The Hunt-League is what the arctic clans of Baerfrost became when the breach centuries ended and the survivors found themselves still standing. The institution is two-tier and uncomplicated in its bones. Each clan picks its own chieftain by its own meritocratic test: most clans weigh proven kills, but the reckoning is the clan's own affair, and several of the older clans weigh seasons-led, hard-winters-survived, or feasts-hosted in place of or alongside the kill-count. A Baerfrost chieftaincy is never inherited and rarely contested for long; the clan that has the wrong chieftain finds out by the next bad season, and the test reopens.
Once a year at midwinter, the chieftains travel to the Cold-Hall and meet in council. They vote among themselves for the Hammer-Lord: the Jotunborn whose Merit over the past year stands tallest. Authority is total within the year, ends at the next midwinter, and passes without inheritance to whoever the chieftains read as the year's tallest standing. The Hammer-Lord rules the League's external affairs (treaties with the southern jarldoms, the trade-bond with the Skarvorn-coast, the rare emissary sent to Haizava); inside Baerfrost the chieftains continue to rule their clans, and a Hammer-Lord who tries to govern a clan that is not their own is reminded, courteously and then less courteously, that the Hammer is not for that.
What makes the League unusual on Talan is the combination: the meritocracy is total, the term is fixed, the office is real, and no Hammer-Lord has ever held the office twice in succession. (Twice non-consecutive happens; twice in a row would, by the unwritten reading, mean the year's Merit had not moved, and a year in which Merit had not moved would be a year the Gathering would not vote.) The institution was forged in the Dark Era and fit it perfectly; that era has ended, and the League is only beginning to feel what that means.
The Cold-Hall is the only Baerfrost structure that does not move with its clan. It stands on the high tundra at the country's interior, a long low building of fitted stone and beam-timber dragged up from the southern pine-line in the Dark Era and never replaced. The hall has no permanent residents. It is opened twelve days before midwinter by the chieftain whose clan-circuit runs nearest that year, swept, fired, and provisioned for the assembly; closed again on the morning the new Hammer-Lord rides out. Between gatherings, the hall belongs to nobody and to the wind.
The Gathering itself runs over the three darkest days of the year. The chieftains arrive on the first day with their seconds and a small honour-guard each, leave the honour-guard at the camp-ring outside the hall, and enter alone. The first day is feast, recital, and the reading of the past year's Merit: each chieftain stands in turn and gives a plain account of what their clan has done since the last Hammer passed. (Plain accounts are required; a chieftain caught embroidering is told once and shamed twice.) The hall drinks Isbran through the recital, the freeze-distilled "ice-fire" the clans make by setting a honey-and-grain wash out through the deepest nights and keeping only the heart the cold cannot freeze; the harder the winter, the stronger that year's pour. The second day is debate, in the Jotunborn register's formal mode, with the seconded chieftain at each speaker's left to call out any claim of fact that the second can disprove. The third day is the vote.
The voting is by iron token. Each chieftain carries a single token cast in their clan-mark, and each in turn lays their token in the hall's central brazier-pit on the name of the Jotunborn they read as the year's tallest. The year's first measure of Isbran is poured into the brazier before any token and goes up in a brief blue flame, the one libation the wordless faith allows. (Voting for oneself is not forbidden, but is held to be the act of someone who has not yet understood the institution.) The chieftain whose name carries the most tokens lifts the Hammer from the hall's beam and is, for the next year, the Hammer-Lord. They ride out at first light. The chieftains close the hall behind them and ride home through what is, by then, beginning to feel like the year turning.
The Hammer itself is a heavy long-hafted warhammer of dark iron, head bound with annual rings of beaten silver, one ring added at the close of each year's term. The hafted weapon is older than any chieftain present can remember; the eldest ring still attached is the ring of the second Hammer-Lord (the first ring is held in private custody by the clan of the first Hammer-Lord and has never been re-attached). A chieftain who lifts the Hammer at the Gathering's third dawn carries something with the weight of every previous year's reading in their hand. The weight is not metaphorical. Several Hammer-Lords have remarked on the difficulty of the first day's ride.
