The river wore a skin like a lie: smooth, pretty, untrustworthy.
It had frozen in a night of tidy wind, so the ice looked honest. Men tested it with poles and a rope about the waist, tapping, listening. The sound came back right—until it didn't. Along the bend where the current kept thinking of spring, there was a seam no eye liked. They chalked it and said each other's names in the brisk way that keeps boys from being clever.
Karsk came at noon, walking the hard water as if it were a floor he'd paid for.
He wasn't dressed like a churchman, and he didn't carry himself like a clerk who'd misplaced his pity. Good leather, fur at the neck, a steel cap that had seen hands that cared. Broad the way a door is broad, with the unsettling sense he could pass through a smaller opening if it were worth his time. At his hip swung a traveling bell in a steel cradle—no bigger than a man's ribcage, lip-lipped with pale metal etched in almost-letters. The cradle had three hinged arms and a strap across his chest. When he moved, the bell kept a sailor's balance.
Two hush-guards ghosted him, pale straps at their wrists, knives that liked quiet. They halted when Karsk lifted two fingers without looking. He walked on alone until his toes stopped neat at the line where a man who didn't know rivers would already be swimming.
"Champion," Fen said, beside Asgrim on the bank, spear low. "Not the sort who needs the room told he is."
Ash stood with a coil of line and a mallet across her back. "That frame is new," she said. "Not pretty. Made by someone who knows how metal sulks when it breaks."
"Hard to break isn't impossible," Asgrim said. Fellgnýr lay wrapped; Skylaug sat quiet on his forearm. The bead-cord on his right wrist carried its small ledger: Hjalli, crooked fence, unsayable cove, harbor first, the baker's brag, practice-line, corner-post.
Karsk planted the cradle's feet wide on the ice and undid the strap that had held the bell riding his ribs. He laid his palm along the lip, almost tender. "I've heard of you," he said, bored with the fact. "Thunder-man who says no politely. The Jarl wants the tool you carry and the weather you've been teaching to stand straight. I came to see whether the stories have bones."
"Then look," Asgrim said. He didn't add and leave. Truth works better without decorations.
Karsk tilted the bell.
It didn't ring—not like honest metal. It fed. The air within the mouth went thin as parchment a scribe in love with neatness has scraped too often. Sound slid off the ice and lost its middle. A boy on the bank swore by moving his lips only and discovered the comfort of cursing in a world that tried to make curses clerical.
Asgrim took three steps onto the ice where it was thick and properly arrogant. Hearth-Bane had no jurisdiction here; the river never permits it. The runes along his collarbones lifted their heads—ready, not eager.
"Truth," he said, because thunder isn't a dog and won't come to a whistle. "No one here drowns today."
He flicked his wrist and sent Fellgnýr low and wide—vector clean—three handspans above the ice.
Karsk lifted the bell a finger's breadth.
The recall thread—silver-plumb straight in Asgrim's ribs—cut. Not snapped. Not frayed. Erased, like a ledger entry scraped clean. Fellgnýr, mid-flight, went loose in the world's grammar. Momentum tugged; path swallowed its own tail. The hammer wobbled like a fish told water is optional.
Asgrim stopped wanting to win. He became a man fixing a problem he'd been hired to fix.
He placed a waypoint beyond the hammer—small, exact—as if tying a cleat no one could see. A second halfway back. Not a chain; a ladder. He bent his wrist and spoke the recall differently—not to iron, but to path. Fellgnýr shivered, found the first rung, then the second, and came obedient as a tool, not a pet.
Karsk watched the adjustment and nodded, as if a craftsman had just seen a joint fitted with respect. Then he shifted his stance and tipped the bell more, aiming the mouth like a mason's plumb over Asgrim's chest.
The cut moved with it. It wasn't a circle; it was a knife.
Asgrim tried another throw—short, mean, a dockman's flick meant to bang the cradle's hinge. The cut found the thread again and ate it. Fellgnýr hung on momentum and surprise and skittered off the cradle's arm like a dog that has realized the wrong door is shut.
"Good," Karsk said, not cruel. "You can learn. Most loud men cannot."
"Loud men don't come to rivers," Asgrim said, matter-of-fact.
Karsk planted his boots a shade wider and breathed in the way men do when they are about to show you their best trick and hope you'll respect it. He drew the bell slightly back and down, and Asgrim felt it—not hush, null—a neat slice in the day between them, thin as a quill's edge, lying along the ice.
He couldn't win this by throwing. Every recall thread would feed the mouth. He needed the bell to cut something else.
"Plant," Fen said softly.
