The Vinland Althing

• Chapter 1 The Frost Across the Bay
• Chapter 2 Scales and Bog Ore
• Chapter 3 The Knarr at L'Anse aux Meadows
• Chapter 4 Whispers in the Longhouse
• Chapter 5 The Markland River Route
• Chapter 6 Smelter's Mark
• Chapter 7 Council of the Gothi
• Chapter 8 Into the Sweetwater Sea
• Chapter 9 The Red Stone of Michigami
• Chapter 10 Blood on the Anvil
• Chapter 11 The Winter Law-Giver
• Chapter 12 Portage of the Shadows
• Chapter 13 The League of the Inland Forges
• Chapter 14 Skræling Oaths
• Chapter 15 A Ledger of Broken Iron
• Chapter 16 Night at the Straits
• Chapter 17 The Guild of the Western Skerries
• Chapter 18 Black Sand and Birchbark
• Chapter 19 The Broken Bloom
• Chapter 20 Trial by Tally Stick
• Chapter 21 The Lawspeaker's Silence
• Chapter 22 Ice on the St. Lawrence
• Chapter 23 Gathering on the Plains of Thingvellir
• Chapter 24 The Voice of the Freemen
• Chapter 25 Cold Metal, Hot Blood
• Chapter 26 The Law of the Inland Seas

The salt-crust on Leif’s Skerry was thick enough to dull a gutting knife by mid-morning, which Einar took as an ill omen for the mackerel run. The wind had swung east before sunrise, bringing with it the flat, gray smell of the Labrador drift-ice that had no business being so far south in the month of the Hay-Harvest. Fifty years ago, if the old men in the drinking sheds could be believed, the grapes had still ripened along the tidal flats behind the dune-spits, small and sour as sheep’s plums, but real fruit nonetheless. Nowadays, a man was lucky if his parsnips didn't freeze in the furrow before the second turn of the moon after midsummer.

Einar Finnbogason hauled his broad-bottomed faering up past the kelp-line with a rhythm born of thirty winters on the Straits of Belle Isle. He was forty-two, which made him older than two of his brothers who had gone down with a timber-raft off Cape Breton, and younger than his knees felt whenever the damp settled into the limestone seams of the cove. He wiped his palms on his sealskin kirtle, leaving two dark smears of cod-slime across the grease-hardened hide, and looked across the mouth of Epaves Bay.

A three-masted knarr was working its way through the shoals, its square sail stained the color of boiled alder bark. It was an awkward beast of a vessel, broader in the beam than the old Greenland boats, with high clinker sides built to take the battering of the western river bars. It flew no ribbon at the masthead, which meant it was either a free-trader from the southern fjords or someone who didn't care to pay the harbour-dues to the Lawspeaker’s bailiff before he had dropped his stone.

"That’s Sigurd’s timber-prow," his nephew Ketil said, dropping an armload of split spruce onto the shingle with a clatter that startled a ringed seal off the ledge forty paces out. Ketil was nineteen, had hair like sheep’s fleece after an ash-fire, and believed that every keel entering the bay carried a keg of honey-wine intended solely for his personal use. "He’s riding high. He didn't find much oak in the south this season."

"He’s riding high because he’s carrying charcoal, not baulks," Einar said, squinting through the salt-haze. He could see the black ring around the knarr's waterline where the ash-wash had sloshed through the scuppers during the morning tack. "And he hasn't come from the south. He’s come down the Great River with the tide."

"There’s no iron on the river," Ketil said firmly. "Old Brand says the river-men only have soft stone and beaver-pelts that rot before you can grease them."

"Old Brand hasn't been farther west than the Tadoussac shallows since the year the king’s church in Gardar starved," Einar replied, hauling the fish-basket by its hemp bail. "And Brand still thinks a pound of bog-bloom from the Meadows is worth four yards of wadmal. Move your legs, boy. The bailiff will be down at the slip before the anchor-flukes bite the mud, and I have six dozen cod that need the salt before the flies find them."

