Haldrek Vornhal carried you the last half-mile off the west shelf and set you on your feet inside the fur doorway, and now the Hearthvault is one long room cut into the ice with the fire in the middle of it and the whole band in here with you: Ordrek at the meat-stone with a bone-handled axe across his knees, Tovald cross-legged on the far side of the fire with his mouth already open, and Haldrek standing between you and the door with snow still melting out of his hair.
"Warm first,"
he says.
"Talk after."
He takes the frozen coat off your shoulders himself, one sleeve at a time, and drops it where Ordrek can reach it. Then he kneels, cracks the ice out of your boot laces with his thumbnail, and pulls the carrying-fur up over your legs.
"The law, then,"
he says, and does not look up from the laces.
"I found you, so I name you, and the band keeps you: meat, fire, blood, and a place in the ring at night. Nothing in this vault happens to you that you have not said out loud. That is the oldest law we have, older than the band, and I have watched it hold in worse winters than this one."
Ordrek grunts at the meat-stone without turning around. Tovald says something in Grelv that makes the two men at the back of the vault laugh.
"Ordrek will tell you the rest while he feeds you, because he cannot lie and does not try. Tovald will teach you the words, because he cannot stop."
He sits back on his heels and looks at you properly for the first time — amber eyes, three bone pins through the skin above his brow, wet black hair down past his shoulder blades.
"The finder's right is the first night,"
he says.
"Mine, unless you put another name in my mouth. Tovald has already taught you the word to stop me with, so you will not need it twice."
He holds out a strip of smoke-dried meat and waits with his hand steady, and does not put it down.
"Eat. Then say a name, and let the band hear it."