nothing that mattered.
"Now," Fen said, not louder, just nearer.
Asgrim slid the bow cleat a spear-length up, the yard cleat a hand down, the stern cleat out. He couldn't have described the shape he was drawing to a man with chalk. He could feel it: a crooked harp strung across a patch of air that believed in harps only at weddings it had paid for. He tapped the nail to iron and walked the path once, twice, thrice until his calves asked for the sugar and got work instead.
The third mast went—just the top, just where a man could repair it without calling the dead to bear witness. Spar and canvas spilled like laundry. The hush-mouth under that sail stared at its own deck and listened to its own failure.
"Lines," Asgrim said again, and a boy he didn't know struck a coil cleanly across the water like a saint's finger pointing at a lesson.
The cutters fell off. Not routed—reconsidering. Men with clean hands did tidy work and learned that sometimes tidy loses arguments with craft done at the right size. The helmsman who had earned Asgrim's respect raised a hand once—nothing priestly, strictly practical—then set his course to a horizon where neat could live another day.
Low Drum's crew exhaled in the silent way men do when their bodies would like to celebrate but their teachers are watching.
Asgrim set the hammer's head on the anvil-fragment and stopped moving it. That was work, too. The nails answered with a sympathetic tink as if to say enough. The three points hung a breath longer, then softened like rope that has heard it is no longer needed. He left the air with a memory of obedience, not a scar.
Ylva cracked one eye and looked to the ledger she keeps where no one can see it. "You didn't call storm," she said, not-praise. "No debt to the sea this day."
"I'd rather pay with fatigue," Asgrim said, counting the new aches and filing them where they would do him good later.
"Cost?" Ash asked, practical. She leaned on the tiller and made the boat admit it liked her.
He thumbed his bead-cord. Nothing cold. No new hole where a person should be. But when he reached for the second beat of an old rowing song—the cheap one men sing to keep stroke honest—it slipped sideways, not lost, only shy. He tied a knot ugly as a knuckle between Thunder keeps oaths and practice-line and let the cord bite.
"A beat from a baling song," he said. "I'll earn it back with buckets."
Fen snorted. "We can arrange that," he said, approving a debt he could collect without blood.
The sea stayed plate-clean, but now it felt less like a threat and more like a test. Low Drum, Sister-Barrel, and Three Knots put their bows where the day would allow. The hush-sails kept their distance like men who had discovered they were outnumbered by the right kind of stubborn.
Hjalli finally breathed like a boy again and stopped counting pins. "We didn't drown them," he said, wanting someone to tell him that was as good as a song.
"We didn't," Ash said. "We broke what can be mended. That's a better trick."
Asgrim let the hammer rest and stood his palm flat to the sailcloth until the wrong violet under it agreed to be polite. He spoke in the voice calm allows:
"By bread, by wind we taught into a good job, by work—ours—I'll spend before I ask you to."
No thunder answered. It wasn't owed. The air took the sentence the way a tool bench takes a promise: with satisfaction and no applause.
Toward evening, a wind with honest flaws wandered in—patchy, inconsistent, beautiful. The sails filled in a way only men who have rowed awhile can describe with grace. Waypoints gone, hammer sleeping, Asgrim watched the crew prove they were smarter than weather that tried to be clever by being absent. He watched his own hands accept gesture as language. He kept count of what he had done without his voice and found that tally both short and adequate.
"Voiceless will come for us again," Ylva said, quiet, almost fond. "You'll remember how to make your hands speak."
"I will," Asgrim said, and touched the tar-knot Fen had stitched into his chain so the itch for a flourish would bite him first next time.
Night pooled. Low Drum's name rode under her like a second hull. Far off, somewhere a bell remembered what it had been taught to eat and went hungry. The calm trap had closed and failed to catch them. It would be set again, smarter. He would be ready—not angrier, just more useful.