"You owe me the name of the man who killed Odell Rooks, and I will take nothing in its place."

Verlin Bluffs, Nebraska. For more than a century a Black funeral house has kept the county's dead: washed, carried, and entered by name in a register whose Remarks column holds what no courthouse form would take.

In 1919 a drowned stranger comes off the river with a debt fastened to his body, and August Wardlaw writes him into the book as No. 611, man unknown. That same season, the house buries a young Army cook in its own family row: No. 623, name unknown, held there until he is called for. The debt circles back for its answer in 1968. By 2026 the hoard has wakened, and the keeper of the book must weigh what a name is worth once everyone who owed it is gone.

The wergild was the old law's settlement for a killing: the man-price, owed by the killer or the killer's kin to the family of the killed, the payment that closed a feud. The same law recognized one killing beyond settlement, the killing done in secret, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. This novel lives in that gap.

THE WERGILD is the tenth novel in the Fractional Fiction series, in which each standalone book rises on the load-bearing structure of public domain masterworks. This one carries Beowulf in its frame: the kennings, the hoard, and the oldest debt in the language.