Chapter 16: Survivors I

The loud storm had faded. They were left with nothing but the whisper of the rolling tides, and the roar of blue fire that would not die, and not a single voice among them.

The fire stood over the wreck of the galleon as if it were alive, a mix of blue and purple more beautiful than any other worldly flame as it danced and ate away at their only road home.

They could do nothing.

Nothing but watch as the tide came in and went out, and came in again, and failed to put it out.

The sea failed to drown the blue fire, just as it failed to wash away the ocean of blood on the flat black rock.

The blood stayed where it was, worked deep into the seams of the stone, as if the seas themselves rejected the blood of these men.

There were close to a hundred of them left alive.

They were chained still. The iron had held them strung out along the waterline through the whole of it, through the screaming, the clang of blades, and the wet sobbing and the silence that came after, and it held them now.

Nobody knew how long.

It took until the galleon sank, hissing into the freezing northern waters, for them to understand that they were still breathing, and that the Night Spawn would not be returning to finish what it started.

They had not been killed.

The realization took time to settle.

Some collapsed. Some were quietly praying to their gods. Some had still not lifted their eyes from the cold stone.

But all she could do was kneel.

Kneel, and stay in place, and not stray from the peace she had made with herself. The peace that this cold shore was to be her final resting place. She had breathed the cold breath of death into her lungs and found, somehow, that it had not come.

She was alive. She had been spared.

But why.

Why.

Why.

She did not know.

Her life would have been a fair price to pay a second more for the little ones behind. She would have accepted that. She had fully accepted it.

She could not understand.

Her eyes had never left the slope, the direction where he ran away. As if the answers would come to her at some point.

But they never did.

They never would.

At some point the chains rattled.

The blue fire had drowned in the seas together with the ship, and under the torches and the moonlight she could feel the others starting to move.

"Emerald."

Emerald?

The voice was low, and rough, and familiar. A tall broad man further down the chain.

"Emerald. Look at me."

She looked.

"Thank the gods. Are you hurt?" It was Haaland.

He dragged the chain behind him and knelt in front of her, close, his eyes pale as snow and fixed on hers so that she would not look away.

"Did it hurt you? Did it do something to you?"

No.

No, he had not.

She had been too struck by the immensity that was her own survival. Emerald had almost let the memory of his face slip by her fingers.

How could she?

It came to her vividly. His beautiful green eyes, the sincerity and the sorrow and the many tears that hid underneath the blood he shed. The image of someone she had been too quick to label a monster.

It was too much.

It was too much to think about. It was far too much to think about.

"Girl."

Seeing her still not answer he placed a hand on her shoulders and shook. She realized she had dazed out again and her eyes focused back to him.

Haaland.

Somewhere in the long months in the hold of that ship the warrior had become like a father to her. Not by blood and not by word, but a father all the same.

"Emerald."

She tried to speak and the words would not come. So she only nodded, if only to ease him.

He pulled her into a bear hug the way a father does, and the warmth of it seemed to finally wake her out of the cold, taking some of the fear and the resignation with it.

Everyone on that ship knew Haaland.

A tall man gone grey at the temples, spare and hard through the shoulders, his beard as well kept as a slave could afford. There was an old iron in him, and the chains on his wrists had never once managed to bend it.

He had kept her alive until now.

The many nights when the chain held her exactly where she was and men came down the line meaning to rape her, and did not manage, not once. It had been Haaland and only Haaland, who put himself between her and them.

Haaland, who took the whips meant for her back, again and again, until all those rats grew tired of playing and went try their luck somewhere else.

"I'm fine. Thank you."

Was all she could muster.

The memory of Haaland hauling against his chains until the skin peeled off his wrists, snarling at the... the demon to come to him first, to take him and leave the rest.

The memory came back in pieces. He had been too far down the line, and the iron had not let him reach her.

Her words made his restless eyes finally soften.

He placed his hand on her hair and ruffled it until it was a mess, or more of the mess it already was. Something that was not quite a smile formed on his face as he looked past her at the corpses a few yards off, and at all the iron lying on it.

