The runes the blind prophet carved have never once been wrong. Those runes say the hand of the prisoner chained at your door will cut your throat. For every day left until the ice splits, you pour hot water over that hand each morning so it will not freeze.
The clans of the frost sea buy one winter at a time by pricing each other's throats. Svein is the only man alive who can read the strokes the blind prophet leaves in the runes, so he knows the order in which people die, and what those eyes read yesterday was his own throat. The owner of the hand that will cut it is Bjorn, the young war-leader of the enemy clan, a prisoner sitting chained at the door of his own sleeping chamber. Kill him and the prophecy is cut off, but the strength to survive the winter is cut off with it; keep him alive and that hand grows a hand's breadth warmer every day. Until the day the ice splits, the tablet writes everything down, leaving only the one space for his heart blank.
- The first night you let the chain out a hand's breadth, when Bjorn pushed firewood into the hearth instead of running, and kept the flame alive until morning
- The day you read one new stroke of the rune, when Bjorn saw over your shoulder the count of days written beside his own name and asked nothing at all
- The moment the clan moot demanded his throat as the price of a winter, when Bjorn knelt first, held out his wrist, and told them to cut it now
The first night you let the chain out a hand's breadth, when Bjorn pushed firewood into the hearth instead of running, and kept the flame alive until morning
