Chapter 41: Seeds, Cattle and Iron IV

Both of them wanted to hear about the newer one, and there is nothing else to do on a boat in the middle of the ocean, so he tried explaining the autonomous rig.

"Nothing is moving it," Hiccup began. "Not me, anyway. Toothless is."

He pointed at the sketch.

"Because the right question was never how to work the fin. It was how to give the fin back to him."

He tapped the drawing.

"There is a muscle at the root of the tail. Two, in fact. They drove the fin he lost, and they are still there. They still fire. Every time he wants to bank left, that muscle pulls. Until now it was pulling against nothing at all."

"So you just... read the muscle?"

Eivind got there fast, he seemed honestly astonished. So was Oddr, who had joined the conversation at some point without either of them noticing him do it.

"Exactly. Look, here."

He pointed again.

"I anchored a plate over it and ran a linkage off that. So when it tightens, the fin opens. When it slackens, it closes."

He spread his hands.

"That is the whole idea. It is simpler than everything that came before it by a wide margin, it took me about fifty tries to arrive at it."

"So it mirrors him?"

"That is one way to put it."

He tapped the deck.

"I spent months standing on those cliffs watching that lizard try to learn to fly on his own again. Making adjustments, replacing parts, having to rebuild the whole thing from scratch."

He rolled his eyes.

Eivind was quiet a moment.

"You say it as though he did something wrong. What did he do?"

"When it finally worked, that first time, he flew for twenty four hours straight without coming down," groaned Hiccup. "I did not see him again until the next morning."

The mechanism was not perfect, of course.

The fin answered about half a beat slower than the real, flesh one had. In ordinary flight nobody would ever notice it. But in a hard turn at speed Toothless still had to anticipate ahead of himself, and it had taken the pair of them the better part of a year of relentless practice to burn that into him.

"It was worth it," Hiccup admitted, with a helpless sort of gesture.

"Not being able to fly on his own was starting to get to him. It was the least I could do."

He frowned.

"He saved my life. After all."

He leaned back.

"It is better for me too, I suppose. The autonomy makes him a flying war engine." He shrugged. "A war engine that likes fish and sulks when it rains. But a war engine all the same. You just can not imagine the things I've begun designing for-"

"Fifty tries," interrupted Emerald.

Both of them looked over.

It had genuinely been hours. The rambling had started around midday and the sun was well down toward the water.

In all that time Emerald had not said a word and had not moved from the mast.

They had genuinely forgotten she was still there.

She had her chin on her knees and the fur up around her ears, which made her look cute, and she was looking at the charcoal drawing on the deck with undisguised interest.

"Fifty tries and two years," she repeated.

Hiccup nodded. "Roughly."

"All for a tail you took off him."

Hiccup's expression darkened, a scowl set on his face. Even now, the subject of that bola was not a thing he enjoyed being slapped with.

What is the problem with her.

"Well. If you want to put it like that-"

"He flies on his own all the time now, though," she went on, evenly. "So I imagine he has long since forgiven you for it."

"...Yes."

There was an awkward pause.

"And you stood on those cliffs the whole while. For many months."

"There was not a great deal else to do."

"No," she agreed, shrugging. "I do not imagine there was."

She said nothing more, and went back to looking at the drawing, and Eivind, bless him, remained entirely oblivious to the tension and was already asking something about the friction plate.

Hiccup found he had lost the thread of the answer.

He picked it up again a moment later and the answer came out fine, and nobody noticed.

Except that when he glanced up she was now just staring at him, and she did not look away when he caught her at it. He was the one who ended up looking at the sea.

What is wrong with this woman. Is she still mad that I did not want her aboard?

He did his best to ignore the girl, and the talk went on another hour after that.

Eivind thought the friction plate on the old manual rig could be modified to adjust itself as it wore, and drew it on the deck to prove the point, it was a good sketch.

Hiccup argued it would seize in the middle of the first hard turn you asked it for, and then spent ten minutes explaining which part of the drawing would seize and why.

Eivind argued back.

In the end neither of them convinced the other, but the back and forth was enjoyable.

The third night was clear and cold, and there was no reason at all for anybody to be on deck.

