The waystation sat where two roads decided to be sensible together.
Low walls, a traveling shrine-stone veined with lichen and coin-scratches, stalls with bread that had learned to be good without brag, and a trough where horses taught boys patience. Word of the famine convoy saved by wind had run ahead of them as if it had its own legs. Word travels faster than thanks; it is lighter.
Pilgrims clothed in the tidy gray the island liked gathered in eddies around the shrine, palms ready for rest. Traders with honest dirt under their nails made the marketplace look like something a god would pretend to have invented. The air wore what was left of a hymn.
Ash's eyes counted joinery and exits. Fen walked the perimeter with the easy posture of a man who knows he can be rude later if needed. Ylva watched the sky for arithmetic.
Asgrim stood three steps off the shrine-stone, Fellgnýr wrapped and Skylaug quiet on his forearm. The bead-cord on his right wrist ticked through its small ledger under his thumb.
"Hjalli." Warm.
"Crooked fence." Stubborn as iron.
"Harbor first." Ugly knot.
"The brag." A plain washer for a boast he intended to earn back.
"Practice-line. Corner-post. Warden—paid."
A small half-knot: long tether—thin summer.
He touched the hole where his sister's name should sit and did not ask it to entertain him. Holes deserve manners.
They had come for bread and news and to teach a chorus to people who wanted safety they could own. Orri's embassy had reached this town yesterday; its wake still shaved the middle from words if you spoke too neatly.
Svala would have made a speech. Ash made work. She passed mallets to boys and let them find a rhythm a clerk wouldn't see coming. Fen showed a mother how to sit her basket so her back would not hate her later, which is a sermon.
Asgrim kept his voice below the size that frightens honest dogs. "By bread," he said to the stone and the crowd and the little country between hearth and wind that lives in the ribs. "By wind we've taught into a good job. By work—ours—"
His voice came back right. The shrine-stone didn't shave it. The air here remembered it was not a clerk.
The knife came like a polite mistake.
A pilgrim in gray—face polite as a good floor, wrists braided with the island's modest cord—stepped through the crowd the way habit does and stooped as if to touch the bead-cord in courtesy. The knife was a sliver of foundry steel dressed as humility. One stroke, clean as grammar.
The beads fell.
Not far—just to his palm, to the dirt, to the lip of a stall—but their names rushed for cold as if a window had been opened in his head and winter had remembered its address. Hjalli went thin; corner-post blinked; the ugly knot of harbor first loosened; the half-knot for thin summer slid toward silence.
The pilgrim ran.
Asgrim could have thrown. Fellgnýr knew the path across three stalls and one boy and a woman with bread and a clerk who did not deserve to be an example. The throw would have been good—two waypoints, a short mean recall—to clip a fleeing heel.
He didn't.
The tar-knot Fen had sewn into his chain bit, a necessary unkindness. He let it sting him into patience.
"Names!" he said, not big, many. Not a leader's shout—an alarm for neighbors. "Speak them! Hold them for me."
Ash was already moving, a curse tucked where children couldn't hear it. "Fen," she said.
Fen went. He didn't run through the crowd; he edited it. He used shoulders as punctuation and a spear haft as a line break. The pilgrim threaded tidy gaps; Fen took them away.
The first name to go thin was a small thing that no god would miss: the crooked fence by the smith's yard whose humor had trained boys to walk straight. "Crooked fence!" Asgrim called, and the smith answered from habit.
"Crooked fence!" chorused three boys who had once fallen off it and had every intention of doing so again.
"Hjalli!" a woman called, pointing at a child who immediately flushed for reasons he didn't understand.
"Hjalli!" Asgrim returned, the bead warm enough to find his skin again.
Ash had a coil of shipwire—thin, tar-stained, meant for small rigging fixes—and her teeth. She snapped a length free as if the wire had offended her, threaded the fallen beads without asking if they wanted to be threaded, and tied a stovepipe hitch around his wrist that would hold a masthead in a gale. "Keep talking," she said, fingers faster than fair. "We'll fix the necklace later."
The pilgrim darted past a stall; Fen let him. There were knives on that table and glass that wanted to be a story. Fen shepherded his quarry toward a lane with walls that didn't care about strangers. The pilgrim saw the gate ahead and put his head down into the old, honest run of someone who has been promised forgiveness if he only delivers a package.