The new ring is added in summer by a Skarvorn-trained silversmith of the southern coast; the silversmith's clan-name is not recorded in the hall's reckoning, only the work. The reading is that the Hammer belongs to the Hammer-Lord for the year and to the Gathering for the longer time, and the southern hand that adds the ring is hand and not author.
The Cold-Hall's beam is the Hunt-League's chronicle. Trophies of the kills that won the Hammer hang along its length: a tooth, a vertebra, a strip of corrupted hide cured with sea-salt. The skalds (Baerfrost keeps no formal bardic order; they are clan-kept and clan-trained) recite the beam at every Gathering, naming each kill and each Hammer-Lord in turn, a recital that fills most of the first feast-night. The Cold-Hall keeps no written records of the older centuries: the beam is the record, and the recital is its index.
Three older entries carry the institution's past most heavily; a fourth, the most recent, carries its present. They are set down below as a southern chronicler would; the skald-reading at the hall is denser, longer, and not properly translatable.
The founding decades are a long run of small entries: tooth and claw and corrupted bone-shard, taken one at a time from the things that came north out of the breach. The early Hammer-Lords were the chieftains who killed the most and brought the most clans-people through, and the beam's first century is so dense with small trophies that cleaning it is a clan duty of its own.
The skalds give particular weight to the Hammer-Lord who first ordered corruption-trophies cured in sea-salt, on the reading that the corruption should not be let into the hall's air. The practice has held ever since: a Cold-Hall trophy that is not salt-cured is, by definition, not a corruption-trophy.
The teeth still hang at the hall's beam: a curved row of nine, the largest the length of a Jotunborn forearm, each set into a wedge of darkened ice-bone. The kill was made off the north shelf by a Hammer-Lord whose clan-name the recital still gives in full; the beast had been rising from beneath the pack-ice for three seasons running, taking sealers and once an entire winter-camp, and that year's Hammer-Lord had stood the Merit-vote on three smaller kills and a public oath to take the kraken before the next Gathering. The kraken was taken. The Hammer-Lord was not re-elected, on the reading that the kill had been the term's work and the term was complete.
The teeth are the only trophy in the hall that visitors are permitted to touch. The reading there is older than anyone present can give a reason for.
A long pale eel-bodied thing that rose at the spring thaw of 2487 MR and was tracked, harried, and finally killed over a six-month chase that ranged the whole length of the north shelf. The Hammer-Lord that year stood on the kill alone; the skalds note this approvingly, on the reading that a clean single-kill Merit is the truest kind. A single curved vertebra hangs from the hall's beam where the kraken's teeth do not, and the spacing is deliberate.
The serpent's vertebra marks the last clean single-beast kill on the beam, the last of the old kind of year. For the better part of forty years after it the Hammer was carried on quieter Merit (smaller kills, seasons-led, feasts-hosted), and the chieftains began to wonder what the League was for. Then the dark came back, and the kills that followed were of a different and grimmer kind, and did not end in a kill at all.
In 2524 MR the deep opened. A dungeon of the Nine erupted beneath the north pack-ice in the same wave that opened the Hollow of Ten Thousand Threads and the others across Talan, and what came up the under-ice tunnels was not a beast but a corruption-army with a will behind it. The clans fought it for four winters under kill-Hammer-Lords, the institution doing the one thing it was built to do, all out, one last time. They did not clear it. What they managed, with their own dead and no help from the south, was to seal it: to close the breach and bind the thing behind it. It sits there still.
The beam carries the trophies of those four years, salt-cured and dense, the first new corruption-trophies since the breach-years; it also carries something the beam had never held before, an entry that is not a kill. The skalds recite the Sealing plainly and do not pretend it was a victory: a thing sealed is a thing not finished, and every chieftain who hears the recital knows the seal is still down there with the leakage seeping past it. The 2524 entry is the youngest on the beam and the heaviest, and the argument that fills the Gathering's second day grows straight out of it.
