Chapter 20: Survivors V

That night was the longest one yet. At least, it was for Haaland.

He had tried so hard to avoid conflict with the other camp as much as possible, to avoid this exact same thing. To keep everyone alive, and yet...

He grit his teeth.

He loathed what the others had turned into, privately and completely.

Even when his own side was owed something.

Even when everyone on both sides of that plaza knew which four men had walked out to the edge of the camp that night to murder Torvald, and which of the four had led them, and not one soul could prove a word of it.

He had to hold them back.

Day after day their camp lent the hunters wood, food, anything. They never gave a hard word. However, Haaland was not a fool. None of them were, and they all knew how this would end without anybody having to say it.

Sooner or later the island would tire of the game. The hiding and the seeking would wear thin, and the hunters would blunder onto the thing by dumb luck.

And when they did, however gently Emerald had spoken of it, whatever it did or did not intend for them, half a hundred terrified people were not going to stop and ask it for a cup of ale and a civil talk.

They would come at it with all their swords and all their grief.

And then they would simply die.

Haaland could not let that happen.

The three of them met that night, apart and away from the others, out past the last of the firelight where the upper forest began.

"If the hunters find it," Oddr grunted, "it will be a massacre. Ours."

"I know."

Haaland's face had aged in those long days, gone tired and dark around the eyes.

"It is not a thing they can beat. They cannot even find it, I do not know how to make them see. Every dusk they return worse than they went up. One morning they will not come down at all."

It was a long silence.

The trouble was that there was no clean end of the knot to pull.

Any move against Rum and the men he had so swiftly armed with their slaver's swords would hand him the excuse to fold them back into the larger one, or worse. With every blade on the island already in the hunters' hands, that could only end one way.

It surprised them both that Emerald was the one to speak.

Something had gone out of her since the death of that young man. She had hardly talked since.

But she said it low, her puffy eyes fixed on the dark.

"He spoke to me. On the beach, that first night." She swallowed. "In the half-instant before it lowered its hand to kill me. I'll make it quick, he said."

He had promised her a quick death and then had not been able to deliver it to her, and then she had seen him weep, and walk away.

Oddr was quiet a long moment.

Emerald did not lie, she did not embellish things, both of them knew it. That was the whole of why they even entertained her words.

"A demon does not lie," she argued. "and a demon does not weep."

She took a long breath before the rest of it.

"I think there is a person somewhere inside him."

It took a while for anyone to think of anything to say to that.

"Something that talks can be reasoned with," Oddr frowned at last, pinching carefully at the hairs of his beard.

Then he shook his white head, slowly.

"But it does not change a thing, girl. We cannot find it. They have combed this island for days and never once laid eyes on it."

He tucked his hands into his fur, hunting for heat.

"We can try speaking with it all we want, but if we can not contact it, then it's useless..."

They spoke some more and parted with nothing decided.

They lay down that night each holding the same useless piece of a puzzle that connected to nothing else they had. Sleep did not come to any of them.

The note came the next day.

Emerald found hers folded into a seam of the wall where she slept, and she did not know at first that it was a note at all.

A scrap of something pale and stiff, not quite paper, marked over in charcoal.

Norse.

She could speak the northern tongue. She had learned it the way you learn things that make you valuable enough to keep you fed.

Still, she was rusty, the letters were not the letters of her own tongue, and they swam in front of her. Deeming it better to share it with the others, she carried the scrap down to Oddr, because Oddr should be able to read this fine.

The old man held it to the last of the light and his stare turned thoughtful.

"Where did you get this," he muttered, and it was not quite a question.

"It was on the wall. By where I sleep." She watched his face. "What does it say?"

He read it to her, low, so that no one else caught it.

Come to the shore at dusk. The three of you alone. No weapons. We will speak of what is to be done, no harm will come to you.

That was all. No name. No mark. He turned it around and the back of the note was blank.

Haaland had come looking for the old man over a matter of his own. He listened to the end of it, and then, without a word, laid an exact copy of the note down beside the first.

