Chapter 29: Around the Campfire

Rum swung his sword, or at least he tried his best to. He got half a step before his own men took him.

They caught his arm and his shoulders and bore him back and pressed down onto the stones.

He went down under his own faction.

Shouting that they all were fools, that they would see, that one day they would all see what he had been keeping them from.

Whatever the case may be,

what happened next took the rest of the day and most of the night.

They had a long debate about what to do with Rum and with the three others who had taken a part in the murder of Torvald, among other things.

It went on for hours with everybody talking over everybody.

The discussion turned chaotic, Oddr had to sit in the middle of it steering the whole thing with a word every quarter hour or so.

Some asked to have him bound until spring and judged then.

Some wanted him put off on the far side of the island with tools and no blade.

In the end they let him walk mostly free.

He had been disarmed, and watched, and stripped of every scrap of authority he had built. But free. Sleeping by the same fires and eating the same food as the rest of them.

Many reasons were given.

The one that carried was Oddr's, who argued that a camp which had spent a month letting one man decide things ought to be very careful about the first thing it decided for itself.

Haaland thought that decision was a mistake, he said so more than once.

The actual terms took a few more days to hammer out. It was strange, Haaland thought, watching it happen, how little there was to hammer.

The boy may have been young, but he carried himself with every bit of seriousness.

Who could blame him. The Night Spawn held every card in the negotiation and held them openly, and yet, the terms he offered weren't bad.

In fact, quite the opposite, Hiccup asked for things, suggested things.

The contrast between the leverage he had - the dragon, the intimate knowledge of the island, the prowess to do as he willed - and his amicable, even considerate way of speaking his mind made him impossible to say not to.

It was all the more shocking when one realized he had no need to do any of that. He could have demanded pretty much anything and some way or another it would have to be done.

Kind of crazy, right?

Hiccup Haddock had walked into a camp that had spent a month arming against him, sat down, let them break their swords on him, and walked out of it with the whole thing in his hands.

Then of course,

under all that persuasion sat the plain fact that not one of them would be standing here as free men if he had not gone out of his way to free them.

He never said that part again.

He had said it once, when he needed it, and then he put it away.

Still, everybody remembered, it would be impolite to not feel at least a little bit grateful for it.

Either way, Hiccup laid out most of what he knew.

The caves under the eastern slope, which where the ones they were sitting in at the moment. He pointed they were not caves at all, not properly: the cellars of the abandoned citadel, cut and pillared and roofed, going back into that hill chamber after chamber for further than any of them had ventured.

Dry stone, out of the wind, and warm enough the further in you went that a fire down there was a luxury and not a lifeline.

He had lived in them for a year, so he knew which of them flooded in hard rain and which had a roof that could not be trusted, he walked Haaland through all of it with a stick and a rock for a map.

He was careful about the food, Haaland respected him for it.

Hiccup Haddock did not offer to feed them.

He emphasized that bringing in food the last few days had been a measure to help during the unforeseen blizzard, nothing more.

So come the thaw they would hunt their own, and fish their own, and break the south terraces so in spring they could plant seed in them. He would show them where the game ran, and from which wells the water was good, and after that survival would be their problem, not his.

"You will work," he repeated. "All of you. I am not offering you a soft life, at all. I am offering you your own."

What he did offer, was the one thing none of them could have bought at any price.

He and the Night Fury would keep the island.

Anything that landed upon these shores, be it slavers, raiders, pirates off the northern lanes, any ship at all, he would take care of.

Every wild dragon on those cliffs, which had frightened the camp witless for a month, would leave them alone, he would see to it personally.

It was curious, Haaland had spent most of his life selling protection to lords and merchants and frightened towns. So he knew just how valuable protection could be.

It was a sound proposal.

The only negative side was what they already knew: nobody would be allowed to sail for the mainland until the thing in the south was dead.

It might be a year. It might be five. Hiccup would not give them a date.

Which was actually fair, because a date he could not keep would be far more problematic than just keeping it vague.

They did not hold a vote.

There was no need for one, most of them were staying in the island, and so most of them did not feel troubled by the negative side of the terms.

It sort of made sense, Haaland concluded.

There was plenty of land here.

He already had a rough measure of how much, however, Hiccup made it clear that the island was massive, perhaps the size of a smaller continent. In any case, it than a hundred people could walk in a week, not a soul alive to claim it.

Most of them had never owned one single thing in their lives.

Yet here there were halls and buildings made of good stone standing empty for the taking. There were fish so thick that a child with a pole could feed a family.

There was no lord. There was no levy. No raiding season, no press gang, and no winter where somebody decides which mouths are worth the keeping.

Then again, what exactly, was waiting back home? A village that let the ships take them? A field that belonged to a mediocre ruler? The same hunger they had been walked out of?

The irony was you do not fill a slaver's hold with people who will be missed.

That was the plain truth of it, every one of them knew it about themselves, and here, for the first time in any of their lives, it turned out to be a piece of good fortune.

By the third night people had stopped talking about going home and started arguing about which of the ruined buildings outside they wanted.

Of course, not all of them.

There were still people who had somebody. Really had somebody.

They would take the first boat the day it was possible, they were staying only because there was no other choice, and they would not forgive it.

Hiccup accepted that.

"That is fair," he shrugged. "I would be the same in your position. When the time is right, I will help you build the boat myself."

