Chapter 30: The Chief of Berk

The sky had gone a deep flavorless white. The snows had stopped with the last blizzard, and what lay ahead for the village of Berk was yet another good spring.

It had been a bad winter.

The blizzard came down out from nowhere, from far reaches of the north and sat on the island the better part of a week. Men went out on ropes to find their own sheds. Some of the old fishing houses on the low side came down under the weight of it.

Now it was over, the drifts were going grey at the edges, the world smelled of wet wood, thaw, and fresh grass.

To him, it all smelled of smoke.

There were two big chairs by the fire in the chief's house, and a small one.

Stoick the Vast sat in one of the big ones every night. Gobber took the other whenever he came by to visit. Nobody ever sat in the small one, Stoick had got very good at not looking at it.

He had thought about burning it.

Many times.

He had thought about a great many things in these two years, most of them at this hour, most of them with a horn of ale in his hand.

It was a small chair.

It had been commissioned for a boy of eight who never quite grew into it, it sat at the wrong angle to the hearth because that had been the angle the boy preferred, nobody had moved it since.

He could put it on the fire right now.

It would feed the flames and keep him warm for another hour, it would take a moment.

He did not. He could not work out why, since he had already burned everything else.

The horn was empty.

He let out a long breath and filled it again. That was the rhythm of the evenings.

He held the councils. He walked the streets. He counted the winter stores twice a month and cut the rations when they needed cutting and took the complaints on his own back rather than pass them down.

He put the fishing crews together in the summer and settled who went out with whom, which is a harder job than it sounds when the men involved have been feuding since their grandfathers.

He talked trade with the passing hulls, he haggled well, he got Berk a fair price more often than not.

He was still a good chief. That much had not changed.

Then came the evenings. When he finally got to come home, and shut the door, and drink until his mind would go quiet enough to let him sleep.

Gobber knew, and Gobber was the only one who cared.

He had known about his drinking problems for a year and a half, perhaps because the old smith knew him better than anybody left alive did.

Stoick's gaze settled into the fire, his head swimming.

The room had begun to do the slow thing it did at this hour, where the walls came in a little and the corners went soft and the light off the hearth got warmer and further away.

He was aware of the beam over his head.

Of the rack of his father's weapons on the far wall, which he had not taken down in twenty years and never would. Of the shutters rattling as the thaw wind found them.

And of the stairs.

They were right there at the edge of his sight, the way they always were, going up out of the firelight into the dark of the upper floor, and his eye went to them the way a tongue goes to a broken tooth.

At the top of them there was a door.

He shook his head, and the urge to go up died in him again.

It was empty anyway.

The room was a bed frame and a floor and some empty desk and little else.

Because the day after the cove, Stoick the Vast had gone up those stairs with a sack and taken everything his son owned.

The drawings. Hundreds of them, on scraped hide and bark and the backs of ledger sheets Hiccup had no business taking out of the great hall, and every single one of them was of dragons. Of wings. Jaws. Tails, in six positions, on one many pages.

The little leather book he was always writing in and always hiding.

The contraptions. Gods, the contraptions. Bits of gear and spring and leather strap. Half of them unfinished, and none of them working, and all of them useless.

He let a sob die in his throat.

He had burned all of it that night. Every scrap.

He had burned it himself in the pit behind the house, feeding it in a handful at a time, and it had taken most of the night, because it burned so slowly in the rain.

He burned it out of fury.

He had been so filled with rage at the time, too much rage to see things clearly.

Because Stoick had not stood over that fire weeping. No.

He had stood over it with his jaw locked and his hands shaking, and every time he fed another sheet of it into the flames he had thought, this is what you have done to us. This is what you have done to me.

Because his clueless boy had made a bargain with the devil.

That was how Stoick understood it then, and in the part of him that never learned anything, it was how he understood it still.

Who could it have come to that point? Everyone knew what a dragon was!

Everyone on this island had buried their loved ones because of those wretched creatures. And yet his son, his own blood, had gone out into the woods and found the worst of all of them and put his life at risk and dared called the thing a friend.

That was not a mistake, a mistake is dropping a hammer.

That was a deal.

The devil had known exactly who to go for, and lure.

It had not gone to Snotlout, who was loud and thick and belonged. It had not gone to the Hofferson girl, who was hard as a nail and knew precisely who she was.

It had gone for his Hiccup.

The only one who wasn't gifted enough to lift a shield. The one the whole village laughed at without meaning, who ate his supper at the edge of a room full of people who had known him since birth, and who wanted so badly, so obviously, to be worth something to somebody.

