Chapter 42: Seeds, Cattle and Iron V

She did not answer straight away. He did not push her.

When she spoke at last, it was as though she were picking up in the middle of some other conversation, one she had been having with herself, for a great many years.

"There was a levy."

Her voice went somewhere else when she said it, and her eyes went with it.

"Levy?"

"A levy. A tax."

She had her elbows on the rail and her chin on her hands.

"There had been a couple of bad harvests in the years before. My village was too poor to pay in grain. We had no gold either." She shrugged. "So the tax was paid in people."

Hiccup could not find a word.

"They came in the autumn with a writ," she went on.

"Nobody could read it. So they simply told the number, and left the choosing of who to sell to the village, which was generous of them. Though I did not understand that at the time."

"How old were you."

"Nine."

She replied at once. The heartbreaking number came out low and tired on her tongue, worn smooth by too many years of enduring.

Somehow that was worse than anything.

"They ended up choosing in the long hall. The whole thing took most of a night."

She turned the ring on her thumb, which was not gold.

"Everyone was there, I remember as if it was yesterday. It was all very orderly. Nobody shouted. They just went through the families one by one, working out where a loss would be felt least. My mother had been dead years, my sister was barely five, and my father."

She stopped.

He did not fill it. He had learned, already tonight, that opening his mouth would be the wrong choice. So he kept quiet.

Somewhere in the rigging a rope tapped once against a spar, and then again. It was windy.

She started again.

"They got what they asked for. In the end somebody had to come out of our door, and it was going to be my sister or it was going to be me."

"Oh."

"So I offered. I was too young to understand what I was actually doing."

A long breath went out of her.

"I thought it was a brave thing to do. Everyone in that hall looked so relieved."

They were quiet a while.

"What about your father?" Hiccup's face had darkened.

For a moment her eyes went somewhere else again, it took her strength to bring them back.

But she answered.

"That man did not stand up. He did not say anything at all. He stared at the floor for the whole of it, he was still looking at it when they walked me out in chains."

She shook her head.

"Calling him father is not right. He was a sorry excuse for a man. Whether he could not bear to watch me go or whether he simply could not be bothered, I have long since accepted that I will never know."

She straightened up off the rail.

"I do not know whether it worked, either," she added, almost briskly.

"I do not know whether they came back the next autumn and took her anyway. I have had a great many years to torture myself about that one."

Hiccup stood there with too many things to say and not one that would come out.

"Emerald-"

"It is fine," she chuckled. "I know you are not good with words. So don't say anything."

Neither of them moved off the rail, and neither of them said anything for a long, long time.

She was good at hiding them.

The small sobs almost swallowed by the sound of the waves. The wet on her face in the dark. If not for what he was, he would never have noticed all those details.

He almost spoke. He took the breath for it, and let it out empty.

I truly am not good with words.

But he could still do something.

She was shivering. Grief or cold or both together, he could not tell.

So he drew the robe off his own shoulders and put it round hers.

It was a small thing.

It was also the only honest thing he had.

After a while the shivering stopped. She wrapped herself around it and the warmth still in the wool did the rest.

"Thanks."

She had been sincere and told him the true parts.

Every one of them.

She had stopped exactly where she always stopped.

Hiccup could be stubborn and dense at times, she had learnt. However, she knew he was trying to avoid hurting her, he was probably just being considerate.

She bit her lip in frustration.

Nobody pays that for somebody to carry water.

They buy you early. They feed you up. Then they just wait.

She had not understood it at nine, but she had understood by eleven, nobody had sat her down and explained it, nobody ever does.

She had simply worked it out the way one works something obvious. Off the way she was fed, the way she was kept, and the things men laughed about over the top of her head while they did sums about her.

She had been meant to be a breeding slave.

That was all.

They had seen her pretty face when she was young and that was the sole reason her value had been enough to pay the remainder of her village's debts, and let her sister stay free.

That had been the whole of it. From one end to the other.

Everything she could do was pray and hope her master would have her be his concubine, perhaps a second or third wife, if the Gods still loved her.

They didn't.

So her prayers and hopes were no use, she was dreaming about the exceptions to the rule.

Deep inside she knew she would become some rich man's plaything, her body taken from her, forced to bear his children. She only wished it wouldn't take many tries for her to die in childbirth, as her mother did. They said she had a narrow waist, it was only a matter of time.

Emerald had given up quarrelling with her destiny years ago.

Arguing only brought pain.

Her own end she had made her peace with. What haunted her was the other end of the bargain.

She remembered her sister well, despite all these years. They had the same mother, after all, the same blonde hair, the same pretty face.

It disgusted her to think this way, but she knew so very well what the men that had kept her captive were willing and capable of, so she had done her best to hide her origins.

No matter the cost.

She had held that line. For years she had. Every time a hand had lifted her chin, every time a man had asked her where she was from with that particular kind of interest, she would give them nothing.

Not a name, not a village, not a coast.

It had been her only pride, the small corner of her mind that was still, hers.

It made no difference.

Her new master didn't take long to figure out she was hiding something. Whether he did it to spite her, to haunt her, to finally break her. He did his share of asking, he found out, it wasn't even difficult.

He had shared with glee how their most obedient slave had a sister somewhere on the southern coasts. She had learned that too late to unlearn the pride.

Her silence had never been worth a copper to them.

That secret had been the last precious thing she owned.

The thought her sister might still be back home, unnamed on any ledger, alive perhaps, running through summer grass with the sea behind her, it had been the one thing they had never quite managed to take.

That man had made a game of ripping it from her.

The night he had spoken the name of the village aloud across the table from her, and smiled as he saw her horror break out on her face. It was then she understood that she owned nothing at all any more, not even her own mind.

She had lost hope then.

She stopped weeping. Stopped counting mornings. Stopped waiting for a miracle that might save her.

There were no miracles. There was no justice.

Then they steered the galleon toward the shores, and this stupid, fairy tale fucking half-dragon had come along and butchered that fiend along with nineteen others, and buried her most well-guarded secret with them.

He had run through them, their cries in agony and confusion as they died still rang in her ears.

She laughed despite herself. It was dry and short.

Hiccup was, at this very moment, standing at her elbow, working himself into a knot over whether he had blurted the wrong question about her father.

How is he this dense.

It was ridiculous. He was ridiculous, her sobs eased, the warmth and soft smell of the robe made her feel tingly all over.

Hiccup had no idea.

He thought her thanks that day had been for sparing their lives, but that wasn't the case. The thanks had been because this idiot had returned that corner of her pride, back to her.

Damned idiot.

Emerald shook her head, and put her hands flat on the rail and looked at the black moving water and then, eventually, sideways. At the shape of him against the stars.