Chapter 23: Heart-to-Heart II

Haaland's head whipped itself around so fast his neck cracked.

Of all the things!

Of every careful, cautious, sideways thing a person could have opened with, standing on this beach, in front of this creature, the girl had walked straight up to the one memory soaked in more blood than any other and put her hand all flat and wide on it.

He saw the same astonishment on Oddr's face. The old man's eyebrows had climbed halfway up his forehead and stayed there.

Absurdly, the creature looked as taken aback as they did.

It blinked at her. The dangerous patience went out of it for a moment and left behind something almost startled. He had braced for them to throw their accusations and instead he was simply handed a weird and out of place question.

Emerald Bjornsdottir should have looked away.

Every sensible instinct in a person's body would have screamed to look at the stones, at the sea, at anything at all except the feline gaze of the creature that had emptied a ship of men with its bare hands.

No, instead she looked right at it, wide-eyed.

And the thing, who had answered nothing yet, went quiet a long moment, and its gaze drifted off her and out to the pitch black water as if reaching back for something that was difficult to put into words.

"Killing is a bad habit," it finally sighed.

The words came out strangely. Not cold. Not quite tender either.

"Learning that you can solve your problems by getting rid of whatever is causing them is a dangerous thing to learn."

A pause.

"You are a kind woman. You put your arms out in front of the little ones... Then you thanked me. Nobody has thanked me for anything in a very long time."

It stopped. Started again.

"That is not, that is not really an answer. I know it isn't."

His rough voice had lost some of its footing.

"I have had weeks to work out how to say this and I still cannot make it come out as a reason. I did not decide anything. I want to be honest with you about that. I had already decided. I had it worked out, all of it, cleanly."

Its hand made a small helpless gesture at the rocks between them.

The great dragon behind him shifted, and settled.

Whatever it wanted to say did not come out whole.

Its hands opened and closed once on its knee, and for a moment it had the look of a man asked to prove that water is wet, and discovering to his horror that he is going to have to try.

It scrambled to put the words into some kind of order.

"You were small. You were chained. You had not done a single thing to me."

A resigned breath.

"I do not harm innocent people."

Silence.

Oddr and Haaland looked at each other.

There was no word for what passed between them.

For the better part of a moon this thing had been their very fear and nightmare. Something lurking at the edge of their fire. The very reason men slept with swords across their knees and children were not allowed to walk to the treeline alone.

It had been the demon, devil, spawn of the night.

The abomination that emptied a slaver crew with its bare hands and burned their only road home to blue ash without one word of explanation.

So how could you make peace with it just sitting on the ground with its knee up, tripping over its own sentences, trying and failing to explain itself to an eighteen-year-old girl.

The sheer unreasonableness of it made Haaland's head swim.

He had expected a monster. He had not prepared for this, there was nothing anywhere in his life that had prepared him for it either.

Demons are supposed to lie, or to threaten, or to bargain. Yet this thing was doing none of it. It was sitting on cold rock at a polite distance, letting an armed man stand over it, and answering her question with enough honesty to embarrass itself.

Oddr made a small noise in his throat.

Then the old man walked forward three steps, groaned like a felled tree, and lowered himself onto the stones with his legs crossed under him.

"Oddr!" Haaland almost roared.

They traded a short look.

"My knees have opinions," dismissed Oddr. "Besides, I cannot think properly standing up."

He tipped his white head at the demon, folded his hands in his lap, and settled in with the serene indecency of a man taking the best seat at somebody else's funeral.

"Go on then. You were saying."

Haaland stood a moment longer with his sword half up and the whole of his life telling him not to sit.

Then he cursed quietly and sat, he laid the blade flat across his knees where his hand could still find it, which was a compromise.

Emerald sat last.

Somehow she sat closest to the creature, for some reason she did not take her eyes off it once.

After that they talked a long time.

It answered most questions.

That was what undid them in the end. More than the legendary night fury napping a few feet away, more than anything: It said it would answer, and then it simply did, plainly, one question after another, did.

Until answering stopped being remarkable and started being ordinary. Same as talking to a person.

"The marks on the walls," Haaland snorted. "That was you."

"That was me."

"Why not walk up to the camp and say your piece?"

He shifted uncomfortably at that, "There are a hundred of you up there, most of you are holding swords, I'm afraid most of them would not give me a chance to explain."

