Chapter 21: The Taste of Iron

Blood is the worst.

It is sticky and it itches on your skin when it dries. It works into the nooks and crannies of everything. And no matter how hard you scrub, the smell of iron always stays.

He could still remember when blood was a nothing but a footnote of life.

Back when they were children who did not know any better, and made teams, and fought each other with wooden swords and axes. A split lip. A hot trickle over the mouth. A bruise you could cover with a thumb.

He had bled more often than most, so he had learned the trick of it.

You just tilt the head back, pinch the bridge, count to a hundred. By morning it was a purple-green smudge and a story nobody asked to hear.

That was the whole of it. Blood came in drops, and drops could be swiped away, and life went on.

He could not remember when that stopped being true.

Grown men held more blood than he had ever imagined. More than any nightmare had cared to warn about. All of it had gone somewhere, and most of it had gone onto him.

It was in his hair. It had dried in the grooves of his horns like rust in old iron. It had soaked his cloak and glued the cloth to his spine, and dripped out of every inch of his face and all of his hands and arms-

He knelt at the well and scrubbed, the water went red, and then it went black.

Somewhere in the fifth bucket he understood that he could not tell where their blood ended and his own began.

It had all dried the same colour.

The slavers' and his own ran off his forearms in the same red ropes, thinned by the same water. There was no line anywhere on his skin where one stopped and the other started.

All night he had thought of them as two separate things.

Their blood and his blood.

However, the waters did not honour that difference. To them it was just blood. It had all come out of people.

He scrubbed harder, as if the line might be revealed there somewhere.

Then the last of the red on his skin lifted away and the map of it bloomed up through his pale skin, everything the night had actually cost him, coming clear inch by inch like ruins out of a fog.

The long shallow cut across his collarbone.

The deep one in the forearm, still seeping, opening again as the crust came off with the water.

The left side of his ribs, where something had connected hard enough that he could hardly walk without limping and which now hurt to breathe against.

And over the shoulder.

Pale and puckered and older than all of the others, the one ridge that had never gone away. The reminder of his past. The only forsaken thing from that life the tree had let him keep.

It had almost been kinder to stay covered in blood.

He sat high in the bones of the dead city, on one of the towers still standing, on a shelf of broken wall that had been a window once. One knee drawn up, his back against the stone.

It had been a few hours since he killed the slavers.

The sky was still black and the storm had nearly blown itself out, but dawn was a long way off.

Far down, where the rocks met the black wild sea, lay the wreck of the galleon, and with it every chance of getting off this island.

Hiccup hoped it stayed that way.

Because as said, he could not kill them.

He had stood over that girl with his hand raised, he had faltered, he had made his decision the hard way, there was no undoing it now.

He could not let them go either.

They were a hundred of them. Every one of them had seen this island that shouldn't even exist, they had seen him, they had seen what they were figuring out was a legendary night fury.

He was not stupid.

Not anymore.

Set them loose on the mainland and it would not matter if ninety-nine of them kept their mouths shut. The moment the wrong ears heard of this place there would be no way back. Pirates, mercenaries, and far worse would infest these waters like rats, and after that it would only be a question of how long he could keep killing.

How many men fit in one galleon.

How many galleons could come at once.

A hundred mildly competent men was all it would take to kill either him or Toothless at their current strength. No more, no less. The scars beating under his skin were a humbling reminder of exactly where his limits lay at.

This was always going to happen.

Sooner or later.

Hiccup had spent a year and a half flying above these waters, and that had taught him most of the shipping lanes in the northern seas.

Slave trading ships were not rare here. In fact, they were common.

They came up the coast lanes every season, low in the water, holds full of exactly this. Farmers. Fishers. Masons. Goatherds. The rare warrior or smith. And a great many girls and women who would be sold as breeding slaves, sex slaves, concubines, playthings.

Just the thought of it made him shudder.

This was the whole shape of the problem: He was too weak to hold the island alone. He had no way to build the strength to hold it. And the island was ringed by shipping lanes that would sooner rather than later stumble upon its shores.

He had a sword at his chest and a wall at his back.

So until he could think of something better, he would just watch.

So he did.

