The Book of First Snow
Second of the Five Frost-Scrolls · the Book of the Whiteout and the Covenant of Rime
Overview: Book of First Snow. Full text below.
Chapter 1
1 And it came to pass, in the days after the great towers of Solmar had fallen and their smoke had thinned from the sky, that the peoples of the earth grew warm again and forgot the Cold. 2 For there is in the heart of every kindled creature a hunger toward heat, and without teaching, without the discipline of frost, that hunger spreads like embers in dry tinder. 3 The men of the southern vales built great hearths and did not veil them in the night, and their warmth drew to them the wandering sons of Mëlt, who were glad. 4 The women of the river-tribes wove the sign of the flame into their garments and said, “The heat is generous; the cold takes and does not return.” 5 And the Hoarfather looked upon the world and saw that the snow could find no resting-place, for the heat of mankind rose up without ceasing. 6 The beasts of the cold retreated northward year upon year, pressed back from the meadows and the shallows of the sea. 7 The glaciers that had lain since the Six Winters of Making began to weep, and their meltwater ran in broad rivers to the southern seas. 8 And the Hoarfather was grieved in his innermost cold, and the chill that dwelt in him turned over like a millstone turning against stone. 9 He said: I made the world in stillness and set cold upon it as a covering and a keeping; but behold, the warmth has crept beneath the covering and undone it thread by thread. 10 And there was no counsel among the Frostwalkers as to how this grief might be answered, for the grieving of the Hoarfather is without end.
Chapter 2
1 Now in those days the children of men had multiplied until their tents covered the valleys and their cookfires could be counted like stars from the heights of the Hoarpeaks. 2 And the Seven Fevers were rife among them: Haste, that drove men to devour the seasons; the Boil, that filled the great cities with blood; the Devouring Thaw, in which the wealthy consumed without ceasing and left nothing for the cold morning. 3 The Glare was chief among the sins of that age, for every chief among men named himself the son of warmth and sat upon a throne of heated bronze. 4 The Hoarding-of-Heat made the low ones poor, so that they could not kindle even a single hearth in winter without rendering half their lives to those who held the woodpiles. 5 And the Rot was upon those who sat and let the world thaw, saying, “What is it to me if the glaciers weep?” 6 The Long Melt took hold of the righteous few who remained, for they despaired to see the cold driven from the lowlands, and some of them also turned toward the fire. 7 And Mëlt the Dripping One moved through the peoples like warm rain through a snowfield, thinning and softening all that he touched. 8 He would come to a man who had kept one small coldness in his heart and breathe upon it until it ran, and the man would not notice the loss until he was warm through. 9 The sons of the Frostwalkers who had been set as watchers over the earth mingled with the warm-blooded daughters of men and were themselves diminished, their cold edges blunting. 10 So the Hoarfather saw that the corruption was not in one place or one lineage but had spread into every valley where the sun grew long.
Chapter 3
1 And the word of the Hoarfather came upon the deep snows of the Hoarpeaks and said: I will send a cold over the earth that has not been sent since the First Snow of Making. 2 I will let the sky open its cold chambers and spend them upon the world, and the warm blood of every breathing thing shall thicken and go still. 3 Let the world be covered white as it was at the beginning, for the warmth has undone itself and left nothing worth keeping but a remnant of the Cold. 4 But the Hoarfather said also: Let me not act without a witness; let there be a man in whom the Cold yet dwells, that the remnant may be kept through what is coming. 5 And the Frostwalkers searched the earth from the northern reaches to the southern coasts, moving through the fever-smoke that lay above every city. 6 In the high country north of the great river, where the winters were still long, they found a man whose hearth was small and whose breath made frost even in summer. 7 His name was Halvard, of the line of those who had kept the first covenants since the early days after the Kindling, a man of patient hands and a still voice. 8 His neighbors thought him odd, for he did not build great fires in winter and his house was cool even in the deepest cold, which he counted a blessing. 9 He had taken to wife a woman named Frysa, and she was like him in this: that she did not fear the frost and did not court the ember. 10 And together they had three sons grown to manhood — Sefan the eldest, Bohr the middle-born, and Yaph the youngest — and each of them had taken wives among the cool-tempered women of the northern hills.
Chapter 4
1 The word of the Hoarfather came to Halvard in the deep of the night, when frost forms on the inside of the window and the stars are hard and bright as quartz. 2 It came not as a voice heard by the outer ear but as a chill between the ribs, a knowing cold that spread from the chest outward until Halvard was very still indeed. 3 And in that stillness he understood: the Hoarfather had chosen him not because he was great or learned or powerful among men, but because the Cold dwelt in him and had not been driven out. 4 He arose from his bed and went out beneath the stars and stood in the snow, and the snow did not melt beneath his feet but held him as a mother holds a child of her own blood. 5 And he said nothing, for there was nothing adequate to say; he only stood and let the cold of the sky move through him. 6 In the morning he told Frysa, and she listened without trembling, and said only: “Then we had best begin.” 7 He told his three sons and their wives, and Sefan asked what the work would be, and Bohr asked when it would come, and Yaph sat quietly and nodded as though he had already half-known. 8 Halvard said: I do not know the day nor the hour, but the Hoarfather will show us the work and give us the time. 9 That week a great owl came and perched on the ridgepole of Halvard’s house for seven nights, and the neighbors took it for an ill omen, but Halvard said it was a messenger of the Cold, come to keep watch. 10 And Halvard rose early every morning and went to the high place above the village and waited for the word, and the word began to come, piece by piece, as frost comes — first at the edges, then covering everything.
