Chapter 26: Into the Blizzard

She could not tell how long she was out there.

The wind took the torch almost at once.

After that there was only the ground, and the shape of the slope under her feet, and the memory of a direction.

The tree line. He had said the tree line. Out of the wind. He would leave a mark.

She fell twice. The second time she stayed down longer than she meant to and had to talk herself up out of the snow the way you would coax a stranger.

So she started shouting.

"HICCUP!"

Over and over, until the cold got into her chest and turned the shouting into something thin and useless.

One moment there was nothing.

The next there were hands on her shoulders, hauling her upright, and a voice going at her, furious.

"What is wrong with you?"

He was shaking. Not from the cold.

"You walked into a blizzard. In rags. Alone. At night. On a cliff road. To find me." His grip tightened. "Do you have any idea, do you have the faintest idea, what I would have found out here in the morning?"

"Children," she said.

The cold was into her bones now. She could not feel her toes.

He stopped.

"Five. They went for shellfish at the bays. Sixteen men in the north forest, and nobody can go out, nobody can see."

Her teeth were going too hard to finish it.

She did not need to.

Hiccup let go of her shoulders, looked once into the night toward the bays, and nodded.

He put her under the lee of a rock, out of the wind.

He barked a word, and the great black shape that had been standing behind him the whole time without her noticing came round and curled itself into a wall between her and the storm.

He built a heap of driftwood and dead pine one-handed, faster than she could follow.

Toothless lit it with a sound like a furnace door opening.

Blue fire. Warmth hitting her skin like a slap.

"Stay," Hiccup said. "Do not move from this fire. If you move from this fire I will be very unpleasant about it."

Then he was gone into the white.

Hiccup could not hear a thing.

A storm this size did to his ears what thunder does to a whisper. His range was a few dozen paces of screaming wind and nothing else.

Out here he was as blind as any of them.

Good, he thought grimly, working down the slope with one arm clamped over his ribs. Then do it the old way.

Because he knew this island.

He knew the bays ran shallow. He knew the wind tonight was coming hard out of the north, which put the whole eastern face of that shoreline in a wind shadow. And he knew there were a few places along it where the rock undercut.

He found them not long after, in a sea cave barely deeper than a cart. Five of them jammed together at the back of it with their arms locked around each other.

One was already unconscious.

The others were not, but they had gone past shivering, and he knew that was the bad sign and not the good one.

By his own arithmetic they should have been dead before he came down the slope.

The cave was the whole reason they were not. No wind got into it, and five small bodies were packed into a space the size of a cart, each one keeping the next one alive without the faintest idea it was doing it.

Then the tallest of them looked up and saw what was standing in the mouth of the cave.

The sound she made was very small.

He had forgotten. That was the honest truth of it.

He had spent the whole run down the slope thinking about wind shadows and undercut rock, and had not once thought about what a child would see. And what a child saw was a pale horned shape filling the only way out, snow steaming off its shoulders, green eyes lit up in the dark like a lantern behind a keyhole.

They all pushed back against the rock. One of the small ones started to cry, and it was a thin exhausted sound with nothing left in it.

Not one of them ran.

There was nowhere to run to, and they were too cold to try.

He crouched down. It did not help much.

"I know," he said.

He kept his voice low and even, the same one he used on frightened dragons, and he did not come any closer.

"I know what I look like. I am not going to touch you unless you let me. You are allowed to be as frightened of me as you want."

The crying one stopped.

"Your camp is up the hill. They are all looking for you and they cannot get down here, because they cannot see. I can."

He held one hand out flat, palm up, and left it there.

"So I am going to take you home now. All five of you. And you can shout at me the whole way if it helps."

The tallest girl stared at his hand a long moment.

Then she said, in a very small and very steady voice, "Erlend's gone to sleep and he will not wake up."

"I know. He is first."

Hiccup went in and got the unconscious boy, and the moment he had the child against his chest all the fight went out of the rest of them at once.

He got his robe off and wrapped the boy in it and held him against bare skin, which was the warmest thing available for a mile in any direction.

Then he took the other four. Two under his left arm like sacks of grain, one over his shoulder, and the tallest girl he simply told to hold on to his back and not let go.

She locked her arms round his neck hard enough to bruise a normal man.

"Am I hurting you," she said, near his ear, after a while.

"No."

That was a lie, though not because of her.

The ribs had opened somewhere between the cave and the cliff path.

The flesh had knitted itself shut days ago. It was the bone that had not.

Under the weight of five children he could feel it working against itself, a small grinding shift with every step up the slope, and somewhere in it the new skin had gone again and let the whole thing out.

He stopped thinking about it and kept walking.

They had got everything in before the white came down, and it had taken every pair of hands on that plateau to do it.

Salt fish and the last of the grain, carried down in loads. The water butts. Every stick of dry wood on the island, because wet wood in a cave is a joke told at your own expense. Furs, pots, the seed nobody had, the little each family had scraped together in a month of being alive.

And every sword.

They came down last, stacked and roped and carried in by Rum's men because Rum's men were the ones who had them, and nobody in that column of frozen people going down through the mouths thought about it twice, because it was blowing hard enough to take a grown man off his feet and there was no room in anybody's head for anything except getting under the rock.

Haaland thought about it afterwards. He thought about it a great deal.

The watch fire in the mouth of the largest cave was the only thing burning in the world.

A couple of men were on it, backs to the wind, and neither of them saw anything until it was almost on top of them.

Something came out of the whiteout and was ten paces from the fire before either of them knew it was there.

Two children under one arm. A third over its shoulder. A girl clinging to its back. A fourth bundled against its chest in a black robe.