Asgrim knelt and scooped practice-line and corner-post from the dirt with his palm like picking up a spilled prayer. He held them there while the town did the math out loud.
"Corner-post—" said a boy who had been told to stop kicking it.
"Practice-line—" said a woman whose hands had taught a husband to drill without being stupid.
"Harbor first! War last!" shouted a fisherman who had never before enjoyed saying rules out loud.
The beads cooled, then warmed, then sat down again in his hand as if reminded of their stools. He slid them onto Ash's wire as she held the loop open and swore at inanimate objects with a tenderness she reserved for tools that had disappointed her.
The pilgrim took the gate hard and found Fen.
Fen did not spear him. He did not break him. He performed a simple wrench of the wrist that men who have had chains learns in their bones: this is mine now. The knife fell and clinked like a child asked to sit still. Fen set the pilgrim face-down against the wall with the efficiency of an apology and waited for the man to discover his options were bad and few.
Asgrim did not call thunder to underline any of this. He didn't need sky to be a notary.
He stood with the crowd. "Keep them warm," he said. "Say them like you mean your own teeth."
"Hjalli."
"Corner-post."
"Practice-line."
"Harbor first."
Even people who didn't know what they were saying could hear what they were doing.
The missing word—the sister—did not return; that hole was old and he had promised not to bully it. But the others stayed. He felt the cold go out of the beads like a room warmed by bodies.
Ash twisted the shipwire into a new cord, finished with a smith's bite and a shipwright's scorn for jewelry. It was ugly and would never lie flat. That made it a friend.
"Give me your hand," she said. He did. She yoked the loop over his wrist, then stitched the tar-knot back into its place against the recall thread with the tip of a knife.
"Less pretty," she said.
"More honest," he said.
Fen brought the pilgrim back like a man returns a borrowed bucket to a neighbor he doesn't hate. The pilgrim's face wore a hard kind of pity—pity for himself and for work he believed in because someone had taught him a smaller math.
"Who paid you," Ash asked, "and did they give you enough to live with it?"
The pilgrim looked at the shrine-stone as if it might remind him of an answer that wouldn't embarrass him. "The Choir's clerk," he said finally, voice trained to remain neat. "He said the cord is how you remember oaths. He said we only had to cut it and run. He said thunder would be quiet again and mothers would sleep."
"As if beads hold us up like tent poles," Fen said, unimpressed. "As if we were that easy to fold."
"They are only a ledger," Asgrim said, so the pilgrim and the crowd both could hear. "We keep the numbers aloud when the book is stolen."
"I didn't steal," the pilgrim said, furious and small. "I rescued. Your names make weather. Weather kills babies."
Asgrim tasted the island in the shape of the sentence. Mercy, taught wrong. He didn't try to fix the man. You can't unteach a winter in one afternoon.
"Today you tried to steal anchors," he said evenly. "The part that keeps me from throwing this tool through your chest because it would be easy and correct."
The crowd heard the unsaid and kept breathing. The pilgrim heard it and couldn't decide whether to be afraid or grateful.
Ash twitched her chin at the shrine-stone. "He came to the right place to learn what witness is," she said. She lifted her voice modestly. "Hold him with your eyes while we teach a chorus."
The waystation did. They didn't jeer. They didn't strike. They watched him like a door that had been rude to a hinge. He found out how much weight a gaze can have when it is decided to be useful.
Asgrim mounted the trough's low wall and spoke the oath in pieces so a clerk couldn't shave its middle away.
"By." He pointed to a loaf.
"Bread." The baker's daughter said it as if kneading it.
"By." He touched a rope.
"Wind we've taught into a good job." Oarsmen grinned without liking him and pulled once on the air to remind it who pays wages.
"By work—ours—" He set his palm on the trough's worn edge; a hundred hands answered by touching wood, stone, tool.
"We'll spend before we ask you to."
The shrine-stone kept the middle of their words where it belonged. The air here did not shave; it carried.
Hjalli, cheeks hot from the use of his name in public, started to list the things he loved because someone had told him that sometimes listing is what a man can do: "Scupper. Thwart. Low Drum. Fen's knot. Ash's mallet. The rope that doesn't lie. The beam that says harbor first."