Asgrim set his heels, took two quick steps to where the ice was honest, and drove Fellgnýr's head through the wrap and into the river's skin until it found stone under the freeze. Not a ring of hush—he had learned that lesson. A tether straight down: iron to earth, oath to work.
The field of hush that blooms when planted iron asks the world to behave drew itself tight, not as a circle, as a line—a taut string from hammerhead to bedrock.
Karsk tilted the bell to eat that line.
The mouth drank—and met something that behaved like a rope instead of a word. The cut slid along the tether and caught. The bell's mouth wanted thinness; the tether wanted tension. Where they met became a thing neither had planned: a snare.
Asgrim laid two waypoints—one on either side of the bell's cradle arm—fist-sized hush-stamps beneath the cone, not in it. Not scars—cleats. Skylaug hissed along his forearm as he paid out a loop of chain. He didn't lasso the bell. He tossed the loop across the path the cut had to take to follow the tether. The mouth obligingly drew the chain into its own cone—cleaned the sound of iron—and in doing so wound Skylaug once around the cradle's steel shoulder as neatly as if Asgrim had done the tying himself.
Karsk felt it. He smiled like a man surprised by a better knot than he'd ordered.
He yanked. The bell wanted to move and met tether. The cradle rocked. The hinged arm balked. Skylaug bit. The cone of cut stuttered—only a blink—and Asgrim took the only candy the river was going to give him: time one heartbeat wide.
He Sky-Stepped.
Not a leap for applause. Two shallow pressure steps laid at knee height where the ice wore its honesty, measured breath, counted—one for bread, one for breath. He came up on the bell's off side where Karsk's eyes couldn't be and set his palm to the hinge of the cradle instead of the bell itself.
"By work," he said, because you don't break a thing right without telling it what you're doing, "I'm taking your frame."
He pushed—not thunder, a cooper's shove—vector into steel at an angle that is no one's first guess and every shipwright's second. The hinge took the insult, thought about it, and sprang. The arm popped. The cradle hunched. Skylaug tightened a fraction; the bell's weight shifted stubbornly toward the ice.
Karsk moved like a man who had always had to keep his center of mass conversational. He brought the bell up and around, hunting for the thread of recall he had been eating, trying to cut it into compliance again. Ash's shouted "Chalk!" clipped the middle to Cha— under the cone, but Asgrim's feet remembered and avoided the pale seam that had been written there for fools.
The bell's mouth came across him, hungry.
Asgrim went low and set a third cleat under the cone with the heel of his hand—hush no bigger than a coin, under, not on. The mouth struck its own snag and hesitated the second anyone with a hammer needs.
Fellgnýr returned along the planted tether like a sled dragged home on a rope, came clean into his palm because he had told path to be the boss, and met the cradle's remaining arm with the edge of its square head.
He didn't hit the bell. He hit the shoulder that made the bell a traveling thing.
Steel bucked. The weld—done fast by men who believed in theory and quantity—cracked. The cradle sagged. Karsk's hands went to weight that was no longer cooperative, and he had to choose between keeping the bell and keeping his footing.
He kept his footing.
The bell thumped down onto the ice, still in its yoke, mouth skimming a hair's breadth of breath, cone coughing out a last tidy insult before remembering physics.
"Enough?" Asgrim said, not gloating. His chest hurt where null had skimmed him; his ribs had learned a new meaning for quiet.
Karsk looked at the cracked shoulder and the chain looped clever around it, at the way the planted tether had made his cut into a leash. He drew a short breath, let it go with regret, and stepped back half a pace the way a proud man does when he decides against being stupid.
"Enough," he said.
The hush-guards at the bank tightened and then, seeing him relax, unwound themselves from the idea of the day getting bloody. Fen didn't even tilt his spear. Ash rested her mallet on her shoulder with the lazy readiness of a woman who could be at work again before you finished blinking.
Asgrim unplanted the hammer with both hands, polite. The tether released like a bow forgiving a bad stroke. He wrapped Fellgnýr and chained it, because habits keep men alive. The cut in the air didn't vanish—it had never been theatrical enough for that—but the sense that someone was shaving the middle out of words left the world and went to sulk in a room where bells approve of each other.
Karsk crouched and laid his palm along the bell's lip again. Something about the gesture said sorry for what I asked you to be. He looked up at Asgrim. "You could have taken my wrist when the hinge went," he said. "I've seen men do it for less reason."
"You could have rung that mouth over those boys and made me choose between cleverness and children," Asgrim said. "You didn't."
Karsk's mouth twitched. "Thunder who pays compliments. The Jarl will hate that."
"Tell him something he'll hate more," Asgrim said. "Tell him thunder keeps oaths."
