The Hask

The Hask is the northern country of the Reach: a land of birch forest, long fjords and snow, lying beyond Varrow's failing border marches and holding the last high ground before the Whitefells. It has no king and wants none. Its people are governed by their clan-moots, greatest among them Hrafn, Eydal and Torsk, whose quarrels and compacts together make what little law the north requires. Outsiders call the Hask hard, and the Hask do not argue. They have burned their dead for three hundred years, they exile the Hollowed from the clan-lands, and they keep the oldest houses of the Lantern-Wardens — three facts the southern chroniclers rarely connect, and the Hask see no reason to connect for them.

Geography

The country divides into three broad bands. The fjord coast is a ragged shore of black rock and grey water, where steep-sided inlets run far inland and the fishing villages — Hrafnvik chief among them — shelter under their headlands from the western storms. Behind the coast lie the birch forests, pale-barked and whispering, cut by rivers that freeze solid from mid-autumn and carry the spring logs down to the fjords. North of the forests the land rises into the Whitefells, bare high fells where the snow never wholly leaves and the archive has no reliable map; the Hask themselves travel there in summer only. Kallavesk stands at the forest's northern edge, a market and meeting-place of long halls built of tarred pine, known to the south chiefly for the story of the Burned Man, which the archive records in its place.

The climate has worsened within living memory. Since the Long Winter of 309–311 AS the Hask say their winters last half the year, and the snows come down from the fells earlier than the oldest skalds remember. The Hask name the Wound the Cold Seam, and hold that its winter brightening and their lengthening winters are one weather, not two; the archive records the belief without pretending to settle it.

History

The Hask were never a province of the Empire in more than name. Imperial maps drew them inside the border; imperial tax-barges rarely wintered there. When the Sundering came, the north felt it as the rest of the Reach did — the silent gods, the thin harvests, and then, in the Grey Years, the first risings of the Unquiet. The Hask answer to that horror became their custom and their creed: burn the body before the third night. Within thirty years of the Sundering the practice was universal among the clans, and it has held for three centuries, while Varrow and the southern shrines still dispute whether burning is piety or desecration. The Hask consider the question settled and the southerners soft.

It was in the Hask, in 31 AS, that the Lamplighter founded the Lantern-Wardens, and the order's seat remains the Lamphouse of Hrafnvik above that fjord, the oldest of its chapter-houses. The wardens' two strictest rules — burn their own dead without exception, and refuse all dealings with ashcraft — sit naturally beside Hask custom, and the clans have sheltered the order ever since. Ashcraft itself is punished by exile from the clan-lands: a Hollowed of the Hask keeps their life and their goods and loses their name from the moot-rolls. Missionaries of the Pale Choir, who elsewhere swell their ranks with Ash-Clerics, have been turned back at the fjord-moots more than once, and Archcantor Ilyth the Seventh has not pressed the matter.

Life there today

The Hask live by fish, timber, furs and sheep, and by a thrifty husbandry of grazing that has grown bitter as the winters lengthen. The Long Winter's three bad years left the clans quarrelling over summer pasture; moots that once met in a day now sit for a week, and blood-price claims from the lean seasons are still being argued at Kallavesk. A Hask hall smells of tar, woodsmoke and dried fish; the fare is rye bread, salted cod, mutton and a sour milk the archive's correspondent declined twice. Soapstone lamps burn through the long dark, and the skalds earn their keep: song is the fjord villages' chief wealth after fish, though the Hask choose their winter songs carefully, for the Unquiet are drawn to singing, and every hall keeps a burning-place ready behind it.

Law is the moot's and memory is the skald's. The Hask keep little writing of their own beyond tallies and grave-marks, preferring witness to ink — an oddity, the archive notes, in the country that gave the wardens their written lanterns. Trade with the south runs through the fjord towns: furs, amber and salt fish out, iron, grain and southern wool in, paid in honest weight rather than Caldmere's clipped coin.

Rumours

The fjord villages report that risings in the north no longer wait for fresh graves as they once did; old burial-grounds of the pre-burning generations — cairns in the high forest, older than the custom — have been found opened from within, and not only in the bad winters. The wardens of Hrafnvik do not deny it and will not discuss their contracts aloud. The skalds, for their part, have begun a slow argument over whether certain very old songs should be sung at all, and accounts of which songs, and why, differ from clan to clan.

Burn them before the third night, and sing the low songs. That is the whole of the law the winter keeps.