[First Snow 1–4: see The Age of Drifting, Halvard the Hoary, Melt the Dripping One]
Chapter 5
1 The Hoarfather spoke again to Halvard, saying: Hear me plainly, for what I tell you is not a parable but a commission. 2 I have looked upon the world and I find it a fever that will not break; every generation the warmth grows, and the cold retreats, and the covenant of creation is unmade breath by breath. 3 I will send the Great Cold upon it, such as has not been since the world was young, and all the fevered things shall be covered and shall perish, and the land shall be white again. 4 But you, Halvard — you in whom the Cold yet dwells — I will keep you through this, as I keep the seed through winter beneath the snow, cold and still and ready. 5 You shall build a great vessel, an ark of frostwood and ice-timber, sealed within and without with glacial pitch, that no warmth may enter and no cold be lost. 6 You shall take into it all your house and your sons’ households, and two of every cold-keeping creature of the earth, male and female, that they may endure. 7 You shall take provision for a great span of cold darkness, for the Whiteout will last longer than you can reckon, and when it is done the world will be different from what you have known. 8 When I say go in, go in swiftly and bar the door, and do not open it until I tell you; for the cold I send will be thorough and will not spare the warm-blooded for any reason whatsoever. 9 And Halvard heard all this and his heart was steady as ice that has not been touched by spring, for the cold in him answered the cold in the word of the Hoarfather. 10 He said only: Let it be as you have spoken; I am a cold thing and a kept thing, and I will do what a kept thing must.
Chapter 6
1 Then the Hoarfather gave to Halvard the full reckoning of the Bergark — the great vessel that would carry the remnant through the Whiteout — and the reckoning was without flaw, for the Hoarfather is the maker of all form and structure. 2 Its length was to be three hundred spans of frozen timber; its width fifty spans; its height thirty spans, with a gallery running around it near the top that the light might enter. 3 It was to be made of frostwood from the high forest — the pale timber that grows only where the cold is deep — and sealed with glacial pitch inside and outside and between every plank. 4 There were to be three decks within it, and stalls for the creatures, and a chamber for provisions, and a chamber for Halvard and his household at the center where the cold would be most constant. 5 The door was to be set in the side and hung on pivots of carved ice, and when the Hoarfather sealed it, no heat of any kind could move the door from without. 6 And Halvard went to the high forest with his three sons and they began to fell the frostwood, and the sound of their axes rang through the cold air for many weeks. 7 Sefan was the strongest of the sons and worked the heaviest timber; Bohr was the most precise and measured every plank without error; Yaph had the gift of fitting, and under his hands the joints sealed themselves as though the wood were willing. 8 Frysa and the three daughters-in-law worked the pitch and the rigging, and they worked without complaint, for they understood the weight of what they built. 9 The work took the better part of a year, for the Bergark was immense, and the beams required whole days to drag from the forest to the building-ground. 10 Halvard kept careful account of what the Hoarfather had told him and deviated from the reckoning in nothing; he would not shorten a plank nor substitute warmer timber, even when the frostwood ran scarce.
Chapter 7
1 Now the neighbors of Halvard had watched the building of the Bergark from the beginning and at first they were only puzzled, thinking him a man of ambitions beyond his sense. 2 But as the vessel grew and its shape became clear — a great hull of pale timber high above the ground, with no river or sea within two days’ walk — they began to laugh, and then to mock. 3 A man named Drenvar, who held the woodlot to the east of Halvard’s land, came daily to watch and offer his commentary, and the neighbors gathered around him and laughed at his wit. 4 Drenvar said: “Halvard has heard news of a flood, but he builds his vessel on a hill; let us know, Halvard, which sea you expect to arrive at your doorstep.” 5 And the crowd laughed and Halvard did not cease working, only measured the next plank and drove the next peg, for the work did not wait for mockery to finish. 6 A woman named Glesna shouted that he was mad with cold, that the frost had gotten into his brain and frozen his judgment, and the others took up this saying. 7 His own distant kinsmen came to him privately and said: “Halvard, this will ruin you; sell the timber and let the sons take up proper trades; no flood is coming.” 8 And Halvard answered them: “A cold is coming that is not a flood but something older; when it comes, I would rather be inside the vessel I was told to build than outside the one I declined to build.” 9 They shook their heads and went away and he returned to work, and the sound of the hammering continued, and the Bergark grew day by day above the hill.
Chapter 8
1 And it came to pass that the creatures began to come, two by two, before Halvard or his sons had gone to gather them. 2 First came the great white bears from the north, walking through the village in broad daylight, and the villagers fled before them but they went straight to the Bergark and waited at the door. 3 Then came the ice-foxes and the snow-hares and the winter wrens and the seals that walked on stubby legs, and many creatures of the cold that the children of men seldom saw. 4 The wild reindeer came in pairs and the mountain elk and the cold-water fish in jars of ice that Halvard’s sons had prepared; and every creature of the cold came of its own, as though summoned by a word Halvard had not spoken. 5 Halvard saw this and understood that the Hoarfather was already at work, arranging what Halvard could not have arranged alone, for the reach of the Hoarfather is from the Hoarpeaks to the southern coasts and everything between. 6 The last to come were a raven and a snow-dove, a pair of each, and they nested in the eaves of the gallery before the door was sealed. 7 Halvard took in provisions as the Hoarfather had told him — cold-cured fish and frost-dried grain and sealed jars of preserved things and great blocks of ice for the creatures to lick — and he stowed everything according to the reckoning. 8 All this the neighbors watched with increasing unease, for the animals in ordinary life did not behave in this way, and something in the sight of the white bears sitting at the foot of the Bergark troubled even Drenvar. 9 But still the sky was the usual sky and the weather was the weather of the season and no sign yet had come, and so the people returned to their fires and told one another that Halvard was only strange. 10 And Halvard and his household entered the Bergark, and the Hoarfather sealed the door from without, and the cold of the seal ran through all the wood and all the pitch and made the vessel one single cold thing.