It turned out the answer to the whole problem of not knowing what to say to people was to be busy near them until it became easier.

So he hauled stone.

These people had decided to stay, and people who have decided to stay do not patch a windbreak. They build a wall that will stand the test of time.

So the work turned from surviving the week into something slower and more stubborn.

They went up into the ruins with purpose for the first time since they climbed the cliff road on the clear days, in whatever hours the weather gave them, and back down through the mouths of the caves before the light went, because it was still midwinter and nobody was mad.

Then every evening the whole hundred of them went back down under the eastern slope and slept in the warm caves with the snowstorm going over the island. That is where they stayed, from the blizzard through to the end of winter.

Of course, the talking was still awkward, and there was no elegant way through that part.

The children were the first to dare approach the scary demon, actually.

He was setting a lintel stone when a girl of about eight planted herself in front of him, entirely unafraid, and asked whether his horns hurt.

"No," Hiccup replied.

"Can you feel them?"

"Sort of. It's like fingernails. Or, no."

He frowned, genuinely trying to get it right.

"Maybe more like teeth. You know how a tooth is yours but you cannot really wiggle it."

"Can I touch them?"

"I would rather you did not."

"Why?"

"Because I..." He stopped. "Because I have never been asked that before, you are the first person who has-"

The girl laughed at him, not bothering to listen him finish explaining, and skipped off.

Toothless came down into the camp about a week after that.

He came at a walk, at a measured pace, with his wings tight and his head all raised low, moving with the elaborate care of a very large creature who has been told to behave.

Half the camp went up the walls, of course. The other half just froze.

None of them were to blame, seeing a dragon this close for the first time would be intimidating for anyone.

Still, if Hiccup Haddock was going to be living together with these people for years to come, so it was better to get them used to Toothless as soon as possible.

Uhm.

It was the same boy who had fainted out during the blizzard, who had not let anybody take that black robe off him for many days. He walked to them under the perplexed gazes of everyone and put his hand flat on the dragon's snout.

Toothless went cross-eyed looking down at him.

That made the boy giggle, high and hysterical, and after that it was over.

Not fixed. Over.

Toothless had as much charm as he had appetite, you had to give him that. Seeing one of them touching the dragon the rest of the children just ran to see who would get to touch it next.

Barely a few minutes later they were all just rolling and skipping around running after each other playing some version of tag.

That was fast.

That evening a woman brought Hiccup food.

He stared at the bowl a moment too long before he took it, and she went away so quickly he barely got the chance to thank her. He sat down to eat at the edge of the firelight, on a fallen pillar drum, a few paces outside the ring where everybody else was sitting.

He noticed the distance. He chose it. Kind of.

Oddr came and sat beside him uninvited, which was the only way Oddr ever sat anywhere because the old man could be a bore at times. It was barely a minute later that he started making little remarks about the way he ate, the way he sat, and whatever thing was available to be picky about.

Seeing the old man being insufferable Haaland rolled his eyes and came over sitting on the other side. The two of them talked work for some hours until the fire turned to embers:

Which of the south terraces to break first, and whether the soil there had gone sour in all those centuries or was still fertile.

Which of the old sealed storerooms might still be dry enough to use, and what could be stored into them before the snow.

Which halls to fix and make sound before the next hard rain and which to leave standing empty another year. Whether it was worth building a proper smokehouse before autumn.

Hiccup said it was, that he would build the thing himself if somebody would tell him what a smokehouse was supposed to look like, cause he had only ever seen the inside of one.

It was a calm back and forth, relaxing, even.

It was also the most ordinary conversation he had had since he was... fifteen, he chuckled.

Emerald came and sat near him too, sometimes. Though she was pretty shy about it.

What she wasn't shy about was the whole staring business.

The girl would take a bowl she did not much intend to eat and settle across the fire from him, and every so often would look up.

She would find him watching the flames with that tired crease between his brows and let herself look for some few heartbeats and then drop her eyes the instant before his head turned.

Truth be told every so often, so would he.

Who could blame him though. The girl was really pretty, with that blond silky hair of hers and those bright green eyes.

Gods.

He would glance over every time and find her studying her supper with great concentration, and conclude, reasonably enough, that she must have been... staring at the wall behind him.

Must be that. I guess.

He shrugged and dismissed any ridiculous ideas and so they went on like that for the better part of a fortnight, the pair of them entirely convinced of the other's indifference while Oddr watched the whole performance with a look of incredulity plastered all over him.

It's been a week, just how dense can this pair be.

Regardless, it was good entertainment, so he wasn't about to spoil it.

He was asleep.

Emerald noticed before anybody else.

He had gone quiet in the middle of something Haaland was saying, and Haaland was standing there with his mouth half open. The boy on the fallen column had his back against a broken pillar with his chin down and a bowl still balanced on his knee.

Sitting up. In the open. Was he that tired?

Then she saw the faint puffy circles under his eyes, and the exhaustion evident on his face just a few moments ago, and the fact she had never seen the boy sleep.

Nobody woke him.

Haaland carefully took the bowl off his knee and set it down on the stones and let him lean on the wall so he wouldn't fall. And a woman brought over a fur, one of the good ones, and laid it across his shoulders and went away again without a word.

And the camp went on murmuring around embers of the campfire, and the supposed demon of the island slept as one of them.

And not one person there was afraid.