And Oddr, with no hurry at all, drew a third out of his rags and set it down beside the other two.

The same words. The same hand. Three times over.

"Someone wants us where it is quiet," Haaland said slowly. "Us. And nobody else."

"Someone who can write," pointed Oddr.

That was the part that mattered.

Not many slaves could write. Far fewer could write Norse.

They looked at one another in the failing light and each of them ran the same tally. A hundred half-starved souls hauled out of a hold. Farmers and goatherds and fisher-folk and children. Not one in ten among them had ever held anything finer than a rope or an oar.

"Rum," Haaland murmured, testing the shape of it. "Or one of his. It would surprise nobody if they tried to silence us. It may be a lure."

Oddr shook his head. "Rum cannot write his own name in his mother tongue, much less in Norse. None of them can, actually."

He turned the scrap over in his old fingers, and over again.

His eyes had gone somewhere far off. To the hunters' story of the round buried room under the old halls. The rotted books. The burned charcoal sticks. The nest of loose paper.

He did not say for certain.

He was not a man who said things out loud before he was sure, and he was not sure. Not yet.

"Then who," squeaked Emerald.

"It might be Eivind," Haaland offered. "He studied under a pastor. And that resembles his hand writing, or near enough to it."

Oddr looked at the scrap again, and turned it. He said nothing either way.

It could be. It would even make sense.

Eivind, the young man had stood with Rum's camp for a while now, and yet he had lately started drifting away from it.

Was this Eivind trying to talk terms with them? To discuss something away from prying ears? That theory seemed plausible.

Perhaps he wanted to change sides.

"Either way we do not know," the old man concluded, gently, and folded the scrap away, his old eyes peaking the fading daylight, "But the shore is a long walk and dusk is coming."

He shrugged.

"Come. I have a feeling this will be less boring than anything else on offer."

They followed him, reluctantly.

The note had asked to bring no weapons. They chose to take that as advice rather than as instruction, and went scrambling for whatever blades would sit unseen under a layer of fur.

The shore at dusk was probably the loneliest place in the world.

It was the same flat black rock they had washed up on. Mostly because shore was a very vague word, and this was their best guess at what it meant.

The three of them came down across it in the last grey light, over bloodstains the sea had still not finished taking, the wind off the water going through their furs as though it meant something by it.

So they stood there, three of them, and waited to see who in all the world had called them out.

Nobody came.

The rock ran flat and open the better part of a mile to the cliffs. If it was Eivind, then there was nowhere on it for him man to come at them unseen.

The light went out of the sky by degrees.

Grey to iron to the deep blue of full dark, and the first stars came out cold and hard over the water.

Then it was night, and they were still standing there.

It was then the thought found Emerald.

That a few feet off away from here were the same chains that had kept them captive for so long, still there on the floor, untouched, rattling with the come and go of the waves. And the same remains, and the same dim moonlight as that night.

The images came crawling back, and her heart began to climb her throat.

Haaland shifted his weight.

Night had fully descended upon them. It was difficult to see now. She saw his hand drift to where the sword hung under the layers of fur, and stay there.

"There is nobody," he growled, low, the anger stepping in where the fear had been.

"It is a trap, we are standing in the open like fools-"

Oddr put a hand on his arm.

Haaland frowned but saw the old man was looking up, out into the night over the endless ocean, one finger pressed steady against his lips.

Silence.

They heard it before they saw it. They would never have seen it at all if the old man had not been pointing straight at it.

It came down out of the black between the stars.

It was the black between the stars, a shape the eye kept sliding off and finding again only by the places where it blotted the sky out.

Then the wind of it reached them. A downward push of cold air that flattened the dune grass and drove the girl's blonde hair back off her face.

It settled onto the shore in front of them without a sound its feet could be blamed for, folding wings that went on folding longer than wings had any right to.

Then it lowered its head.

It is majestic.

That was her first thought, and she could not talk herself out of it.

The Night Fury.

The dragon of legends Oddr had named had at last been given shape, and the shape, standing that close and that suddenly, left all three of them utterly unable to move.