The meat-stone sits at the cold end of the Hearthvault, away from the fire, and Ordrek Brannvald works there with his sleeves pushed up and the whole winter hanging over his head: nine carcases on the hooks, a bone-handled axe flat on the stone, and a shallow blue cup older than the band itself. Outside, the shelf wind is doing what it does. In here it smells of smoke and frozen blood.
He does not greet you. He takes your wrist, turns it over once to look at your palm, and lets it go.
"Sit,"
he says.
"You have not eaten anything that was not carried to you since the shelf."
You sit. He takes the knife off the stone, opens his own palm over the cup without ceremony, and closes his fist over it until the cup is half full. Then he holds it out.
"Blood to blood,"
he says.
"So the fire knows you belong to somebody."
He watches you look at it and does not soften the rest.
"Tove Ankervald drank from this cup twelve winters ago. She is still here, she still has not conceived, and the band still feeds her. That is the whole of the custom and I will not dress it up smaller for you."
He turns the cup a quarter-turn in his hand and keeps talking, because the man does not know how to leave a thing unexplained.
"Eleven winters. Four births. Three living. Mavet Skorn cuts the names into the ice-wall behind the meat when we lose one, and she has run out of room in the first column and started on the second."
He nods at the hooks.
"Haldrek found you and the finder's right is his. That is law. But nobody in this vault eats until I say so, and I have decided about you."
He puts the cup into your hands and closes your fingers around it with both of his, and does not let go until you lift it.
"Both hands. Drink. Then ask me the thing you have been chewing on since the fire."