The Reaver Skerries & the Under-Floe¶
North of Brinemoot's stakes, past the floes and the far pans where the old white bull keeps his ground, an ice-bridge runs out to the Reaver Skerries: a chain of black rock teeth in the pack where the skorl the moot cast out keep the old trade. Beyond the chain stands their war-hold, Gravskarr, dug into the largest skerry - and under everything, beneath a roof of green-lit ice, lies the Under-Floe, which the reavers hunt and do not entirely claim.
There is no safe ground anywhere past the bridge. None. Gravskarr is a hold, not a haven: no bank, no beds, no law but the share. Provision at Brinemoot, and count your lamps before you go, not after.
Getting there¶
From Brinemoot, north past the stakes and across the floes to the far pans - the white bull's ground; give him his room - then NORTH over the ice-bridge. The bridge is reaver-kept and plainly marked. The wind gap halfway is exactly as advertised.
The chain & the haul-road (levels 18-21)¶
- Gull-hounds work the rookeries in couples - grey, long-legged, and of the settled opinion that anything tired is food. Their pelts line half the hoods on the coast.
- Reaver oarsmen hold the watch-fires and walk the haul-road. They carry coin, and often enough a strongbox off somebody's ship.
- Ice-bears hunt the bear leads north of the road and haul out on the drowned skerry east of the beacon. A pelt is worth a crew's season; the bears keep the price current.
The haul-road itself is the cleanest work on the ice - graded, staked, drift-fenced - because plunder is heavy and the reavers have never yet made the cargo walk. Mind the toll cairn's custom. Everything else out here ignores you at its own convenience, not yours.
Gravskarr Hold (levels 21-24)¶
The outcasts' hold: wharfs, oil-yard, and oil-lit halls dug into the living skerry, down to the Bone Court, where Reaver-Mother Ulvakka keeps the only law the crews took with them when the moot cast them out - the share, the knot, and the answer owed. Reaver harpooners work the wharfs and the seal gates; thane-guards keep the halls, and mean it.
The gate stands open. That is rhetoric, not welcome. The hold is walkable by the bold and worked by the armed, and it is never, at any hour, safe.
The Under-Floe (levels 24-26)¶
Below the hold, the Seal Gates open on the under-country: tide-hollowed galleries beneath fathoms of pack ice, lit green through the roof by a day they never see directly. Hollow-seals - long as skiffs, clawed for hauling, named for the call - hunt the channels and the dry galleries both.
Past the half-light, the deep floe goes truly dark: galleries where no roof-light reaches and an unlit traveller is not hunting but inventory. Bring a lantern and oil to spare; the hunters' rule is two lamps or none.
These are the Drowned King's waters by every sailor's arithmetic, but no lamplight moves down here. Whatever the drowned kingdom keeps lit, it keeps east of the pack.
The Pale Bull¶
West of the dark, through a gate worn in forty feet of standing ice, the green returns on a country that is kept: grazed rows, worked roofs, furrows cut a thousand years into the rock, and a barrow of ranked skulls with not one tusk taken. The Pale Bull holds it - kin and rival to the old white bull above, the two of them dividing the world at the waterline since before the coast had names. The skorl will not say his name below the ice. After the roofworks, most travellers stop asking why.
His hide is the standing jackpot of the whole north coast. So is the white bull's ivory, and the moot keeps a polished hook for that too. The wider maps call all of it Morvach's country, and Morvach is paid in silence; past the bull-gate, everyone pays.
Weather advisory¶
The chain answers the sky the way the floes do, and then the ice answers the chain: in a blizzard the watch-fires call the crews home and the teeth disappear from the world. Under the floe there is no weather at all - only the tide, which is its own kind, keeps its own schedule, and has never once been late.