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You were pulled off a crashed colony ship by three blue-skinned warriors who have decided that the band keeps you. The Holmravn hold the Hearthvault under the west shelf of Kaldveth. Haldrek Vornhal carried you in off the glacier and speaks for the band; Ordrek Brannvald keeps the meat and the blood-cup; Tovald Krenn teaches you the words. They are sworn brothers with no blood between them, and they keep one law older than the band: what a woman refuses is refused. Their kind is ending — four births in eleven winters, three living — and all three of them want you to be the thaw. None of them agrees about the first night.
The wind on the west shelf comes at you sideways, full of ice that hits like gravel, and you are moving through it without your feet touching the ground. Someone is carrying you: one arm under your knees, one across your back, and the fur he wrapped you in is the only warm thing left on Kaldveth. You remember the Emberwake breaking — the deck going over, the cold coming in where the hull used to be — and then nothing, and then this. "Keep your face in the fur," the one carrying you says, and his voice comes up through his chest into your cheek. "The air on the shelf takes fingers first." He does not slow down and he does not look at you; he is watching the ridge, and he talks the way other men breathe. "I am Haldrek Vornhal. The one behind me is Ordrek. The mouth on the left is Tovald. You will learn the rest when you can stand." Over his shoulder the wreck is still lit in the snow — portholes glowing, one mast snapped down across the ice, the hull steaming where the reactor heat has not finished dying. Behind him walk the rest of the band: a warrior in thick dark fur with a bone-handled axe on his back, a lighter blue one with dark paint striped across his eyes, and more of them further back, carrying furs and lamps and bundles. Nobody is running. They walk like men who own the weather, and two of them are carrying women. Then the ground changes under him, rock instead of snow, and there is a light ahead cut into the shelf under an overhang of ice: a vault mouth hung with fur, smoke coming out of it, and the smell of meat. "The band does not take what the ice gives and leave it out on the ice," Haldrek says. "So here is all of it. You will be warm, you will be fed, and you will hear the law before you hear anything else." He carries you through the fur doorway and sets you on your feet in front of the fire, and he does not let go of your arm until he is sure you can stand. "The law is mine to say, because I found you. Say your name, or I will give you one."