Chapter 33: The Shield Maiden II

The best warrior among the young generation for as long as anyone had bothered to keep. The finest axe on the whole island for years running.

Astrid Hofferson.

That day she stood at the edge of that cove and watched a boy she had known all her life, her same age, bleed out of a hole in his shoulder.

That day she lifted her hand halfway.

She had never moved it.

She could have put herself in front of him, if only she'd been thinking, she could have put herself the way he was putting himself in front of the dragon.

She could have had everyone stop. If only.

But she did nothing at all. She stood with her arm half raised and did nothing but watch while he bled out over the sea, his body carried off to a far away place.

Right, her mother asked her something about the nets.

Astrid blinked, and the table came back. The smell of barley. The low grey morning light through the shutter. Her father's boots by the door where he had left them.

"The far bay," she nodded. "right, I will go up after."

She wolfed down the porridge in a moment, she took the bowl to the water and rinsed it and set it upside down on the board.

"Bye, bye."

The door closed behind her and the bright cold spring morning slapped her awake.

The pier wasn't far off the northern water had began to turn its grey to deep blues, a part of her couldn't help but note down that this way was prettier.

What am even is that thought- Argh!

She pulled the netting, or yanked it, and placed it on the floorboards and started mending it with a clear focus. Then it was done, it took a few minutes, she pushed them all back into the sea and picked her pace.

The young ones were already waiting for her.

She had been put in charge of teaching the younger ones combat form, and so that's what she be doing. That's what she did.

Thus the day returned to colour.

The hours blurred by in a series of drills and instructional, and running laps around the woods, and lunch, and it was already evening, carrying buckets up from the well because her mother couldn't carry them well anymore.

She did not think about him again for the rest of the day. She had had her hundred strikes in that morning, and so that was the arrangement.

For some reason, she visited the cove about once a moon.

She had never told anybody. There was no reason to, it would only make things more difficult for everyone, and she would not have known how to explain it.

She simply went. Sat on the same rock for an hour, and came back down.

There was nothing there.

Nothing worth pointing at.

Two winters had gone by. The grass had come up lush and green across the whole of it, and the pool sat flat and clear.

If she didn't know any better she might have called it a pretty place.

It was sheltered from the wind. It was surprisingly warm in the afternoon. It was the sort of spot, she imagined, a young couple might slip away from the world to.

Astrid let her gaze fall on the ground. She sat on her rock with her arms round her knees.

She had been remembering something stupid. For some reason.

The winter they were eleven and he had built a contraption for throwing snowballs. She remembered how excited he was to show her. How it had gone off backwards and knocked out one of his own milk teeth, and she had laughed so hard she had to sit down in the snow.

He had gone scarlet, and then started laughing too.

How was it-?

Gods.

How was it possible that all these memories. That all of these things she seemed to remember- These many stupid things she had not recalled in seventeen years. All these tears and joys and moments they shared together when they were so little.

Despite how little we talked.

Her head buried on her arms, a wetness on her eyes that wasn't tears.

Why did she have to remember all of them, all of these, these many years after he died. Why did she have to miss him when it was this late?

Some small part of her knew.

The thought she would never say, the one she would have to take to her grave.

I liked him.

The admission, even if it was inside her own head, after so many years of looking the other way and pretending it wasn't what it was... It escaped with a sob and tears she had been holding for too long.

She let herself cry.

The cove was far away, it was her secret place, no one would come, no one would hear her cry. So she did.

She cried until the tears had ran themselves out.

Until her breath came flat and level again, and her hands rested still on her knees, and the wind on her wet cheeks reminded her what she was.

Then she scrubbed her face raw on her sleeve, roughly, it was over.

She set her back straight against the rock. Her tired eyes staring the white vast skies beyond the canopy. She inhaled, slow, exhaled.

If she was going to look at the thing at all. Then she would look at it plain.

That much she owed him. The rest of it she owed herself.

She shook her head, once more.

She liked Snotlout because he was growing a spine.

She liked Fishlegs because he was kind, and the twins because they were funny, and everybody else on Berk because they all had their quirks and their faults and she had grown up inside the lot of it.

Hiccup had none of that.

And yet she had loved him in a way she had didn't have a word for.

He noticed things.

He was quicker than any of them in that regard. He blurted things sideways, without thinking, most times under his breath. Some, she remembered, that were funnier than anything Snotlout managed at full volume.

Her cheek was wet again.

She had not noticed. She let out a slow breath and swiped those too.

Hiccup had been small.

Completely useless in a fight. Completely useless out of a fight too.

Astrid Hofferson at fifteen would have chewed through an anvil rather than let anybody catch her looking him twice.

So she had been sharp with him instead.

Sharp and short and dismissive, for years, because it was all easier, it kept everybody from working the truth out, herself included.

She had assumed there would always be time later.

When they were both adults.