The settlement at Straumfjord was not the grand town the skalds sang about in the halls of Norway—if Norway still had halls that cared about three thousand souls clinging to the rim of an ice-choked continent. It was two hundred long-houses of peat and turf, their low backs turned against the northern gales, huddled between the black spruce scrub and the gray gravel beach. Above them rose the timber palisade of the Law-Stead, where the five districts of Vinland met every second summer to settle their boundary disputes, their timber-rights, and the blood-fines that had accumulated over the long dark.

In the center of the settlement stood the great stone smithy, its chimney belching the yellow, sulphur-heavy smoke that smelled of bad eggs and dried peat. That chimney was the heart of the world, though few liked to live downwind of it. Without the bog iron dragged out of the peat-baths behind the Great Bog, the settlements would have rusted back into the stone age within two generations. A Norseman without iron was just a Skræling who spoke a more complicated language and had worse skin.

As Einar reached the fish-drying flakes, Hallstein the Bailiff was already trotting down the path, his boots sinking deep into the wet moss. Hallstein was a man whose girth suggested that the Little Ice had not yet reached the larders of the Lawspeaker’s kin. He carried an ash tally-stick under his left arm and a brass-sheathed measuring rod in his right, using the rod more as a walking staff than an instrument of justice.

"Whose timber is that on the spit, Einar?" the bailiff called out, his breath pluming like sea-smoke in the July chill. "If it’s the timber from the Point-Gothi’s grant, it carries a three-penny toll per cord before the sun hits the gully."

"It’s driftwood, Hallstein," Einar said without looking up from his basket. "Drowned fir from the northern beaches. You can have the worms out of it if you want your tithe, but the wood belongs to whoever dragged it above the drift-line before the tide turned."

Hallstein stopped, puffing, and looked out across the bay toward the knarr, which had just let go its fore-stone with a heavy plunge that sent gray spray over its low bulwarks. "That’s not Sigurd. That’s the Sea-Raven. Out of the Markland Reach."

"She’s low in the stern," Ketil observed, lingering by the drying rack with a gutting knife he had forgotten to use.

"She’s low because she’s carrying ballast she didn't dig out of the sand-spits," Einar said. He laid his first three cod across the spruce laths, their bellies split clean to the tail-fin. "The river-knarrs don't use river-gravel for stones. It shifts in the chop off Anticosti. They use bloom-bars."

Hallstein’s small, gray eyes narrowed until they were nearly lost in the folds of his fat cheeks. He tapped the tally-stick against his thigh with a slow, dry rhythm. "The Lawspeaker hasn't licensed any bloom-furnaces beyond the Three Rivers. The charter of sixty-eight is clear on it: all metal smelted within the King’s Peace—or what’s left of it—must be marked with the Meadow-Cross at the Straumfjord scales."

"Then you’d better go tell the master of the Sea-Raven," Einar said, tossing a cod head to a three-legged dog that had been waiting patiently behind the salt-barrel. "He looks like a man who has come three hundred leagues of white water just to hear you recite the Law-Codes of Bishop Isleif."

A four-oared skiff had dropped from the knarr’s side and was pulling toward the landing-slip with short, jagged strokes. The men at the oars were not the yellow-haired youths of the coast settlements. Two of them had the wide, high cheekbones and grease-braided hair of the Innu who lived along the Saguenay, though they wore tunics of homespun wool under their caribou parkas. The man in the stern-sheets was tall and thin as a larch pole, wrapped in a mantle of dark, un-dyed wool pinned at the shoulder with a ring-brooch of plain, bright iron—not the dark, pitted stuff that came out of the bog-ovens at the Meadows, but smooth, bluish metal that caught the gray light like grease on a shield.

Einar wiped his knife on his thigh and stood up. He knew that brooch. It had belonged to Thorvald the Far-Goer, who had gone up the St. Lawrence twenty summers ago with five boatloads of dried cod and ten kegs of salt, promising to find where the sweetwater ended and the earth fell off into the sunset.