For some reason, Emerald was on deck.

She had not been given the watch today. The watch was one of the fishing brothers, up in the bow, being extremely conscientious about the empty sea and not turning round once.

Actually.

She had come up because the hold reeked of sweaty men who had not washed properly in days, and she had discovered over three days that she would rather be cold.

Hiccup was at the stern again.

Of course he was.

He must have been entirely immune to the weather, because there was no other way to explain a man walking about the open sea in that cold with his chest all bare and nothing over it but that long black wool robe.

Which was not, she happened to know, the same robe.

The other one still hung on a broken column in the middle of the plaza, where they had hung it that winter, in all this time no one had taken it down.

He had probably made himself another and said nothing about it.

Freak.

Well, she did not really think so.

She had wanted to get a proper look at him for a while now, however, the half-dragon was difficult to approach and had made it clear he would rather be left alone.

Still, she had nothing better to do, so might as well.

So she went and stood next to him and said nothing for a while.

"You should sleep," he chuckled eventually.

"So should you."

"I do not sleep much."

"I know."

He glanced at her, plainly unsure what she was getting at.

"I never thanked you for helping me, that day when I walked into the blizzard." She paused a second, "I was stupid. If you had not lit that fire and had Toothless stay wrapped around me keeping me warm, I may not have survived that."

"That is nothing to thank me for." He shrugged, looking at his hands on the rail, "...but you are welcome."

They stood silent for a moment. She hoped he would continue the conversation, however, it was clear he wasn't in the mood for words.

She waited a few more seconds, nothing.

"You go down early and you are awake again by midnight. Every night since we sailed," she said, to the sea. "I sleep by the ladder. So I can hear you walk in and out at odd hours."

"...Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. It is not a complaint."

She paused.

"It is only that I can't sleep properly either, and it is nice to know I am not the only lunatic aboard."

That got something out of him.

Not a laugh. A short breath through the nose that came very close to one.

They stood a while. She watched the stars come out thick over the black water, and he must have been watching the sea, his slit eyes fixed on a cloudy night hers couldn't pierce.

"Can I ask you something," he muttered at last.

"You can ask."

Hiccup turned the edge of his hood over between his fingers, which she had noticed he did when he was working up to something. "Haaland, he fought me on bringing you with me- with us, in front of everyone, in the plaza. That is unlike him. He was set on getting you onto the ship."

Something moved at the corner of her mouth. Small. Gone almost as soon as it appeared, and covered so quickly a normal pair of eyes would have missed it.

His were not a normal pair of eyes.

So there is something.

"Yes."

"Why?"

Emerald considered the water.

"You will have to ask him," she shrugged, and enjoyed saying it.

"He will not tell me."

"No," she agreed, pleasantly. "He will not."

Hiccup made a noise of pure frustration, which she let herself enjoy for a moment. Then, because she was not quite that cruel, she gave him another thread to pull.

"Haaland has decided I do not need looking after any more. He has been taking care of me for a long time. He thinks it is high time I grew up. That is most of it."

She shrugged one shoulder.

"He is right, I guess. We are free people now. I owe him that much."

They stood quiet, listening to the water working along the hull. Her answer seemed genuine; however, there was still something off.

"That is not all of it."

"No."

"Then what is the rest of it?"

"Ask him." She was giggling now, softly. He would be blushing if he wasn't so vexed. "Don't give me that look." She bumped her shoulder against his. "I don't know, ask him for a duel. He is noble at heart. I am sure he would answer anything at all, should you win."

Which left Hiccup considerably more confused than he had been before he opened his mouth.

He asked her about the port later.

Well. Not the port.

He asked it badly, and sideways, and wrong, because he was still so rusty from not speaking to anyone for years, because he was many things and tactful around people had never once been one of them.

"I'm curious about all the ports and the less common tongues you seem to speak so well... You mentioned you've been to many of them, when you- back when-"

He stopped, suddenly aware of how lightly that had come out.

"It must have been very hard on you."

She was quiet long enough that he was certain he had ruined the entire thing.

Damn you.

Damn you, Hiccup, how come you fumbled this one up as well.

Then she answered.