A shrug.

"It would have gone side ways, I did not want that. So I ended up contacting the three of you."

"Why us?" frowned Oddr.

"Why? Obviously because you are the only three who want to talk."

The old man's mouth twitched. Confused.

"I can hear a great deal on this side of the island. Not most of it, and not far. But enough." That seemed to help explain things.

It tipped its head slightly.

"You told them a devil does not take notes."

"I did."

Something that was almost a laugh came out of the creature.

"That was the most kind thing anyone has said to me in a year."

Haaland shifted his grip on the sword across his knees. He had been waiting for the right moment and there was not going to be one, so he took the wrong one.

"The raft."

The word came out harder than the rest.

"Ask," the Night Spawn nodded, his pale hands twirling his silky pitch black hair.

"Why did you burn it? All those days of work. Women hauling vine with their hands coming apart. What was the point of it?"

Its gaze turned harder, and colder.

Was this for real?

"Because had you succeeded in reaching a shore you would have brought the entire north to my doorstep."

"We would not have-"

"You would not have meant to."

It let that sit.

"You wanted to hire mercenaries for a rescue, and from there the word would just spread. Even if that was not your original plan, somebody would talk:" His hands extended to the sides.

"An island up north that nobody has seen or heard or mapped, a ruined city on top of it all full of relics and treasure and oh, a Night Fury and a d**emon living in its caves. The one who kills them gets to keep their heads as trophy."

It was nearly hissing by the end of it.

"They start asking questions the moment someone's mouth slips. By spring the first ships put out. By summer these shores are full of scum."

Its jaw set.

"That is not a guess. That is only what happens."

"So you burned it."

"Yes."

"That raft was their hope," Haaland snorted, and there was iron under it.

"I know."

"People wept over it."

"I know that too."

The demon's jaw worked tighter.

"I am not going to sit here and tell you it was fair. It was not. It was the only choice I had that ended with all of you alive. You can hold it against me if you wish, Haaland."

Hearing his own name in that mouth took him aback more than any of the reasoning had.

He hadn't noticed until now. Sitting still, close, in the thin moonlight.

The few seams still closing along the forearms, and how very few of them there were, which was an answer all by itself.

Its superficial scars may have healed, however, the careful way he held one arm in against a cracked rib. It betrayed the exhaustion and deeper injuries inflicted on him, deep and structural.

Then its face, under the crown of horns.

Gods, but the face was young.

"You keep saying you cannot let us leave," asked Oddr. "Care to explain properly?"

His slit eyes went round the three of them, there was a bit of hesitation in them but it gave away.

"A few reasons," he counted them off on his fingers.

The ordinariness of the gesture was somehow the strangest thing yet.

"The world does not know this island."

A pause.

"What is up on those heights has stood untouched for longer than any of us can count. Towers. Murals. Libraries nobody has read in an age. If a story reaches the mainland, all of it will end up ransacked away, and then it will never have existed at all."

Something crossed his face.

"There are things on this rock that are very dangerous, things that are valuable, a few that are both. There are even a few I have not dared touch myself."

His eyes went somewhere far off for a moment.

Then he let out a soft laugh.

"However, the most important reason why will not let you leave is actually winter. The currents around this island are everything but ordinary."

A pale finger came up and pointed at the horizon.

"Past that headland they would take a lashed raft apart in a a few hours. You would not have reached a port. You would have reached the bottom of the sea at most. Plus the cold, plus the fact that we are a long way off any settlement."

A breath.

"If you truly want to go, wait for spring. Better still, wait for summer."

Nobody spoke for a while after that.

The waves rolled in. The waves rolled out.

Oddr had been quiet in the way old men are quiet when they are working up to something. He tilted his head, wearing an expression of the purest innocence.

"Right. Now, a small thing, if you will humour an old fool."

He gestured vaguely at the enormous coiled dragon now snoring behind him.

"The pair of you. I have known married couples with less understanding between them."

He laughed at his own joke, which was the only way that lame joke was going to get laughed at.

"How does that come about?"

The demon went very still this time, and his eyes, for the first time all night, stopped actually being present.

They traveled somewhere else entirely.

Somewhere years back and a long way south.

And then, quietly, with the tide going out and the three of them sitting on the stones in front of him, he decided to tell them everything.

From the cove, all the way to the shore of this island.