Held Until Called For

A thousand years ago, the early English law, and the Germanic law behind it, had a word for settling a death. Wergild. Wer, meaning man. Geld, meaning payment. The man-price: a sum owed by the killer, or by the killer's kin, to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, and once it was paid, the feud was closed. Grief became arithmetic so that grief would stop becoming graves. The same law kept a darker word beside it. Morð. The killing done in secret, by night, and left unacknowledged. The one killing the whole system could never settle, because a price cannot change hands until the killer has a name, and the debtor of a morð has none. Between those two words there is a gap a thousand years wide, and my new novel lives inside it. The book is called The Wergild. It is the tenth novel of Fractional Fiction, and today I want to tell you what it keeps.