The harbor had a waystation's politeness: ropes coiled like sentences that won't start fights, a tide-wall patched by ten different men in ten different years, a shrine-stone with lichen taking minutes no one would read. Huts climbed the low head like thoughts that knew when to stop.
Low Drum slid in under oars with Sister-Barrel behind and Three Knots standing off to count weather. Nets hung to dry and didn't creak. Children watched without running the last three steps; their mothers had taught them about the last three steps.
"They saw us from the island," Ash said, eyes on the point. "Expect company. The kind that wears apologies."
Company came as if it had practiced: two boats trimmed with neat-white ribbons, six oars to a side keeping the same thought. At each prow a little bell wore a linen cap like a polite widow. Between the boats a plank-raft carried eight people in gray, hoods back, mouths solemn: an embassy with the look of men who fear dogs but not paper.
They grounded with a hiss and a tidy thump. The leader stepped down: narrow as a ruler, hair like sanity, hands that had never loved rope. On his breast a silver disc showed a stylized bell whose lip ate its own echo.
"I am Orri, clerk to the White Jarl," he said. The middle of White came out thinner than courtesy; he didn't notice. "By mercy's writ we bring an offer."
Asgrim stood on the tide stones where weed makes boots honest, Ash at his shoulder, Fen a half-step forward because spears like to be consulted by timing. Ylva stayed with the bows, palms on rope as if offering the sea a way to interrupt.
"Speak," Asgrim said, size kept for rooms without kings.
Orri let the harbor see his teeth—not warm, competent. "There is an instrument in your custody that belongs to no world and endangers this one," he said. "Surrender it. The Jarl will grant safe conduct, food, timber rights, and exemption from levy. Your thunder ends; your children sleep."
A murmur moved across the quay like wind considering a different direction. Sleep is a currency every village understands.
Asgrim kept his palm on the sailcloth so Fellgnýr would know it was being held, not shown. "Safety," he said. "For whom?"
"For everyone," Orri said, faster than truth. "For mothers who have heard enough of men shouting at storms. For men who have earned quiet after years of being brave on the wrong days."
"And for a Jarl who prefers a dome over a sky," Ash said pleasantly. "What happens to those who don't fit under it?"
Orri did not dignify the question. He gestured, and from the second boat eight figures in gray stood as one. Their throats bore inked lattices like seam charts; cords circled their chests in measured loops. They took breath together—a square breath—and on Orri's small nod, the Null Choir began.
They did not sing. They unsang. A fence of soundless sound went up—subtle at first, then insistent. Syllables lost their middles. A gull cried and the ul folded out of it. A woman said her child's name and it arrived at the air in two tidy halves that didn't know each other. The quay felt like a blanket pulled up to a frightened face—kind and suffocating.
"Don't answer big," Ylva said, low. "They want a duel."
Asgrim tested the water with a small truth. "We won't yield Fellgnýr." The sentence broke its shin in the won't and limped the rest of the way out.
Orri smiled, professional satisfaction tidy around the eyes. "You see," he said, almost gentle. "Even your refusal can be eased. The Jarl offers relief from jagged edges. Lay down the tool. Lay down the noise."
Hjalli stood behind Ash with his knuckles in his mouth, eyes big as wet stones. The mothers on the quay had their arms crossed to keep their hearts from getting loose.
Asgrim didn't reach for thunder. The Choir would carve the middle out of any oath big enough to wake it. But the Choir was few. A dome of neat over a harbor of messy.
He put two fingers to the mast of Low Drum and tapped—tak—tak—tak—the low drum the village had made. Fen's spear butt found the tide flagstone and joined—t—t—t—. Ash's mallet bumped the gunwale—thunk—that particular pitch only shipwrights know.
"Not louder," Asgrim said, to the quay and to the oars and to the children holding their noises in. "Together."
He lifted his hand and spoke the simplest line he owned, size of a palm, truth small enough to hide under a blanket and still be true.
"By bread—"
Svala wasn't here; the harbor had its own elder. She picked it up like a dropped ladle. "By bread," she said, not big, many. The word hit the fence and the middle shaved off and still there were pieces enough to hear. The men with nets on their shoulders echoed it with the extra beat nets add to everything. The children, freed by permission, whispered bread like a conspiracy. The first strand of null bent.
"By wind we've taught into a good job—"
"By wind we've taught into a good job—" The fishermen had lungs for weather and fit vowels where the Choir tried to take them. The old women hummed under, the pitch choring is done at; it filled the Choir's tidy holes like tar poured honest into seams.
"By work—ours—"
"By work—ours—" Hammers answered from the boats—Ash had slipped mallets to boys without anyone noticing, and wood returned work the way wood always has when asked in its own voice. Ylva lifted two fingers and laid a pressure rail across the quay at thigh height—a handrail of air to carry syllables from chest to chest so they didn't have to brave the Choir's fence alone.
Orri frowned, the first crack in a face that had learned to be correct. He twitched two fingers and the Null Choir adjusted, breathing square-quick, subdividing, moving their mouths in patterns like grids. They tried to find each voice and eat it as it came.
But there is a mathematics to chorus the neat forget: it refuses to be a single thing. It staggers; it braids; it carries its own back-beat. Ash gave the mothers a counter-line that turned words into work: "Scupper, garboard, mast-step, keel—" Plain nouns make bad prey. The Choir took a bite of gar— and —board arrived anyway on another mouth.