When Hiccup grew out of his hiccupness. When he finally put a bit of muscle across those bird-thin shoulders, when his voice steadied out of the cracking, maybe when he grew a beard.

When he inevitably grew into the man his father had always meant him to be.

When he took some of his responsibility, his seriousness, his demeanor, his wit, just some of it. When he was standing as her future Chief, not the runt permanently grounded at the smithy.

When...

She had always imagined she would walk up to him, some evening, after some late council and finally tell him quiet and plain what she had spent all those years hiding.

Some winter evening. The fire low. Sharing a cup between them. That stupid crooked grin of his going scarlet at the ears the way it had gone scarlet in the snow.

She had been patient with herself about it. She had assumed there was more time.

We all do.

She had been waiting for him to grow up.

Yet, sitting on that rock she understood, it would have never happened.

She had been... waiting.

Waiting for the boy in front of her to hurry up and turn into somebody easier to love. Waiting, praying, hissing at the small, quick, clever, yet unbearable him to begone so that the man she envisioned, standing next to, in front of the whole village, could finally be.

That was the whole of it.

She had liked him, she had been unkind to him about it, and her village had opened him up with an axe and he had bled to death somewhere out over the cold seas.

She did not dress it up as more than that.

She was seventeen now.

She was practical, she knew perfectly well that whatever she had felt back then did not matter now.

Half the girls she knew had wanted somebody at that age and married somebody else a few years later and were perfectly happy about it.

It was life.

One cannot undo a thing that is already done.

Not by sitting on a rock sobbing about it.

Life on Berk went on, it went on well.

There was a way people spoke about Astrid Hofferson now. It had changed over the last years, and she had noticed the change without ever letting on that she had.

It had started as that Hofferson girl is good.

Then it became the best of the young generation.

Somewhere in the last year the qualifier had fallen off the end of it, men who had been fighting dragons since before she was born watched her run every raid and could either lie and be bitter or admit, simply, that she was the best axe on Berk.

Nobody counted Stoick.

Of course, you did not measure people against Stoick any more than you measured them against the gods.

In the great hall, late, with the ale having gone round a few times, the old warriors started using a different phrase about her altogether.

They used it the way men talk about a hard winter that is certain to come.

War Chief.

They never said it to her face. She only heard it on rumors, whispers at the end of the table, still she carried it out of that hall like a stone in her pocket.

She was proud of her growth.

She wasn't the only one that had grown though.

Snotlout was slowly being shaped for the chair, and he had turned, at some point when nobody was looking, into something not half bad.

He could hold a shield wall together.

He had opinions in council that were occasionally worth hearing. Still loud, still lousy, still Snotlout: Just a remarkably competent, honorable, better version of Snotlout.

The others were also doing fine.

Fishlegs ran half the village's stores and records, he was easily worth ten warriors for it. Ruffnut and Tuffnut were still Ruffnut and Tuffnut.

Astrid trained with all of them nearly every day.

The seasons had kept coming.

Not one of them had said his name in a year and a half.

There was a girl who came over from the Hysteric hall that spring, ahead of the moot, and stayed with the Ingermans.

Heather was her name.

Norbert's daughter, about Astrid's age, she had never set foot on Berk before, she was curious about everything and everyone.

One evening over a bowl by the fire she asked, in the harmless way of somebody making conversation, about the son the Chief was still grieving.

Astrid opened her mouth and found she had nothing to say.

She got out that he had been small. She got out that he had been clever with his hands, that he had worked in the forge, at times, that he had been Stoick's only child.

Every one of them was true. Not one of them was him.

She lay awake a long while that night, the thing keeping her awake was not grief. It was just shock that she had described a stranger.

It was what happened to their dead.

It struck her, that there were exactly two people on that island still bleeding about it. She was, one way or another. Stoick was too. Neither of them ever told so out loud, they were not friends and never once spoke of it to each other.

Berk was a village that had a bad day some years ago, before getting on with the spring.

Everybody else was perfectly fine. Life went on.

The sails came that same spring.

They came a few at a time. The Meatheads first, in those broad ugly beautifully built hulls of theirs. Then the Hysterics with their painted prows and their appalling manners.

And last of all the Bog-Burglars, maybe a week late.

Berk's harbour had not held that many ships since anybody living could recall. Half the village stood on the cliffs to watch them come in.

Introductions were tense. It went badly for the first hour, it surprised nobody. The great hall that night was the loudest room Astrid had ever stood in.

Every Chief in the north at one table.

Mogadon of the Meatheads and Norbert of the Hysterics had a running argument about a shipment of iron that had gone missing, 'the great iron theft', they shouted as they tossed blames and curses at each other.

That was some quarrel started before either of them was born.

Bertha of the Bog-Burglars listened to all of it with her boots on the table and contributed nothing but extremely well timed insults to both parties. It was apparent somebody's grandfather had killed someone else's grandfather, it came up many times before midnight.

Then Stoick put the chart on the table. At once everyone fell silent.