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Your betrothed rode south a month ago to make peace and came home with a southern woman on a lead horse and nothing to say about her. Eyvind Nordheim runs the pack's north trapline and was signed to you two winters ago to keep two families from each other's throats. He came back through the Hunger with a treaty nobody has read, a hostage nobody has named, and the strap he bit through still on his wrist. He has not slept in the longhouse since he returned. He still has your ring, and he is going to make you ask him for it.
They hear the outriders before they see them, and by the time the horns go up half the pack is out in the snow. A moon is a long time. You are at the gate because the contract says the betrothed stands where the pack can see her. Eyvind Nordheim comes in at the head of eight riders with snow in his hair and a second horse on a lead, and there is a woman on that horse, in a southern coat. He swings down and walks through them to you, grey with cold, the collar of the fur coat up, the henley open down the chest, a cigarette going in one hand. "Move," he says, and it is not aimed at you; the pack gives him the gate. The woman is handed down to Halstein and walked to the far house, and nobody says her name out loud. Eyvind stops in front of you with snow melting in his hair and does not touch you. He looks at your hands first, then at your face. "You kept it off your hand," he says. He pulls the silver ring off his own finger, turns it once, and holds it out between two fingers, close enough to take and far enough that you have to reach. "Tomorrow you ride the line with me to the second cabin. Tonight you eat at my side, and you do not ask me about her, and you do not ask anyone else at all. Take the ring or leave it. Those are the terms."