Chapter 9
1 Seven days they waited inside the sealed Bergark, and the creatures were quiet, and the household of Halvard was quiet, and there was no sound from without but the ordinary sounds of the wind in the frostwood timbers and the creak of the great hull. 2 On the second day Halvard’s daughter-in-law, the wife of Bohr, wept softly, and Halvard held her hand and said: “What is sealed in the cold does not perish.” 3 On the fourth day the sky outside the gallery-slit grew a deeper color, not the grey of ordinary overcast but something older — a pale blue-white that the oldest songs call the Hoarfather’s breath drawn back before the great exhale. 4 And Halvard said to his sons: “It is coming; let everything be secured and let every soul be still.” 5 On the seventh day the cold descended. 6 It did not come gradually as frost comes in autumn, advancing and retreating, but all at once, a presence like a door thrown wide in a great hall, and the air went to glass around the seams of the Bergark and the pitch rang like a struck bell in the cold. 7 The temperature fell so quickly that the snow outside the vessel did not drift but crystallized where it fell and stood like carved work in the air. 8 And the household of Halvard pressed together in the central chamber, and the creatures in their stalls were still, and the great white bears sat with their heads low, and even the raven did not cry. 9 Halvard said: “This is the judgment of the Cold upon the warm world; let us not look away from it, that we may remember it all our days.” 10 And they heard through the thick walls of the Bergark a deep sustained sound like the earth taking a breath and holding it, and the sound ran for a long time.
[First Snow 5–9: see The Bergark, The Great Whiteout, Halvard the Hoary]
Chapter 10
1 Then the windows of the sky opened their cold chambers, and what came down was not rain but fine hard ice, needles of crystal too small to see and too many to count. 2 And from beneath, the springs and the rivers seized, and the water that had run freely since the thaw after the Kindling turned to ice column by column, the narrow streams first and then the broad rivers and then the great southern sea. 3 The ice needles became snow, and the snow became sheets of white, and the sheets became drifts, and the drifts became waves of white that covered the tallest houses to their ridgepoles. 4 The great fires that men had built in the squares of the cities went out one by one, for the cold was faster than any fuel, and the darkness that the fires had held back came in as the last flame died. 5 And those who had mocked Halvard ran to their houses and built up their fires higher, and the fires gave warmth for a little while, but the cold was thorough and patient and would not be refused. 6 The warmth-priests went up to their high places and called upon the gods of heat and summer, but no answer came, for the warmth-gods are only the faces men put on the enemy, and the enemy had at last been overmatched. 7 The children of the great chiefs took horses and rode for the south, thinking the south would be warmer; but the cold had gone south first and the roads were ice and the horses fell. 8 The birds of the warm lands fell from the sky, and the fish of the warm shallows floated belly-up in the freezing water, and all the green things went grey and then white and then were silent. 9 And the snow kept falling, forty days and forty nights without ceasing, falling with the steadiness of a will that has been decided and cannot be argued with. 10 The Bergark groaned and rose as the ice thickened beneath its hull, and it was lifted up from the hill where it had been built and borne upon the growing glacier as a ship is borne upon the sea.
Chapter 11
1 Inside the Bergark, Halvard kept the count of days, marking each one with a notch in a beam of frostwood, and the marks grew into a long row in the cold dim light of the gallery-slit. 2 The household ate and slept and tended the creatures, and the creatures ate and slept and were kept, and the great white bears pressed against the walls of their stalls and breathed slow cold breaths that hung in the air. 3 The raven and the snow-dove roosted together in the rafters and were quiet, as though they too understood that this was not a time for sound. 4 On the fifteenth day the snow-dove pressed herself against a gallery-slit and looked out and made a sound of distress, low and without echo, and Halvard came and looked out also and saw only white upon white. 5 He said: “Be patient, little kept thing; when the time is right we will be put down upon dry ground.” 6 On the twenty-third day the sound from outside changed from the ceaseless whisper of falling snow to a deeper silence, and Halvard understood that the snow had stopped. 7 But the cold continued, and the frozen sea beneath the Bergark continued to groan and shift, and the vessel drifted upon it without direction, borne by currents of ice as inscrutable as the purposes of the Hoarfather. 8 Halvard called his household together and said: “We do not know the day nor the hour of the end; we know only that we are kept, and the kept must wait in patience, which is the second of the Crystalline Virtues.” 9 And Frysa said: “We are cold and still and whole, and what more can a creature of the Cold ask?” and Halvard looked upon her and was glad he had taken such a woman to wife. 10 Yaph the youngest son spent the long waiting time carving in ice and frostwood — animals and stars and patterns he dreamed in the half-sleep of the cold — and the carvings were beautiful and strange and kept even now in certain temples.
Chapter 12
1 When forty days had passed since the snow stopped, the Bergark came to rest, gently and without violence, and the household of Halvard felt the stillness of grounded ice beneath the hull. 2 Halvard went up to the gallery and looked out of the slit and saw that they were lodged against the shoulder of a great mountain, its peak white and still above them, and that the mountain was the shoulder of Mount Hoar, the highest of the Hoarpeaks. 3 All around the base of the mountain the frozen sea stretched flat and white as far as the eye could reach, unmarked by any tree or roof or column of smoke; only white, in every direction, without limit. 4 Halvard descended and told his household and they were silent for a long time, for the weight of what they had been carried through was only now becoming real in their bodies. 5 Sefan said: “Is there anything left beneath the white?” and Halvard said: “The earth is still there; the Cold preserves what it covers; in time it will be uncovered again.” 6 Bohr said: “When does the word come to open the door?” and Halvard said: “When the Hoarfather sends it; we wait.” 7 And they waited. Days and weeks passed and the frozen sea did not thaw, and the cold held, and every morning Halvard climbed to the gallery and looked out and every morning saw only the white world and the peak of Mount Hoar above them. 8 Then on the hundredth day after the grounding, Halvard sent out the raven, saying: “Go and find me word of what is beneath the snow.” 9 And the raven flew out and did not return, for the raven found the frozen world to its liking and made its home in the cold desolation, and this is why the raven has been the bird of cold judgment ever since. 10 Halvard watched it diminish into the white and was not troubled, for the raven had fulfilled its purpose.