Somebody screamed.

Every blade in that camp came up at once. A dozen men boiled up out of the cave mouths into the snow with swords in their hands, and the rest came crowding out behind them, until half a hundred people stood in the storm staring at what had walked up out of it.

They saw him first.

Pale. Horned. Bare to the waist, steaming in the cold, snow packed into every line of him.

Then they saw what he was carrying, and the whole thing stopped making sense.

Nobody moved. Nobody could work out what they were looking at, and the swords stayed up only because nobody had told the arms holding them to do anything else.

So Hiccup did the one thing there was to do, which was to move slowly and keep his hands where they could be watched.

He went down on one knee in the snow at the exact edge of the firelight.

He set them on their feet one at a time. Turned each of them by the shoulders toward the fire and gave them a small push.

The girl on his back had to be prised loose, finger by finger, because she had locked up and could not make herself let go.

Then he laid the last one down carefully on the cleared stone.

"He needs warmth on his chest, not on his hands and feet."

His voice came out rough and quiet, and it carried anyway.

"Do not put him near the flames. Skin against skin is better. He went under about an hour ago."

Then he stood up.

And that was when they saw the blood.

With his arms finally empty and the firelight full on him, the whole left side of him was wet and dark from the ribs down. It was running freely and steaming where it came, and there was a great deal of it.

It had been there the entire time, under two children and a girl's arms and a boy wrapped in his robe, and not one of them had been able to see it until now.

He did not appear to have noticed it himself.

He stepped back into the night.

Nobody swung.

Half a hundred people in the snow with blades in their hands, and not one arm moved, and afterward not one of them could say exactly why.

The mother got to her son.

She got both arms round him and dropped to her knees with him and made a sound with no words in it at all. Then she turned around, still on her knees, to say something to the shape at the edge of the light.

There was nothing there.

Only snow, going sideways, and the dark past it.

The hunting party came in on their own a few hours later. All sixteen of them, roped together and half dead, navigating by the pure stubbornness of men who refuse to die within sight of a fire they cannot see.

They had been out in it the whole time. Nobody had rescued them, and they were fiercely proud of that for about as long as it took them to get warm and hear what had happened at the watch fire.

After that they did not have much to say.

The boy in the robe lived.

He would not let go of that robe. Not that night, and not for six days after it. When they finally got it off him to dry it, somebody hung it on a cut stone spur beside the big fire, back under the roof where the smoke went, and it stayed there, black and torn and enormous.

Nobody took it down.

The storm did not break for another four days.

It eased and came back and eased again, never long enough to be worth anything.

Nobody could fish. Nobody could work the forest. The bays were white and the north path was gone under a drift as tall as a man.

The camp sat in the first two chambers behind the cave mouths, burning through the last of the dry wood and eating what was left of what they had, which by the third day was not much, and by the fourth was almost nothing.

Nobody went deeper. There was deeper to go, and everybody could feel that there was, and not one person suggested it. What they wanted was the sound of the weather they were not in, and you only got that near the front.

Hunger in a blizzard is a different animal to hunger in fair weather. There is nowhere to put the effort. A man can starve on a warm day and still walk out and try something.

So when the next morning came and there was a deer lying in the snow a dozen paces from the mouth of the largest cave, nobody asked questions about it for very long.

Gutted, bled, and clean. Laid out on flat stones with the snow brushed off them, in weather that had kept a hundred people inside a hill for four days.

Which meant that whatever had put it there had walked up to where they were sleeping in the middle of that, and stood there, and gone away again.

Nobody said that part out loud either.

The morning after that there were three.

Then a stack of dry firewood, split, where no dry wood had any business being.

Then a whole run of fish, laid out in rows on the flat rock by the north path with the frost still on them.

Every dawn.

Never a sound in the night.

Never a footprint anybody could follow more than fifty paces.

Hiccup could not make them listen.

So he would simply be useful. Every day. He would let them draw their own conclusions and he would not ask them for one single thing in return.

It was, he reflected, the first patient plan he had ever applied to people instead of dragons.

He was almost proud of it.

Down in the camp the stories started, and then stopped being stories.

It left the deer.

"He must be hunting the whole north valley for this," said the goatherd, and nobody at that fire corrected him.

Rum felt the ground moving under him and did the worst possible thing.

He forbade it.

Nobody, he said, standing on his plinth with his jaw set, was to touch the meat. It was bait. It was the same trick as the raft, hope handed over so it could be taken away again, and any man who ate from the demon's hand was eating his own chain.

On the fifth morning of it, Rum had a deer carcass, whole and good and enough to feed forty people, thrown off the cliff into the sea.

Eivind watched it go.

He stood at the cliff edge with his arms at his sides and watched good venison turn over twice in the air and vanish into the grey water, and behind him in the camp there were children whose wrists you could close a hand around.

Eivind was still standing there long after dark.

Because forbidding a hungry man his food was a thing masters did to slaves.

Because he had just watched it done again, on this cliff, in the name of a pale face that had been standing at the back of his head for days and would not leave.

So Eivind stood in the cold and let himself think, at last, about the night the man died at the edge of the camp.

About the three sets of footsteps arriving together in the dark, and the fourth man already waiting for them there.

About Rum's voice saying, without one scrap of heat in it, that this was what came of talking.

And about how afterward all four of them walked away, unhurried, not one of them out of breath.

He had known that night.

He had known it and put it somewhere he did not have to look at it.

Eivind stood at the cliff with his fists closed and made up his mind, finally and completely, to say out loud exactly what he had heard.