At the feast the jarl's sons were poured glory. Steinar was handed an empty cup.
It had been cut from dark wood, smooth on the outside, blackened at the rim by other men's lips and old smoke. There was no mead in it, no silver, no ring, no salt. Only the dry smell of oak and a thin crack in the side, as though the cup had once been thrown into a fire and then pulled out again.
In Hroald's hall they were laughing before the jarl had even raised his hand.
The feast was heavy and long. By the doors it smelled of wet wool, steam rose over the bowls, men's faces reddened from the fire. The dogs lay under the benches and took the bones before the junior servants could. The beams above the hearth were black. Shields of the senior kins hung in the smoke: not everyone was remembered in that hall, but the chosen names were repeated constantly.
Ragned sat nearest their father.
Hroald's eldest son sat straight and confident. He wore a new blue cloak with a silver clasp. A long sword given by his mother's kin stood at his feet. When Hroald named him heir to the western ship, men struck the tables with their palms. Somebody shouted that Ragned was born to go first. Somebody added that the sea itself would give way when it saw his prow mark.
Brand Song-Carver did not take up the laughter at once. A good skald was in no hurry to follow a crowd. He waited until the noise died down, and only then struck the strings with his fingers.
The song went evenly, strongly, without any excess sweetness. It praised Hroald as founder of the kin and Ragned as his worthy heir. The ship seemed to continue the elder son's arm, and death in battle promised him eternal memory.
Steinar listened and knew that a place had been left for him in that song.
Not a line.
The emptiness between the lines.
He stood at the lower end of the table, where those sat who had already been allowed to eat but not yet allowed to speak. The jarl's third son. The son who was not trusted with the back door during a raid, because he had once already chosen a door instead of the shield ring. The son whom the boys by the stables called Empty Cup, until they noticed that he could hear them.
He heard almost everything.
He heard Nera the Smoky by the side wall arguing with a servant about sacks of salt. He heard old Modra at the entrance coughing dryly and painfully into her hand. He heard Saiva, sitting below Brand, falter almost imperceptibly on the third repeat, where the song reached the place at which the youngest son should have appeared.
There Brand made a pause.
Not a long one. Not a rude one. The kind that could be taken for a master's breath.
That was exactly why the hall understood.
Steinar had not been forgotten. He had been left out on purpose.
Hroald waited until everyone had finished laughing and raised the empty cup. His beard was white at the mouth and dark at the cheeks. The jarl looked at his son the way a man weighs up how useful a thing still is to the kin.
"Ragned receives the ship," the jarl said. "My middle son receives men for the spring crossing. And you, Steinar, receive what you have filled your own life with."
The cup was set down in front of him.
Empty.
The knock of wood on the table sounded quiet. But in the hall you could hear a wet twig burst in the hearth.
Steinar could have raised the cup and answered so bitterly and sharply that his words would be remembered. The other memory left over from the fever suggested several ways of turning an insult to his own use: an empty cup is easier to carry, it can be filled, and with the free hand you can pick up what others have dropped.
In that other memory people were not sung about but written down, in books, lists and accounts where almost anyone could be found. That world had not been kinder. But it had been harder to forget a man there than in Hroald's hall, where one silence from Brand was enough to strip a living man of his name.
He said nothing.
The silence was calculation. If Steinar answered too cleverly, they would begin watching him. And if he kept quiet where a flash of anger was expected, he would be reckoned weak again and allowed to observe.
Steinar took the cup in both hands and lowered his eyes. The hall decided he had swallowed the disgrace. In fact he had seen that the inner side of the rim was scored with small notches.
Not on the outside, where anyone might have noticed them.
Inside.
Where the lips touched the wood.
The notches ran unevenly: short, long, deep, barely visible. There were far too many of them to be accidental scratches. Somebody had been keeping a reckoning on that cup so that a man saw it only when he drank.
Or when he was handed emptiness.
Brand touched the strings again.
The song came back to Ragned. To the ship. To the sword. To the water ahead. It passed by Steinar as easily as though he were not there between the benches.
And then the hall laughed again.
Steinar raised the cup the way a gift is raised. The wood touched his lips. The notches inside scratched the skin. He tasted old smoke, sour mead and other men's hands.
For the first time he was killed with something other than a sword.
He was killed with an empty place in a song.
Open in the reader