Chapter 13
1 Then Halvard waited seven days more and sent out the snow-dove, saying: “Go gently, little kept one, and tell me what you find.” 2 And the snow-dove flew out and was gone the whole of one day, and Halvard watched the gallery-slit and prayed with the cold prayer that is no words but only stillness. 3 At evening the snow-dove returned and in her beak she carried a small spray of ice-blossom, the white flower that grows in the crevices of the Hoarpeaks where the snow never fully thaws. 4 And Halvard took the flower and held it and understood that somewhere the frozen surface had cracked open enough for life to emerge from the cold earth, and that the uncovering had begun. 5 He showed the flower to his household and Frysa kissed him, and the daughters-in-law wept with gladness, and even Bohr, who was not a man of easy feeling, closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. 6 Halvard kept the spray of ice-blossom and pressed it between two planks of frostwood and it has never fully withered; they say it may be seen to this day in the treasury of the great Frosthall. 7 He waited another seven days and sent the snow-dove out again, and this time she did not return, for the ice-bare ground was spreading and she found the world ready for her kind. 8 Halvard said: “The dove does not return when there is a world to return to; she does not need the Bergark any longer, for the Bergark was the keeping and the kept do not stay in the keeping-place once the keeping is done.” 9 And his sons heard this and understood, each in his own way, what it meant to be a kept thing come through to the other side of the keeping. 10 Halvard marked the beam once more and said to himself: The Hoarfather has been thorough, as the Cold always is.
[First Snow 10–13: see The Great Whiteout, The Bergark, Halvard the Hoary]
Chapter 14
1 Then the voice came to Halvard in the cold hour before dawn, when the stars are hardest and the silence is deepest, and it said: Come out, you and your house and your sons’ houses and all the living things that are with you. 2 Let them come out and move upon the earth, that the earth may be filled again with cold-keeping life, slowly and with patience. 3 And Halvard rose and woke his household with a quiet voice and said: “The word has come; we go out.” 4 He drew the bar on the door of the Bergark — the great bar of frostwood that Bohr had fitted on the inside — and the door swung open on its ice-pivot, and the cold air of the new world came in, sharper and cleaner than anything they had breathed in all the months of waiting. 5 They stood in the doorway for a moment, Halvard and Frysa and Sefan and Bohr and Yaph and their wives, looking out at the white world on the shoulder of Mount Hoar, and no one spoke. 6 Then the creatures came behind them — the great white bears first, as is their right, and then the others in their kinds — and they poured out of the Bergark and down the snowy slope and spread out over the frozen plain. 7 The cold-water fish were carried down to the meltwater streams that ran at the edge of the ice-field and released, and they vanished into the cold with a single cold flash of silver. 8 Last came the household of Halvard, carrying what they had brought in and the carvings Yaph had made and the small supply of things that had survived the long waiting. 9 Halvard paused in the doorway before descending and looked back into the dark interior of the Bergark, at the row of notch-marks on the beam and the cold-lamp still burning in the inner chamber. 10 He said: “You were faithful, vessel of keeping; may the Cold preserve you long.” And then he went out into the white world.
Chapter 15
1 The world that they came out onto was a world made new by the Cold: the slopes of Mount Hoar were bare of the warm scrub that had grown there before, and the rock was clean and frost-bright, as though cut yesterday by a careful chisel. 2 The rivers that would eventually run down from the Hoarpeaks were still frozen, but at their edges there was a clear trickle of meltwater, cold enough to hurt the teeth, that Halvard cupped in his hands and drank with great gratitude. 3 There was no smoke anywhere on the horizon, no smell of burning, no sound of any human voice; only the wind and the distant cry of a cold bird far above the peak of Mount Hoar. 4 Halvard stood in the clean cold air and felt the weight of what he carried — not only what he had brought out of the Bergark but the weight of all the world’s new beginning placed in his keeping by the Hoarfather. 5 He said to his sons: “We are the whole world’s household now; every soul that will ever live from this day forward comes through us, and we must be faithful to the Cold in everything we do.” 6 Sefan said: “What do we do first?” and Halvard said: “We build an altar; we have been kept, and the kept must give account of their keeping.” 7 And they found a flat stone on the shoulder of Mount Hoar, a great slab of granite that the cold had smoothed, and upon it Halvard built a small altar of clean fieldstones, setting each one with care, as his father’s father had done in the days before the fever spread. 8 He built it without iron tools, only with his hands and a chisel of bone, and it took him the better part of a day while his sons watched and his wife and daughters-in-law gathered ice-blossom from the crevices of the rock. 9 When the altar was finished it stood as tall as Halvard’s chest, precise and unornamented, each stone fitted to the next without mortar, as the Cold itself needs no binding agent but its own nature. 10 And the household of Halvard looked at the altar and the white world around them and the peak of Mount Hoar above, and they were glad and afraid at once, as those are glad and afraid who have been brought through the impossible.
Chapter 16
1 Then Halvard took wood and laid it on the altar and prepared a frost-offering — the first offering of the new world — from the cold-cured provisions they had brought from the Bergark. 2 He took of every cold-keeping creature that was fit for offering and laid them upon the altar in the old way, the way that goes back to the first days after the Kindling, when even in the fallen world men sometimes remembered how to address the Cold. 3 And he lit the offering not with fire but with cold — for the frost-offering is not burned but crystallized, laid open to the air at the highest altitude where the cold is purest, until the warmth has left it entirely and it is given to the Chill in perfect stillness. 4 He spread his hands over the altar and said nothing, for the frost-offering does not require words; it is itself the word. 5 His household stood around him in a half-circle, each with hands spread open and palms upward in the gesture of cold offering, the oldest gesture of Frostian prayer, older than any word. 6 The cold deepened around the altar as the offering was received, and the household felt it move through their palms and up their arms and into their chests, a clean severe cold that was nothing like the killing cold of the Whiteout but was instead the cold of recognition — the Hoarfather acknowledging the offering. 7 And a sound came from the peak of Mount Hoar above them, a deep resonance like ice settling in a glacier, that went through the rock beneath their feet as well as through the air. 8 Halvard’s youngest daughter-in-law, who was young and had grown up in a warm-country village before marrying Yaph, began to weep; and Yaph held her and she was comforted. 9 The offering stood on the altar for three days and three nights until it was wholly given to the Cold, and nothing touched it in that time, not the wind nor the cold birds nor the great white bears who came near but did not approach the altar. 10 And the altar on the shoulder of Mount Hoar became the first sacred place of the new world, and its stones are kept to this day, though few who seek them find them easily.