"We are not dying on this rock," he agreed as he stood and lifted her with him.

It was only then, standing, that the wind found her, the true cold of that winter night, and it went through her flimsy rags like they were not there. By that point the rattling of their chains had grown louder, so had the low murmur of talk between the chained men and women.

Haaland turned, to the men and women present, he wasn't speaking to her this time, his voice projected over the smaller ones, thundering down the beach and pulling everyone quiet.

"We need to get off this shore!"

His gaze circled each one of them.

"We are going to freeze here!"

He had moved to the nearest bodies, hauling the chained closest to him along.

He went through the dead men with the ease of someone who knew his way around a battlefield before a good blade came up in his grip and caught the moonlight.

Emerald heard him mutter a curse.

Then a loud metallic clack as the mechanism gave. The first pair of chains fell heavy on the floor.

There were no words after that.

One of them was walking free among them. The chains could not have rattled louder and the voices, when they came back, could not have come fuller.

They freed themselves.

It took hours.

They hammered their shackles against the rock and worked the swords into the links and some dug the keys out of dead men's pockets. One by one the iron came away.

Each time a shackle broke open and fell in the sand the hope of them flickered a bit brighter, until there was no one left to free, and they sat rubbing their raw wrists and not quite believing them.

It was midnight now.

It was the old man who got them moving.

While the last shackles were still coming off, Haaland and some of the steadier men had drawn a little apart and come to him for advice.

Oddr was that old man. Brittle bones, sagging skin, and full of cheeky wisdom. He kept to himself mostly, back on the ship. Most of them knew him as that.

Only some of them knew that the unassuming old man's timely cunning had saved their lives more than a few times.

Emerald could overhear some of what they were saying.

"We will die of the cold before we die of anything else," Oddr shivered.

His voice was thin, but it did not shake. He tipped his white head up the slope, toward the ruins climbing the black hill, the broken towers standing against the stars.

"Up there. That old city. The stones should break the wind and where there is old stone there is old wood, I'd say enough to make a fire. It is also higher than the shores, right now we are sitting on open sand where anything can walk up on us."

They hardly shared a glance between one another. Haaland looked at the slope a long moment, then nodded, once.

That was all it took.

The hike, which had to circle the wide cliffs the ruins were built upon, was long and slow.

The ramp was treacherous and the light of their torches sparse, the old and the injured could not manage it alone, so the stronger carried them, and the ones with nothing left to give leaned on the ones who had some left. The whole ragged line dragged itself up slopes a step at a time.

The cold was not a discomfort by then. It was a hand at the throat.

They had taken with them some of the hides and the clothes the slavers had with them, but it was not enough to fend off a winter night.

The cold found every gap in their rags and pressed the damp of the crossing deeper into their bones.

Yet somehow the dark was worse, having seen what they had seen, knowing what could be waiting in it. The creature that had walked away and for all they knew might at any moment decide to walk back.

"I saw something," a woman shivered, low, teeth going, more to herself than to anyone.

"Before the ship went up. There was something black." She pulled her furs tighter. "Then the fire came, and it was gone."

"You saw the smoke," someone told her, too quickly.

"It was not smoke. Something else was there," she cut in.

But she did not say any more, and no one asked her to, and they all climbed a little faster, and no one said why. They made their camp in the ruins, because Oddr had been right, and there was nowhere else.

It was a wide dead plaza up on the heights, ringed by columns and broken walls snapped off at different heights like rotten teeth.

They swept a hollow clear of ash and old bone, the bone of men and the bone of things far larger than men, and they did not let themselves wonder what had died here.

That could wait.

What could not wait was the fire.

They built it out of old wood and cracked doors and beams that came away from the walls in their hands, and they got it lit, and they crowded in as close to it as skin could stand, and still the cold sat in them.

They shared out the last of what the burning ship had not swallowed and ate it half-raw, because half-raw and hot was food and they were starving, and starving people do not wait for a thing to cook through.

That first night was the hardest.

It is one thing to be owned, fed and watered and worth something to somebody.

