Hakon Rimeward

When Captain Eirik first sent scouts north to Isselhold, to learn whether the Frost Key still lay there, he sent them by twos. Brynja and Tor went first. Tor was Hakon's elder brother. Hakon was meant to go with the next pair. Eirik stopped him at the gate and sent another in his place, because a captain does not send two sons from one hearth; and that one did not come back either. Nor did any of the eleven, over thirty years. So the north calls Hakon 'the Twelfth', and he has made a life on the margins of that word: thirty years a ranger of the tundra, hunting wolves, guiding sledges and, twice, bringing frozen strangers home alive. He goes as far north as the last cairn before Isselhold, and he has never gone past it. He knows bow and blade, and the small hearth-craft of the north that keeps a body going in the cold. He drinks in the Frozen Flagon, under the eleven names cut into the post, and every year when Halla brings out the mittens she knitted for the scouts, he counts them, and there are still eleven pairs.