One road out of the mire remained open throughout the siege, and Milava alone travelled it.
No one stopped a midwife: no clan, no jarl, no ice. It had been so since ancient times. No one dared delay a woman hurrying to a birth or a dying person. To their credit, the Northmen observed this custom as faithfully as the Forest clans. In the third week, a young Northman at the landing post, tormented by pain, showed Milava his swollen cheek. Grumbling, she pulled out his rotten tooth and gave him wormwood tincture. From then on, the men at the posts bowed to her and raised their spears to let her pass. Milava went to the hamlet with her herbs, delivered babies, tended the sick and closed the eyes of the dead. And all the while she listened. In her presence the people of the hamlet spoke freely, as though beside their own hearth.
At the height of the thaw, she was summoned to a dying man. An old oarsman from Torop's longship, a stranger in the hamlet, was living out his last days with distant kin. A deep cough racked his chest, and the old man knew he would not survive. For three nights Milava gave him raspberry-leaf broth with honey and took no payment. She did not want a man to die alone.
On the third night he began to talk. All his life he had kept silent at another man's command, and now he hurried to have his say while he still could.
"I rowed, lass," he said, staring at the ceiling. "Rowed all my life. Wherever I was told, that was where I rowed. An oar does not ask where the boat is going." He laughed, but at once began coughing. Milava gave him some warm broth. "And now I lie here thinking: I was no oar. I only pretended to be."
He had rowed for Torop for twenty years. For twenty years he had carried notched tally sticks down the river, recording tribute, clans and numbers of people. And he knew what no one else knew: there were always two sticks. One showed the jarl a smaller sum, the other recorded how much had truly been collected. Torop hid the stolen wealth in caches all along the river. He was not stealing from the clans, but from Gunnvald.
The old man fell silent, remembering what had happened twenty years before. The Northmen had asked Torop to put them in touch with a smith who had come from the south: Kres's father. They had heard of the master and wanted to call him across the sea to their shipyard. The smith refused. "My iron will not leave this place, and neither will I," he said. Then Torop deceived both sides. He told the Northmen the smith had died. He told the clan that the incomer master had brought blight upon the bee trees with his strange fire. That lie was believed for twenty years. When the smith died and the bees began dying again, no one doubted his guilt. "I carried that stick, lass. His name was on it, with a line cut across it. All my life I have remembered how it tapped inside the box. So quietly. Like a woodpecker."
He died before dawn. Milava closed his eyes and carried away in her sleeve what he had given her of his own will: the tally stick with the true account, which the old man had hidden inside his oar for many years. If the jarl saw it, neither lies nor long service would save Torop.
Back at the mire, she told Kres everything in the presence of Jorunn and Koren. Kres listened in silence to the story of his father and gripped the hammer haft until his knuckles whitened.
"There is our weapon," said Old Koren. "Show it to the jarl. Today."
"No," said Kres. He had to clench his teeth to keep his voice from trembling. "We have only one piece of proof. We will show it when it can decide everything, not when I feel the urge for vengeance."
That night he sat alone by the forge with his father's hammer across his knees. He remembered how his father had once got drunk and spent until dawn sharpening an axe that he never took anywhere afterwards. That night a distant hamlet burned. His father had also liked to say, spitting out scale, "Iron does not betray you, son. People betray you, then blame the iron." Through all three winters in which he wasted away from illness, his father had known who started the rumour that destroyed him. He had kept silent so that his son would not seek vengeance and die after him. "I will not avenge you, Father," Kres told the cold forge. "Vengeance will not bring you back. I will show the jarl the tally stick and let him judge his own interpreter."
In those same days Torop came to the hostages' tent. He wanted Hort to persuade the clan to give the jarl another ten people, and promised the old man a share and honour in return. The interpreter spoke long and pleasantly. Only when he had finished did he understand that Hort would not agree.
For the first time, the old priest saw Torop close at hand without the jarl behind him. Hort studied him long and intently. "Why so silent, old man?" the interpreter finally burst out. "Spring is near, and still you stare at the snow." "At the snow," Hort agreed. "Come spring, all the snow will melt. And everything that lay beneath it will be there for all to see. It happens every year, Torop. It has never been otherwise."
That night, for the first time in his long life, Hort prayed not for submission. He prayed for judgement.
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