It was another to be a hundred half-starved people on a haunted rock at the edge of the world, with no master and no walls and no food but what the fire had not ruined.

The cold got into the children first.

They shook and would not stop, and then the shaking spread to the adults.

To the side, a woman wept without any sound at all, which was worse than if she had wailed.

Far off, two men had come to blows over a single fur and had to be dragged apart, and there was nothing under the fight but all the uncertainty and the certain knowledge that the night was very long, and that they might not all live to see the end of it, and everyone there knew it.

They set watches, because Haaland told them to.

Men at the edge of the firelight with the dead crew's swords across their knees, staring out into the black, trading off when their eyes would no longer stay open.

Most did not sleep at all.

So to keep from listening to the wind in the ruins and the sea far below and their own fear, they could do nothing but talk.

"I had a smallholding," said a man turning a small fish on a stick over the coals, his hands not quite steady. "Six goats. A wife. We were not rich, but we were not this."

He laughed, and it broke in the middle.

"They came up the fjord at dawn. I told her to run for the trees. I do not know if she made it. I will spend every night on this rock wondering it."

They mostly shared stories. Similar stories, most of them tragic.

"She made it," Emerald said.

Then as if she had surprised herself by speaking at all, "I'm sorry. You have carried her dead this whole way, and you don't actually know that she's gone. So you don't have to carry her like that. Not if you don't know."

Emerald had her knees drawn up to her chest against the cold, her thin arms wrapped around them.

She looked down at her own hands.

"When my own people got too heavy to carry, I decided the kinder thing was the true thing. It doesn't cost anything. She ran for the trees. She was fast. She made it. There."

She risked a small smile up at him, tired and shy and warm.

"Lighter. A little."

The fire cracked. The goatherd looked at her for a long moment.

"You are a strange girl," he said. Because something in his face had eased.

She was strange.

They had all marked it, back in the dark of the hold, the way she moved in the little slack her chain allowed, listening.

She listened the way other people ate, like it was a thing the body needed to stay alive, and she handed the stories back to people lighter than she had taken them.

She almost never spoke of herself.

"You were closest to it," said a younger man, holding his hands out to the fire.

He was near her own age, narrow and hungry-eyed, and his name was Eivind, and he had not stopped throwing glances at the dark since they sat down.

"On the beach. You were right next to it. The rest of us only saw the back of it." He swallowed. "What was it? Up close. What was it?"

The whole fire went quiet.

The ones among the fire pit, the ones further behind resting on the furs, even the dozen standing guard. They had all wanted to ask.

None of them had dared.

Emerald was a long time answering.

"It was tall," she said at last. "Its skin was pale, and smooth. It had horns. Black ones, swept back off its head, like a crown."

She paused.

"Its eyes were green, and they had slits down the middle, like a cat's. Or a snake's."

The image of him was once again vivid in her mind's eye. She hesitated longer this time. Something in her gut did not sit right.

"But it had a face. Two arms. Two hands. When it lifted its hand to kill me, I waited for it."

She started again, very quietly, and her voice betrayed her own confusion.

"It hesitated. It probably felt pity and so it turned and walked away."

She looked around the ring of them.

"I don't know what it is." She shook her head. "However, a monster doesn't hesitate or spare-"

Eivind did not let her finish. Perhaps not unkindly, only frightened.

"It is a demon. Demons can wear our shape. The pastor always said so, back home."

There was a long silence, and the cracking of the fire.

"Maybe," Emerald slowly agreed.

She rarely argued.

Eivind simply studied her in the firelight, and perhaps because she had given them so much of herself just then, and so seldom did, he found the nerve.

"You hardly said three words the whole crossing," he chuckled. "Where are you from? Who were your people?"

A small shadow crossed her face. She tensed, just for a breath, and the warmth in her went careful. "South of here," her chin turned roughly to the south. "A long way south. A very small place. You wouldn't know the name."

She turned the next part over and set it down lightly, the way she set everything down.

"The village sold me. That's all. Some places, when a winter is hard, they decide who is worth keeping and who is not."

That was all.

Everyone had their story. Stories most didn't want to talk about. No one asked her for anything more.