He had watched them break their chains on his rocks. He had watched the tall one walk down the corpses like a man who had done it before, and the old one point up at the ruins with the certainty of somebody who was most definitely right, and the whole miserable ragged column haul itself up the cliff road in the dark, carrying its weakest on its back.

He kept watching after that. He had nothing else to do.

He had their names by that same night. It was impossible not to pick on them, they said them often enough.

Toothless folded down beside him on the broken parapet and followed his stare to the distant glow of the campfire. The Night Fury made a low questioning sound in his throat.

"I do not know yet," Hiccup groaned. "Stop asking."

Hiccup had not heard an actual human conversation for over a year, and so listening to them from afar was compelling and strangely soothing. Even if what they were saying was utterly unimportant.

Songs, sometimes. Arguments, often. But mostly the quiet stories they told each other around the fire once the children were down.

He would not have been able to explain why he kept going back for it.

He just listened, and watched from afar, whenever he could. He watched them fish the bays, and pick their way through the forests and the grass hills, and stand their watches every night with the swords of those slavers across their knees, guarding against him.

Hiccup also used that time to wander into the ruins too.

He had been most of a year learning things about the abandoned citadel and there were still whole districts he had never walked.

The thought came to him in one of them.

He was brushing dust off a mural half eaten by the centuries, the way he had a hundred times before. The murals were everywhere, he tried to read this one.

A harbour.

Crowds.

Dragons on the rooftops and dragons in the sky and small human figures underneath them, not fleeing, not fighting.

Just living.

He stood there with his hand flat on the stone for some reason.

A world where people live beside dragons needs people.

He had been planning a nation of people and dragons... Or at least he had tried to.

His intent had been to first raise a force of dragons up so he could begin to make moves and begin to rebuild all of this. However, as fate would have it, the Red Death was an obstacle his plans had not accounted for.

It weirded him out that somewhere in all that planning had he walked straight past the fact that half of the mural was human, and that he had spent a year and a half making sure no human who saw this place ever left it.

Had he been wrong about his entire approach?

His mad dream needed people. That much was certain.

However, people were not things you could displace and move around at a whim: People had communities. They had families, and land, and dead buried.

Roots like that do not come out of the ground because a stranger kindly asks them to.

Hiccup could not simply go and get people.

Or at least, that had been his understanding until now.

What if that was an option?

What if he had been looking at things from the wrong angle. What if the slaver lanes were not another obstacle at the end of a long list of obstacles. What if they were the piece he had been missing all along.

He wasn't listening to their far off conversations anymore, he was fully immersed on the thoughts:

Every slaver hull crawling up that coast was carrying people nobody would ever come looking for. People whose old lives had already been basically burned down to the waterline. People who might, if they were freed and fed and given walls and treated properly, decide to stay...

Free them.

Settle them.

No captives. No slaves. Citizens.

The first hundred of a nation that did not exist yet. Empty the slave ships and fill the harbours, and let these empty streets be crowded and alive again.

It was insane, he noted bitterly.

This all required these people to stop seeing a demon in him. It also required him to stop, in fact, behaving like one.

Hiccup held the idea up to the light, turning it, testing it for cracks. It was at that point that the cursed raft took any choice away from him.

He had known about their plans since before they began building it.

He had let it go on because the hope was keeping them warm at night, because he had not come to a derision yet, and because he could not believe these fools would be desperate and mad enough to sail away on a flimsy raft and onto open sea at winter.

He turned out to be wrong.

The forsaken raft lay finished on the north shores and at dawn it would be four or five suicidal bastards attempting and failing to reach to the mainland.

Of course, there was no version of this in which that thing sailed.

He would have loved another road. If only he had been offered one.

However, there was none.

There was no version in which he just walked into their camp tonight and tried to explain himself. There were, he understood with a tiredness that went down into the marrow, no right choices left anywhere in the pile.

"Do it," he groaned quietly.

Toothless dropped from the cliffs, and the night turned blue, and Hiccup watched their hope go up in flames.

He knew already, bitterly and coldly, that he was lighting the same conflict he wanted to prevent in the first place.

A mistake.

His.

An inevitable one, paid for out of their hearts.