Fen called cadence like a sergeant who had chosen to keep men alive over being feared. "Left—right—breathe—" The spear butts and boat hooks gave it shape. Hjalli, allowed, stomped on the plank with unambiguous joy, and the Choir's grid had to chase feet now as well as mouths.
Asgrim didn't lead so much as leak his stubborn into the crowd. He took the oath and broke it into small pieces that could live past polite knives: "By—" he nodded to a rope coil, "bread—" he nodded to the woman with flour on her sleeve, "by—" he touched the low drum curve of Low Drum's bow, "wind—" he tilted his palm, and the boys at the oars pulled once, the sound of water answering filling the Choir's subtraction with something that had nothing to do with syllables.
A man on the embassy raft tried a little bell under its cap—just a tap, a scold for dogs. The cap drank the ring, as designed, but the memory of it tickled the air; three women laughed despite themselves, and laughter is a wheel that makes bad roads look foolish. The Null Choir's mouths tightened; grids dislike mirth.
"We'll spend before we ask you to—" Asgrim said, and when the Choir sheared the middle out of spend, the smith at the tide-wall lifted his hammer and spent it on stone—clong—the noise of a promise fulfilled without witnesses. The word arrived by sound's cousin.
The fence wavered. Not broken—confused. Too many angles. Too many small truths shot under it like children's feet under a tablecloth.
Orri saw it in the small change of his Choir's eyes and tried a different tactic: nearer, softer. He stepped onto the tide stone, palm open in the shape of men who want to buy your mistakes at a discount.
"You sing because you are afraid," he said, and his voice found a way through, gentle as cloth. "Afraid the thing you carry is bigger than you. Afraid of hunger. Afraid of the winter you remember. We can take that fear away."
"You can take the sound it makes," Asgrim said, steady. "You can't spend fear for us. Only work does that."
Around them the harbor made work: a rope passed hand to hand; a child fetched a bucket; a man lifted a crate so a bent woman didn't have to. Each act had a noise. The Choir couldn't eat all of them. They were not syllables. They were boards returning your weight, iron telling you when it was straight enough, bread crust cracking where the loaf wants ready.
Asgrim raised one hand for silence—not all the way, just enough to change key. Silence came partial and proud. He looked at Orri.
"Keep your mercy," he said. "Or spend it fair. But don't call it safety if what you mean is smallness. We are not surrendering this tool. We'll sing together until your Choir is bored or honest."
Orri's face learned a new line—between the brows, from a thought he had not planned to have. Behind him the gray-robed singers were sweating in tidy ways. Their breath kept its squares only with effort. One looked at the old women humming the chore pitch and flinched as if he had remembered someone.
"You cannot negotiate with a crowd," Orri said at last, crisp to cover the fray. "There must be a voice."
"There is," Ash said, sweet as tar. She waved at the quay, the boats, the boys, the mothers, the smith, the old women, the gull whose cry had come back mid-argument and sounded like gulls again. "It's us."
The clerk of mercy looked at the weight of it and did the arithmetic honest men do when they do not like the answer. He inclined his head, neither beaten nor certain.
"The Jarl will hear that you prefer noise to safety," he said. "He is assembling a procession. You will meet order you cannot outsing."
"Then we'd better practice," Fen said, friendly, and tapped his spear butt three times so the harbor would remember what steps to keep under their feet.
The Null Choir drew breath together, tried one last grid, tasted choir answered by chorus, and let that breath out in a neat, frustrated sigh. They covered the little bells. They stepped back onto their boats in order because men who have learned to be precise cannot abide the chaos of acting in a huff.
As they pushed out, the quay did not cheer. It went back to work with deliberate noise: a laugh here, a clatter there, the scrape of a pot, the thump of rope, voices deciding to exist. Ylva leaned on the mooring post and smiled like a woman who had been waiting to see whether a village wanted to be saved or to save itself.
Asgrim thumbed his cord. No new holes. No beads demanded. A modest cost, then: his voice would be rough for a day; he would pay it gladly. He tied no knot for that. He didn't want to make a necklace of heroism out of a hoarse throat.
Hjalli tugged his sleeve. "We beat them with names and things," the boy said, proud in the way boys must be sometimes to grow properly.
"We outnumbered them with witness," Asgrim said. "Remember that. You can be alone and loud and still lose." He looked past the clerk's receding boats to the road beyond the headland where bells would pour a city-sized dome over men who liked tidy. "We'll need ten times this many voices where we're going."
Ash squeezed his forearm until the tar-knot bit and he thanked her for it with a look. "We'll build a song that works," she said. "One you can teach while you're tying a clove hitch."
Fen shaded his eyes. "Karsk will hear of this," he said, not displeased. "He'll want to know if thunder is a choir now."
"Thunder is an oath," Asgrim said, touching the beam of Low Drum. "The choir helps it reach the roof."
They took on water and bread. They traded iron for salt and promises for rope. Orri's embassy slid toward the next harbor that might be tired enough to love a neat solution. On the shrine-stone a gull landed and said everything it had been saving at once, and old men laughed because it was vulgar and holy.
As dusk came soft, Asgrim stood where hearth and wind meet—on the porch-line of the world you can carry in your chest—and spoke the sentence that liked to be spoken where many hands could hold it.
"By bread, by wind we've taught into a good job, by work—ours—I'll spend before I ask you to."
Thunder didn't come. It wasn't owed. The harbor answered with chorus, and that felt like the right kind of weather.