Halvard III rules Tangiern from the Timberhall at Nøsen, the sixth of his dynasty to hold the kingdom. Calling him a king flatters the office. He is a jarl among jarls, first in war and the sea trade and the faith of the dead, but bound at every turn by the other jarls who hold the major towns and answer to him only as far as it suits them. His grandfathers learned the trick of the throne, which is that a Tangier king rules by keeping the jarls from ruling each other, and Halvard has spent his reign at exactly that work.
His attention runs south, to the Void and the trade that crosses it. The elven war on the eastern march he treats as weather: he keeps Frostrien garrisoned, rotates men through the cold border posts, and otherwise lets Klevnaf and Istora exhaust each other in the Suftos uplands. He has been offered alliance by both and ground by neither, and he wants what each is selling about equally, which is nothing. A king who covets elven territory is a story the elves tell about him; Halvard has trouble enough holding the country he already has.
The king's own grave
Halvard enforces the faith of the ebb as hard as any priest. A body to the open Void, never to the ground, never to still water; he has fined jarls for slack funerals and made an example of more than one. He also knows where his father lies, and it is not the sea.
Halvard II died in deep winter on the eastern frontier, caught by a blizzard that closed every road between Frostrien and the coast. By the time the thaw let his guard move him, the old king's body had turned, and the funeral fleet would not carry a turned corpse onto the road out. So the second Halvard went into the frozen ground near Frostrien, in the dark, with a dozen men sworn to silence, and the king who upholds the doctrine that condemns that grave is the man who dug it. The inland jarls who keep their own dead in the forest know the story, or enough of it, and a king who has buried his father in the dirt cannot lean too hard on the families of Brattholt. Halvard preaches the ebb and dreams, more nights than he admits, of his father walking the Fragenstor with the rest of the unquiet.