Steinar did not call his people.
A shout would only warn the thief that the loss had been discovered.
He rose, threw on his cloak and walked along the wall as though he had gone to relieve himself. Steinar's guard by the southern stone nodded. Ragned's guard by the water was trying too hard to look elsewhere.
A thin scrap of leather lay on the ground beneath the wall.
Not a piece of the loop, but a soft, dark scrap from a sheath, steeped in salt. Ketil wrapped such leather around his small knife so the blade would not knock against the wares on his trading bench.
Steinar found Eska by the fish.
She was not asleep. She sat crouched between two baskets, holding a splinter of wood.
"Did you see who took the cup?"
"I saw the hands," Eska said.
"Whose?"
"Ketil's. But he wasn't the one who took the cup."
Steinar crouched beside her.
"Tell me."
"Ketil passed your cloak twice during the day and looked to see where the loop was. One of Ragned's men came at night. His thumb is crooked like a fish hook. He cut the loop while Ketil stood farther off and coughed to cover the sound of the knife between gusts of wind."
"Why didn't you wake me?"
Eska clenched the splinter.
"I thought they were taking a knife. Then I saw the cup, but it was already too late. If I had screamed, they would have seized me first."
She spoke calmly. She had long known what came of a kinless girl's cry against a warrior.
Steinar wanted to say she should have cried out, but stopped himself. By the old reckoning, a child without kin was the easiest person to call a thief, and so their cry was heard last.
"What matters is that you stayed alive."
Eska blinked. It seemed no one had ever praised her for saving herself.
Then she quickly held out her sleeve to him.
Inside, by the seam, the cup's notches had been scratched in small, crooked strokes.
She had not copied every notch, and her work was uneven. The child's hand had slipped; twice a stroke had cut straight through the cloth, but the general order remained.
At the very edge of the sleeve was one strange stroke, deeper and more crooked than the rest.
"I didn't find it with my eyes," Eska said quickly, as though afraid the adults would decide for her again. "With my fingernail. Dirt had worked into the wood, but underneath it my nail caught on an edge. So there was a stroke there. Brand won't notice it if he looks carelessly."
"I copied everything while Modra was asleep," Eska continued. "Adults like to say, 'I remember,' and then they die, go to sea or let Brand tell it all differently."
Steinar felt his throat tighten.
He remembered another world where knowledge of people was kept in long rows of marks, yet children were still seldom believed. Here a kinless girl had preserved the reckoning herself because she understood: a sacred cup could be stolen, but no one would think to seek a chronicle on a child's sleeve.
"Eska," he said quietly. "You have just saved more than you know."
She twitched one shoulder.
"Just don't tell Nera. She'll say I ruined the sleeve."
By dawn Steinar knew almost everything.
Ketil had vanished from the old camp with his small sack. Tracks left by two men were found by the water; according to Eska, one of them had a crooked thumb. The tracks led to Ragned's tents, then vanished among the many footprints.
Accusing Ragned was easy. Proving his guilt was much harder.
And Brand was already waiting by the great fire.
He held the empty cup in his hands.
He did not hide it or smile like a thief, but held it before him with the bearing of its rightful keeper.
"Found it by the shore," he said when Steinar approached. "A man who cannot guard a possession of the kin has no right to it."
Steinar looked at Ketil. The merchant stood behind Ragned beside the sacks of grain, trying not to meet anyone's eyes.
"Many honest finds turn up by the shore," Steinar said. "Sometimes scraps from someone else's sheath are left beside them."
Ketil looked away.
Brand ran a finger along the inside of the cup's rim.
"I wondered for a long time why Hroald gave it to you. I thought it was only mockery. Now I see the old jarl was wiser than that. The cup keeps debts, and the man who leads the kin has the right to call them in."
Modra stepped forward.
"You do not know what you are holding."
Brand inclined his head to her with genuine respect.
"I know enough. A notch for one saved. A notch for one bought. A notch for one fed during a famine. If the kin once spent blood or grain on these people, their descendants cannot suddenly declare themselves free of the debt."
Farin went white not from fear of a sword, but at the familiar words: descendants, debt, service.
He already knew: first came the reckoning of debt, then service, and only afterwards the iron chains.
Brand raised the cup higher.
"At dawn, before the witnesses of two ships, I will sing the cup's reckoning. Not as Steinar's disgrace, but as the kin's memory. And everyone whose name is bound to an old debt owed to Hroald will return beneath the kin's rule until the debt is worked off."
Ragned said:
"That is just."
It did sound just, and that was precisely why the people were afraid.
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