Chapter 10: Hands full of Blood

The ship was a dozen miles out and steering straight for the island. That told him most of what he needed to know.

It had swung for the shore the moment the coast came clear of the horizon, which meant they had not known the island was there until a breath ago, which meant they were not hunting him.

They could hardly have missed it.

The broken citadel stood high on the heights, towers and walls catching the last of the light for miles out to sea, a whole abandoned city that was not supposed to exist on any map any man had ever drawn. To a shipful of hungry men it would have shone like a promise.

An empty-bellied ship come to see what the vanishing fog had uncovered, and to carry off whatever of it could be carried.

His sanctuary. The forgone kingdom, its towers and its murals and its libraries, every wonder of it that had stood untouched through all the long centuries of its hiding, up until the night he had washed ashore to die on it.

Come now to be pried up and hauled away by a boatload of thieves.

He could not let them.

And there was a colder thread under that, it was the cold thing at the back of his mind, the patient one, it spoke very quietly and very clearly.

This time he was not fool enough to cover his ears against it.

They were explorers, of the worst kind.

The type of men who would not simply leave treasure be, greed had a long memory. If they found nothing they would forget the place, but if they found the wonders he had seen they would go home and tell of it, and come back with ten more ships, and after those, ten more.

Letting them sail away whole was its own kind of door, and the chain of his thoughts showed him exactly where it led, and he did not look away from it the way he wanted to.

He had time.

They were slow and far off and dusk was close.

He would not be caught without a plan. Not this time.

He found an old helmet among the ruins, a thin worn unlovely thing of dull metal, nothing like the beautiful work all around it, but it fit down over his head and it hid his face and his horns, and that was all he asked of it. He did not want to fight them.

He wanted them to see a man, an ordinary unremarkable man, and for them to understand they had to leave.

He did not call out from the open. He had learned that much. He went down quiet through the rocks above the shore and settled in to wait as the vessel rose over the horizon.

Toothless felt them too.

Hiccup felt the dragon stir somewhere inland, felt the question come down the bond clear as speech, that low rising need to be there, to put himself between him and the strangers. Stay, Hiccup pushed back at him, as hard and as plain as he could make it.

Stay away from this, bud. Let me try.

The need did not ease. It pressed against him the whole time, the dragon's certainty grinding against his own hope, but Hiccup held it off, and Toothless, unhappy, obeyed.

The ship ground up onto the beach in the last of the light.

And the men came down off her loud, unsteady and pleased with themselves, a dozen of them and maybe more, a skin passing between them, already laughing about the empty ruin they had found and what an easy haul a dead and undefended island would make.

He listened to them talk. He listened to them joke, in cheerful filthy detail, about the last village they had emptied, about the people they had taken off it and what they had done with them, and whatever small reluctance he had carried down the rocks curdled in him.

These were not poor men driven to bad work. These were the other kind.

He had expected as much.

Hiccup took a long breath and came down to the beach anyway, into the open, with his empty hands raised.

And for a moment they only gaped at him, the unarmed figure in the dented helm who had walked up out of nowhere. And then they roared with laughter.

"That's far enough," he called to them, level and slow and as reasonable as he could be facing a band of murderers looking for treasure. "There's nothing here worth your lives. Take your ship and put back out, and nobody has to get hurt."

The confusion didn't last long because his words were, to them, the funniest thing they had ever heard.

They did not so much laugh as roar in the drunken haze expected of pirates sailing lawless waters. These men who took villages whole and who put people in cages and counted them as cattle and enjoyed the spoil of the women left behind.

And here was a single scrawny kid with some bucket on his head and not so much as a knife on his belt, threatening them to turn their ship around and go home.

"Or what?" one called, grinning, and the rest howled.

Then another of them strolled up, still grinning, and did not stop when Hiccup stepped back, and kicked his legs out from under him.

Hiccup let himself go down rather than do the thing his body wanted to do. Which was a mistake.

A brutal kick to his stomach stopped him from standing back again, PAHH.

They closed in a loose ring and started kicking him back and forth. They kicked between them like a game, howling, delighted, a last bit of sport at the end of a long voyage.

