Chapter 28: Once more, With feeling

"Kill that thing!"

The order was clear, sound, and loud.

Still, for all their wits and the weeks they had spent hunting the Night Spawn, the same Night Spawn standing now before them, not one soul dared be the first to move.

It was a dozen armed men.

An order given plain in front of everyone presents, and yet they stood there with their blades up and stared at the thing.

No.

The boy.

"Are you deaf?" Rum's voice went across the chamber like a whip crack. "It is sitting down. It is sitting in front of you with its hands in its lap. Kill it!"

That shook the braver ones out of it.

Hiccup saw them coming and did absolutely nothing. They approach, they were coming, and yet he was at peace.

Then it happened.

It was as if every muscle in him drew down at once, without being told, and as if his skin went tight and cold and became durable as steel.

The first sword flashed down its arc and onto his shoulder and rang.

It rang like a hammer on an anvil, yet it didn't bite, the blade uselessly jumped out of the man's hands and skittered away over the floor.

It stunned Hiccup as much as it stunned everyone else. He had been bracing for that strike.

He didn't have time to think about it though, the next one hit his back and again his muscles coiled and this time it simply snapped clean across a hand's width from the hilt, and the piece went spinning.

The third man had a cruel look in his eye, his strike flared pain across his broken ribs.

He hit him with a strike of the knee Hiccup made a small sound through his teeth and the air went out of his lungs, but otherwise he was fine, he'd seen it coming.

The next strike never came.

The bunch of them had their swords up and could not make themselves bring them down.

Not if he wasn't fighting back.

They exchanged a few glances at each other, and the one who delivered that strike to his ribs looked just as puzzled as the other ones.

Then they looked around, and were they expected a crowd of jubilant people roaring for the blood of this demon, they found nothing but disapproval and hostility to their little display of violence.

They let go of their swords at last, one after another clattering away on the floor, walking away from him.

"I burned your raft." He finally caught his breath. "Yes. That was me."

He took a long breath.

"Not to torture you. Not to burn your hopes. I burned it because this island is my home, and it is the only one I have got, and if word of it ever reaches the mainland then I will lose it."

He amassed the courage to look up at them.

"That is the whole reason. I don't mean to hurt you, or to do wrong to you-"

Nobody spoke.

"It was not fair. It cost you many days and it must have been hard to cope with your loss of freedom and I'm sorry for it. But I would do it again, and you deserve to hear me say that out loud instead of guessing at it."

"You butchered, you murdered all the men who kept us," somebody hissed.

"I did." Hiccup turned to look at them. "They were slavers, and I am not sorry about that one."

His gaze went round the crowd.

"If any of you want me to be sorry about that, I am afraid I cannot help you."

Nobody had an answer.

So he took the silence and used it, because it was the only opening he was going to get.

"Now let me tell you what I actually came down here to say."

He shifted where he sat, winced, and kept going.

"You have all been living on this island for a month as though it were a prison. You have lived in little more than a few paces of caves, cliffs, and ruins you are frightened to walk into. So none of you have seen it."

He nodded toward the mouth, north, past the snowstorm, toward a tree line none of them could see.

"The forests run many days' walk. There is deer in it, and boar, and birds enough to feed this camp for ever. The bays west of here are so thick with fish you can grab them by the scoop without a boat."

He looked round the ring of faces.

"There is fresh water off the wells, there is entire fields of good soil on the south terraces that will take seed at any time, that will feed you for generations- there are hills and hills where to raise as many cattle as you will-"

He put a hand flat on the worked floor beside him.

"This goes back. This goes a long way back. Chamber after chamber of dry cut stone with the roofs still on them, it is warmer the deeper in you go, there is more of it than a hundred people could fill. I have slept down here for a year. You have been huddling in the doorway of my house for many days and you have not once looked past the firelight-"

He let that sit.

"There is no lord here. There is nobody to pay. No tithe, no levy, no raiding season, the dragon raids don't reach this far, there's nobody coming up the fjord at dawn to take your wife or burn your barn or take your children."

His voice hardened.

"Nobody here owns anybody. Not one person on this island belongs to another. That is not a promise I am making you. That is simply how it is going to be for as long as I am alive."

The chamber had gone quiet.

Hiccup had never been the best at convincing people or selling his ideas, and yet, you would have to be deaf not to hear the passion and the resolve of his voice.

"I have never hurt one of you," he breathed in. "Not on the beach. Not in a month of you hunting for me. Not this morning with a dozen swords on me. That is not going to change."

He shook his head.

"I do not hurt innocent people."