The skiff ground into the shale forty paces down from the fish-flakes. The tall man stepped out into six inches of freezing surf without looking down at his sealskin boots. He didn't haul the boat; he left that to the two river-men, who pulled the prow up past the surf with the indifferent strength of men who spent four months of every year portaging thirty-foot canoes over granite ledges.

"Einar Finnbogason," the tall man said. His voice was cracked, like a horn that had dried too near the hearth, but it had the cadence of the southern quarter about it. "Your father still owes my uncle three heifers for the hay-meadow at the creek-mouth."

"My father has been under the cairn on the north hill since the winter of the great drift," Einar said, walking down to meet him. "And the heifers died of the murrain the year after the ship from Greenland failed to come. If you want the beef, you’ll need a spade and a very long memory, Valbrand."

Valbrand Thorvaldsson smiled, but only with the left side of his mouth. The right side was pulled taut by an old white scar that ran from his ear-lobe into his collar-band, the mark of an iron-tipped arrow that hadn't quite done its business. "The memory I have. The spade I can buy. I hear the bog-bloom at Straumfjord is selling for twelve ounces of dried hake to the pound-weight."

"It was," Hallstein said, bustling up behind Einar with his tally-stick raised like an off-duty priest holding an aspergil. "Until the ice set in at the northern heads. Now it’s sixteen ounces, and two parts in ten to the Law-Hearth for the upkeep of the sea-marks."

Valbrand turned his gray eyes on the bailiff. There was no heat in the look, only the flat, cold curiosity a butcher might show toward a pig that had squeaked before the mallet fell. "The sea-marks have been down since the gale of Michaelmas, Hallstein. I had to smell my way past the shoals by the stink of your kelp-heaps. If I pay two parts in ten for that, I’ll want the Lawspeaker to come out and hold the lantern himself when the autumn drifts start."

"The Law is the Law," Hallstein blustered, though he took half a pace backward into the dry gravel. "It was spoken at the Meadow-Thing before your grandfather was cut for the stone."

"The Law was spoken for men who had three ships a year from Bergen," Valbrand said softly. He reached into the leather pouch at his belt, drew out a square bar of metal no longer than a man’s forearm, and tossed it into the shale at Einar’s feet.

The bar did not thump with the dull, spongy weight of the bog-iron that Einar had hammered into fish-hooks since he was nine years old. It rang against the gray beach-stones with a high, clear ping that sounded like church-bell brass, sharp and musical in the cold air.

Einar looked down. The metal was clean. It had no slag-holes, no charcoal pits, and no sign of the crumbly red rot that ate the Meadow-knives if they were left in the bottom of a wet boat for three days. It was marked at the end with three stamped lines: not the broad cross of the Bishop’s smiths, but three parallel grooves that looked like the marks of a bear’s claws on cedar.

"That didn't come out of the peat at the Black Marsh," Einar said, without touching it.

"No," Valbrand said. "It came out of a hole in the red rock three hundred leagues past the Long Sault. Where the water is sweet enough to drink from your palm, and the hills are made of nothing else."

Ketil made a move toward the bar, but Einar caught the boy by the shoulder of his kirtle with a grip that left marks through the wool. Across the water, on the deck of the Sea-Raven, three more men were standing by the windlass, and they were not river-men. They were large, broad-shouldered Greenlanders in heavy grey vadmal, and every one of them had a short-hafted wood-axe tucked into his belt with the edge turned forward, ready for the draw.

The wind took another turn toward the northeast, bringing with it a spat of hard, round graupel that rattled against the dry cod-skins like gravel thrown against a wall. The short summer was already slipping away into the gray Atlantic, and for the first time in his life, Einar Finnbogason felt that the cold was not coming from the north at all, but from the great, dark woods behind the sunset.

The weighing shed at Straumfjord smelled of old grease, wet dog, and the sour vinegar the smiths used to quench their tool-steel. It was a squat building constructed of granite boulders rolled up from the tidal reach, chinked with dry sphagnum moss that was constantly being pecked out by sea-sparrows. Inside, suspended from a soot-blackened ceiling beam of old white pine, hung the Great Balance. It was a ponderous thing of beaten bronze and Norway oak, balanced on a hardened iron pivot that groaned like a dying bull whenever more than three stones of bloom were dumped into the copper-riveted trays.