And it hurt.

He was hard to cut and hard to break, but a boot to the knee was still a boot to the knee, a heel in the gut still drove the breath out of him, and he curled in on himself and took it.

"Please," he got out, between the blows. "Please, you don't have to do this. Just go. Take the ship and go, I swear, I'll pay you if-"

"It's still talking," one of them chuckled before kicking him again.

And the whole time, with the part of his mind that was not begging, he held Toothless back.

Because he could feel the Night Fury up on the clifftop, could feel the ire pouring off him down their bond, white and rising, the great body coiled at the very edge of the rock and ready to drop. Hiccup pressed back against it with everything he had.

No. Stay. Not yet. I can still fix this. Please, bud. Let me fix this.

He was still sure, even then, that he could fix it.

Then a boot caught the helm and knocked it half from his head, and a hand reached down laughing to tear away the rest, and the setting sun fell full on his face, and the laughing stopped.

They saw all of it.

Not the black hair or the bone-white skin, which a man might still have squinted past as human, but the slit green eyes, and the crown of horns lit traitor-bright by the low red sun.

The beach went silent.

That same blank uncomprehending horror moved across every face at once.

He knew that silence.

He had stood on the wrong end of it his whole life.

"Please," he heard himself say, for the twentieth time, small and cracked, his cursed inhumanity bare to all of them now. "Please. I'm not what it- Don't make me do it."

The laughter was gone, and what filled the space where it had been was the slow scrape of swords coming out of their sheaths.

And the careful backward shuffle of men who had just understood that the thing in front of them was not a joke at all, and that his threats had not been part of one either.

Then they came in, all at once with the intensity of barbarians, to put it down before it could do whatever such a thing did. Blades out, faces wild, there was no game left in any of it. They wanted his head off his shoulders and they meant to take it.

So he weaved.

Hiccup turned one sword on the bracer at his arm and ducked another and gave ground across the shingle, surrounded and outnumbered, and still, even now, some last desperate part of him was scrabbling for the words.

"Stop. Please, just stop, I don't want to hurt you, don't make me-"

A sword skidded off his hardened forearm without breaking the skin, and he thought, dizzily, that he could bear this, that he was strong enough now to bear it and still talk them down.

Then one of them put his whole grown weight behind his blade, and it came in past the bracer, and it bit.

It drove through the tough layer of his skin at last and into the meat of his arm, and the pain bloomed bright and hot, and the blood came.

His blood. Running red down his arm and dripping off his fingers onto the pale sand.

It was the cove all over again.

The shingle of the island's shore was gone and he was small, and weak, and surrounded, and no amount of begging or pleading or reason was changing a single thing. No sacrifice was enough, not even the truth written plain in his own opening body.

They would only frown, and tighten their grips, and bring the blades down anyway.

The same blank faces. The same blades. The same blood dripping on the floor. The same answer to the only question he had ever really asked the world.

He had given sixteen years and the whole of his heart to making people listen, and not once, not one single time, had it ever worked.

Something in him completely came apart.

"WHY WON'T YOU EVER LISTEN!"

It tore out of him raw and guttural, no longer aimed at these men at all but at all of them, every deaf righteous face he had ever stood before.

"WHY WON'T ANY OF YOU EVER FUCKING LISTEN!"

There was no decision in it. There was nothing left in him to decide with. He simply jumped at the nearest of them knowing nothing of what he was doing.

His body knew none of the things a warrior's body knows. It only knew that it was strong now, and fast, and frightened, and so it had to do things in the oldest and ugliest of ways.

He caught the first man by the jerkin. The hand closed too hard, fingers he had never learned to soften sinking in like hooks, and he wrenched, meaning only to throw the man off.

And the arm tore away at the shoulder instead a CRACK of bone and then the tearing of flesh, a wet ripping crack and a sheet of blood that went across Hiccup's mouth and chin and stayed there, warm.

The man was shrieking. However Hiccup didn't see that. The pirate's face had become Stoick the Vast's, his father's. Blank and uncomprehending as it had always been, and Hiccup was going to finish the gods dammed job.