Then he pointed, without turning his head, out through the mouth and up at the heights, where a black shape sat unmoving against a white sky.

The hundred people flinched.

"And my dragon is not to dread either. That is the other half of what I am offering you."

He let them look at it.

"Slavers have come here once already. They will come again, no doubt. These are the northern trade lanes and that is what sails them. Pirates. Raiders. Whole ships of men who take people for a living."

He turned back to the crowd.

"If any of them make landfall on this island while I am on it, I will kill them. They'll die on the beach, the same way the last lot did, not one of you will have to lift a hand. I'll protect you from them. The dragons on the cliffs will not touch you either. I will see to that. That is what I am for."

Silence.

Then, from somewhere in the middle of the crowd, a woman's voice. Her fear making the words shiver on her mouth.

"And if we want to leave?"

There it was.

"You cannot," Hiccup answered. "Not yet."

The noise that went through the chamber was a tide of murmurs and gasps.

"Look, I am not going to pretend that is anything other than what it is," he confessed.

"However, there is a thing south of here that rules every dragon between here and there, and while it lives I cannot hold this island against any true threat. So I have to kill it first."

They are going to think I am mad.

He kept going anyway.

"But when I do, then you can go home. All of you. Anyone who wants to."

"And how long?" the same woman called.

"I do not know."

"Then you are our jailer," Rum roared, he had had enough of the thing talking.

He came forward through his own men and stopped three paces off, and Haaland, watching and leaning against the pillars, had to admit the man had picked his ground well.

"Look at him," Rum said to the camp, without taking his eyes off Hiccup.

"Walking into the one hole we had left. Making a show on our stones. Very brave. Very moving." He pointed south, out past the cliffs, out over the water.

Was that a tingle of desperation on his voice.

"My wife is that way. My boy is in the water, dead somewhere between here and her. His wife is that way," a jerk of the chin at a man to his left, "and her children are that way, and the graves of half of you are that way. And this thing sits here and tells us, kindly, in our own tongue, that we may not go."

He turned in a slow circle so that the whole chamber had him.

"He feeds you. Good. A man feeds a horse too."

His voice rose.

"Kindness from a jailer is still a jail. He can bring you a deer every morning for ten years and it does not change one single thing about what he is doing."

It was the best argument anybody had made all month.

There was nothing clever to say to it, so Hiccup did not try to be clever.

"You are right," he said.

Rum stopped.

"You are right." Hiccup said it again, louder, so the back of the crowd would hear too. "I have no good answer to that. I have a true one, and none of you are going to like it."

He got his breath.

"There is no version of this where I am not doing something cruel to you. If I let you go, I gamble my home and the lives of the few people that will stay."

He turned his head toward Haaland and Oddr.

"Yet,If I keep you, I stand between you and every person who is waiting for you."

He shook his head slowly.

"So here is the ugly part."

He did not like saying it. Every person watching could see that he did not like saying it. He said it anyway, because it was true, and because Hiccup Haddock was not above using it.

His expression turned sour as he leaned back.

"Just a moon ago you were nothing but slaves starved and chained in the bottom of a ship and then sold and then worked until you either starved or died from exhaustion. No god was coming to answer your prayers, no one was going to save you. No. One."

He looked round at them.

Nobody spoke.

"I am not asking you to thank me. I do not want thanks from anyone. It would not sit right."

His jaw worked.

"I am asking you to wait. That is all. Not for ever, and not for nothing. Wait, and be fed, and be warm, and be safe, until I can make it so that you leaving does not kill everybody who stays or ruin everything I've worked so hard for."

"Then it changes nothing."

"No," Hiccup agreed, grinding his teeth now. "It does not."

Rum lifted his sword, fire on his eyes.

She moved first.

A mother came out of the crowd fast. The same woman whose boy had come in out of the blizzard wrapped in the wool of that robe.

She put herself between them.

"No," she pleaded.

"Get out of the way."

"No!"

Yet she was not the only one.

Haaland came out. Then Emerald. Then Oddr. Then others, some of them looked frightened half to death and came anyway, they stood beside the woman.

Then the tallest of the five children, before anybody could catch her arm and her mother had to come out after her and ended up standing there too, furious and weeping and not moving.

Then one of the hunting party. Then another.

It was not heroic.

It was just people shuffling out of a crowd with their heads down and their faces embarrassed, taking up positions in front of a stranger.

Inside a minute, more than half of that chamber was standing there.

Then Eivind walked out to the front of them and looked at Rum.

"Torvald."

Rum's teeth gnashed and he swung anyway.