Chapter 24: Heart-to-Heart III

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Somewhere in the middle of the story the Night Fury had got up, stretched, gathered an armful of driftwood off the tide line and heaped it between the four of them and set the small campfire alight.

It crackled there now, the flame of it blue and purple and mesmerizing, while the sea rolled in and dragged out and in again. The wind came off the water and pushed the smoke sideways.

Not one of the three of them could find a word.

Hiccup let them have their silence.

He had earned it, he supposed. He had just spent the better part of an hour filling it.

He had told them everything.

Not the polished version either. He had opened his mouth meaning to answer Oddr's question and be over with it and instead he had simply lost his footing in it. It came out in the wrong order and too fast, some of he shouldn't have shared.

He told them about Berk.

About being the chief's son and the village joke in the same breath.

About Hiccup the Useless.

The forge. The inventions that never worked. The father who could not look at him without something failing behind his eyes.

He told them about the bola somewhere along the way. About the one night his aim had been perfect, and what it had cost. That he had gone into the woods meaning to cut the head off a downed Night Fury and had found himself freeing its ropes instead.

Then the cove. The fish. The months of the two of them learning each other in secret. The saddle, the fin, the first flight.

And then the rest of it.

He told them how it ended, and he did not soften that either. A hundred people who had known him since he was born, and axes, and the sound his own father's voice had made. The shoulder. The cold sea as they flew away.

The long bleeding dream as they flew, how he had been perfectly certain that he was dying, and how he had mostly been at peace with it.

Then washing up here.

Then a year and a half of nothing but a the Night Fury, the city, and his own voice.

He did not know why he told them so eagerly. Perhaps because it had all been shut up too long. Perhaps because they were willing to sit and listen.

He was tired, he was hurt, he had been carrying this, every part of it, alone, since he was fifteen.

He kept forgetting that part.

He had gone more than a year and a half without a single human being to talk to.

It slipped his mind for weeks at a time, buried under all the hunger and the killing and the reading and the weight of everything he was carrying. It only ever came back now. Sitting on cold stone with his ribs aching, talking too much to strangers because they had been kind enough to sit down.

He was Seventeen now. Gods.

He told them almost everything.

Almost.

Hiccup had learned in the most direct way exactly how frightening a hybrid could be. He knew precisely what one of him was worth, and precisely what one of him could not be stopped by.

So he was careful enough not to hint at the existence of the pale tree. That would have to stay secret. At least for now.

Across the fire, the three of them still were not speaking.

He could see it working through them, though.

He was getting better at reading faces again.

The old one had his head tipped and his eyes half lidded, doing something behind them that Hiccup could not follow.

Emerald had both hands over her mouth, her eyes fixed on the flames.

Haaland was simply staring at him. There was no hatred left in it, Hiccup was pretty sure. Only the raw, undefended look of a man rearranging a great many things at once.

That was the trouble with the truth.

Once it was out, everybody had to make room for it.

"Seventeen," Haaland muttered. His voice came out cracked. "You said seventeen."

"Yes."

"When I was seventeen I had already killed men, for somebody whose name I never learned."

He looked at the fire for a while.

"Nobody sat down with me either."

Hiccup did not have anything to answer with, so he did not try.

The warrior looked at his own sword, lying flat across his knees where it had been all night, the blade catching blue off the fire.

Then he took it up, he slid it back into its sheath, and let his hands rest empty on his thighs.

It was a small thing. It took him no more than a breath. It was also the first time in a year and a half that anybody had put a weapon away in front of Hiccup instead of picking one up.

"Thank you."

Haaland grunted, gruff and embarrassed, and looked out at the water.

It was Hiccup who broke the next quiet, he did it clumsily, the way he did most things involving other people.

"So what do you make of it?" he asked. "The city. You have been living in it the better part of a moon now."

Oddr's eyebrows went up. "You are asking us?"

"I have had a year and a half of my own opinions. They have stopped being interesting."

The old man barked a laugh at that, delighted, and the girl smiled behind her hands, and something in Hiccup's chest loosened by a notch.

So they told him.

About the plaza with the columns snapped off like rotten teeth, and the murals they could not make out the meaning off.

About the bones in the ash, the ones far too large to have been men, the ones which they had swept aside on the first night and made a point of not thinking about since. They themselves came to the conclusion that it must have been dragon's.

