Chapter 46: Seeds, Cattle and Iron IX

She did not touch the scar.

She looked at it, that was all. A long look, the kind you give to a thing you want to be sure you have understood. Then he pulled the collar of the shirt back up over the shoulder, and she let him.

The ship rolled quietly under them.

"Whose axe," she asked, after a while.

Hiccup did not answer straight away.

He was looking at the water. The sun had moved a hand's width lower, and the light on the swell had gone from bright to gold, and neither of them had shifted off the mast.

"Does it matter?"

"It might."

He turned the edge of the hood over in his fingers again. He seemed to be deciding something.

Then he seemed to decide it.

"One of the men in the front row." He turned.

"That is not what I meant."

"...No. I know." The rigging creaked above them.

"My father was standing about ten paces away when the axe went in. He had the whole village behind him. Just one word and every hand on that beach would have stopped."

His face darkened. Hiccup thought about what to say.

"He looked at me," he laughed, dryly, "he did not see me. That is the closest I can get to it."

He turned the edge of his hood over again.

"I do not believe he ever actually did. At any point in those fifteen years. Not once. Not one single time. I used to think that if I did something big enough he would have to. That was the whole plan, more or less. That was years of a plan."

He stopped.

"Then I did something big enough, and he still did not, in the end."

He let out a breath.

"I hope I never see any of them again."

He said it quietly.

"That is the honest truth of it. I do not seek revenge. I do not have any enemies among them. I want them to stay on their island, I want to stay on mine, that is all."

Emerald did not answer straight away.

There were things a person was supposed to say here. She knew all of them. He must have been frightened. Fathers are complicated. Perhaps in his own way he did.

So instead she lifted her head off the good shoulder, and set it down again on the other one.

On purpose. The one with the scar in it.

Hiccup went completely rigid, the way he did about most things, and then, after a moment, did not.

"Then they deserve nothing," she whispered, to his ear.

He turned his head.

"A village that gives up its own is finished. It does not matter what it was afraid of. It does not matter what it thought it was saving."

Her voice had gone even. "It has already told you what it is. You are not obliged to sit and argue with it for the rest of your life."

"You do not know them."

"I do not have to. You and I are not so different."

She did not lift her head.

"Mine did it in over a tax, out of a whim, in front of everybody we knew. I spent years looking for the version of the story where his choices made sense. I looked properly. I looked for years, and there was no version."

Hiccup went still.

"So no," Emerald chuckled, her laugh soft, like bells, "I am not going to be fair to them for you. I am not going to hold both sides up and weigh them to give you a balanced opinion. Somebody else can do that."

Hiccup was stunned.

"You are the only person who has ever said anything like that to me."

Her eyes found his.

"Most people are cowards about other people's fathers."

"...Yes."

"It is very boring of them."

He felt her shrug against his arm.

"I am on your side. That is all I have got, I am not taking it back-"

Except that at that exact moment something went off in the hold like a bag of hammers falling down a stair, followed by an outraged squeal, followed by a second squeal in a different key, followed by Eivind's voice at a pitch no grown man should be able to reach, saying a word his mother would not have approved of, and then the same word again, twice, louder.

Something wooden broke.

Then twenty ducks, on deck, all at once, immediately, in a great feathered explosion up the hatch, followed a heartbeat later by the pig, which had somehow got out too and was going the wrong way round the mast, and Eivind after it with straw in his hair.

Emerald put her face in her hands.

"I hate this ship," she groaned.

"You chose to travel on this ship."

"I chose this ship," she agreed, from behind her hands.

Then she got up to go and help, and took his robe again with her.

They picked up the currents the next morning.

The wind came round hard out of the north-east and the sea got up with it. The merchantman began the long ugly corkscrewing roll of a heavily laden ship taking it on the quarter.

Eivind lasted about a quarter of an hour.

He made the rail. Barely.

He was still hanging over it, green to the ears, with a sympathetic duck watching him from the top of the hay, when one of the crew called out from the bow.

Didn't we get over this already?

He rolled his eyes and gave Eivind some privacy to deal with his seasickness.

Somewhere behind his eyes the warm fixed point had come up bright, loud and impatient, the way it always did when the distance started closing; it had done so a good half hour before the lookout saw anything.

Toothless.

The grey of dawn opened.

Black cliffs standing far away, sheer out of the water. Above them, catching the first of the light, the broken towers on the heights.

Home.

Emerald came up beside him at the rail.

The sun was just then coming up behind them. It came slow, spilling low and level over the water and finding the cliffs one narrow band at a time. The black going out of the stone.

What was left, in the new light, was a hard grey-brown, streaked with the white of nesting birds. The towers on the heights caught the light first, and stood lit against a sky still holding on to the night.

She looked at it a long time.

The cliffs, the towers, and the distant grey smoke going up off the plateau, the campfire where they burned driftwood to cook breakfast.

"Hiccup."

"Mm."

He turned his head, his eyes unfocused and still on the land growing out of the haze.

Then Emerald swiftly went up on her toes, and stole his first kiss from him.

It was quick and slightly off centre. It landed about half on the corner of his mouth, and it was over before he had assembled one coherent thought about the fact that it was happening.

Then she came back down onto her heels.

It was not much of a kiss by any reasonable standard, a peck.

"Hm," grinned Emerald, considering him. "Yes. Thought so."

"Th- Thought what-"

She patted him on the chest, in the manner of a woman satisfied with a gods-damned purchase, then laughed and strolled off down the deck.