Such a wretched creature had no trouble.

No trouble luring his Hiccup, the boy had not even thought- the thought of telling his dad, his father, that he was hiding a Night Fury had not even crossed his mind.

Whose fault is that, hissed the part of him the ale always struggled so hard to drown.

There had been a hundred nights before the cove when the boy had come to him with something in his hands and started talking, fast, always too fast, the way he did when he was excited.

And Stoick had said not now, son.

He could not remember a single one of those conversations anymore.

He could remember saying not now.

Yet if he only had listened. Once. Properly. Sat down for once and actually sat there, present, and asked what any of it was and what it was for, and been told.

Then there would have been nothing left in that boy for a devil to reach for. There would have been no hole in his Hiccup for the likes of a dragon to fill.

Stoick had spent two years failing to find a way around his mistakes.

There was not one.

The fire had turned all of it to ash.

And now, two years on, there was nothing left.

Not a drawing. Not a line of the boy's handwriting, which had been terrible, and which he would have burned the chief's hall to see again. Not a shirt. Not one single thing in the world to remind him of his son.

And now Stoick was losing his son's face.

He could still remember the shape of him. Always thin. Always cold. He could still hear his voice.

But the face had begun to blur, and there was no image to check it against, and every month there was a little less of it, and it would go on that way until there was nothing left of it.

He had been so angry that he had burned his boy out of their home.

Then the anger had gone the way anger always goes, and what came up underneath it was a grief so vast, so absolute.

By the time he realized, there was nothing left to grieve over.

He had arrived months too late to save one scrap of hide from that fire.

Yet he still had one thing.

Stoick turned his head and looked at it, and it was a small chair at the wrong angle to the hearth.

How was it possible that the gods had never to let him grieve.

Twenty four moons is a long time in a place that buries people every raiding season. There were funerals that first winter and a bad epidemic of fever the next, and a good harvest that same spring, and some weddings, and some dozen children born.

The seasons kept coming and nobody remembered his Hiccup any more.

All they remembered was the year of the bad cove business.

He had heard it said at his own council table in hushed tone, in exactly that way, yet not one man had so much as blinked.

The year of the bad cove business.

They only spoke of it properly when out of his hearing. They spoke of it as a shame. Stoick's boy had gone bad in the head, or been witched, or seduced, and had died siding with a dragon of all things against his own people.

The forge had a new apprentice.

His name was Oak or something similar. He was sixteen, built like a barn door. Gobber had taken him on that first spring because a one armed smith cannot swing a hammer for ever.

The lad was steady.

Strong as an ox and twice as patient. He could hold a piece dead still on the anvil for as long as you needed it held, in all that time he had broken nothing.

He did precisely what he was told and not one thing more.

Gobber would set him a dozen nails to make and come back to a dozen nails, all identical, all adequate, and the lad would be standing there waiting to be told what to do next.

No questions. Nothing new. Nothing changed.

He had never once in his life looked at a thing and wondered whether it might be done differently. "He's a fine worker," Gobber reassured, meaning it kindly.

And that was true, and Stoick knew it was true, and he also knew that the forge had never been so awfully quiet.

There had been a time you could hear that shop from halfway down the hill.

Not the hammering. The arguing.

The boy's voice going on and on about some idea while Gobber told him to shut up and work, and the sound of something being taken apart that had been perfectly fine to begin with.

Stoick had stood in the doorway of that forge with his hands behind his back and nodded, because yes, he seemed a fine lad. Then he had gone out and walked down to the docks and stood in the sea breeze for a while.

The fire of the hearth had burned low.

Stoick leaned forward, took a piece of dry split pine out of the basket, fed it in, and watched the flames come up around them and take hold.

There was the matter of the succession, but that was already settled.

Spitelout had spent two years quietly moving his son into the empty hollow his son left. He had done nothing so crude as claim it.

Only Snotlout had been pushed at the chief's left hand in council. Snotlout given a boat on the raids. Snotlout's name tossed back and forth until it stopped sounding strange and wrong.

The lad had improved, in all honesty.

Somewhere along the way Snotlout Jorgenson had turned into something not far off competent.

Stoick could not even resent them for it.

He could only sit at the head of that table and look down the length of it at Spitelout Jorgenson, and say nothing.

Because officially, Spitelout Jorgenson had done nothing wrong.

He had thrown an axe at a dragon and hit the dragon's defender in the confusion, no man there could have known where the boy would step.

Stoick had never brought up the matter, and he never would.

His actual thoughts, they would have to stay buried, or his rage would break this tribe in half.