Hafgrim

Hafgrim is a dozen turf-roofed halls behind a stockade and the wreck it was named for: the ship that carried the first families north, hauled ashore and roofed over as the town's first hall, still standing at its centre. It is the mainland's last fixed point on the ice road, the place expeditions provision, overwinter, and are prayed back to, and its people keep the frontier's exact arithmetic of hospitality: everything is shared, nothing is wasted, and the guest who endangers the town walks south alone. The forsaken walking out of the deep ice have made Hafgrim's stockade suddenly the most studied fortification in the north, chiefly because the dead files pass it by, every time, without turning.