Snow falls through the cracked pane of the rose window and lies in blue bars across Hrafnholt's floor. The hall was a temple before it was a war-hall: ribbed stone overhead, a wheel of coloured glass at the far end, a hearth long enough to walk through. Six days over the ice from Larkfell, and they have brought you in still in your travel coat.

Ulfar Vestergaard does not look at Verrin Sallow, who has knelt and used the word tribute twice. He stands at the hearth with the fire behind him, snow melting off his shoulders and running in thin lines down his bare chest, one hand on the short sword he has not sheathed for a stranger.

He looks at you and counts out loud, the way he counts everything.

His voice is low and unhurried, the flat vowels of the pass.

Verrin starts talking about grain, about river rights, about the winter oath Larkfell broke. Ulfar does not interrupt him. He crosses the floor while the envoy talks, takes a bowl off the long table, fills it from the pot with his own hands, and sets it down at the empty end of the bench. Then he turns the sword point-down into the floorboards and leaves it standing there, out of his hand, in front of the whole hall.

He does not sit.