The Hunt-League was Dark-Era survival made permanent. For most of a century the era seemed over: corrupted-spawn stragglers dwindled to near-rumour, the deep beasts grew rarer each decade, and the southern trade-routes that the Adventurer Era opened brought Skarvorn-coast caravans up through the pine-line with beer, salt, iron, and (this part the chieftains discuss only at the Gathering's second day) ideas. Border clans built permanent winter-halls rather than camping and began to look very much like jarldoms in everything but name. The Gathering still met and the Hammer still passed, but the question of what Merit is for, with the dark apparently gone became the loudest argument the chieftains had ever held. Then, in 2524, the dark answered: a dungeon of the Nine opened under the north pack-ice, and the clans who sealed it across four hard years could not clear it. The question stopped being abstract. There is a General to kill again, and it cannot be killed the old way.
The argument crystallised at the most recent Hammer-passing. A border-clan chieftain stood the Merit-vote on the strength of a trade-treaty negotiated with the Wyndwalken's eastern range out of the Air Monastery: the first treaty of its kind, a formalised exchange of cartographer-survey work for Baerfrost ice-route guidance, sealed without a kill anywhere in the year's reckoning. The vote carried. Half the chieftains read it as a betrayal of the institution; the other half read it as the institution finally working. The Hammer was lifted. The Hammer-Lord rode out at first light. The chieftains who had voted against rode home a different way.
The Hunt-League is what the dark required of us, and the dark is back under the ice. We sealed the thing in 2524 with our own dead and no help from the south, the way we outlived the whole Dark Era alone. Merit is the kill. Harden the clans, raise Hammer-Lords who can stand a General's spawn, and one day we clear what we could only seal. We have never needed the south, and we do not need it now: the cold made us enough once, and it will again.
We sealed it. We could not clear it, and four winters of our best dead are the proof. Sealing is not winning, and a Nine General is past the reach of any one Hammer, however tall it stands. The road to ending the thing runs through the Air Monastery treaty, the Adventurers' Guild, allies who bring what the tundra cannot grow. Merit is whatever actually clears the ice; pride that will not ask for help is only a slower way to lose the seal.
Both readings are held by chieftains the others respect, and the sealed thing under the ice gives each of them something true to hold: the self-reliant point to the seal the clans set with no one's help, the others to the clearing they could not make. Neither has prevailed. The unwritten rule of the Gathering still holds that the question is the chieftains' own and the year's Hammer-Lord, whoever it is, does not weigh in. What has changed is that the question now carries a clock: the seal of 2524 holds, but a seal is not a wall, and the leakage through the under-ice tunnels worsens a little with each thaw. The next several years decide not only what Merit is for, but whether the Hunt-League clears the thing it sealed before the thing wears through the seal, and whether it does that alone or not at all.
Baerfrost is Fisaya-touched, undogmatic. The wind goddess sits over the country in her storm-and-breath aspects more than her travel-and-ruin aspects; a Jotunborn weather-reader asked which Fisaya they serve will give the answer in cloud-shape and wind-direction rather than in theological category, and a Jotunborn cleric in the southern temples will tell you the answer is the same answer. The temples here are small, open-faced, set in the lee of stone bluffs where the wind passes through without forcing the building. The central rite is silent attendance to whichever storm is currently passing.
Clerics of Fisaya are uncommon in Baerfrost (the Jotunborn temperament does not naturally produce them; the southern Vindul temples draw the few who do take the orders), but weather-readers are everywhere. Every clan keeps at least one, and the best of them work as ice-route guides for saltkeel crews working the northern Hafra arc; the trade is steady enough that a Baerfrost-trained reader on a Hafra-bound saltkeel raises the manifest-price of the crossing by a fixed percentage. The reading is not magical, in the same sense the Tengu wind-knowing is not magical: it is breath training and pattern discipline, applied generation after generation to a country whose weather is the chief antagonist of life.
What Baerfrost Fisaya-devotion has that mainland Vindul Fisaya-devotion does not is the long silence. A Jotunborn at the open-faced sanctuary may stand for an entire passing storm without speaking, without moving past what the wind requires, and consider the rite complete. Mainland clerics visiting the north report that the silence is not the Vindul silence; it is older, and it does not ask anything back.