Chapter 45: Seeds, Cattle and Iron VIII

Last of all came the hard goods.

Some pair of barrels of pitch. Some saws. Some keg of nails. And the barrel of wine Hiccup had promised the crew back on the first day, which none had forgotten, least of all the fishing brothers.

Then also rope: hemp cable and the lighter cord and the tarred stuff that lasts in the wet, coil upon coil of it going down into the hold until the fishing brothers started making jokes about opening a chandlery.

Then iron. Pretty much as many bars as they could afford, which turned out to be a great deal less than ideal. The price had apparently gone up on account of a great war happening somewhere inland, and there was not much of it on the northern coast to begin with.

Half a year's supply, by their estimates. Perhaps a whole year's supply of iron if they were careful, and if they mended rather than made.

That was the last of the buying.

The purse came back to Oddr almost flat, and he weighed it in his palm and said nothing about it, which was his way of saying a great deal.

The rest of the day went to carrying. Barrows down the stone from noon until the light was gone, and the ship taking each load lower into the water than the last, and the fishing brothers on the deck calling for the next one before it was well off the plank.

They left the next morning.

By that point the ship sat a good foot and a half lower in the sea, turned heavy and slow and reluctant to come about, the hold was packed to the beams, hay lashed on deck under a canvas and twenty or so ducks sleeping on top of it.

The crossing back to the island went well. No weather to speak of, no trouble with the animals beyond the ordinary complaint of animals at sea, no man ill, no rope parted. The days ran into one another the way easy days at sea do.

They sat on the deck with their backs to the mast, side by side, in the long slant of a late afternoon sun that had not yet touched the horizon, after the watch changed and the noise below had died down.

It had become a habit.

She still had his robe. She had given it back only for the days ashore because he needed the hood, but taken it again the moment they sailed off, and had long stopped pretending it was about the cold.

They were sitting shoulder to shoulder.

The smooth and soft of her skin leaning slightly against his, the braids of her warm bright yellow hair tingling his skin as it streamed in the spray of sea water.

Her hair smelled like the sun, somehow.

Hiccup had decided to say nothing about it, on the grounds that saying something about it might make it stop. The ship was barely making headway.

The rest of her was warm too. All along his side, from shoulder down to hip, a steady heat that came through the wool.

He tried his best to keep his attention to the water.

That was proving difficult, too.

This treacherous body.

So he did not turn his head.

Above them the sky had gone clear and blue, the daylight bright and unhurried on the water, hours yet before dusk.

Neither of them looked up at it.

Again, it was anatomically impossible, she had her head down against his shoulder, on the robe side, and had been that way long enough for it to have stopped meaning one thing and started meaning something completely different.

Or did it?

Hiccup had his doubts.

"Hey, Hiccup," she asked eventually, probably bored.

"Tell me more about it, about Berk."

She tipped her head back to look up at him, the low sun catching one side of her face. "You told me about that Gobber, and your father. I want to know more."

He looked to the side. Conflicted. He didn't enjoy touching the subject of his past.

"There is not much else."

"You are a very bad liar."

He was quiet long enough that she thought she may have pushed it too far.

Then Hiccup snorted, and rolled his eyes, and began telling his story once more. "In the beginning, there was a dragon,"

That got a dry laugh out of her, "Toothless."

He nodded, "yeah, before he was Toothless."

He had told her some of it before. On the long nights on the crossing out, and on the beach with the others round the fire, that first time they met. He had told it in episodes. In a voice that stood a step back from itself, almost as if it were someone else's story, not his.

He turned the edge of his hood over in his fingers.

"You know the bola. That day I just fired it at the sky and got lucky. Nobody else saw the shot, in fact, when I bragged about it that same night, no one believed it."

He leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and let out a long exhale.

"I remember it though. I remember the weight of the sling coming off my shoulder, the whip of it in the air, and thinking that will not have hit. There is no way."

He paused.

"Nothing I had built up to that point had ever worked. So I really didn't expect... anything, really," he frowned, "then something went out of the sky."

His voice had gone lower.

"I went out to finish him that next morning. The legendary Night Fury... Downed by... me. I found him in a cove about a mile inland. He was tangled. Grounded. Unable to get out."

A chuckle.

"I had the knife with me. He was not going anywhere, he was helpless, I was the one holding the blade. Everyone would have treated me as a hero, had I sunk my blade in, you know."

There was a hint of pain in his voice.

"My father would have picked me up off the ground of that cove. He would have carried the head back into the village on his shoulder, and me on the other."

He frowned and shook his head, slowly, his eyes gone distant, "Everyone would have celebrated me, everyone would have finally-"

Astrid.

Maybe if he had killed the dragon back then. Maybe she.

No. Not her.

He crushed that thought.

"It's taken years to work out why I did not, and I still do not have a good answer for you. I just looked at him and he looked back. So I cut him loose, and went home, and threw up in a bucket."

Emerald snorted.

"After that it was months of me walking into the wood every morning with a bag of fish and lying to everybody I knew about where I had been."

His voice grew steady.

"They were the best months of my life, really. At least, the best months of my old life."

"Then they found out. They came down into the cove."

He murmured it.

His hand went still on the hem of the hood. He was somewhere else for a moment, somewhere he had been a great many times before.

Some dark place. His slit eyes open, a slight blaze building in them.

"All of them. It was the whole island, more or less. I remember thinking that was strange, that they had all come at once, nothing on Berk ever got everybody out of doors at the same time. That is what I remember thinking. Before anything else, that."

Something moved behind his eyes, under the hood. Emerald saw them go narrower, the slits down the middle of them thinning to a hair.

"I tried to explain."

A pause.

"I stood in front of them and tried to tell them. I was fifteen, I was bad at it, they did not hear what I had to say. They tried their best to kill him."

A silence.

"I would not let them. So instead they turned on me. Nearly finished the job, too."

Emerald's hand had come up without her thinking about it, hovering somewhere near his arm, not quite landing.

"Hiccup-"

"It is fine. It was years ago, most of it healed." He lifted a hand vaguely. "I heal well. That is one of the things I got out of the bargain."

"Not all of it healed."

He looked at her.

"I saw it," she nodded. "In the street. Your collar was slightly open."

Hiccup did not say anything for a moment.

He frowned and after a second of hesitation, turned his bare left shoulder toward her and let her see.

She had seen it for a heartbeat in the rain. Up close it was worse.

A pale, thick, badly closed line high on the muscle where the neck runs into the shoulder, angling down and inward. Somebody had put a blade into him from above and behind, at a hard angle, and it had gone deep.

"An axe," Hiccup chuckled nervously, all of a sudden feeling conscious of her touch.

"It still hurts, as a matter of fact. Not badly. It aches when it is cold and it aches when it rains, which up there is most of the year."

He sounded, more than anything, mildly irritated about it.