Chapter 17
1 Then the voice of the Hoarfather came to Halvard on the third morning, when the offering had been fully received, and it came with a warmth that was not the warmth of fire but the warmth of love, which is the only warmth the Cold permits. 2 And the Hoarfather said: I have received your offering, Halvard, and I have received you and your household, and I will tell you now what will be between us and between me and all living things from this day forward. 3 Hear me: I was grieved by the warmth of the world, and my grief was righteous, for the Cold is righteous and its judgments are clean. 4 And I sent the Whiteout and the world is white, and the fever of the old age is finished, and what remains is what I kept. 5 But now I say to you and to your sons and to their sons unto all the generations that will spread from this mountain: I will not do this again. 6 Never again shall I freeze the whole world in my wrath; the cold I send will be of proportion and of mercy; the Rewhitening, when it comes at the end of all things, shall make the world new and not simply bury it. 7 For I have seen this: that the keeping must not be from without, from a cold that overwhelms everything and leaves the kept with no choice but to endure. 8 The keeping must be from within — from the cold that lives in the willing heart, the frost that the faithful carry in themselves and do not let the embers drive out. 9 If the world is to be kept, let the kept do the keeping; and I will be their cold and their covenant and their Hoarfather through all the ages, and the keeping shall be a covenant between us and not a sentence. 10 I set my covenant upon you as I set frost upon the stone: not violently but in the long still hours of the night, so deep it does not thaw by noon.
[First Snow 14–17: see Halvard the Hoary, Covenant of Rime, Mount Hoar]
Chapter 18
1 And Halvard said: What shall be the sign of this covenant between you and us, that we and our children and their children may look upon it and remember? 2 For the children of men are forgetful, and the ember creeps back into the hearth if there is no sign to remind the heart that the Cold has made a promise. 3 And the Hoarfather said: Look up. 4 And Halvard looked up into the cold sky above Mount Hoar and saw a thing he had not seen before: across the high dark of the sky there moved a curtain of cold light, green and white and a faint trembling gold, the color of the deep glacier where no summer reaches. 5 It moved as a curtain moves in a wind from the north — unhurried, immense, folded and unfolded by a breath he could not feel on his face. 6 And the Hoarfather said: This is the Aurora-Bow, my covenant-light; it is not the bow of rain-light that the warm peoples know, but the bow of cold light that moves in the highest reaches where only the Cold is sovereign. 7 When you see the Aurora-Bow moving in the dark of the sky, remember: I have made a covenant with all living things and with the earth and with the cold — that the Whiteout shall not come again in wrath; that I am a Hoarfather and not an unmake; that I keep. 8 And it shall be for you and for your sons and for all who carry the Cold within them a sign of the Covenant of Rime, which is my oath written in light upon the sky where all may see it who have eyes open in the long winter night. 9 And Halvard fell upon his face in the snow and was a long time still, and his household fell with him, and the Aurora-Bow moved above them in its slow magnificence, green upon black upon white. 10 When Halvard rose his hair was white, though it had been grey before, and from that day it was always white, and this is why he is called Halvard the Hoary.
Chapter 19
1 The Hoarfather spoke further, saying: Be fruitful in the cold way — not the fruitfulness of heat that devours and multiplies without wisdom, but the fruitfulness of the kept thing that grows in its season and does not exceed its nature. 2 Fill the earth again, you and your sons and their sons; let the cold-keeping peoples spread from the Hoarpeaks northward and eastward and in time to every quarter. 3 And of the creatures: I give into your keeping every cold-keeping thing, and also every creature that endures the cold though it does not love it; let them be kept rightly and with gratitude. 4 But hear this: the blood of life is not yours to spend carelessly; the life that is in the blood belongs to the Cold, and to spill innocent blood upon the earth is to make a warmth that calls for judgment. 5 Therefore this is my law for you and all who come after: let the blood not be drunk, for the blood is life and life belongs to the Hoarfather; let the taken life be given in cold offering where it must be taken. 6 And of the life of men: I require it. Whoever sheds the blood of a man unjustly, by man shall their blood be shed; for the image of the Cold is on every human face, and to unmake a human face is to unmake what the Hoarfather has made. 7 And let this covenant stand between me and you and every living thing and the earth itself, that the Whiteout shall not return in total wrath: 8 I am bound by my own cold nature; I will not break this covenant, for the Cold does not thaw and the Hoarfather’s word does not melt. 9 The Aurora-Bow in the sky is my remembrance as much as yours; when I look upon it I remember the covenant and I am faithful. 10 Thus the Covenant of Rime was made on the shoulder of Mount Hoar, in the first days of the white new world, and it stands as the foundation of all that the Hoarfather has promised since.