The crowd took the idea and made it a weave. Housewives at three different stalls named work so beautifully the Choir would have died of boredom trying to eat it: peel, knead, lay, sweep, mend, lift. Old men took the verbs and made them into a drone, the pitch you sharpen knives at. Even Ylva hummed in a key the sea recognizes when she's willing to be civil.
Names did what names do when they are witnessed; they sat down and refused to be stolen.
Fen eased the pilgrim onto a crate. He didn't bind him. Binding would have made a symbol; this was a lesson. "Your hands?" Fen asked.
The pilgrim glanced down, confused. "My hands are…" He stopped. The backs of them were the hands of a man who had rowed as a boy and then spent too long in easy rooms. He looked embarrassed for the first time.
"You can work," Fen said gently and without permission. "Or you can try to make the world quiet so you don't have to hear yourself trying."
The pilgrim swallowed. "The Clerk said… if I did this… mothers would sleep."
"Mothers sleep when men keep watch and fix roofs and teach boys to be loud at the right times," Ash said. "Mothers sleep when bread happens because wind didn't steal it and men didn't pretend weather is a god who owes them favors."
Asgrim put his palm to the new wire-cord, ugly as a scar, and the beads pressed back warm under his skin. He felt how small a thing a cord is, and how little it mattered next to the sound of a town agreeing out loud.
"Beads are helpful," he said to the crowd. "Not holy. If someone cuts them again, you hold my names for me until I've got hands free to tie them back on. And I'll hold yours when you need both hands for something that matters."
The crowd accepted the bargain because bargains that make sense are a carnival for decent people.
Ragna—who had arrived without anyone noticing she was late—tapped her ledger with a knuckle. "I'll add a line," she said, as if the book had asked her for a snack. "Twice a day we say the cords. Out loud. Not just for him. For everyone. You don't need beads for witness."
"Say them now," Svala would have said. The town said them anyway.
"Hjalli. Crooked fence. Harbor first. Practice-line. Corner-post. Warden—paid. Thin summer. Thunder keeps oaths."
When the last word finished being itself, the air felt like it had eaten properly.
Fen let the pilgrim stand. He stayed. Now that the thing he had been sent to cut had refused to be the only thing holding up a man, his mission looked flimsy and his feet heavier.
"Clerk will want a report," he said, half to himself.
"Give him one," Ash said. "Tell him names live in mouths. Tell him to bring more scissors if he wants, but he'll run out of hands before we run out of voices."
The pilgrim's mouth made the shape of offense and discovered he had misplaced it. He went away not as a martyr or a prisoner but as a man who had been given an evening's worth of thinking to do and no one to impress with it.
Asgrim thumbed the cord—the wire scratchy, the beads unpretty—and liked it. He would replace it with leather later because wire makes bad bedfellows, but not because he feared it might fail him again. The failure had been his—forgetting that the necklace is a bookmark, not the book.
He climbed the trough wall once more and did exactly the thing he wanted to do least in front of people who had nearly watched him become stupid: he told the bill.
"Spent," he said. "A cord. Breath. Shame. Refused: a throw that would have made a child a story. Gained: a chorus that knows my names better than my wrist."
The town knew better than to clap. They nodded, which is older and less wasteful.
Ash finished tying the last stitch into his tar-knot so it would bite earlier next time and flicked the frayed end off her nail. "We'll make ten more cords from scrap before we sleep," she said to Hjalli, who shuffled his feet because he knew who would be twisting wire with sore thumbs until midnight.
Fen rolled the pilgrim's knife in his palm and then, without flourish, slid it into a crack in the shrine-stone where future fools might see it and decide not to become past ones. "Let it stay there," he said. "If someone needs it, they can explain why."
Evening came with the dignity of men who had done the correct amount of labor. The stalls packed modestly. The mothers let their children run the last three steps. The shrine-stone took on the day's temperature and pretended not to approve of anything.
At the edge of the square, Asgrim stood in the little country between hearth and wind that he carried with him and said the line he had decided to die saying, no matter how many times it bored the right people:
"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 answer. It wasn't owed. The crowd did, softly, with the sort of sound that keeps thieves honest and mothers asleep. The beads warmed. His hand warmed. His fear cooled.
He had thought he wore a chain; he had been wearing a chorus. Now he knew.