Einar Finnbogason stood by the salt-troughs near the open double doors, nursing a horn of small beer that tasted predominantly of alder bark. The sleet had slackened into a thin, greasy drizzle that glazed the turf roofs of the village, turning the trampled tracks between the longhouses into grey, knee-deep porridge. Behind him, Hallstein the Bailiff was leaning over the tally-table, his sleeves rolled back to reveal pale, doughy forearms dotted with freckles the color of dried rust.

"Three marks and two ounces," Hallstein announced, bringing a notched stick down against the oak planking with a hollow rap. "Pitted at the horn, cracked in the drawing. That’s meadow-ore from the Black Marsh diggings, second furnace, late June melt. If you want this entered as sound trading-iron for the Greenland run, you’ll pay the smith three pennies of wadmal to re-heat and beat the sulfur out of it."

The man on the other side of the balance was a smallholder named Orm, who had three fingers missing from his left hand—the frost-bite harvest of a bad drift off the Belle Isle shoals five winters back. Orm looked down at the dull, porous lump of iron sitting in the brass pan with the tired hatred only a farmer could muster for cold stone.

"I roasted the turf three days over birchwood, Hallstein," Orm growled, his breath smelling of the salt-herring he had been chewing since daybreak. "I crushed the roasted nodules myself with the stone maul until my arms were as stiff as ash-poles. The bloom was bright when we pulled it from the clay chimney."

"And it’s full of rotten slag inside, like a dead seal’s liver," Hallstein said cheerfully, using his thumb to flick a crumb of crumbly red dross off the lump. It fell onto the board and disintegrated into dark powder. "The peat in the Black Marsh has gone sour, Orm. Everyone knows it. The frost stays in the moss until midsummer, and the water in the cut doesn't drain into the creek anymore. It sits and rots the iron. Take your mark and be glad I didn't fine you for wasting birch-charcoal that belongs to the Commons."

Orm spat into the peat-dust at his feet, grabbed the lump of dirty, grey-brown metal with his good hand, and shoved it into his sack. He shuffled out into the rain, his walrus-hide boots squelching miserably in the mud.

"That’s the fourth bloom this morning," Ketil muttered from his perch on an empty lard-cask. The boy had his gutting knife out, idly carving a row of notches into the edge of the barrel-stave. "None of them worth a cod’s eye. Old Torstein says that by the time I have a beard, we’ll be tipping our harpoons with bone again, like the Skrælings up in the fjords."

"Old Torstein had his brains addled by a swinging spar in the year of the three comets," Einar said, though he looked down at the bar of western iron tucked inside his own sealskin kirtle. He had not given it back to Valbrand. Valbrand had merely laughed, stepped back into his skiff, and told him to show it to the Law-Smith if he wanted to see an old man weep.

The Law-Smith was sitting by the forge at the rear of the shed, where a low bed of charcoal glowed dull crimson under the slow puff of a double-bellows worked by a half-blind boy from the southern settlements. His name was Brodir, and he had been hammering the bay’s iron since the days when the Bishop in Gardar still sent ships carrying German brass and French wine. He was seventy winters old, with a beard that was entirely white save for the yellow stains around his mouth from his pipe-weed, and wrists as thick and knotty as spruce roots.

"Bring it here, Einar," Brodir said, not looking up from the scythe-blade he was straightening with light, taps of a four-pound hammer.

Einar walked through the gloom of the shed, stepping over piles of rejected slag and bundles of dried bog-myrtle used to bank the fires. He drew the square bar from his kirtle and laid it on the polished anvil-face.

The contrast was enough to make a man stop and stare. Next to Brodir’s scythe—a mottled, greyish-black tool full of hammer-welds, cold-shuts, and the grey scabs where the bog-lime had refused to fuse—the western bar lay like a streak of summer lightning. It was dark, dense, and possessed a fine, uniform grain that had taken the forge-hammer with the smooth indifference of seasoned yew.

