Chapter 39: Seeds, Cattle and Iron II

"You are missing the point, Haaland."

Hiccup nodded up the hill, where the pitch black width of Toothless's wings lay along the top of a broken wall, pretending to be asleep and failing at it.

"He will stay."

Haaland followed his eyes and, slowly, let out a deflated breath.

"He stays," Hiccup frowned. "He knows the coast. He flies the circuit around it a few times a day whether I am here or not. If he sees a sail he will likely burn it before it makes the shallows. You do not have to do anything. You only have to keep people calm while he does the work."

Haaland nodded, reluctantly. Some part of him did not much enjoy the idea of a hundred lives resting on a flying lizard, no matter how legendary it was 'rumored to be'.

"Then what if something goes wrong on your end, can you manage with no dragon?"

"If something happens on my end I will think of something." Hiccup shrugged. "I would rather have that, than leave the island standing unprotected behind me."

"I am aware of the reasoning."

"Then why are we still talking about it?"

"Because I do not like it, and I can afford that opinion."

Haaland was looking down from the cliffs they stood on.

Down at the broad merchant hull still sitting on the sand, and at the small blonde figure walking the length of the ship with one hand trailing along the boards, counting something.

It took the better part of three days to make the abandoned ship fit to sail.

The work fell to the fishing brothers, who had been building and mending boats their whole lives.

By the time they were finished, the job was not perfect: The sail had holes in it. The rigging was wrong. The wood groaned with every swell that went under her.

However, the ship would not sink, probably. So they went south on a grey morning with the whole island watching from the cliffs, which was becoming a habit.

Hiccup stood at the stern and watched the island shrink until there was nothing left of it.

The cliffs went first. Then the broken towers on the heights, which held on longer than anything else, a row of black teeth sitting on the horizon the best part of an hour.

Then those went too.

What if something comes at you, down there, with no dragon?

That was the question Haaland had asked him. It was the wrong one, and Haaland must have known it was the wrong one when he asked.

Hiccup was not worried about Hiccup.

He was worried about the some eighty people he was leaving with a couple of notched swords to protect themselves. The island would be days away by boat.

Toothless's presence down the bond lay steady. He would be able to pull at it at any moment. Knowing that and feeling it were still different things.

A warm fixed tether behind the stream of his thoughts. Right where it always sat.

Practice had taught him to push their communication through the bond further than before. Hiccup pushed a question down it. Not words, he had concluded early on, because Toothless couldn't understand them.

It was more like pushing thoughts in the form of images, emotions, and instinct.

Anything?

It took a second to come back all at once, the way it always did, it was not information so much as the clean image of bright clear weather, mixed with boredom, mostly.

Enormous, aggrieved, theatrical boredom.

Under that, thin and clear, the cold of high air and the shape of a coastline going past below, which meant Toothless had gone to fly the circuit around the island just now.

It was difficult to explain.

It was as if he were peeling layers of it, as if he were holding a snapshot of Toothless's soul at a given moment in time. It was an exciting sensation.

He examined the depths of it, there was nothing. No alarm. No heat. Nothing on the water in any direction.

Except right at the bottom of it, unmistakable, an excited note as in seagull in sight.

Hiccup let out a breath he had been holding for a long while.

All right.

All right. They will be fine.

He stood there a moment longer with his hands on the rail, and the tension on his shoulders came down an inch, and he decided he would do that again in the afternoon.

And probably every few hours after that.

Eivind was sick and hanging on for dear life for the first day. He vomited again into the sea and having got that out of the way, he sat down on a coil of rope and said almost nothing for the rest of the day.

Which was rather the problem with Eivind.

The young man was not a talker.

He answered when he was spoken to, precisely and usefully, and then he stopped.

So the talking, such as it was, mostly fell to Hiccup.

He started talking about the sails, which were stepped too far forward, and which he thought could be shifted back a foot and a half if anybody could be bothered to move the step.

Eivind turned that over for a good while, then said it was nearer two feet, he gave his reason.

The reason was correct.

Hiccup looked at him properly for the first time.

How old is he. Nineteen? Twenty?

It was the first time in years that anybody had impressed him, and from the way the young man went carefully back to studying the bow, it must have been about that long for Eivind too.

From then on, both of them quickly warmed up to each other.

Emerald had traveled by ship a great many times, ever since she was a small girl.

Yet never like this. It felt strange.

The air was the first thing.

It came off the water cold and clean and thick with salt, and it went all the way down into the bottom of her chest in a way that nothing had for years. It was pure and clean, she breathed deep and slow, she couldn't grow tired of it.

It smells like... freedom?

Then there were the waves.

Every time the bow rammed the sea it shattered it into a thousand droplets and threw them at her, on and off, all morning, until her eyes ached with it and she still would not look away.

The last time she had been on a ship she had been inside it.

Under the deck, under the water line, shackled and chained to the wood with a hundred other people and hardly any room for them.

You couldn't stand up, you could not lie down flat either.

You slept where you sat, where you relieved yourself, where you ate. In the wet, in whatever the person beside you had been unable to hold, because there was nowhere to go and no one who would have taken you there anyway.

The only weather down there was the sound of it happening outside, nothing else.

So it felt very strange indeed to be allowed outside of one.

The wind was a nuisance, she had to admit. She had forgotten wind could be a nuisance.

It got into her eyes and pulled her hair out of its braids every time she fixed it, and did not stop until she knotted it savagely at the back and dared the Gods to try again.

Her hands were cold, too. The spray came over the side and went straight down the neck of her shirt at least once an hour.

Still, she could not stop grinning about any of it.

Nine years really is a long time.

Long enough for most of it to feel new again.

Not all of it, though.

The sea, at least, she knew.

Everybody seemed faintly astonished by that, she had to admit she enjoyed watching their reactions when they saw her dexterously hauling rope and reading the winds.

She had grown up in a fishing village. Somewhere not far south from here.

On the coast it wasn't rare for a family to have their own boat, or at least share one. So she had been in and out of them since she could walk.

It had been so many years... and yet her legs had gotten used to the whole business inside an afternoon.

It brought back memories.

She let them come, and let them go. She did not look at them either way.

By the time the light thinned and the wind changed, she had gone quiet with them, and her eye had begun to wander the deck the way it does when there's nothing else to do.

It was evening already, the cold had got into everything. Most of the crew were below, the deck had gone the colour of old iron.

Hiccup was still at the stern.

He was up there alone, which was usual, because he seemed to prefer his own company to anybody else's. She knew that much.

He had the hood up, which was also usual.

There is nobody out here, though.

She looked around. There was nothing but grey water in every direction, further than the eye went, and a crew who had all seen his face a hundred times already.

So why keep it up?

Perhaps he was not hiding his face from them.

Perhaps he simply did it now, the way a man does a thing he has done for many years, out of habit.

It was difficult to tell. She would not know for sure unless she asked, and asking would stir a fluttering she was not quite ready to feel.

So she looked instead.

She stood there for a good while, with her arms folded against the cold, truth be told she did not feel one scrap of guilt about it. He was kind of handsome. With his back turned to her, looking all longingly at the horizon. His silky hair fluttering in the wind.

Somewhere in the middle of it, it came to her.

Ah. I see.

She found herself a place out of the wind and pulled her knees up, and decided, on entirely practical grounds and for no other reason whatsoever, that tonight was not the night.

We are the same animal, you and I.

By the time she looked again, he had not moved.

He would not, either. Not that night, nor the one after it.

It would take many nights, and a great deal of cold, and one very badly asked question, before either of them said a word to one another.