"It was a kingdom," Hiccup nodded. "An age ago."

He looked up the black slope toward the heights, where the broken towers stood over the whole of it.

"People lived all over here. Actual people, in houses, with markets and boats and children. And the dragons lived here with them."

He watched their faces.

"There were no dragon wars. No raids. No slaves either."

Haaland frowned and shook his head. "That is not possible."

Though he said it quietly, it was not really a disagreement.

"I thought so too, but it's all up there on their records. The walls and the wide open halls and every detail of it. It's all proof. Centuries of it."

Hiccup's jaw tightened.

"They simply had it. It worked."

Then his face darkened.

"It worked, until they met their end at the hands of one of their own." Hiccup didn't hide the disappointment and dejection on his voice.

There was a long awkward silence.

"You say you cannot hold this island by yourself."

Oddr jerked his chin west, toward the cliffs above the fishing bays.

"There are dragon nests all over those cliffs. Dozens of them. And you are sitting on a Night Fury you tamed at fifteen years old."

He spread his hands.

"So tame more. Tame all of them. Nobody in the world will ever dare land on this rock again. Where is the flaw?"

Hiccup laughed.

Some short, rough, startled sound, it stopped almost as soon as it started.

He could not remember the last time he had laughed. Not since he made it here. Not once in a year and a half, he had not noticed the absence until the thing itself came back.

He rubbed the back of his neck, shaking his head. "I have already done it."

"You have?"

"Dozens of them." Hiccup nodded. "I am good at it. It is the one thing I have ever been properly good at."

Something bitter moved across his face.

"I tame them, and I keep them, they answer to me for a few days. Weeks, if I am lucky. Then one morning they are gone."

"Gone where?"

"South." He turned a small stone over in his fingers. "The strongest and the healthiest first. Every time. They do not run. They are lured, and I cannot stop it," a pause "not yet, at least."

"Something is taking them," guessed Oddr.

"Yes."

"What is?"

"Something ancient," chuckled Hiccup. "Something very large, a long way south of here. It has been doing it for centuries. As long as it is alive, I cannot hold a single dragon longer than a week."

He leaned back on his arms and looked up.

"So I have to kill it. Somehow."

Silence.

Then Oddr, who had been rolling all of it around behind those quick old eyes, blurted it out loud. He said it gently, the way you say a thing you already know the answer to.

"So. Until you kill it. Nobody leaves this island."

Hiccup straightened, and the green in his eyes came up brighter for a moment before he got it back down.

"Nobody leaves."

"Because one boat that reaches a port is-"

"Is the end of everything." He nodded once. "I cannot risk it, Oddr. I have thought about it from every side there is."

"And how much?" the old man asked.

"How much what?"

"Time." Oddr smiled, as if it was obvious, without any humour in it. "You are asking a hundred people to stay stuck on this place. At least specify wait until when?"

Hiccup had lied about this number several times inside his own head. He found he could not do it out loud, to a man's face, with the man looking at him.

He frowned into the fire.

"I do not know."

"You do not know."

"I do not know how to kill it yet. So I do not know when I will be able to kill it."

The admission scraped on the way out.

"I have read every page in that library that has not rotted. I have flown south and seen it with my own eyes. It has an army. It is the size of a mountain. Its hide is probably impenetrable."

He made himself finish it.

"I will not put a number on it. If I gave you one it would be a comfortable lie and you would hold me to it. I would not be able to keep it."

The old man nodded slowly.

"Well," muttered Oddr. "At least you are honest about it."

Then, shifting topic kind of unexpectedly, they told him about themselves.

Haaland went first. The middle aged man was a sellsword, out in the south. He had spent his life fighting other men's wars. No land. No children. Home had always been wherever the work was, and there had been nothing waiting for him in any port for a long time.

"The island does not frighten me the way it frightens them," he explained. "There is fish, there is shelter, I have slept in worse places for worse reasons."

Oddr was much the same, except cheerfully shameless about it. The old man had outlived his family tree. He had nothing to go back to but a cold country and people who most probably assumed him dead.

"I had already made up my mind to die on. Before tonight. Before any of this."

He waved a hand at the ruins, the sea, the dragon.