Brodir did not touch it immediately. He picked up a pair of long-handled tongs, took a glowing lump of charcoal from the hearth, and dropped it onto the bar. The wood smoke curled up, sweet and blue, catching the sharp tang of the raw metal underneath. Then he set his hammer down, reached out a hand whose palm was as hard and cracked as horn, and picked up the bar by its middle.

He did not weigh it on Hallstein’s bronze scale. He held it in his palm, bouncing it with tiny, subtle movements of his wrist, testing where the center of mass lay.

"How much?" Hallstein asked, having waddled over from the tally-table, his brass rod tucked beneath his arm like an extra bone. "If it’s from the river-knarr, it hasn't paid the mooring-penny at the Point. If it’s traded metal, it pays four parts in twelve to the Law-Hearth."

"Be quiet, Hallstein," Brodir said softly. The old man picked up a heavy, cold-chisel with an edge of hardened Greenland steel and set the tip against the corner of the western bar. He raised a five-pound sledge and struck it once, hard.

The blow rang out through the shed with the clean, high snap of an axe hitting dry birch in deep winter. The chisel bit into the corner of the bar, but it did not tear the grain or send off the shower of brittle, dark flakes that characterized the meadow-bloom. Instead, it raised a tiny, bright curl of steel—pure, silvery, and tough as walrus-ivory.

Brodir bent his head close to the metal, his cloudy eyes scanning the cut. He touched the bright wound with the tip of his tongue, then wiped his mouth with the back of his soot-stained hand.

"It’s not bog-iron," Brodir said. His voice was flat, devoid of the bailiff’s nervous calculation. "It was never under water. It never saw moss, nor sheep-dung, nor the sour mud of the spruce-swamps."

"Rock-ore," Einar said.

"Rock-ore," the smith agreed. "And not the soft, yellow stuff they dig out of the hills behind the bay either. This was taken out of the deep stone, roasted in furnaces that burned three cords of dry maple to the charge, and beaten while it was white-hot with water-hammers or the work of twenty men at the double-sledges." He turned the bar over, his thumb tracing the three parallel lines stamped into the butt. "There isn't a furnace between here and Cape Breton that could heat a bloom this big through to the core without burning the carbon out of the edges. Who brought this into the bay?"

"Valbrand Thorvaldsson," Einar replied. "He dropped stone off Leif’s Skerry an hour ago. He has forty of these in his bilge for ballast, and he didn't look like a man who was worried about paying the harbour-tithe."

Hallstein’s face went the color of unbaked bannock. He took the tally-stick from under his arm and began to turn it between his fingers with a frantic, dry scrape. "Thorvald’s boy? He has no license from the Lawspeaker. The inland trade was put under the King’s Hand—or the Council’s Hand, seeing as the King hasn't answered a parchment since the great mortality—forty winters back. Nobody goes past the Tadoussac rapids without a signed timber-token from the Gothi of the South Shore."

"Valbrand didn't have a timber-token," Einar said, watching the old smith run his thumb over the clean chisel-mark. "He had four men with Innu braids pulling his oars, and six Greenlanders on his deck with their axes turned out. I don't think he’s planning on trading with Hallstein’s tally-sticks."

"He has to trade with them," Hallstein insisted, his voice rising a register as he glanced out through the shed doors toward the gray mist over the bay. "The Law of the Meadows is clear: all iron is Meadow-iron. If a man could just bring in stone-bloom from the west without the Meadow-Cross, what happens to the families who have the bog-rights on the Point? What happens to the church-tithes for the Lawspeaker’s hearth? A pound of bloom is sixteen ounces of dried cod because the peat-digging takes forty days of summer labour per hearth! If this stuff comes down the river, a man won't be able to buy an armload of dried ling with a cart-load of meadow-ore!"

"That," Brodir said, setting the bar back onto the anvil with a heavy, final clatter, "is precisely what Valbrand knows."