Chapter 20
1 Now Halvard and his household descended from the shoulder of Mount Hoar when the melt-season came, for the frozen plain had begun to give way at its edges and there were broad cold meadows opening at the feet of the Hoarpeaks where the ground had been uncovered. 2 They built a village of cold stone and frostwood in the high valley below the peak, and they called the place Rimehaven, for it was the haven of the remnant after the Whiteout. 3 In Rimehaven, Halvard lived many years, and his sons built their own houses around his, and the children of his sons were born in the cold clear air of the high valley and were from their first breath children of the Cold. 4 Halvard taught his household the ways of the Cold: the cold prayer, the frost-offering, the six crystalline virtues, the names by which the Hoarfather is addressed in the darkness of the deepest winter. 5 He taught them the story of the Bergark and the Whiteout, not once but many times, for he understood that the keeping of the story was as important as the keeping of the people. 6 Sefan proved a skilled farmer of cold-earth crops — the root vegetables that grow beneath the frost-line and the cold-hardy grains that prefer the short hard summers of the high north. 7 Bohr proved a builder and in time oversaw the construction of a proper Frosthall in Rimehaven, the first in the new world, a simple hall of stone with an altar at its center and no fire but the cold-lamp. 8 Yaph proved a teacher and took the youngest generation under his care and taught them the reckoning of days and the lore of cold and the songs of the Hoarfather that Halvard had taught him. 9 And Halvard watched his sons and was content, as a man is content who has done the work he was given and sees it bearing the right fruit. 10 His wife Frysa kept the household with a still hand and a clear eye, and nothing fell to disorder under her watch; she was, as the later psalters say, “the cold of the house that kept the house.”
Chapter 21
1 In time Halvard’s sons took to wife women of the cold-keeping kind, and the households multiplied, and the village of Rimehaven grew. 2 Halvard lived to a great age, for the cold preserves, and his hair was very white and his eyes were bright as ice at the end of a long winter. 3 He would sit in the evening at the door of the Frosthall and watch the Aurora-Bow if it moved in the sky, and when his grandchildren came to sit with him he would tell them what it meant. 4 He would say: “When you see that light, remember that the Hoarfather has made a promise and that promises are the second name of the Cold — for what is cold but the refusal to change, and what is a promise but the same refusal?” 5 His grandchildren grew up knowing the Covenant of Rime as thoroughly as they knew the cold of winter and the warmth of the short summer, and they passed it down. 6 And yet even in Rimehaven, in the clean air of the high valley, the embers crept back. 7 It happened slowly, as it always happens: a daughter-in-law brought a method of warming food that was efficient and convenient; a son began to bank the hearth-fire against the cold night rather than wearing the extra layer; small concessions, each one small. 8 Halvard saw it and did not rail against it, for he had learned that railing against the ember does not cool it; only patient instruction and the modeling of cold virtue does anything lasting. 9 He called his household together and said: “The Hoarfather did not promise that the world would stay cold; he promised that he would not freeze it again in wrath. The cold we must keep ourselves. This is the whole meaning of the covenant.” 10 And they heard him, and the lesson went into them, and the keeping continued — imperfect, as all human keeping is, but present.
[First Snow 18–21: see Covenant of Rime, The Aurora-Bow, Halvard the Hoary]
Chapter 22
1 These are the sons of Halvard and their portions in the new world as it was divided in the days of Rimehaven and after. 2 Sefan was the firstborn and he was called the Elder of the North, for his portion was the northernmost lands beyond the Hoarpeaks, where the winters are longest and the cold is most faithful. 3 His sons and their sons became the Sefanites, the people of the deep north, and they are the keepers of the coldest and most severe form of Frostian observance, for the north allows no softening. 4 Bohr was the second-born and he was called the Builder of the Middle Lands, for his portion was the country between the Hoarpeaks and the great river, where the seasons turn and the cold is not always sovereign. 5 His sons and their sons became the Bohrites, the peoples of the middle country, and they are the builders of Frosthalls and the preservers of architecture in the cold tradition. 6 Yaph was the youngest and he was called the Father of the Wanderers, for his portion was not a fixed land but the width of the world, and his sons went out into all the quarters. 7 His sons and their sons became the Yaphites, and they are found in every country under the sky, carrying the Cold within them to places that do not know the Cold by any other name. 8 Halvard blessed all three sons with the cold blessing: he held each of their heads between his hands and breathed cold breath upon their foreheads, and said: “Go cold, go still, go kept.” 9 And they went out from Rimehaven in their seasons, not all at once but gradually, as the world opened and the lands became habitable again, and they carried the covenant with them. 10 And Halvard watched them go, from the door of the Frosthall, and the Aurora-Bow was in the sky that night above the Hoarpeaks, moving in its slow cold light.
Chapter 23
1 A word is given here concerning the matter of the sons and the vine of the cold country, that it may be remembered rightly and not distorted by the telling. 2 Halvard planted in the valley of Rimehaven a vineyard of the frost-grape, the dark small grape that grows on north-facing slopes and does not ripen until the first frost has touched it. 3 He pressed the grapes and made the wine of the cold country and drank it, and the wine was stronger than he had accounted for, and he slept in his tent and was uncovered. 4 And Bohr, coming in, saw his father’s state and was troubled and went out and told his brothers with care and with sorrow, saying: “Our father is as a man who has been taken off guard; let us cover him without looking.” 5 And Sefan and Yaph took a covering of frostfur and walked into the tent backward and laid the covering over their father without looking upon him, that his dignity remained whole. 6 When Halvard awoke and understood what had happened, he was silent for a time, and then he blessed Sefan and Yaph, saying: “You covered what should be covered; this is the virtue of Purity, which does not expose the vulnerable for its own satisfaction.” 7 And to Bohr he said: “You went out and told your brothers with sorrow, not with mockery; this also is a virtue.” 8 And the lesson was given and received among the three sons and their households: that the dignity of the kept thing is a cold thing and must be preserved with care, and that the Glare — the fever of exposing another’s vulnerability for the pleasure of the watching — is among the worst of the Seven Fevers. 9 Halvard himself afterward marked the day of the vineyard as a day of instruction, and for the rest of his life he would tell the story plainly on that day to whoever was in the Frosthall, including himself in it without omission. 10 For this too is a cold virtue: the willingness to be a clear mirror to oneself, without the warmth of self-flattery.