Karsk set his thumb into the crack at the cradle's shoulder and felt the give. "He'll ask which oaths," he said.
"Ours," Asgrim said simply. "Bread first. Harbor first. War last. No one drowns for your tidy."
Karsk stood. The hush-guards had come close enough to be useful without being tempting. "You'll see the capital, thunder-man," he said. Not a threat. A receipt. "You'll find there are people who like neat for reasons less ugly than you think."
"I expect to," Asgrim said. "I expect to argue with them anyway."
Karsk looked hard at him, then past him at Ash and Fen and the two boys with chalk still on their gloves who had not died today. "Carry your tool," he said at last. "I'll carry your message."
He gestured to his men. They lifted the cradle by the unbroken arms, because professionals don't leave a thing for children to fall in love with. The bell hung at an uneven tilt, sulking. As Karsk turned, the light caught the mouth's split shoulder and showed—just for a breath—script inside the lip that wasn't decoration.
Ash saw it first. "Hold," she said, and Karsk did, because his nobility included good manners.
Asgrim stepped close. Inside the bell, etched with that almost-writing hush metal prefers, lay a pattern of lines and small circles—too neat to be nothing, too ugly to be pretty. Not letters. Not a saint. A map. It paled in ordinary day, but when he let Fellgnýr's wrapped head kiss the rim, the wrong violet inside the hammer's crack answered the pale in the metal like two notes discovering they had been written in the same key in different worlds. The pattern stood up in light: a spoke of lines, a hub, a crescent of smaller circles, one graven deeper than the rest.
Fen's finger hovered over the deep mark without touching. "Sanctum," he said, meaning the word and the shape at once.
Karsk's face didn't change, but his breath did—one hitch, honest. "I don't know what that is," he said, and Asgrim believed him. "I was told the bell walks and I walk with it."
"It just told us," Ash said, annoyed on principle by secrets that masquerade as ignorance.
Karsk shut his mouth around the next sentence a proud man says and swallowed it. "If you meant to make me a liar, thunder-man, you've done the easy part," he said. "The hard part is persuading me to care."
"Then listen to this," Asgrim said. He didn't move closer; he let the river carry the words. "There's a place where your bells go to learn to eat. There's a road to it. There are people on that road who think pain is tidy. If you bring this home and show it to your Jarl, tell him: when we come, it will be to break the teacher, not the students."
Karsk watched him for a long heartbeat, like a man testing ice with his eyes. Then he nodded once, the sort of nod that means you've bought yourself a conversation later with someone who matters.
"Thunder keeps oaths," he said, trying the phrase on his tongue. "We'll see if your roof holds your words when it rains."
"It will," Ash said, as if roofing were her personal jurisdiction. It was.
Karsk signaled his men. They shouldered the cracked cradle and went back the way they'd come: not routed, not triumphant, just going, which is what professionals do when the day is done.
The river remembered itself a little more with every step they took. The seam at the bend sighed and forgot its ambition. The boys with chalk breathed properly again and found reasons to carry rope and be useful.
Asgrim waited until Karsk was a small certainty up the white and then knelt by the scar the cradle had left where it had sulked. He set his palm to the ice and spoke a work-oath small enough for a river to approve:
"By boots that know where not to step, by poles that test, by ropes that don't lie, this bend is honest again."
The ice made the right hollow sound back—the one that says I'll hold if you hold me.
Ash crouched and peered once more into the mouth of the bell in his memory, seeing the spray of circles and the deep-cut hub. "We'll need a bigger boat," she said, already listing timber with her eyes.
Fen rolled his shoulders. "We'll need better jokes," he said, which is how soldiers admit fear.
Asgrim wrapped Fellgnýr tight and chained it, not because it would run, but because he wanted to feel where his hand was. He touched the bead for Hjalli and felt it warm him back. He did not touch the hole where the cove's name ought to be. He would not prod that wound for glory.
He looked downriver, where the bell had gone, and upriver, where their lives lived. "Thunder keeps oaths," he said quietly, to the water and the men and women on its bank, not to the champion striding away. He said it like he meant to be bored of saying it by the time he was old.
The wind lifted, bored of being tidy. The fjord answered to the right small noises. In the failing light the chalk seam blushed and vanished, ashamed of itself. Above the bend, a hawk went about its business in a sky that did not yet know it was destined for stranger things.
They walked home on the bank, not the ice, because a day that has taught you a lesson deserves to see you apply it immediately. Ash's list for morning started with frame-breakers and bolts for ugly welds. Fen's started with teach boys to test. Asgrim's was only a single line carved into the beam above his door before sleep:
THUNDER KEEPS OATHS