The smith stood up, his joints popping like dry branches under a snowshoe. He walked over to the rack where his finished iron was stored: three dozen scythes, a tub of rough boat-nails with square heads, six timber-axes with soft iron bodies and thin Greenland-steel bits welded into the clefts, and a pair of broad-axes intended for the timber-fellers down in Markland. Every one of them was grey, uneven, and pitted with the small, unavoidable flaws that came from working with meadow-ore that had too much phosphorus and too little sun.

"Look at this trash," Brodir said, kicking the tub of boat-nails. The nails rattled with a dull, leaden clink. "Half of them will snap if they hit an oak-knot in the planking. We’ve been smelting mud for three generations, Einar. When Leif came, there was wood enough to burn three charges for every pound of bloom, and the bogs were fresh. Now the woods are three leagues back from the salt water, the drift-wood is mostly rotten hemlock, and the peat is freezing two months earlier every decade. If a man wants an axe that will hold an edge through a four-foot pine without chipping like shale, he has to wait for a ship from Trondheim that hasn't sailed since my grandfather was a boy."

"The Law protects the diggers," Hallstein repeated, though the certainty had drained from his tone, replaced by the sour obstinacy of a man whose livelihood depended on a lie everyone had agreed to tell.

"The Law protects the men who own the bogs," Ketil spoke up from his cask. "Which means the Lawspeaker and his cousins at the Point."

Hallstein turned on the youth, his brass rod raised warningly. "Hold your tongue, Ketil Finnbogason, or I’ll have two yards of wadmal off your winter share for disrespect to the Council."

"He’s right though," Einar said quietly, stepping between his nephew and the bailiff. "The Lawspeaker bought the north bog from the Church when the priest died of the quinsy, and he hasn't lowered the iron-rate by an ounce of fish since. Meanwhile, my faering needs twelve new ribs, and I can't buy forty nails from Brodir without selling two-thirds of my cod-catch to the Law-Hearth at their own price."

He reached out, picked up the western bar, and slipped it back beneath his kirtle. The weight of it against his ribs was solid, cold, and immensely reassuring. It was not the light, spongy weight of the Meadow-bars that felt like dried bone in the hand; it had the true heft of deep rock, the kind of stone that lay under mountains where the frost could never reach.

"Where is Valbrand now?" Brodir asked, looking past them toward the landing.

"He’s gone up to the Longhouse of the Western Quarter," Einar said. "He told the boatmen to hold the skiff at the stone spit. He’s looking for timber-sleds and three teams of dry-draught oxen."

"Oxen?" Hallstein squeaked. "There aren't ten oxen left in Straumfjord that haven't been slaughtered for the winter barrel! You can't feed an ox on dried kelp and spruce-tips through five months of drift-ice!"

"He has grain," Einar said simply. "Two casks of Indian corn in the forward hold, dry as horn and yellow as gold-leaf. He gave Ketil a handful to chew on while we were hauling the skiff."

Ketil grinned, showing teeth that were still dusted with the bright yellow meal, and pulled three hard, rounded kernels from his pocket, rolling them in his palm like amber beads. "Tastes like hazel-nuts, but sweeter. The river-tribes grow fields of it as wide as the hay-meadows at Gardar, where the frost doesn't come until the hunter’s moon."

Brodir took one of the yellow kernels from the boy’s hand, examined it closely with his single good eye, and popped it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, his old jaw working with a rhythmic, grinding crackle.

"The world is getting wider in the west, Hallstein," the smith said, wiping his beard again. "While you’ve been measuring the mud in the Black Marsh with your brass rod, the forest has been growing without your leave. If Valbrand has five tons of that metal in his hold, your tally-sticks won't be worth the ash-wood they’re split from by the time the Althing meets on the Plains."

"We’ll see what the Gothi say," Hallstein muttered, backing toward the door. "The Point-Gothi has forty men with ring-mail coats and iron-pointed spears. A river-knarr can be seized for harbour-dues just like a seal-boat."

"You go tell the Point-Gothi that," Einar said, watching the bailiff hurry out into the drizzle, his kirtle gathered up out of the mud to save the hem from the slime. "And tell him to bring plenty of whetstones. If his men are using Meadow-iron spears, they’ll blunt on Valbrand’s bulwarks before they pierce the turf-fenders."