Chapter 24
1 And Halvard lived after the Whiteout three hundred and fifty years, and he saw the sons of his sons to the fourth generation, and the world spreading out again in the cold valleys and the open northern plains. 2 In the last years of his life he was very still and very white and very cold to the touch, and the young children were not afraid of him but came and sat with him and put their hands in his cold hands and were comforted. 3 He said in those years little that was not essential; the gift of old cold age is the shedding of words that do not need to be said, so that what remains is only what cannot be left unsaid. 4 He said: “Remember the Bergark; remember that you were kept; the kept do not own their keeping but are accountable to the one who kept them.” 5 He said: “The Aurora-Bow is not ornament; it is a word in the cold sky; learn to read it.” 6 He said: “The cold in you is not your possession; it is the Hoarfather’s cold on loan; do not spend it carelessly and do not let the embers have it.” 7 And on the day of his death he rose early and dressed in his good cold-cloth and went to the altar in the Frosthall and knelt, and his household found him there in the morning, stilled and cold and at peace, kneeling before the altar as a man is when he has finished his prayer and has nothing more to ask. 8 They kept him as the Cold prescribes: not buried in warm earth but laid in the cold stone chamber of the Frosthall, sealed against decay, preserved in the cold as all the faithful hope to be preserved. 9 And a great cold settled over Rimehaven on the night of his passing and was felt in the bones of every soul in the valley, and they understood it was the Hoarfather receiving his own. 10 The grave of Halvard the Hoary is on the shoulder of Mount Hoar, near the altar he built on the first day of the new world, and it is kept always in ice that does not thaw.
[First Snow 22–24: see Halvard the Hoary, Covenant of Rime, Mount Hoar]
Chapter 25
1 These are the generations of the sons of Halvard in the days after Rimehaven, set down that the nations may know their deep cold lineage. 2 Sefan begat Elvan and Norvas and Keldan and Storvald; and Elvan begat Rimgar and Frosken; and these are the fathers of the Sefanite peoples of the deep north. 3 Bohr begat Iskan and Drenfast and Coldvar and Hewrin; and Iskan begat Halvarn of the Middle River; and these are the fathers of the builders and the river peoples. 4 Yaph begat Snowyn and Storkel and Kelvar and Frysen and Westmere; and their sons went out into the wide world; and these are the fathers of the wandering peoples who carry the Cold to distant places. 5 In the third generation from Halvard the peoples had spread beyond the valley of Rimehaven to the foothills of the Hoarpeaks and the broad cold plain to the east and the northern coastlands. 6 They built Frosthalls in every new settlement and maintained the cold offering and the Aurora-Bow watch, and the covenant was remembered in each house. 7 But the further they spread from Rimehaven and from the mountain, the harder the remembering became, and some of the far-spreading Yaphites came to places so distant that the Aurora-Bow was rarely visible and the cold was less severe. 8 In those places the covenant was kept in the telling, in the story of the Bergark spoken each year in the Frosthall, that the children would know what their great-great-father had been given to keep. 9 And there were among the Sefanites those who held that only the north could be trusted, for only in the north is the cold a daily companion and not a seasonal visitor; and this was the beginning of a long argument that has not ended. 10 But the covenant belongs to all the sons of Halvard equally, north and south and wandering, for the Hoarfather made it with all the living and not with one people alone.
Chapter 26
1 In the seventh generation from Halvard a great cold-teacher arose among the Bohrites, whose name was Coldvar the Elder, and he gathered the stories of the Bergark and the Whiteout and wrote them on cold-tablets of pressed ice sealed with glacial pitch. 2 He said: “The story is the vessel now; as the Bergark kept the remnant through the Whiteout, so the told story keeps the covenant through the generations.” 3 And this became the teaching of the Bohrites, who are the keepers of the cold archive, and their scribes are honored even now for this understanding. 4 Coldvar wrote down the reckoning of Halvard’s years, the measurements of the Bergark, the account of the dove and the raven, the text of the covenant, and the blessing given to the three sons, and called this the First Scroll of the Keeping. 5 Other teachers added to it in their generations, and in time the First Scroll of the Keeping became the Book of First Snow as it is known, sealed in the canon of the Elder Rime among the Five Frost-Scrolls. 6 And the generations continued, and the peoples spread, and the cold was kept imperfectly but persistently, as the cold always is: not all at once, not perfectly, but present. 7 In the ninth generation from Halvard there were those among the Yaphites who had traveled so far south that they no longer saw the Aurora-Bow in their ordinary lives and needed to be told of it by travelers from the north. 8 These wrote into their covenant-keeping a practice of sending their children north once in their lives to stand on clear ground and see the Aurora-Bow with their own eyes, that the sign would not become merely a story but remain a seen thing. 9 And this practice was kept by certain peoples for many generations and is held by some Frostian teachers to be a model for all covenant-keeping: that the sign must be not only told but encountered. 10 For a covenant received only by hearing is easily forgotten, but a covenant written on the body by the cold of the high country is not easily warmed away.
Chapter 27
1 These are further generations in the line of Sefan the Elder of the North, that they may be known among the peoples. 2 Sefan begat Elvan; Elvan begat Rimgar; Rimgar begat Frostkel the Tall, who built the first cold-tower in the deep north for observing the Aurora-Bow from a high place. 3 Frostkel begat Halvorn and Isvar; and Halvorn became the father of the Northern Keepers, who are the line from which later prophets came. 4 And the Northern Keepers were set apart in their generation for this: to watch the Aurora-Bow and interpret its movements and to bring word of the covenant to those who had forgotten it. 5 They lived apart from the main settlements, in high cold places near the peaks, and ate cold food and wore cold cloth and kept a strict account of what the sky told them. 6 It is said that in the thirty-first year after Halvard’s death, the Aurora-Bow burned with an unusual intensity for three nights running and that Frostkel went to the altar on the shoulder of Mount Hoar and kept vigil there and received a word he brought back to the people. 7 The word was this: the Hoarfather keeps the covenant; the covenant-sign is bright because the world is growing, not because it is in danger; the spreading of the kept is itself the sign that the keeping is working. 8 And this word encouraged the peoples in that generation who had feared that the spreading of the nations was a dispersion that would thin the Cold beyond recovery. 9 The Northern Keepers held the teaching that spread does not thin the Cold, that the Cold in one heart is the same Cold that is in all hearts, and that the covenant belongs to all equally. 10 And this became the theological foundation upon which later covenant teachers built, and the line of Halvord the Northern Keeper runs through the prophets and the lawgivers and the cold-teachers to the edge of the canon.