His steps blurred and took him off the ground. He jumped on the bleeding man before any could move, his hands squeezing on the neck until it just snapped with a SNAP.

A blade struck at his unguarded back.

He should have felt it coming. He should have slid from it without a thought, and he did not, and the bright line of it tore across him.

He turned into the pain with no guard and no craft and took the man who had cut him by the head, a hand pressed over each ear, and squeezed.

There was no clean way to do it, so he just pushed harder, and harder, until the skull gave all at once, slow and loud and final, and the man wore Spitelout's face the whole while, and this was payback for that fucking axe and every cold hour of pain that had come after.

After that there were no more thoughts to spare.

They cut him again, more than once, his half-dragon's body overpaying in blood for every clumsy thing he did, and he no longer felt it. He bit and thrashed and rampaged like an animal.

His teeth found a throat and tore it loose, and his mouth filled with the iron heat of it, and he spat and went for the next. He clawed. He drove a fist through a breastbone and felt it cave like wet wicker.

He caught a fleeing man by the hair and slammed his face down into the rock until it was nothing but a pulp of bone and brains.

Blood ran to his elbows and matted black in his hair and soaked his shirt through to the skin, his own and theirs together, until there was no telling them apart.

The beach was all noise.

War cries gone to shrieks. Men calling on their gods, on their mothers, on each other. Boots scrabbling at wet stone.

And under all of it the low broken sound of his own sobs, because the man stumbling and dying in front of him now wore Astrid's face, the half-raised hand, the open mouth, and he could do nothing but strike him too into a shower of brains and blood.

And he was killing, and killing, and killing.

They were not really there. He knew it even as he saw them. It was only a beach full of cruel greedy men who had come to grow rich off a graveyard and hack apart whatever they found on it.

But it did not matter whose face the grief hung itself on.

His hands did not care.

His hands had finally found the one language the world never once failed to answer and it wasn't words.

He did not bother holding the Night Fury back anymore.

Toothless came.

He felt the dragon's pain arrive before he heard the wings, his own anguish doubled and flung back down the bond, and then the black shape dropped screaming off the cliffs, and the last of the men still standing had time only to look up, and Toothless opened his jaws.

And the blue fire rained upon them, and washed the beach, and the screaming turned to the thunderous wails of men roasting alive.

When it was over the beach was very quiet.

It lay strewn with the dead and their ashes, dark pools of blood spreading and meeting in the hollows of the shingle, and the smell of it hung over everything, smoke and salt and the thick disgusting reek of burned flesh.

Hiccup stood in the middle of it, his arm still bleeding and the blood of strangers cooling on his skin and his chest heaving, and he waited for the horror to come back, the great drowning wave of it that had nearly put him on his knees in the smithy barely a week before.

It did not come.

Slowly, he understood that it was not going to.

What came instead was quiet. A flat, clean, enormous quiet, settling over him like still water closing over a stone. And under the quiet, a cold that was not the cold of the air, because the cold of the air had not been able to touch him for a long time.

It was the cold thing in his chest, the one that had been growing in him since the pool, and it had finally come all the way up and filled him whole.

And he found, standing there among the dead, that he wanted it.

That after the cove, and the pale tree, and the long bitter winter, and all the blood pooling at his feet, this was the only thing that did not hurt.

He had tried gentleness.

He had tried the open hand and the careful words, more times than he could count, and the world had answered him every single time exactly the same, and he was done.

He would not spend one more drop of himself on people who would only ever look at him and see a monster, and reach for a blade.

If a monster was all they could see, then he would stop wasting his breath arguing about it.

Out on the sand the ship lay tilted where they had run their ship aground, empty, dead men scattered around it, come for a kingdom and finished in an evening.

He did not say anything to Toothless. He did not need to. He only turned his eyes to the ship and let the fury rise in him, the whole roaring weight of it pouring down the bond, and the dragon felt what he felt, and lifted his head, and set every last plank of the ship alight.

The fire went up all at once, a tower of flame standing off the dark beach into the falling night.

And Hiccup stood there with his hands full of blood and watched her burn, and only then, at last, with everything finally quiet, cold, and mercifully simple, did he feel the warmth of it on his face.