Brodir watched the bailiff disappear behind the peat-wall of the drying shed, then spat into his hearth. "Einar."

"Aye?"

"That bar under your coat. Don't let the Point-men see it."

"I’m not a fool, Brodir."

"You’re a fisherman who thinks he’s an iron-merchant because he has thirty winters on the Straits," the old smith said, his voice dropping into a harsh, conspiratorial whisper that barely carried over the sigh of the bellows. "Listen to me. Valbrand’s father didn't go west twenty summers ago just to look at trees. He went with three smiths from the South Shore who knew how to build a Catalan hearth—the kind the Basque whalers used to talk about before the ice closed the Grand Bank. They knew where the red stone was because the Innu told them where the earth bled into the lakes."

"The Sweetwater Sea," Einar said, remembering the tales his father used to tell by the grease-lamp on winter nights—of lakes so vast you could sail four days with a fair wind and never see a tree, where the water was sweet as spring-melt and the bottom was paved with copper and iron.

"Aye. The Sweetwater Sea," Brodir replied. "If Valbrand has found the way through the portages with a knarr-keel, the bog-iron at the Meadows is dead. And the men who own the bogs know it. They’ve known it since the first sample came down the river three springs ago."

Einar froze, his hand resting on the hilt of his gutting knife. "Three springs ago? This isn't the first keel?"

"It’s the first keel that wasn't burned to the waterline before it passed the Saguenay mouth," the smith said, his eye fixing Einar with an intensity that had nothing to do with age. "Two boats came down in the year of the frost-famine. Neither of them ever dropped stone in Epaves Bay. One went down off the Gaspe shoals with all hands—or so the Point-Gothi’s men reported when they brought in the salvage. The other had its bottom knocked out on the rocks behind Anticosti, and every bar of iron in her hold was dumped into thirty fathoms of salt water."

The shed was silent save for the hiss of the rain against the hot stones of the chimney and the rhythmic, asthmatic wheeze of the leather bellows. Ketil had stopped carving his barrel-stave; the boy was staring at the smith with his knife held half-open, his eyes wide in the gloom.

"Who knocked the bottom out?" Einar asked.

"Men who like the price of meadow-bloom just where it is," Brodir said. "Men who have forty ring-mail coats and sixty tally-sticks in their iron-chests. If Valbrand is up at the Western Longhouse, he isn't just looking for oxen, Einar. He’s looking for men with faerings who know the channels between the skerries—men who can move thirty tons of rock-iron into the southern settlements before the Lawspeaker can convene the Thing and declare the western trade an outlaw’s business."

Einar looked out through the open door toward the grey expanse of the bay. The Sea-Raven was sitting quiet in the lee of Leif’s Skerry, her square sail furled tight against the yard, her dark, heavy sides black with rain. She looked solid, immense, and dangerous—an intruder from a world that had forgotten the slow, freezing death of the eastern settlements and found a country where the trees were tall enough to make masts for the King of England’s own fleet.

"My faering is forty years old," Einar said, almost to himself. "The garboards are soft, and the stem-post has a split from the frost that I’ve had to wedge with tallow-hemp every spring."

"Then you’d better go get yourself some sound iron nails, hadn't you?" Brodir said, picking up his cold-chisel and turning back to his dull, grey scythe-blade. "Before the price of dried cod goes through the roof, and the bay freezes over for good."

Einar turned to his nephew. "Ketil. Go down to the slip. Tell the boys to haul the mackerel-nets and grease the rollers. We’re not going out for the cod-run on the morning tide."

"Where are we going?" the boy asked, his voice bright with the dangerous excitement of the young who have never seen a man killed over a sack of metal.

"We’re going to the Western Longhouse," Einar said, pulling his hood tight over his ears as the northern wind began to rise again, bringing the bitter smell of the Labrador drift-ice across the grey water. "To see what an ox is worth when it’s paid for in rock-steel."