"It is warm enough in summer, I am told. The fish practically climb out of the water. Nobody here has ever heard of me and nobody is coming to collect on anything." He shrugged. "A man could do a great deal worse with his last few years than a quiet island at the edge of the world."

Emerald said nothing at all.

She only nodded, once, her eyes on the fire. Though she stole a look at him every so often, and did not seem especially concerned about whether he was noticing.

"But we are not the ones you have to convince," Haaland grunted. "The rest of them are not us."

His face gone heavy.

"There is a woman up there with a boy of six who has never met his father. There is a man who does not know whether his wife is still alive. Half that camp still has somebody at the other end of the sea. Every day they are on this rock is a day they are kept away from their loved ones."

He looked Hiccup dead in the eye.

"You are asking them to wait years. You will not get it. Not because you couldn't convince them to. But because the way they see you, you are the one thing standing between them and their family. There is nobody alive who takes that without a fight."

Hiccup did not answer.

There was nothing fair in it. Nothing. He could see that.

Standing between someone and the people he loved was the most monstrous thing you could do to them. Hiccup was doing it to a hundred at once, and every one of his reasons was good, yet none of that made it less wrong.

There must be another way to be certain of a man's silence.

Months ago. A crew that had got ropes on him.

One of them kneeling on his chest with a fist in his hair and a small curved knife, prying his jaw open, explaining quite calmly to the others that they should take the tongue first so the demon could not curse them.

The blade had shattered on his teeth. He had killed the man a heartbeat later.

Yet Hiccup remembered the logic of it. It had been such practical logic.

Hiccup's stomach turned over.

He shoved the thought down so hard and so fast that his hand tightened on the wood he was holding and cracked it to pieces.

No.

He was not going to become that. He had drawn one line at killing innocents and he was drawing another one here, right now.

He had frightened himself yet again. It was becoming a habit.

"There might have been a way," Haaland said, oblivious, staring into the flames. "If things had been different. If you had come to us before the raft."

He shook his head slowly.

"You have to understand the consequences of what you have done."

"I know."

Haaland said it anyway.

"The camp has split. There is no holding it together now. The ones who went to Rum have gotten worse every day since, hunting you gives them something to do with it."

His jaw tensed.

"You know, a man died."

Was it an accusation? Was he blaming him? Was he to blame? Hiccup did know. He had known since the night it happened,

"I know a man died," he nodded carefully.

"That was them turning on each other. Over nothing. Over a fight about firewood."

Haaland's hands had curled.

"So no. If you walked up that hill tonight, no amount of words would fix anything. Even with every good reason you have, they would not hear one of them."

Hiccup did not answer.

Over a fight about firewood.

That is not what happened.

Hiccup had heard most of it. Not all of it, the wind had been blowing strong and they were near the edge of his reach, but he had heard enough of it.

Rum had not lost control of a scuffle. Rum had deliberately removed someone. Then he had stood in front of everybody the next morning and called it an accident, and watched to see whether Haaland would do anything about it.

He is testing you, Hiccup thought, looking at the tired warrior across the fire.

He killed one of yours to see what you would do. You did nothing. So he will do it again, sooner rather than later.

He opened his mouth.

Then closed it.

Not tonight. He had spent an entire evening buying an inch of trust off these three and he was not going to spend all of it on an accusation he could not prove.

He would find another way to hand it to them. He would find a way where Haaland worked it out for himself.

"It is late," Oddr grumbled.

The old man was squinting up at the sky, working out how long they had been sitting there.

"If three of us are missing at dawn, somebody will notice, and I would rather not spend tomorrow explaining where we were."

"He is right," said Haaland, standing, working the stiffness out of his knees.

"Then we will do this again," Hiccup agreed. "Not the shore. There is a place further up the tree line, out of the wind. I will leave a mark where you will find it."

They gave him a nod each, which was more than any of them had expected to give a demon that morning, and then they went.

Hiccup stood on the black rock with the fire dying blue behind him and watched the three of them start up the long slope toward the cliffs. Small and slow, picking their way over the stones.

Something eased in his chest that had been clenched for a very long time.

It had gone well.

It had gone better than well.

He put a hand to his side, pressing flat over the cracked rib, and stood there breathing shallow and watching until they were gone.