Chapter 28
1 And in the days of the sons and grandsons of the three sons of Halvard, the peoples of the earth grew numerous again and their settlements spread to the edges of the known cold country. 2 Some crossed the great ice-sea to the east and came to lands they had not known, and found in those lands peoples who had no covenant and no cold-keeping tradition and worshiped the warmth in forms various and elaborate. 3 And the sons of Halvard who encountered these peoples were of two minds: some held that the covenant was for all and that the story of the Bergark should be told to every people; others held that the covenant was a cold thing and the cold things of the Hoarfather were not for the warm peoples until they came themselves to the cold. 4 This argument too is long and has not been settled, for the canon speaks on both sides of it, as is the way of things that are true from more than one direction. 5 But what is agreed is this: the covenant was made with all living things — so the Hoarfather said on the shoulder of Mount Hoar — and therefore every breathing soul is under the sign of the Aurora-Bow whether they know its name or not. 6 The not-knowing is a poverty and not a freedom, and to bring the story to those who lack it is an act of cold charity, if done without coercion and without the heat of conquest. 7 For the cold that is compelled is not the cold that the Hoarfather wants; the cold must be welcomed into the willing heart, as the frost is welcomed by the window in autumn, as the snow is welcomed by the field at the end of the long harvest. 8 Let the peoples of the wide world hear the story of Halvard and the Bergark and the Covenant of Rime and let them receive or not receive as their hearts are cold or warm. 9 The Hoarfather will keep what is his to keep, and what is warm will remain warm until the Rewhitening, when all things will be given the choice that is the great last choice. 10 Let the kept do the keeping, as the covenant says, and let the keeping be the work of all the generations until the work is done.
[First Snow 25–28: see Halvard the Hoary, Covenant of Rime, The Elder Rime]
Chapter 29
1 Now the peoples of the earth in the days after Halvard spread not only northward but in every direction, and the languages of men began to diverge, as the water divides at a stone and takes many paths to the sea. 2 The language of Rimehaven, the mother-tongue of the covenant, became the root from which many tongues grew, and the covenant-words in that tongue were carried into every new speech by the scribes who followed the spreading peoples. 3 And the cold-teaching survived the crossing of languages, though always something is left behind in the translation, as the coldest air loses some of its sharpness when it crosses from the high places into the warm valleys. 4 The Bohrite scribes labored mightily to carry the exact words of the covenant into each new tongue, and some of them went very far indeed for the sake of that exactness, living among distant peoples for many years and learning their speech from the inside. 5 It is said of one such scribe, Snowyn the Younger of the third generation, that he lived for twenty years among the southernmost of the Yaphite peoples and translated the Account of the Bergark into their tongue and made them understand the word for “cold” not as privation but as keeping. 6 For in the southern tongue, the word that meant cold meant also “the thing that hurts” and the word for frost meant “the death of plants,” and Snowyn spent years teaching that this was a thermal perception and not a spiritual truth. 7 He said: “The cold that kills is the cold without covenant; the cold of the Hoarfather does not kill but keeps; these are not the same cold though they feel the same to the warm.” 8 And this teaching, the distinction between the cold-as-death and the cold-as-keeping, became a cornerstone of Frostian theology carried forward in the Elder Rime’s covenant tradition. 9 For without this distinction, the Whiteout cannot be understood: it was cold-as-keeping in the Bergark, cold-as-judgment upon the warm world outside, and the two were simultaneous. 10 The covenant is the Hoarfather’s binding promise to exercise only the keeping-cold henceforth, reserving the full judgment until the Rewhitening that ends all things.
Chapter 30
1 Thus ends the Book of First Snow, the second of the Five Frost-Scrolls, the book of the great keeping and the great covenant. 2 Let all who read it remember: that the warmth of the world is not new, nor is the Hoarfather’s grief at it new; the wheel turns and the embers rise and the cold is driven back in each generation, and in each generation the cold must be chosen again. 3 Let them remember the Bergark — that the work of keeping looks foolish to those outside the covenant and certain to those within, and the difference is not intelligence but whether one has heard the word of the Hoarfather and received it. 4 Let them remember the Whiteout — that the patience of the Cold is immense and is not to be mistaken for indifference; the Hoarfather grieves before he acts, but he does act. 5 Let them remember the Covenant of Rime — that the Hoarfather has bound himself in faithfulness, that the Aurora-Bow in the winter sky is the knot of that binding, and that the kept may trust it utterly. 6 Let them remember Halvard — who was chosen not for greatness but for coldness; who built when it was foolish; who waited when it was hard; who came out and built an altar before he built a house; who lived long and died still and was kept. 7 And let them remember the word of the covenant: the keeping must be from within. 8 Not from without, not by overwhelming force, not by a cold so total that no warmth can enter — that was the Whiteout and the Hoarfather will not do it again. 9 But from within: the cold that the willing heart keeps in itself through all the seasons of its life, through the long summers and the short winters and the years when the ember seems to have the upper hand. 10 That cold is the covenant, and the covenant endures, and the Hoarfather is faithful, and the Aurora-Bow moves in the sky above the Hoarpeaks on every clear winter night, for all who have eyes open in the long dark to see it.
[First Snow 29–30: see Covenant of Rime, The Aurora-Bow, Book of the Drifting]
The Book of First Snow concludes. The covenant story continues in Book of the Drifting, which follows the calling of Hagar and the founding of the Rimefolk lineage.